The History of Middle Earth, Volume IX, which is titled Sauron Defeated, will probably do the least to illuminate our understanding of the Second Age, but I think it’s still worth reflecting on what it tells us about the evolution of his ideas. It’s a good reminder, too, of how fluid the canon of Middle-earth’s history really has been: a lot of the things that Tolkien nerds claim to KNOW are things that Tolkien himself did not KNOW at many stages in his creative process, and I think that can add a kind of curiosity and even humility as we prepare ourselves to see the launch of a television series that will inevitably have to adapt and modify the things we “know” about Middle-earth (just as every other adaptation has had to do). It’s a funny penultimate stop on the #JamesAndTheSecondAge journey, but one I hope you’ll find rewarding.
The Lord of the Rings was an incredibly challenging book to write: Tolkien was fortunate that a) he had always conceived of it as one book, not three, so that he was never tempted to publish the early volumes prior to completing the story as a whole, and b) he never entertained the idea of writing as a career, so that he could feel no urgency in rushing materials to publication before he felt ready to do so. I think we can argue this is one reason the book is so singularly successful as a work of the creative imagination: I’m hard-pressed to name any fantasy novelist who has the luxury these days of spending fifteen years bringing a single work into readiness for publication. George R. R. Martin, to name but one example, probably now wishes he’d had both the good sense and the economic security necessary to finish writing his whole series prior to publishing the initial books.
I say this because this week’s reflection comes from one of the greater lacunae in the writing process for The Lord of the Rings – Tolkien had begun to write it almost immediately upon The Hobbit’s publication in 1937, given how enthusiastic his publisher was to follow up such a surprise hit with a sequel. The work proceeded fitfully from the beginning, with numerous rewrites of the opening chapter and the early sequences in the book, culminating in a massive revision of the whole first half of Fellowship in 1940. Tolkien gets up a head of steam for a while then during WWII’s height of danger, for the British – I can imagine the Blitz inspiring some escapism into the problems of Middle-earth, anyway – but he runs into real trouble in the mid-1940s. His duties as a professor and air raid warden leave the book stuck about halfway through The Two Towers from mid-1942 until mid-1944, and then he gets a burst of inspiration, only to run slam into the brick wall of writer’s block after a furious couple of months in which he carries Frodo and Samwise all the way to Cirith Ungol, leaving Frodo himself captured by orcs and locked in the tower. He’s totally stuck at this point with the kind of paralysis we have to try to imagine as people who do now know how the story ends – he’s locked Frodo up with no idea about how Sam can get him loose. He’s sent Gandalf and Pippin to a city called Minas Tirith without any real idea of what they’ll find there, and he’s left the rest of the Fellowship back in Rohan, again, without much of a notion of what will drive the action forward. He remains in this exact position, absolutely without the momentum to get going again, for two solid years. There are probably universes in which the story never advances, in fact – where those initial bursts of inspiration never ignited again and the manuscripts died a slow, quiet, unfinished death in a file cabinet in an Oxford don’s college office. We’re lucky, you and I, to live in one of the universes where, miraculously, J.R.R. gets his game back in mid-1946, and (still with lots of gaps for household moves and work distractions and more writer’s block) finishes the manuscript for submission by 1950, ultimately seeing the final published versions emerge in 1953-1954.
I gave you that big timeline here just so that we can appreciate where Tolkien’s head is at in 1945, when he picks up some ideas about the Second Age again and starts tinkering with them. It’s hard to say whether the professor thought that distracting himself with some work on his old discarded ideas from The Lost Road would break his writer’s block, or whether he thought that thinking through the Second Age would help resolve challenges for the story arcs he needed to invent for the final portions of the Third Age in The Lord of the Rings, or whether maybe he really did mean to set that unfinished work aside like all his other unfinished manuscripts, and seriously thought this new novel idea was the thing he would get published (and “The Lord of the Rings” was something he’d get back to in a decade, or never). Whatever was in his head, what he’s composing in 1945-1946, and what I read elements from this week, was an unfinished novel he planned to title The Notion Club Papers. It bears a close relationship to The Lost Road, which I described in my last post, in that like The Lost Road, he planned a story in which some modern English folks could travel back through time to an earlier age, via some kind of dreaming or telepathy or something, thereby unearthing and rediscovering the lost civilization of Numenor and learning something of its language and people. That’s about where the resemblances stop.
