29-579: The Notion Club Papers is an abandoned novel by J. R. R. Tolkien , written in 1945 and published posthumously in Sauron Defeated , the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth . It is a time travel story, written while The Lord of the Rings was being developed. The Notion Club is a fictionalization of Tolkien's own such club, the Inklings . Tolkien's mechanism for the exploration of time
58-536: A draft of the Drowning of Anadûnê (that led to Akallabêth ), and the only extant account of Tolkien's constructed language Adûnaic . Some paperback editions of the fourth volume, retitled The End of the Third Age , include only the materials that relate to The Lord of the Rings . The original idea was to release The History of The Lord of the Rings in three volumes, not four. When The Treason of Isengard
87-497: A fully-formed world, Middle-earth , with invented languages , peoples , cultures, and history . Among his many influences were his own Roman Catholic faith, medieval languages and literature, including Norse mythology . He is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), and The Silmarillion (1977), all set in Middle-earth. The story revolves around
116-568: A poem named "Imram" at the same time, and it was the only element published in his lifetime. Virginia Luling writes of The Notion Club Papers that "Tolkien had reason to abandon it: the existing chapters are unsuccessful, though with gleams." Flieger comments that had either The Lost Road or The Notion Club Papers been finished, we would have had a dream of time-travel through actual history and recorded myth which would have functioned as both introduction and epilogue to Tolkien's own invented mythology. The result would have been time-travel not on
145-724: A strong connection to Pembroke College, Oxford . Stanley Unwin , Tolkien's publisher, was a nephew of Fisher Unwin, the founding member of The Johnson Club. The Notion Club Papers may be seen as an attempt to re-write the incomplete The Lost Road (written around 1936-1937), being another attempt to tie the Númenórean legend in with a more modern tale through time travel . It follows the then-popular theory of J. W. Dunne , who had suggested in his 1927 An Experiment with Time that dreams could combine memories of both past and future events, and that time could flow differently for observers in different dimensions. The modern name "Alwin",
174-578: Is described in The Silmarillion , as part of an invented mythology for England . Tolkien's biographer John Garth adds that The Notion Club Papers character Lowdham's middle name, Arundel, is both an English place-name and an echo of the legendarium's Éarendel (an ancestor of Elendil). Both stories however break off before much time-travelling takes place. Tolkien finally managed to incorporate literary explorations of time in The Lord of
203-545: Is through lucid dreams. These allow club members to experience events as far back as the destruction of the Atlantis -like island of Númenor , as narrated in The Silmarillion . The unfinished text of The Notion Club Papers runs for some 120 pages in Sauron Defeated , accompanied by 40 pages of Christopher Tolkien 's commentary and notes, with examples of the pages hand-written by his father. J. R. R. Tolkien
232-644: The Old English name " Ælfwine ", and the Quenya name " Elendil " all mean "Elf-friend"; in The Lost Road , the story involves father-son characters named Edwin/Elwin, Eadwine/Aelfwine, Audoin/Alboin, Amandil/Elendil, all meaning "Bliss-friend/Elf-friend", as the pair travel successively further back in time all the way through history to Númenor, just as the protagonists of The Notion Club Papers do in their lucid dreams. This situates Númenor, whose downfall
261-589: The original map of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age ; and the evolution of Cirth in an appendix. The third volume, The War of the Ring continues to the opening of the Black Gate . The last volume reaches the end of the narrative, and features the rejected "Epilogue", in which Sam answers his children's questions. It includes The Notion Club Papers (a time-travel story related to Númenor ),
290-534: The High-Elves) on the title page of each of the volumes of History of Middle-earth , written by Christopher Tolkien and describing the contents of the book. The History of The Lord of the Rings reveals much of the slow, aggregative nature of Tolkien's creativity. As Christopher Tolkien noted of the first two volumes, his father had eventually brought the story up to Rivendell , but still "without any clear conception of what lay before him". He also noted how, on
319-524: The Notion Club; these meetings are said to have occurred in the 1980s. The notes, written by one of the participants, include references to events that 'occurred' in the 1970s and 1980s. Green publishes a first edition containing excerpts from the documents. Two scholars read the first edition, ask to examine the documents, and then submit a full report. The "Notes to the Second Edition" mentions
SECTION 10
#1732783805131348-553: The Rings The History of The Lord of the Rings is a four-volume work by Christopher Tolkien published between 1988 and 1992 that documents his father's process of constructing The Lord of the Rings . The History is also numbered as volumes six to nine of The History of Middle-earth ("HoME"). The volumes are: The first volume of The History encompasses three early phases of composition, including what Tolkien later called "the crucial chapter" which sets up
377-574: The Rings , in the form of a visit to what seems to be the deep past in the Elvish land of Lothlorien , following a tradition that in Elfland , time is different; the stay lasts a month, but feels like only a few days. According to Christopher Tolkien , had his father continued The Notion Club Papers , he would have linked the real world of Alwin Lowdham with his eponymous ancestor Ælfwine of England ,
406-574: The Third Age . The title The Return of the Shadow was a discarded title for Volume 1. Three of the titles of the volumes of The History of The Lord of the Rings were also used as book titles for the seven-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings : The Treason of Isengard for Book 3, The War of the Ring for Book 5, and The End of the Third Age for Book 6. There is an inscription in Fëanorian characters ( Tengwar , an alphabet Tolkien devised for
