The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE LEGEND
In February 1968 my father addressed a commentary to the authors of an article about him (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien no. 294). In the course of this he recorded that ‘one day’ C. S. Lewis said to him that since ‘there is too little of what we really like in stories’ they would have to try to write some themselves. He went on:
We agreed that he should try ‘space-travel’, and I should try ‘time-travel’. His result is well known. 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. The final scene survives as The Downfall of Númenor.*
A few years earlier, in a letter of July 1964 (Letters no. 257), he gave some account of his book, The Lost Road:
When C. S. Lewis and I tossed up, and he was to write on space-travel and I on time-travel, I began an abortive book of time-travel of which 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. The thread was to be the occurrence time and again in human families (like Durin among the Dwarves) of a father and son called by names that could be interpreted as Bliss-friend and Elf-friend. These no longer understood are found in the end to refer to the Atlantid-Númenórean situation and mean ‘one loyal to the Valar, content with the bliss and prosperity within the limits prescribed’ and ‘one loyal to friendship with the High-elves’. It started with a father-son affinity between Edwin and Elwin of the present, and was supposed to go back into legendary time by way of an Eädwine and Ælfwine of circa A.D.918, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend, and so to the traditions of the North Sea concerning the coming of corn and culture heroes, ancestors of kingly lines, in boats (and their departure in funeral ships). One such Sheaf, or Shield Sheafing, can actually be made out as one of the remote ancestors of the present Queen. In my tale we were to 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), so I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Númenor into relation with the main mythology.
I do not know whether evidence exists that would date the conversation that led to the writing of Out of the Silent Planet and The Lost Road, but the former was finished by the autumn of 1937, and the latter was submitted, so far as it went, to Allen and Unwin in November of that year (see III.364).
The significance of the last sentence in the passage just cited is not entirely clear. When my father said ‘But I found my real interest was only in the upper end, the Akallabêth or Atalantie’ he undoubtedly meant that he had not been inspired to write the ‘intervening’ parts, in which the father and son were to appear and reappear in older and older phases of Germanic legend; and indeed The Lost Road stops after the introductory chapters and only takes up again with the Númenórean story that was to come at the end. Very little was written of what was planned to lie between. But what is the meaning of ‘so I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Númenor into relation with the main mythology’? My father seems to be saying that, having found that he only wanted to write about Númenor, he therefore and only then (abandoning The Lost Road) appended the Númenórean material to ‘the main mythology’, thus inaugurating the Second Age of the World. But what was this material? He cannot have meant the Númenórean matter contained in The Lost Road itself, since that was already fully related to ‘the main mythology’. It must therefore have been something else, already existing when The Lost Road was begun, as Humphrey Carpenter assumes in his Biography (p. 170): ‘Tolkien’s legend of Númenor… was probably composed some time before the writing of “The Lost Road”, perhaps in the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties.’ But, in fact, the conclusion seems to me inescapable that my father erred when he said this.
The original rough workings for The Lost Road are extant, but they are very rough, and do not form a continuous text. There is one complete manuscript, itself fairly rough and heavily emended in different stages; and a professional typescript that was done when virtually all changes had been made to the manuscript.† The typescript breaks off well before the point where the manuscript comes to an end, and my father’s emendations to it were very largely corrections of the typist’s errors, which were understandably many; it has therefore only slight textual value, and the manuscript is very much the primary text.
The Lost Road breaks off finally in the course of a conversation during the last days of Númenor between Elendil and his son Herendil; and in this Elendil speaks at length of the ancient history: of the wars against Morgoth, of Eärendel, of the founding of Númenor, and of the coming there of Sauron. The Lost Road is therefore, as I have said, entirely integrated with ‘the main mythology’ – and this is true already in the preliminary drafts.
Now as the papers were found, there follows immediately after the last page of The Lost Road a further manuscript with a new page-numbering, but no title. Quite apart from its being so placed, this text gives a strong physical impression of belonging to the same time as The Lost Road; and it is closely associated in content with the last part of The Lost Road, for it tells the story of Númenor and its downfall – though this second text was written with a different purpose, to be a complete if very brief history: it is indeed the first fully-written draft of the narrative that ultimately became the Akallabêth. But it is earlier than The Lost Road; for where that has Sauron and Tarkalion this has Sûr and Angor.
A second, more finished manuscript of this history of Númenor followed, with the title (written in afterwards) The Last Tale: The Fall of Númenor. This has several passages that are scarcely different from passages in The Lost Road, but it seems scarcely possible to show for certain which preceded and which followed, unless the evidence cited on p. 74, note 25, is decisive that the second version of The Fall of Númenor was the later of the two; in any case, a passage rewritten very near the time of the original composition of this version is certainly later than The Lost Road, for it gives a later form of the story of Sauron’s arrival in Númenor (see pp. 26–7).
It is therefore clear that the two works were intimately connected; they arose at the same time and from the same impulse, and my father worked on them together. But still more striking is the existence of a single page that can only be the original ‘scheme’ for The Fall of Númenor, the actual first writing down of the idea. The very name Númenor is here only in process of emergence. Yet in this primitive form of the story the term Middle-earth is used, as it never was in the Quenta: it did not appear until the Annals of Valinor and the Ambarkanta. Moreover the form Ilmen occurs, which suggests that this ‘scheme’ was later than the actual writing of the Ambarkanta, where Ilmen was an emendation of Ilma (earlier Silma): IV.240, note 3.
I conclude therefore that ‘Númenor’ (as a distinct and formalised conception, whatever ‘Atlantis-haunting’, as my father called it, lay behind) arose in the actual context of his discussions with C. S. Lewis in (as seems probable) 1936. A passage in the 1964 letter can be taken to say precisely that: ‘I began an abortive book