The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2

Another layer is a ‘Note to the Second Edition’ of the book, in which Howard Green quotes the opinions of Mr W.W. Wormald and Mr D.N. Borrow that the paper and style of writing suggest that the materials date to during or just after the ‘Six Years’ War’ (i.e. the Second World War, 1939–45). Green, who had earlier suggested that if the future events described in the papers were ‘foreseen’ by their author, concludes: ‘If … any such club existed at that earlier period, the names remain pseudonyms. The forward dating might have been adopted as an additional screen. But I am now convinced that the Papers are a work of fiction; and it may well be that the predictions (notably the Storm), though genuine and not coincidences, were unconscious …’ (p. 158).

HISTORY

Tolkien wrote to *Stanley Unwin on 21 July 1946 that he had ‘in a fortnight of comparative leisure round about last Christmas written three parts of another book, taking up in an entirely different frame and setting what little value in the inchoate *Lost Road … and other things beside. I hoped to finish this in a rush, but my health gave way after Christmas’ (Letters, p. 118). Christopher Tolkien is undoubtedly correct that it would have been impossible for his father to produce The Notion Club Papers and all of its associated material (*The Drowning of Anadûnê, Adunaic language, facsimiles) in a fortnight. He thinks, rather, that his father continued to work on it through the first half of 1946. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that Tolkien read The Drowning of Anadûnê (probably the final version) to the Inklings on 22 August 1946, and in recording this in his diary *W.H. Lewis implied that The Notion Club Papers had previously been read to the Inklings. Christopher suggests that during Christmas 1945 his father probably wrote only the first two manuscripts of Part One and the manuscript of Part Two.

The earliest, roughly written manuscript of Part One was apparently followed by an expanded version with many changes and additions. Christopher Tolkien thinks that after some rough drafting, his father produced the first, manuscript, version of Part Two (in which the two languages which come to Lowdham are unnamed, but clearly Quenya and Noldorin/Sindarin; see *Languages, Invented), but left it unfinished to make some preliminary sketches and outlines for, and the first version of, The Drowning of Anadûnê.

He then made a fair copy of Part One, abandoning it just before the end, and then a typescript, one section of which seems to have been done before the fair copy. He began a typescript of Part Two (in which Adunaic replaced Sindarin), but stopped after completing the entry for 22 May to make typescripts of three successive versions of The Drowning of Anadûnê. Probably when all or most of this was finished, he returned to The Notion Club Papers and began another typescript of Part Two at a point near the beginning of the minutes for 22 May. He replaced the relevant part of the first typescript, and continued as far as the manuscript extended. Christopher Tolkien notes that his father apparently changed his mind about the division into two parts, deleting ‘Part I / The Ramblings of Michael Ramer / Out of the Talkative Planet’ from the first page of the last version of Part One, and providing no heading at the beginning of the typescript of Part Two, whereas on the title-page for the previous manuscript appears ‘II / The Strange Case of Arundel Lowdham’ (p. 153).

The final texts of both parts of The Notion Club Papers were published in Sauron Defeated, with readings from earlier versions where they differ significantly. Notes explain some of the allusions and references in the text. Some of the names that appear in The Notion Club Papers are explained in *The War of the Jewels (1994), p. xi.

Christopher Tolkien admits that he does not know why his father abandoned The Notion Club Papers. ‘It may be that he felt that the work had lost all unity, that “Atlantis” had broken apart the frame in which it had been set …. But I think also that having forced himself to return to The Lord of the Rings, and having brought it to its end, he was then deflected into the very elaborate further work on the legends of the Elder Days that preceded the actual publication of The Lord of the Rings’ (p. 152). Later he wondered, too, if the conception had not become too ‘intricate’ for his father to continue (p. 282).

Another reason may be that Tolkien became distracted by ideas for a new language, Adunaic (later Adûnaic, see *Languages, Invented), as spoken in Númenor, and interested in working out a new study of the fall of Númenor, in a Mannish tradition: The Drowning of Anadûnê. He spent considerable time on Adunaic, producing a seventeen-page typescript, said to be a report written by Lowdham to present to the Notion Club. This begins by describing the probable history of the language, and continues with an elaborate but incomplete account of its phonology. Tolkien also spent hours making ‘facsimiles’ of Lowdham’s Adunaic fragments and two of Lowdham’s father’s Old English texts written in Tengwar (*Writing systems); these are reproduced in Sauron Defeated. The transcriptions and translation of the fragments that Lowdham produces at the meeting of 12 June are reproduced as two colour plates at the beginning of the HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin hardback editions.