Unlike The Lost Road, which focused on a series of character pairings connected together somehow through time, The Notion Club Papers was singularly focused on a group of friends in the “modern” day, with the idea that eventually they would connect to characters from Numenor’s distant past. I put “modern” in quotation marks because the incredibly contrived conceit of this story was that it was the publication of a bunch of notes taken by Oxford professors who were in some kind of social discussion group that met regularly to talk about things they were writing or thinking. https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/8/81/Afalstein_-_Notion_Club_Papers_-_The_Club.jpg Some of you are saying, “Oh, like The Inklings!” Yes, this group is modeled on the group of friends Tolkien met to drink and talk and argue with, and sometimes share written drafts with – the two most famous members being Tolkien, of course, and his good friend in these years, C.S. Lewis. Except for whatever reason, Tolkien sets this all in his future – the Notion Club Papers manuscripts are notebooks he describes as discovered in the early 2000s, consisting of fragmentary notes taken by these group members in the 1980s, though of course the conversations they were having were super focused on the kinds of subjects Oxford professors would have discussed and argued over back in the 1940s. I’ll spare you a detailed blow-by-blow account here, and just say as a summary that this is maybe the least publishable thing Tolkien ever wrote. I mean, I’ve read biographies of Tolkien and of Lewis, I’ve read collected letters by both men as well as Lewis’s published diaries, and most of their minor and major published works – I’ve read a book about the Inklings, too, and so, while there are people who know the Inklings better than I do, I’m definitely in the top 1% of readers who could possibly follow all the little in-jokes and allusions Tolkien makes in The Notion Club Papers referencing the Inklings and the individual members, and even then I could barely follow the line of conversation some of the time. Tolkien’s clearly trying to 1) describe what it’s like for him to invent a language, 2) score some points on C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy which he’d found increasingly frustrating after some high early hopes, and 3) make a bunch of fun little quips about his social group and their foibles, including his own I think, that would amuse them if they had this read aloud to them….oh, and 4) somehow weave a narrative about scholars in the 1980s discovering Numenor and its language of Adunaic in their dreams. It does NOT work as something you can remotely imagine being published as a book and sold. That said, if you do know all that background – or even just a lot of it – there is a lot of fun to be had in moments scattered throughout the manuscript. It’s not viable as an entertainment experience, but it is fascinating as a document.
And that’s where I’d like to go with it, because I think some of the things Tolkien’s doing here are really interesting. The manuscript of The Notion Club Papers stops so far short of being complete that it shares almost no new content about Numenor – really very little content about Numenor at all, in fact. But accompanying the manuscript are several sketches of what Tolkien calls “The Drowning of Anadune” – a new set of brief histories of Numenor that clearly were expressing some of the ideas about that story that he’s planning to work into The Notion Club Papers at some point, if he can pull it together. And what’s most compelling and weird about the versions of The Drowning of Anadune is that they often feel like sketchier, worse versions of the “Fall of Numenor” documents he’d written a decade earlier, which I talked about last week. And by sketchier and worse, I mean that The Drowning of Anadune seems confused about things that shouldn’t be confusing to Tolkien at all – the story combines Elves and Valar together as though they’re all just angelic immortal beings with no real distinction between them. It seems to combine, too, the idyllic land of Tol Eressea where many of the Eldar live out their immortality in peace, and the more heavenly, otherworldly land of Valinor where the Valar sit as the world’s guardians. There seems to be very little understanding of the events of the First Age, which are either not described or summarized so briefly that it feels like Tolkien’s suddenly decided to turn all the battles with Morgoth into one big simplified war, and there’s a weird emphasis on Earendil while leaving out most of the prominent other heroes of the First Age entirely. The cosmology has gotten so confused that the story now claims that Arda’s already round, so that the wave that sinks Numenor isn’t a symptom of the planet being turned from flat to round…leaving its destruction more confusing than it was before (and creating a whole bunch of new logic problems – if the world was round before, why weren’t they allowed to sail west? what changed when Numenor fell?). Now, it’s not that The Drowning of Anadune (in its various forms) is always sketchy and low detail – in fact it’s a bit more detailed about the conversations between Elendil and his dad, and the details of the history of Numenor are coming more into focus, with Elrond and Elros starting to assume their final status (though things are still in flux). You can see him advancing some ideas further than the older Fall of Numenor documents had gone. Still, what’s going on here? Did Tolkien lose his mind? Or was he really about to chuck the Quenta Silmarillion, and most of the creative work he’d done on this legendarium over the previous 25 years, out the window?