435-411: The abandoned novel, and reproduces examples of pages hand-written by his father. The text comments on C. S. Lewis 's Space Trilogy . Lewis and Tolkien were close friends and members of the Inklings literary club. The two men had agreed to write space travel (Lewis) and time travel (Tolkien) novels, since they agreed there were too few stories in existence that they really liked. Tolkien's remarks on
464-625: The central plot, " The Shadow of the Past ". It finishes at the point where the Company of the Ring enter the Mines of Moria . The second volume continues to the meeting with Théoden king of Rohan , and includes the invention and evolution of Lothlórien and Galadriel ; plans for Frodo and Sam 's progress to Mordor ; the creation and development of Treebeard , the Ents , and Fangorn; discussions of
493-450: The club. Jane Stanford links The Notion Club Papers to John O'Connor Power 's 1899 The Johnson Club Papers ; the two books have a similar title page. The Johnson Club was a "Public House School" and met in taverns as the Inklings did. The purpose was "Fellowship and free Exchange of Mind". Both clubs presented papers "which were read before the members and discussed". The Johnson Club was named for Samuel Johnson , who like Tolkien, had
522-625: The contradictory evidence in dating the documents, and an alternative date is presented: they may have been written in the 1940s. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote several unfinished drafts of The Notion Club Papers in 1945. The 120-page fragment was published posthumously by George Allen & Unwin in the UK and by Houghton Mifflin in the US, within Sauron Defeated , the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth , in 1992. The book includes in addition some 40 pages of Christopher Tolkien 's commentary and notes on
551-519: The end of the given story it becomes clear Lowdham himself is a reincarnation of sorts of Elendil , leader of the men who escaped the destruction of Númenor. Other members of the Club mention their vivid dreams of other times and places. The Notion Club Papers is elaborately constructed. The main story (the Notion Club, itself the frame of the Númenor story) is set within a frame story . Both are set in
580-481: The fictional compiler of The Book of Lost Tales , and with Atlantis. One of the members of the Notion Club, Michael George Ramer, combines lucid dreams with time-travel and experiences the tsunami that sank Númenor. He cannot tell if it is history, or fantasy, or something in between. Verlyn Flieger writes that the journeying about of the protagonist recalls the Celtic Imram voyages, noting that Tolkien wrote
609-476: The figures also being Boffins and Bolgers, as well as Tooks. Only with the chapter "The Breaking of the Fellowship" did fluency finally arrive for Tolkien, his son recording how chapters were suddenly "achieved with far greater facility than any previous part of the story". Thereafter Tolkien's problem was rather one of selecting between alternative accounts, so as to produce the best effect – two episodes in
SECTION 20
#1732783805131638-472: The future, after the actual time of writing, 1945. Embedded within the story are Tolkien's versions of European legends: King Sheave , and The Death of St. Brendan , a three-page poem also titled ' Imram '. In the frame story, a Mr. Green finds documents in sacks of waste paper at Oxford in 2012. These documents, the Notion Club Papers of the title, are the incomplete notes of meetings of
667-478: The meetings of an Oxford arts discussion group, the Notion Club. During these meetings, Alwin Arundel Lowdham discusses his lucid dreams about Númenor , a lost civilisation connected with Atlantis and with Tolkien's Middle-earth . Through these dreams, he "discovers" much about the Númenor story and the languages of Middle-earth (notably Quenya , Sindarin , and Adûnaic ). While not finished, at
696-570: The scale of ordinary science fiction but of epic, a dream of myth and history and fiction interlocking as Tolkien wanted them to, as they might well once have done. The Notion Club Papers mentions a great storm in England, on 12 June 1987. The actual Great Storm of 1987 occurred in October of that year. Christopher Tolkien drew attention to this, saying "my father's 'prevision' was only out by four months". The History of The Lord of
725-442: The trilogy are similar in style to Lewis's commentary on Tolkien's poem The Lay of Leithian , in which he created a fictional history of scholarship of the poem and even referred to other manuscript traditions to recommend changes to the poem. Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter , describes The Notion Club as a "thinly disguised" version of the Inklings, noting that the time travellers are two Oxford dons who are members of
754-458: The way, his father could get caught up in a "spider's web of argumentation" – what Tom Shippey described as getting "bogged down in sometimes strikingly unnecessary webs of minor causation". Thus (for example) the character eventually known as Pippin Took was, in a series of rewriting and of deleted adventures, variously known as Odo, Frodo, Folco, Faramond, Peregrin, Hamilcar, Fredegar, and Olo –
783-559: The work into three volumes, each containing two books; the appendices were included in the third. The titles proposed by Tolkien for the six books were: Book 1, The First Journey or The Ring Sets Out ; Book 2, The Journey of the Nine Companions or The Ring Goes South ; Book 3, The Treason of Isengard ; Book 4, The Journey of the Ring-Bearers or The Ring Goes East ; Book 5, The War of the Ring ; and Book 6, The End of
812-520: Was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and a medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages , especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. His professional knowledge of Beowulf , telling of a pagan world but with a Christian narrator, helped to shape his fictional world of Middle-earth . His intention to create what has been called " a mythology for England " led him to construct not only stories but
841-490: Was first published in paperback, Volume 8 was to be called Sauron Defeated and was to be the last volume. Some information on the appendices and a soon-abandoned sequel to the novel can be found in volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth . The titles of the volumes derive from discarded titles for the separate books of The Lord of the Rings . J. R. R. Tolkien conceived that novel as a single volume structured into six "books" plus extensive appendices, but his publisher split
#130869