The lost road and other writings Book

All of the History of Middle-earth volumes that I have read thus far have been chock full of stories, details, notes, and essays that go a long way to showing the sheer scope of what Tolkien was attempting to create from his formative years up to and beyond the creation of his most famous works (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), but in many ways this latest volume seemed to be nearly bursting at the seams. This foray through the HoME volumes has been an intriguing journey for me (and one that I've enjoyed far more than I would have thought) and now it would appear that the first phase of it has come to a close, for it is in _The Lost Road_ that we reach the point Tolkien had come to in the creation of his original mythology before embarking on what would be perhaps the most important, and undeniably the most famous, (though also arguably the most disruptive) stage in his career: the composition of The Lord of the Rings.

Many nerds such as myself who are intimately familiar with the legends surrounding the lives of the Inklings, that group of Oxford writers that centred around Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis, know the story of a discussion the two men had when they decided that there was a dearth of the kinds of mythological and heroic tales that so fueled their own imaginations and thus as Tolkien recalled Lewis saying: "if they won't write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves." Lewis decided to write a story that centred on the intrusion of myth into the world via the vehicle of space travel, while Tolkien was to write a story in which this happened through time travel. Lewis ended up creating the 'Space Trilogy' (in my mind his best works of fiction), in which his philologist hero (a probable partial nod to Tolkien himself) is thrust into a wider cosmos in which the beings and wars of the mythical world are seen to be all too real. Tolkien, as was alas often the case, never ended up finishing his story, though the fragments that exist are presented in this volume and make up the first section in which we see the birth of what was to become an important element of his ever-growing and evolving history of Middle-earth: the rise (and ultimate fall) of the fabled isle of Númenor.

Like so many of the elements of Tolkien's mythology the importance of Númenor seems to be contradicted by the relative scarcity of actual material relating to it. In his published works it is little more than a myth and legend from the distant past whose importance looms large in implication, though less so in apparent fact. Even the posthumously published The Silmarillion has relatively little to contribute on the subject. This was one reason, I think, that the stories which presented an inside look into Tolkien's conceptions of Númenor (both in this volume and in the book Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth) are especially tantalizing to me. Amongst all of the many writings and ideas left 'unfinished' by Tolkien I would probably pair the isle of Númenor with his sparse tales of Tuor, Earendil and the fall of Gondolin as the 'missed opportunities' that most torment me. I wish he had written more, and more fully, on these topics and so what I can find on them I treasure.

_The Lost Road_ gives us some early outlines on Númenor as a concept and its eventual fall within the context of his still developing Middle-earth mythology, along with the few chapters that Tolkien actually wrote of "The Lost Road" (his proposed companion book to Lewis') in which a father and son were to travel back in time and discover their connection not only to this mythical isle, but also to many other significant moments in history which they would vicariously experience through their previous lives. It is in these texts that 'Sauron' was first used as the name for the lieutenant of Morgoth and it was perhaps his important role as the key behind Númenor's fall (along with his off-stage appearance as 'the Necromancer' in _The Hobbit_) that may have contributed to his pivotal role in the work which Tolkien was to begin writing soon after and which would become his magnum opus: _The Lord of the Rings_.

The second part of the text returns us to more familiar ground as we see the further evolution of Tolkien's composition of the Silmarillion proper in the form of an updated series of annals (for both Beleriand and Valinor), a reworking of his 'cosmogonical myth' the Ainulindalë in which the angelic beings called the Ainur sing worldly creation into being, and 'the Lhammas', a text devoted to detailing the development of the languages of the elves within the fictional framework of Middle-earth (and which I found much more compelling than that description is likely to imply). Finally section two closes with a version of the 'Quenta Silmarillion' in which Tolkien again rewrites the entire history of the first age of Middle-earth in a somewhat compressed form…though much of the wording will be familiar to those who have read the published Silmarillion. In contrast to the first two volumes of the HoME series where even many of the familiar stories and characters were sometimes only vaguely recognizable, we now see much that is not only familiar, but often exactly corresponds to what we will see in the published Silmarillion. There seem to be relatively few elements that are yet to change and thus it is much easier to look back across the various volumes and gain a glimpse of how it was that Christopher Tolkien came up with the final text of the published Silmarillion.

The final sections of the book (part 3 and the appendices) will be of primary interest to linguists and others who want to get to the root of the work that, by his own admission, lay behind the creation of all of Tolkien's writings and were their ultimate key: the invented elvish languages. Along with a detailed set of etymologies, there are lists of names and some details on Tolkien's second (and final) map of the Silmarillion. There is definitely a lot to be gleaned from these pages, but I have to admit that I skimmed over most of them. Perhaps on a subsequent read I will be more attentive, but at this time it really was the story elements of the earlier portions of the book that held my interest. Again: if you are a hard-core fan then this is definitely for you, if not then why are you reading this review?