Well, the answer is no to all of those questions. What his son Christopher nods to in the notes – and I totally agreed with his analysis and frankly would carry it further than he does – is that this is yet another example of his father playing with the idea of multiple sources / multiple linguistic traditions around a single moment or story. Tolkien seems to have imagined that what would reach the members of the Notion Club would be the “Mannish tradition” about Numenor – that is, an account of the fall of Numenor (or Anadune, to label it what it would have been called in Adunaic at the time) written by Numenorean colonists living in Middle-earth in the generations following the sinking of Numenor. These would be people who had some information about Elendil and his family, and would know some things about Numenorean civilization in general, but who would have had little understanding of Elves, for instance, and few if any sources to draw on for description of earlier ages of the planet. The reason these descriptions of The Drowning of Anadune are so disconnected from the larger arcs in Middle-earth is because the authors of them, likely writing in the Third Age sometime in either Arnor or Gondor, just didn’t know any better. Tolkien left a few hastily scribbled notes that seem to imply this – and imply also that the texts of The Fall of Numenor, written in the 1930s, represent an Elvish version of Numenor’s fall. The final version of Numenor’s fall – the Akallabeth, published in The Silmarillion, which I reflected on earlier in this series – represents attempts, probably by scholars in Aragorn’s restored Kingdom of Gondor in the Fourth Age, to combine the best Elvish information with the best Mannish information to achieve the most detailed and accurate account of Numenor’s rise and fall. And that’s fascinating.
This is important because I think we can see in these documents Tolkien finally figuring out how to marry the pieces of his legendarium together – his lifelong obsession with the First Age tales of the Silmarillion will bridge to this weird new novel he’s writing in what he now realizes will be the Third Age via these narrative threads of the Second Age. Him playing with how misunderstood the Numenorean past would have been in the eyes of human scholars in the Third Age is, to me, him beginning to imagine Gondor as a decaying empire – a place where most people understand little at all of things Elvish, and where someone like Faramir who understands both respect for the Valar (as he and his men offer simple prayers at mealtime) and distrust of the Numenorean impulse to fear death (as he expresses at length to Frodo and Sam) is really singular. He’s making sense of the fragmented world left behind by the Second Age, and the implications it has for the novel he has been writing, and which soon he’ll realize he’s ready to bring to completion.
It’s also important because, as I alluded to earlier, a lot of what we now think of as canon is still very much in flux as he writes – the person he was thinking of as “Elrond” when he writes the Council of Elrond chapter is NOT the person Tolkien nerds know today, because the whole Second Age backstory for Elrond changes multiple times between 1939-1940 and the final published elements of the legendarium in the 1954 Appendices and the manuscripts that Christopher will assemble in The Silmarillion in 1977. The land he decides to call “Gondor” when he’s writing about where this Boromir fellow comes from in 1940 was simply not imagined then to the extent that he develops it in the late 1940s in writing Book V and VI, and the Appendices in the early 1950s (again, let alone the material in The Silmarillion). I don’t think we need to interpret every sentence Tolkien wrote through the lens of what he was thinking as he wrote it – that would be limiting and unhelpful, to me. But I do think it’s worth remembering that Tolkien himself found that every time he came back to his work, he discovered opportunities to extend and complicate it further. The Hobbit is a more complex story in its second edition than in its first. The Lord of the Rings became a more interwoven and sophisticated narrative the more he worked on it and discovered the ways its themes worked together. The sketches he made of the Second Age in the 1930s are made more complex in the 1940s when he realizes that he can play with perspective – BOTH those sets of sketches are incomplete, BOTH of them are missing details and misinterpreting what was “actually” happening. His fascination with these things – what gets lost in translation, how hard it is to reconcile multiple accounts of the same event, how to read an account that’s been written in a seemingly objective third person voice by genuinely subjective first person scribes who have their own ideas about what’s up – is a huge part of his genius. It adds depth to these books even for readers who don’t know all this stuff, because they’re encountering words that have gone through this kind of maturation process. But it can add even more depth for those of us who do know it, because we can see, appreciate, and reflect on these glimpses of the artist at work, and gain an understanding of what the art meant and means in doing so.
