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from every popular children’s bedtime genre, with pirates and mermaids, Red Indians, crocodiles, and pixies. Yet Valinor was broader still in its embrace. Here the Elves lived side by side with the gods, and here mortal souls went after death to be judged and apportioned torment, twilit wandering, or Elysian joy.
    The Qenya lexicon translates Valinor as ‘Asgard’, the ‘home of the gods’ where the Norsemen feasted after they had been slain in battle. Tolkien was undoubtedly developing the conceit that the Germanic Vikings modelled their mythical Asgard on the ‘true’ myth of Valinor. In place of the Norse Æsir, or gods, are the Valar.
    In the same spirit, ‘The Shores of Faëry’ purports to show a glimpse of the truth behind a Germanic tradition as fragmentary and enigmatic as Éarendel’s. The mariner’s ship in ‘The Shores of Faëry’ is called Vingelot (or Wingelot, Wingilot ), which the lexicon explains is the Qenya for ‘foamflower’. But Tolkien chose the name ‘to resemble and “explain” the name of Wade’s boat Guingelot’, as he later wrote. Wade, like Éarendel, crops up all over Germanic legend, as a hero associated with the sea, as the son of a king and a merwoman, and as the father of the hero Wayland or Völund. The name of his vessel would have beenlost to history but for an annotation that a sixteenth-century antiquarian had made in his edition of Chaucer: ‘Concerning Wade and his boat Guingelot , as also his strange exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I passe it over.’ Tolkien, having read the tantalizing note, now aimed to recreate the ‘long and fabulous’ story. The great German linguist and folklorist Jakob Grimm (mentioning Wade in almost the same breath as Éarendel) had argued that Guingelot ought to be ascribed instead to Völund, who ‘timbered a boat out of the trunk of a tree, and sailed over seas’ , and who ‘forged for himself a winged garment, and took his flight through the air’. Out of this tangle of names and associations, Tolkien had begun to construct a story of singular clarity.
    On Sunday 11 July Christopher Wiseman wrote to Tolkien announcing that he was going to sea. In June he had seen a Royal Navy recruiting advertisement saying that mathematicians were wanted as instructors; now he would soon be off to Greenwich to learn basic navigation ‘and the meaning of those mysterious words port , and starboard’ . Wiseman proclaimed himself thoroughly jealous of Tolkien’s First – he himself had only achieved the grade of senior optime , the equivalent of a second-class: ‘I am now the only one to have disgraced the TCBS,’ he said. ‘I have written begging for mercy…’
    Behind the glib tone, Wiseman was seriously missing his friends. He wished they could get together for a whole fortnight for once. It was manifestly impossible. Smith had written to him repeatedly about an unwelcome sense of growing up. ‘I don’t know whether it is only the additional weight of his moustache, but I presume there must be something in it,’ Wiseman commented. He too felt that they were all being pitched into maturity, Gilson and Tolkien even faster than Smith and himself. ‘It seems to proceed by a realization of one’s minuteness and impotence,’ he mused disconsolately. ‘One begins to fail for the first time, and to see the driving power necessary to force one’s stamp on the world.’
    When Wiseman’s letter came, Tolkien was freshly and painfully alive to this process of diminution. On Friday 9 July the War Office had written to tell him he was a second lieutenant with effect from the following Thursday. Kitchener’s latest recruit also received a printed calligraphic letter addressed ‘To our trusty and well-beloved J.R.R. Tolkien[,] Greeting,’ and