THE INKLINGS

An important element of the ‘minutes’ are references or allusions made by the members of the Notion Club to members of the *Inklings and their works. These include criticism of the methods of transporting Elwin Ransom to Mars and Venus in Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Perelandra (1943) by *C.S. Lewis. One of the members has lectured on Lewis and *Charles Williams with the title Public House School. The Allegory of Love (1936) by Lewis, and Williams’ House of the Octopus (1945), are mentioned as probably the only works by those authors still remembered at all. A few ‘read C.R. [*Christopher] Tolkien’s little books of memoirs: In the Roaring Forties, and The Inns and Outs of Oxford’ but only three members of the Club ‘bothered with Tolkien père and all that elvish stuff’ (p. 219). In the first manuscript of Part Two Jeremy remembers finding in a secondhand shop a manuscript, Quenta Eldalien, being the History of the Elves by John Arthurson (= John R.R. Tolkien, son of *Arthur Tolkien), in which he found the name Nūmenor (sic). Other members then recall C.S. Lewis’s use of ‘Numinor’. Professor Rashbold of Pembroke, who deciphers and translates the Old English text (written in Tengwar; see *Writing systems) is another sly allusion to Tolkien himself (see *Names).

There are also ‘external’ associations with the Inklings, provided in editorial apparatus. A rejected first page of Part One bears the title Beyond Lewis or Out of the Talkative Planet, and continues: ‘Being a fragment of an apocryphal Inklings’ Saga, made by some imitator at some time in the 1980s’. Its replacement has the title Beyond Probability or Out of the Talkative Planet’, a play on the titles of two of C.S. Lewis’s works, Out of the Silent Planet and Beyond Personality (1944), and suggests that the work was ‘written after 1989, as an apocryphal imitation of the Inklings Saga Book’ (pp. 148–9). The real Inklings regrettably kept no such record of their meetings, but The Notion Club Papers probably conveys some of the atmosphere of their discussions. An early list of members of the Notion Club, identifying some with individual Inklings, shows that Tolkien began with such a scheme, but he seems to have abandoned the idea almost immediately. Although some Notion Club members seem to portray aspects of certain of the Inklings, exact equivalences were soon rejected.

The first pages mentioned above continue with ‘Preface to the Inklings’ (rejected version) and ‘aside to the audience’ (second) version): ‘I beg of the present company not to look for their own faces in this mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your own, but belong to other members of the company – if to anybody’ (pp. 148–9). Christopher Tolkien thinks it likely that his father’s first idea ‘was far less elaborate than it became; intending perhaps, so far as the form was concerned, no more than a jeu d’esprit for the entertainment of the Inklings – while the titles seem to emphasize that it was to be, in part, the vehicle of criticism and discussion of aspects of Lewis’s “planetary” novels’ (p. 149). He sees no indication that his father envisaged Part Two as written, until after he completed Part One.

CRITICISM

In ‘Tolkien’s Experiment with Time: The Lost Road, “The Notion Club Papers”, and J.W. Dunne’, in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995), Verlyn Flieger finds that The Notion Club Papers show

a considerable advance in technical sophistication over The Lost Road. Tolkien’s handling of his material is surer, and his sense of story better developed. There is an increase in narrative tension through a carefully-orchestrated sequence of psychological aberrations, a judicious sprinkling of plot-teasers in the first part of the story, and a gothic use of weather, culminating in the story’s violent climax in a night of storm. The tone of this second narrative is more energetic and its setting more clearly contemporary, more conspicuously grounded in time and place, than that of the earlier story. The argumentative, rumbustious members of the Notion Club are a distinct improvement over the rather quiet Errols, while Tolkien’s earliest drafts make it clear that the wit, rough badinage, and often heated exchanges were drawn from life – specifically the Inklings. [p. 42]

See also Flieger’s A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (1997), especially Chapter 5, and her ‘The Curious Incident of the Dream at the Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007).

David Bratman wrote in ‘The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth’, in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), that in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers ‘we have something not otherwise found in Tolkien’s fiction – stories with explicitly modern setting, which display the author’s own aesthetic to language so extensively that his biographer quoted from them for that purpose …. Not even in his essay *A Secret Vice did Tolkien so vividly convey what the imagination of language meant to him’ (p. 81). He also remarks that

The club may best be thought of as the Inklings viewed through Tolkien’s eyes and idealized to his tastes …. He knew his men intimately … and his imaginary conversations have all the freshness, repartee, and meanderings into intellectual byways that one would expect of a transcription of the real Inklings meetings. The opening discussions are wide-ranging considerations of secondary-world literature that in style must be very similar to actual Inklings meetings, though the content is tinged heavily by Tolkien’s own ideas and interests. [p. 82]

See also John D. Rateliff, ‘The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad’, in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000).

Nouns. Description of nouns in Common Eldarin (see *Languages, Invented), published in Parma Eldalamberon 21 (2013), pp. 63–5, edited with commentary and notes by Christopher Gilson, Patrick H. Wynne, and Arden R. Smith.

