The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

The Lost Road and Other Writings - Christopher  Tolkien


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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:

      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 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.

      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


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