J. R. R. Tolkien played with variously rewriting the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer throughout his unfinished novels The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers. This variant version is from The Notion Club Papers: it is supposed in the narrative to be an older and better tradition of the text.

It is accordingly given in a more archaic form of Old English; for instance one can notice the presence of final unstressed æ and i that both merged in e later, or the vowel spelt oe that later became e. There is also a difference of dialect: in The Road to Middle-earth, p. 264, T. A. Shippey says that the archaic version is in Old Mercian, not in Old West-Saxon like the other ones. The spelling is also imitated from the earliest record of Old English and not form the more familiar forms of the 9th and 10th centuries; instances of such archaisms are the use of th instead of þ and ð, of ct instead of ht, of b instead of f to denote the sound [v], and doubling letters to mark long vowels.

The text with its modern adaptation in alliterative verse is from Sauron Defeated, p. 243-244. There are some differences due to metric requirements with the more literal translation of the equivalent West Saxon version provided in The Lost Road p. 244.

In the record a more archaic pronunciation of Old English has been attempted, based on Alistair Campbell’s indications about the evolution of English sounds in his Old English Grammar. Notably:

• b used for [v] is pronounced as a bilabial spirant
• palatal c and gg are pronounced as stops, not yet affricates
• initial velar g is given a spirant value.
• the vowel spelt oe is pronounced [ø], a mid front rounded vowel similar to German ö or French eu.

The text is transcribed in tengwar or “letters of Fëanor”. Tolkien created two different adaptations of the general use of the Third Age to Old English, presented in Sauron Defeated pp. 318-327. We especially attempted here to emulate the mode of the so-called “Text I”. We made use of Måns Björkman Berg’s typeface Tengwar Eldamar.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe