The Lost Road and Other Writings Read online

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  The Lost Road

  AND OTHER WRITINGS

  Language and Legend before

  ‘The Lord of the Rings’

  Christopher Tolkien

  COPYRIGHT

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  www.tolkienestate.com

  First published in Great Britain by Unwin Hyman 1987

  Copyright © The Tolkien Estate Limited and C.R. Tolkien 1987

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note on Accessibility

  Preface

  PART ONE: THE FALL OF NÚMENOR AND THE LOST ROAD

  ITHE EARLY HISTORY OF THE LEGEND

  IITHE FALL OF NÚMENOR

  (i)The original outline

  (ii)The first version of The Fall of Númenor

  (iii)The second version of The Fall of Númenor

  (iv)The further development of The Fall of Númenor

  IIITHE LOST ROAD

  (i)The opening chapters

  (ii)The Númenórean chapters

  (iii)The unwritten chapters

  PART TWO: VALINOR AND MIDDLE-EARTH BEFORE THE LORD OF THE RINGS

  ITHE TEXTS AND THEIR RELATIONS

  IITHE LATER ANNALS OF VALINOR

  IIITHE LATER ANNALS OF BELERIAND

  IVAINULINDALË

  VTHE LHAMMAS

  VIQUENTA SILMARILLION

  PART THREE

  THE ETYMOLOGIES

  APPENDIX

  ITHE GENEALOGIES

  IITHE LIST OF NAMES

  IIITHE SECOND ‘SILMARILLION’ MAP

  Searchable Terms

  Other books by J.R.R. Tolkien

  About the Publisher

  NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY

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  PREFACE

  This fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth completes the presentation and analysis of my father’s writings on the subject of the First Age up to the time at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938 when he set them for long aside. The book provides all the evidence known to me for the understanding of his conceptions in many essential matters at the time when The Lord of the Rings was begun; and from the Annals of Valinor, the Annals of Beleriand, the Ainulindalë, and the Quenta Silmarillion given here it can be quite closely determined which elements in the published Silmarillion go back to that time, and which entered afterwards. To make this a satisfactory work of reference for these purposes I have thought it essential to give the texts of the later 1930s in their entirety, even though in parts of the Annals the development from the antecedent versions was not great; for the curious relations between the Annals and the Quenta Silmariliion are a primary feature of the history and here already appear, and it is clearly better to have all the related texts within the same covers. Only in the case of the prose form of the tale of Beren and Lúthien have I not done so, since that was preserved so little changed in the published Silmariliion; here I have restricted myself to notes on the changes that were made editorially.

  I cannot, or at any rate I cannot yet, attempt the editing of my fathers strictly or narrowly linguistic writings, in view of their extraordinary complexity and difficulty; but I include in this book the general essay called The Lhammas or Account of Tongues, and also the Etymologies, both belonging to this period. The latter, a kind of etymological dictionary, provides historical explanations of a very large number of words and names, and enormously increases the known vocabularies of the Elvish tongues – as they were at that time, for like everything else the languages continued to evolve as the years passed. Also hitherto unknown except by allusion is my father’s abandoned ‘time-travel’ story The Lost Road, which leads primarily to Númenor, but also into the history and legend of northern and western Europe, with the associated poems The Song of Ælfwine (in the stanza of Pearl) and King Sheave (in alliterative verse). Closely connected with The Lost Road were the earliest forms of the legend of the Drowning of Númenor, which are also included in the book, and the first glimpses of the story of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.

  In the inevitable Appendix I have placed three works which are not given complete: the Genealogies, the List of Names, and the second ‘Silmarillion’ Map, all of which belong in their original forms to the earlier 1930s. The Genealogies only came to light recently, but they add in fact little to what is known from the narrative texts. The List of Names might have been better included in Vol. IV, but this was again a work of reference which provides very little new matter, and it was more convenient to postpone it and then to give just those few entries which offer new detail. The second Map is a different case. This was my father’s sole ‘Silmarillion’ map for some forty years, and here I have redrawn it to show it as it was when first made, leaving out all the layer upon layer of later accretion and alteration. The Tale of Years and the Tale of Battles, listed in title-pages to The Silmarillion as elements in that work (see p. 202), are not included, since they were contemporary with the later Annals and add nothing to the material found in them; subsequent alteration of names and dates was also carried out in a precisely similar way.

  In places the detailed discussion of dating may seem excessive, but since the chronology of my father’s writings, both ‘internal’ and ‘external’, is extremely difficult to determine and the evidence full of traps, and since the history can be very easily and very seriously falsified by mistaken deductions on this score, I have wished to make as plain as I can the reasons for my assertions.

  In some of the texts I have introduced paragraph-numbering. This is done in the belief that it will provide a more precise and therefore quicker method of reference in a book where the discu
ssion of its nature moves constantly back and forth.

  As in previous volumes I have to some degree standardized usage in respect of certain names: thus for example I print Gods, Elves, Orcs, Middle-earth, etc. with initial capitals, and Kôr, Tûn, Eärendel, Númenórean, etc. for frequent Kór, Tún, Earendel, Númenórean of the manuscripts.

  The earlier volumes of the series are referred to as I (The Book of Lost Tales Part I), II (The Book of Lost Tales Part II), III (The Lays of Beleriand), and IV (The Shaping of Middle-earth). The sixth volume now in preparation will concern the evolution of The Lord of the Rings.

  The tables illustrating The Lhammas are reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who kindly supplied photographs.

  I list here for convenience the abbreviations used in the book in reference to various works (for a fuller account see pp. 107–8).

  Texts in Vol. IV:

  S

  The Sketch of the Mythology or ‘earliest Silmarillion’.

  Q

  The Quenta (‘Quenta Noldorinwa’), the second version of ‘The Silmarillion’.

  AV 1

  The earliest Annals of Valinor.

  AB 1

  The earliest Annals of Beleriand (in two versions, the second early abandoned).

  Texts in Vol. V:

  FN

  The Fall of Númenor (FN I and FN II referring to the first and second texts).

  AV 2

  The second version of the Annals of Valinor.

  AB 2

  The second version (or strictly the third) of the Annals of Beleriand.

  QS

  The Quenta Silmarillion, the third version of ‘The Silmarillion’, nearing completion at the end of 1937.

  Other works (Ambarkanta, Ainulindalë, Lhammas, The Lost Road) are not referred to by abbreviations.

  In conclusion, I take this opportunity to notice and explain the erroneous representation of the Westward Extension of the first ‘Silmarillion’ Map in the previous volume (The Shaping of Middle-earth p. 228). It will be seen that this map presents a strikingly different appearance from that of the Eastward Extension on p. 231. These two maps, being extremely faint, proved impossible to reproduce from photographs supplied by the Bodleian Library, and an experimental ‘reinforcement’ (rather than re-drawing) of a copy of the Westward Extension was tried out. This I rejected, and it was then found that my photocopies of the originals gave a result sufficiently clear for the purpose. Unhappily, the rejected ‘reinforced’ version of the Westward Extension map was substituted for the photocopy. (Photocopies were also used for diagram III on p. 247 and map V on p. 251, where the originals are in faint pencil.)

  PART ONE

  THE FALL OF NÚMENOR AND THE LOST ROAD

  I

  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 give
s 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.