The Lost Road
HoME 5 — the Akallabêth texts and the time-travel story of the Fall of Númenor
Nature
Volume 5 of The History of Middle-earth, gathering the Númenórean matter between the early quenta of HoME 4 and the Second Age: the nearest relatives of the published “Akallabêth” of the Silmarillion, printed with their drafts. The volume takes its name from the unfinished time-travel story The Lost Road, begun after a friendly challenge from C. S. Lewis in 1936 to write rival tales of such travel; its frame carries an English father and son back through repeated “drowning” dreams toward the Fall of Númenor.
Contents
- “The Fall of Númenor” — the first full prose telling of the Akallabêth (c. 1937)
- The Lost Road — the unfinished time-travel story of the dreamers and the drowning
- The Later Annals of Valinor, and the Later Annals of Beleriand
- The Lhammas (The Lhammas) — the treatise on the tongues
- Quenta Silmarillion — the form of the Quenta as it stood c. 1937
- The Etymologies — the great word-list of the Elvish linguistic stems
- The Second ‘Silmarillion’ Map, and the Second Map of the West
Christopher Tolkien sets out and compares the several Akallabêth versions. The later, longer Oxford time-travel dialogue, the Notion Club Papers, belongs to Sauron Defeated (HoME 9), not this volume; within the vault the Akallabêth variants here, against the published chapter, form the editorial backbone of the Númenórean legend.
Composition
Christopher Tolkien restored the Lost Road from a confusion of drafts and established the textual history of the Downfall: the early prose, the 1930s Akallabêth near to the printed form, and the final published chapter — the differences between them set out in his commentary.