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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