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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, and two which narrate the beginning of an episode in Númenor. There the manuscript ends, except for brief notes for other episodes and part of a chapter set in tenth-century England. Probably after composing the two chapters set in Númenor, Tolkien wrote a second version of The Fall of Númenor.
Although later writings extended the history of Númenor, and added or changed many details, the basic story was already present in the first outline. After the defeat of Morgoth at the end of the First Age, the Valar reward Men who had helped to bring this about with an island in which to dwell, variously called Atalantë, Númenor, and Andúnië. The Númenóreans grow in wisdom and become great mariners. They sail around the shores of Middle-earth and see the Gates of the Morning in the East at the edge of the world (in Tolkien’s mythology originally conceived as flat). Lesser men living in Middle-earth take the Númenóreans as gods. In early versions of the story, the Valar, the ‘Lords of the West’, permit the people of Númenor to sail west to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle where many Elves live, but not further west to Valinor, home of the Valar themselves.
The Númenóreans are granted longer lives than other Men, but are still mortal. Later generations begin to resent this limitation, and to believe that in Valinor they would gain immortal life (*Mortality and Immortality). They are encouraged in this by Thû (the name of Sauron in some early versions of the mythology), once a follower of Morgoth, who comes to Númenor in the likeness of a bird and gains such influence that the king builds a temple to Morgoth and eventually attempts to invade Valinor with a great fleet. In this crisis the Valar, empowered by Ilúvatar, sunder Valinor from the earth, the edges of which are bent back so that it becomes a globe, while a rift opens in which the Númenórean fleet and Númenor itself are destroyed.
The Númenóreans who escape this disaster by sailing to Middle-earth become lords and kings of men. Many still seek in vain to prolong life, but manage only to preserve the bodies of the