The Notion Club Papers
the contemporary-England tale of dream and memory (Sauron Defeated, HoME 9)
Nature
The Notion Club Papers are Tolkien’s contemporary-England fiction: the minutes, talk and dreams of a small Oxford club whose members argue of language, story and memory — until their dreams begin to reach across the deeps of time to the drowning of Númenor, and further back to the far sea-breath of the elder age. The dreamers, among them Alwin Lowdham whose visions arrive in Adûnaic, become the modern witnesses of the drowned land; the tale is the contemporary mirror of the unfinished time-travel romance The Lost Road.
Contents
The club’s evenings in the “Papers” themselves — the voices of its members, talk of philology, of “Atlantis”, and of the age of the world; The dreams: the sleepers’ visions of a great island swallowed by the sea, and of the Star of Eärendel burning in the west — the knitting of the tale to the myth of Eärendil; The Adûnaic phrases that surface verbatim in the novel — the very speech of the drowned land; The gesture toward the whole legendarium: that the Atlantean and Elvish lore survives, broken, in the dreams of the modern tale — the bridge to The Drowning of Anadûnê.
Composition
Written in 1945–1946, the descendant and companion of the abortive time-travel novel The Lost Road (1936–37; HoME 5), The Notion Club Papers was published, with the full drafts, by Christopher Tolkien in Sauron Defeated (1992, HoME 9), together with the related Drowning of Anadûnê. It is Tolkien’s boldest attempt to bring his story into the world of the twentieth century.