And I think it can also allow us, if we are charitable in our hearts, to extend a little grace to showrunners who will find themselves in the same position as Tolkien – coming “back” to fragmentary descriptions of the Second Age in the LOTR Appendices and realizing that they need to become inventors in order to tell the story. Perhaps we can even, if we feel particularly gracious, choose to interpret at least some of their “changes” to the original story as simply a new perspective, a story told by a different scribe whose picture is just as incomplete and biased as the stories we have been treating as “fact” all these years – because all perspectives here in Middle-earth are limited.
I know, I didn’t throw a bunch of Second Age details at you here, but that’s because there’s not much in this section that we haven’t already covered in looking at other versions of the Numenor story already. Don’t worry, my final installment will give you more to think about. The piece I want to close with here is just this – a lot of folks try to reduce Tolkien’s legendarium to being a sort of 1:1 mapping of Earth’s geography to Middle-earth’s. And I get why they do that, because in 1945 he’s trying to do it too. But he gives it up, and I think it’s important for us to know that – yeah, as he’s writing The Notion Club Papers, he’s trying to work out what’s where. England is the Shire, sort of, so is Rivendell in France? Are the Misty Mountains the Alps somehow? Is Far Harad the Eurasian steppe, or the Indian subcontinent or what? And he rapidly finds that it just won’t really cohere – each mapping decision creates too many secondary problems. There’s a tendency on the part of people who are familiar with a handful of Tolkien quotes (many of them from his letters – which are fine, but they capture his thinking in a particular moment, often thinking he revisits and revises later) to make some sweeping claims, and the two big ones I often see are that Tolkien believed the history of Arda was Earth’s prehistory (so that all those places are places here on Earth, millennia later) and that he intended to create an English mythology. And the thing is, he did think both those things for a stretch in the middle of his writing career. He ultimately sets them aside and focuses on the much more interesting project of making Arda its own vivid and real thing. Gondor isn’t proto-Byzantium – it’s just an empire that, sure, has some Byzantine elements, but it’s also got a lot more going on than that. Numenor isn’t Ireland (or America) – in fact, Adunaic, its native language, bears far more resemblance to Hebrew than to any Western European language. The Shire isn’t simply England – and the mythology he built isn’t “English”, it’s drawing freely from all sorts of mythic traditions and languages. Modern Tolkien scholarship – the serious stuff – wouldn’t seriously make the claim that Tolkien is writing an English mythology, or that he’s trying to write the backstory for the race of people living in the British Isles. And I just want to mark that here because it’s one great reason to cheer on the showrunners for not insisting on a racially white, ethnically European cast for The Rings of Power – this is not “England’s mythology” (even if it was, England itself is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic country) and this corner of Middle-earth is not “Northwest Europe” (again, even if it was, lots of people of all kinds of ancestries and racial backgrounds call that part of the world home). It’s honoring Tolkien’s vision in its maturity by seeing his work as a celebration of a richly diverse collection of human ideas and linguistic elements, and ensuring that many different folks from all over the world can see themselves reflected in some corner of Middle-earth is just as it should be. Anybody you know who wants to argue otherwise, you just let them know a BIG Tolkien nerd would be glad to explain why that kind of critique is small-minded and (there’s no better word for it) wrong.
Okay, folks, we’re a little over a week from the launch of this show. What do we think – should I be posting reaction thoughts here? If I do, I think I’ll be doing it a few days after each episode “airs” so as not to spoil people who happened to have a busy day or two and want to catch up. Or will that quickly become overload? Regardless, there’s at least one more post coming, as next week I take on the last fragments of The Second Age Tolkien committed to writing in the History of Middle-earth Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth. It’s got it all, folks – you want more details about the LOTR Appendices? Done! The few details we have about Dwarves in the Second Age? You got it! An account of Numenor through the eyes of the “Wild Men” inhabiting Middle-earth when Numenoreans move east? Heck yeah! And most importantly, the professor’s final sketch, written in the last year of his life, about what he thought was true of Glorfindel, the Lord of the House of the Golden Flower? Uhhhhhh are you kidding half my post is going to be about MY ELF. See you back here next week, then.