Written on four pages, with revisions, Nouns is dated by the editors to the early 1950s. It was closely followed by *Notes for Qenya Declensions.

Númenor. The story of Númenor apparently sprang from a chance conversation between Tolkien and *C.S. Lewis in 1936 or 1937. As Tolkien recalled in a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer: ‘L[ewis] said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” We agreed that he should try “space-travel”, and I should try “time-travel” …. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry: it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend’ (8 February 1967, Letters, p. 378). The time-travel theme allowed Tolkien to plan a story, *The Lost Road (see further for the chronology of its origin), in which he could incorporate a version of the *Atlantis legend which had haunted him since childhood. He told Christopher Bretherton: ‘This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water’ (Letters, p. 347). In a letter to Mrs E.C. Ossendrijver on 5 January 1961 he said that ‘Númenor, shortened form of Númenórë’ was his own invention. Its legends ‘are my own use for my own purposes of the Atlantis legend, but not based on special knowledge, but on a special personal concern with this tradition of the culture-bearing men of the Sea, which so profoundly affected the imagination of peoples of Europe with westward-shores’ (Letters, p. 303).

Early texts of the *‘Silmarillion’ mythology say little about the fate of the Men who fought with the Elves against Morgoth in the First Age. *The Book of Lost Tales never reached that point. The *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926) says only that the Valar assigned Middle-earth to Men, and that Elves who did not leave those lands would fade. The first version of the *Quenta Noldorinwa (c. 1930) states that Men of the race of Hador and Bëor were to be allowed to depart with the Elves for the West if they wished, but of these Men only Elrond was left, and he elected to remain in Middle-earth. In the second version, the permission for Men to leave was omitted. *Christopher Tolkien thinks that this passing idea in the Quenta Noldorinwa nevertheless represents ‘the first germ of the story of the departure of the survivors of the Elf-friends to Númenor’ (*The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 200).

The subsequent evolution of Númenor in Tolkien’s writings was complex. It has roots in his mythology of the First Age and in real world myths; and in the quarter-century following his agreement with Lewis, Tolkien not only brought Númenor into two unfinished works of time-travel, The Lost Road and *The Notion Club Papers, but also wrote three narrative accounts of the island’s story, *The Fall of Númenor, *The Drowning of Anadûnê, and the *Akallabêth, as well as *A Description of the Island of Númenor; he developed and extended its history to provide a vital background to *The Lord of the Rings; and he began (but did not complete) two other narrative works, one (*Aldarion and Erendis) set in Númenor and telling the story of one of the earlier kings, the other (*Tal-Elmar) in which Númenóreans are seen from the point of view of men of Middle-earth.

THE LOST ROAD AND THE FALL OF NÚMENOR

Tolkien described his plans for The Lost Road in his letter to Christopher Bretherton: ‘the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West.’ A father and son would enter into various historic and legendary times and

come at last to Amandil and Elendil leaders of the loyal party in Númenor, when it fell under the domination of Sauron. Elendil ‘Elf-friend’ was the founder of the Exiled kingdoms in Arnor and Gondor. But I found my real interest was only in the upper end, the Akallabêth or Atalantie (‘Downfall’ in Númenórean and Quenya [see *Languages, Invented]), so I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Númenor into relation with the main mythology. [16 July 1964, Letters, p. 347]

Christopher Tolkien, however, can find no evidence that Númenor/Atlantis ever existed independent of the mythology: ‘there was never a time when the legends of Númenor were “unrelated to the main mythology”. My father erred in his recollection (or expressed himself obscurely, meaning something else); the letter cited above was indeed written nearly thirty years later’ (*The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 10).

It also seems evident that the conception of Númenor and of its destruction arose only as part of Tolkien’s plans for his time-travel story. The importance he attached to this part of The Lost Road is confirmed by the preliminary work he did on the Númenórean background before he began to write the story proper. He wrote a quick outline of the history of Númenor, then a fuller, untitled draft narrative: the first version of The Fall of Númenor. After this he wrote four chapters of The Lost Road, two introductory chapters which end as the first instance of time-travel is about to take place, and two which narrate the beginning of an episode in Númenor. There the manuscript ends, except for brief notes for other episodes and part of a chapter set in tenth-century England. Probably after composing the two chapters set in Númenor, Tolkien wrote a second version of The Fall of Númenor.

Although later writings extended the history of Númenor, and added or changed many details, the basic story was already present in the first outline. After the defeat of Morgoth at the end of the First Age, the Valar reward Men who had helped to bring this about with an island in which to dwell, variously called Atalantë, Númenor, and Andúnië. The Númenóreans grow in wisdom and become great mariners. They sail around the shores of Middle-earth and see the Gates of the Morning in the East at the edge of the world (in Tolkien’s mythology originally conceived as flat). Lesser men living in Middle-earth take the Númenóreans as gods. In early versions of the story, the Valar, the ‘Lords of the West’, permit the people of Númenor to sail west to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle where many Elves live, but not further west to Valinor, home of the Valar themselves.

