Elwing and the Isle of Seabirds: Tolkien's Towers and the Lais of Marie de France

During the late 1920s-1930s, J.R.R. Tolkien was engaged in writing numerous poetic lays, many of which he never completed. At the same time, he was engaging in a series of revisions of his grand mythology of Middle-earth, the tales which were posthumously published as The Silmarillion. As he was working on these various projects simultaneously or serially, we should not be surprised to see repeated themes, motifs, and tropes. I argue that among these are several of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) folktale types, especially 432, a version of the Woman Imprisoned in the Tower (Rapunzel) trope termed The Bird Lover. Tolkien may have been drawing upon a work that he references in his own writings (and was known to have owned by 1920), the twelfth-century lais of Marie de France. More precisely, I demonstrate numerous parallels between the Lai of Yonec of Marie de France and related tales, and argue that the tale of Eärendel and Elwing increasingly both reflected and subverted the ATU 432 trope as Tolkien engaged in revisions in the 1930s.