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

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СКАЧАТЬ to emerge with the mention of Ond (later Ondor > Gondor) in early versions of the Council of Elrond (bk. II, ch. 2). Trotter becomes a man rather than a hobbit, described in Gandalf’s letter to Frodo as ‘Aragorn son of Celegorn, of the line of Isildur Elendil’s son’ (*The Treason of Isengard, p. 50). Eventually Aragorn becomes the last descendant of Elendil and the rightful heir to the realms Elendil founded. Tolkien tried out several ideas for the establishment and early history of these realms before he was satisfied. The story that eventually emerged was that Elendil the Tall and his sons Isildur and Anárion sailed first to the North, where they were befriended by Gilgalad and Elendil established the kingdom of Arnor. His sons then sailed south and founded the realm of Gondor, close to Mordor. When Sauron attacks and takes Isildur’s city, Minas Ithil, Isildur joins his father in the North, and Elendil and Gilgalad form the Last Alliance against Sauron.

      THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS AND THE DROWNING OF ANADÛNÊ

      During Christmas vacation 1945 and the first half of 1946, with The Lord of the Rings still unfinished, Tolkien began to transform some of the material from The Lost Road into a new work, The Notion Club Papers, again involving time-travel and the final days of Númenor. As part of this work he also wrote *The Drowning of Anadûnê, a new account of The Fall of Númenor. Apparently it was only after completing the first part of The Notion Club Papers that he decided that the second part should deal with Númenor, writing a note: ‘Do the Atlantis story and abandon Eriol-Saga’ (*Sauron Defeated, p. 281).

      In the second part of The Notion Club Papers, two members of the titular society, Alwin Arundel Lowdham and Wilfrid Trewyn Jeremy, evidently having inherited memories from remote ancestors, have experiences like those of Alboin Errol in The Lost Road. Both are stirred by the name Éarendel, both dream of hearing fragments of strange languages (Quenya and Sindarin) or of seeing manuscripts written in strange scripts, and report these at meetings of the Club. Lowdham remembers that his father kept a diary in a strange script, and that after his father’s disappearance in his boat Éarendel Star he found a sheet in the same script but could not decipher it. During one meeting, a thunderstorm rages outside, and both Lowdham and Jeremy seem to have a vision of, or to experience, the destruction of Númenor. They cry out:

      The ships have set sail at last …. Behold, the mountain smokes and the earth trembles! … Woe to this time and the fell counsels of Sauron! Tarkalion hath set forth his might against the Lords of the West …. The Lords have spoken to the Maker … and the fate of the world is overturned …. The ships of the Númenóreans are drowned in the abyss. They are lost for ever. See now the eagles of the Lords overshadow Númenor. The mountain goes up to heaven in flame and vapour; the hills totter, slide, and crumble: the land founders. The glory has gone down into the deep waters. [p. 251, emended from notes 63–4, p. 290]

      Lowdham addresses Jeremy as ‘Voronwë’, and Jeremy addresses Lowdham as ‘Elendil’. Both rush into the freak storm and do not return for some months. Then they begin to tell of their travels round the western coasts of Britain and Ireland, and of a shared dream in which they were in tenth-century England, Lowdham as the minstrel Ælfwine, Jeremy as Tréowine from the Marches.

      Tolkien abandoned The Notion Club Papers with this account only partly told. Only a few notes and fragments indicate how the story might have continued. One note suggests that Tréowine and Ælfwine were to sail west, find the Straight Road, see the round world below, then be driven back. Another has ‘sojourn in Númenor before and during the fall ends with Elendil and Voronwë fleeing on a hill of water into the dark with the Eagles and lightning pursuing them’, and ‘at the end … Lowdham and Jeremy have a vivid dream of the Fall of Númenor’ (p. 279).

      In association with The Notion Club Papers Tolkien wrote a new account of the fall of Númenor, The Drowning of Anadûnê. This differs significantly from The Fall of Númenor, which had ended with the words: ‘And here endeth the tale of the ancient world as it is known to the Elves’ (The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 29). There is no reason to doubt that when Tolkien wrote those words he intended that the Elves’ knowledge of the world and its history, deriving from the Valar and their own experiences, should reflect what actually occurred. Nothing is said about if, and how, this Elvish tradition was passed on to Men. The Drowning of Anadûnê is intended to show how events in the First Age and the history of Númenor might have been remembered in the traditions of Men after being passed down through many generations: filtered, changed, distorted, and with much forgotten. But this was also a time when Tolkien began to doubt whether he should include in his mythology elements contrary to scientific knowledge, such as a flat world made round, and considered whether to make fundamental changes, or alternatively, changes in perception and knowledge, even writing a version of the *Ainulindalë in which the world was round from Creation. In The Fall of Númenor a flat world is made round at the time of the Downfall, but in The Drowning of Anadûnê the world was always round.

      Tolkien made three rough preliminary sketches before beginning The Drowning of Anadûnê, then produced four successive typescripts. There are considerable differences in the story told in these texts, and Christopher Tolkien concludes ‘that the marked differences in the preliminary sketches reflect my father’s shifting ideas of what the “Mannish tradition” might be, and how to present it; he was sketching rapidly possible modes in which the memory, and the forgetfulness, of Men in Middle-earth, descendants of the Exiles of Númenor, might have transformed their early history’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 407). If one assumes that the Elvish traditions of events in the First Age recounted in the Quenta Silmarillion, the *Annals of Beleriand, and The Fall of Númenor record what actually happened, then it is clear that these versions of ‘Mannish tradition’ preserve only faint and erroneous memories of events. They are particularly confused about the Valar and the Elves, sometimes making no distinction between them, and uncertain about their dwelling places in the West.

      In the preliminary sketches and in The Drowning of Anadûnê Tolkien pays much attention to what the Númenóreans thought or were told about the shape of the world. Although he made no authorial statement on this matter, a careful study of internal evidence suggests that this world was round from the beginning. In the first sketch the Númenóreans ‘believe the world flat, and that “the Lords of the West” (Gods) dwell beyond the great barrier of cloud hills – where there is no death and the Sun is renewed and passes under the world to rise again’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 400), but are told by the Elves that the world is round. By emendations it is Sauron, not the Elves, who tells the Númenóreans that the world is round, but in the third sketch (in a section later struck through) ‘the ancient Númenóreans knew (being taught by the Eledāi [= Elves]) that the Earth was round; but Sauron taught them that it was a disc and flat …’ (p. 404). In the first version of The Drowning of Anadûnê the Avalāi (= confused mixing of the Valar and the Elves), who live in Avallondē, tell the Númenóreans that the world is round ‘and that if they sailed into the utmost West, yet would they but come back again to the East and so to the places of their setting out, and the world would seem to them but a prison’ (p. 345); while Sauron ‘bade them think that the world was not a closed circle; and that therein there were many lands for their winning …; and even yet, when they came to the end thereof, there was the Dark without, out of which came all things’ (p. 347). A note written beside the text says that after the disaster, the Númenóreans continued to believe Sauron’s lies that the world was flat until their fleets, seeking for the remains of Númenor, sailed around the world. In the second and later versions of The Drowning of Anadûnê the Valar send messengers to the last king (now called Ar-Pharazôn) and tell him that ‘the fashion of the Earth is such that a girdle may be set about it. Or as an apple … it is round and fair, and the seas and lands are but the rind of the fruit …’ (p. 364). But Zigûr (= Sauron) refutes this with similar words as in the first version. There is no reference in any of the texts to the Númenóreans seeing the Gates of Morning, as there was in The Fall of Númenor.

      The СКАЧАТЬ