The Númenóreans are granted longer lives than other Men, but are still mortal. Later generations begin to resent this limitation, and to believe that in Valinor they would gain immortal life (*Mortality and Immortality). They are encouraged in this by Thû (the name of Sauron in some early versions of the mythology), once a follower of Morgoth, who comes to Númenor in the likeness of a bird and gains such influence that the king builds a temple to Morgoth and eventually attempts to invade Valinor with a great fleet. In this crisis the Valar, empowered by Ilúvatar, sunder Valinor from the earth, the edges of which are bent back so that it becomes a globe, while a rift opens in which the Númenórean fleet and Númenor itself are destroyed.

The Númenóreans who escape this disaster by sailing to Middle-earth become lords and kings of men. Many still seek in vain to prolong life, but manage only to preserve the bodies of the dead. Their descendants preserve a confused memory of a land in the West ruled by the Gods, to which the dead might come. From this arises a custom among those who dwell on the west coast of Middle-earth of placing their dead on ships and sending them out to sea. Some Númenóreans are able to see, or partly see, a path or bridge rising above the world and leading to the True West; but when they try to find this path they succeed only in sailing around the world. Only the Elves are still able to reach Valinor along the Straight Road.

Amroth, who had continued to honour the Valar, is one of those who escape the destruction of Númenor. He becomes a king in Middle-earth and allies with Elrond, son of Eärendel, and with Elves who had stayed in Middle-earth in an attack on Thû’s fortress. Although they are victorious, Amroth is slain. Thû is driven out and flees to a dark forest.

Having established this history, Tolkien was able to begin to write The Lost Road. The first two chapters, set in more or less contemporary *Cornwall, introduce the main protagonist, Alboin Errol, who from boyhood has heard in his dreams echoes of strange languages, which he calls Eressëan or Elf-latin and Beleriandic, including a passage in Eressëan describing the downfall of Númenor. He finds himself suddenly declaring that some dark clouds ‘look like the eagles of the Lords of the West coming upon Númenor’. Then Elendil of Númenor appears to him and offers him the chance to go back in time, if he takes his son with him. (These two chapters are described at greater length in our article on *The Lost Road.)

The two Númenórean chapters take place forty-four years after the arrival of Sauron (now so named) in Númenor. Elendil (replacing Amroth) is the leader of a party faithful to the old ways and beliefs, while his son, Herendil, has been half won over to the opinion of those supporting Sauron. The kings of Númenor are now descended from Eärendel, and the last king, Tarkalion, in his pride, summons Sauron to Númenor, demanding homage from him. Elendil, who is trying to persuade Herendil to his own point of view, says that men now covet the lands of others, influenced by Sauron; they build metal-clad ships, strong fortresses, and many weapons. Those who displease the king disappear, and there are spies, prisons, torments, and evil rites. Sauron has built a temple to Morgoth on the mountain holy to Ilúvatar, and is encouraging the Númenóreans to abandon the Elvish Eressëan language and revive the ancestral speech of Men. Elendil foresees that Sauron will encourage the ageing king to invade Valinor in a useless bid for immortality. He asks his son to choose between his father and Sauron, and with Herendil’s choice for his father the narrative ends.

The picture Tolkien draws of Númenor under the influence of Sauron, a once great nation in decay, almost certainly owes something to then-current events in Nazi Germany. Christopher Tolkien comments:

From Elendil’s words at the end of The Lost Road there emerges a sinister picture: the withdrawal of the besotted and aging king from the public view, the unexpected disappearance of people unpopular with the ‘government’, informers, prisons, torture, secrecy, fear of the night; propaganda in the form of the ‘rewriting of history’ …; the multiplication of weapons of war, the purpose of which is concealed but guessed at; and behind all the dreadful figure of Sauron …. Moreover, Númenor is seen by the young as over-populous, boring, ‘over-known’ …; and this cause of discontent is used, it seems, by Sauron to further the policy of ‘imperial’ expansion and ambition that he presses on the king. When at this time my father reached back to the world of the first man to bear the name ‘Elf-friend’ he found there an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own. [The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 77]

The second version of The Fall of Númenor probably followed, or was contemporary with, the writing of The Lost Road, for it includes details introduced in that work. Elrond, son of Eärendel, is now named as the first ruler of Númenor. The Númenóreans adopt the speech of the Elves of the Blessed Realm and Tol Eressëa. Elendil, who escapes the downfall, becomes a king in Beleriand and allies with Gil-galad, the Elf-king, against Sauron, whose stronghold, Mordor, is now named. Although Sauron is overthrown, both Elendil and Gil-galad are slain. A later addition states that Tol Eressëa as well as Valinor is removed from the world.