# space vs time travel - out of the silent planet trilogy vs lotr



## grimalkin (Dec 11, 2015)

CS Lewis & JRR Tolkien had this deal between themselves, we must have read about this, or most of us at least, why do you believe JRR chose this form of fable through the ages as a 'time travel' rather than opting for the usual time travel portal stories or time travel science fiction machine stories ? ... how did he truly convince us that lotr is a story which deals with time travel ?


----------



## jallan (Dec 23, 2015)

The time travel story which J. R. R. Tolkien planned to write had nothing to do with_ The Lord of the Rings._ It was a story about the magical taking of a father and son of the current time to increasingly earlier time periods in which they take on the identities and memories of their ancestors of those periods and recall nothing of their present-day identities or the experiences of their counterparts in other eras. The last story was set in Númenor and the father has taken on the identity of Elendil and his son the identity of Elendil’


----------



## Alcuin (Dec 24, 2015)

Lewis’ three volumes were published. They are: _Out of the Silent Planet_, _Perelandra_ (also published under the title _Voyage to Venus_), and _That Hideous Strength_. 

Tolkien never finished his part of the story. You can read part of what he did write in _Sauron Defeated_ (volume 9 of the _History of Middle-Earth_ series). After the end of the _Lord of the Rings_ material (I highly commend to you the “Epilogue”, which was excised before publication of _Return of the King_: it provides a more poignant and cathartic ending to the tale!) in a section called “The Notion Club Papers”. 

It isn’t completely the case that “Notion Club Papers” is separate from _Lord of the Rings_. *jallan* is correct that one of the main characters is “Alwin”, a modern form of the Anglo-Saxon “Ælfwine”, the same name as “Elendil”: “Elf-friend”. The connection comes through Akallabêth: the characters are “remembering” (through dreams and visions, as *jallan* just said) the coming of Sauron to Númenor and the ruin he worked on the Númenóreans and their land. In the process, the characters discover the ancient Adûnaic language and parallels between their modern world and the ancient Númenóreans. 

The conceit of the story is that these dreams or visions took place in Oxford, England, between 1980 and 1990. The papers were subsequently discovered (in the telling of the tale) in the summer of 2012, and the second edition of the book (as Tolkien presents it) was published in 2014. So if you’re interested in knowing what Tolkien thought about how people might be living in our day, there are lots of clues there.

If you’re interested in the story as it stood when abandoned, it runs about 170 or 180 pages in _Sauron Defeated_. It provides some interesting insight into “The Downfall of Númenor”, which appears in the third and final section of _Sauron Defeated_ in three versions, but it isn’t some of Tolkien’s better fiction, IMO. “The Downfall of Númenor” is much better.


----------



## grimalkin (Jan 3, 2016)

Right! so the Downfall of Numenor, the Notion Club Papers and a revision of the tale (the time travel tale) are all better presented in the 2nd edition 2014 book 9 Sauron Defeated ?


----------



## Alcuin (Jan 3, 2016)

_Sauron Defeated_ consists of three parts:

The End of the Third Age
This covers Tolkien’s notes and drafts for _Return of the King_, including the abandoned Epilogue. This section is also published separately under the title _The End of the Third Age_, an abridged edition of _Sauron Defeated_. (Don’t buy it: buy the whole volume, _Sauron Defeated_.)
The Notion Club Papers
These are Tolkien’s drafts on the space and time trilogy he and CS Lewis worked on. Tolkien abandoned this project, but it is intimately concerned with the story of Akallabêth, the Downfall of Númenor, which the characters are “remembering” in their dreams. 
The Downing of Anadûnê
This contains three versions of the Downfall of Númenor. These were edited into one, unified story by Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay for publication in _The Silmarillion_ as the story “Akallabêth”. At the end is a section on Adûnaic, the daily language of Númenor that grew out of the language of the Third House of the Edain (the House of Hador) and grew into the Westron or Common Speech of _The Lord of the Rings_. It is presented as notes of one of the characters in The Notion Club Papers
These are not “revisions”. They are JRR Tolkien’s notes and drafts, interspersed with Christopher Tolkien’s scholarly research on his father’s writings. 

JRR Tolkien’s notes and drafts are housed in two places: Raynor Memorial Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Bodleian Library, at the University of Oxford. Christopher Tolkien is the foremost authority on his father’s work, read drafts of _The Lord of the Rings_ as it was being written, and drew the maps originally published with the books. (To be exact: his father drew the original maps; many of these are published in the _History of Middle-Earth_ series; Christopher Tolkien drew those that were published.) 

What you’ll find is drafts, some abandoned storylines (fewer of these as you get closer to the end of _LotR_); drafts of Tolkien’s side of the space and time trilogy; and drafts of the Downfall of Númenor (or Akallabêth). 

If you really like stories about Númenor, especially the Downfall of Númenor, you’ll probably like the book. There are more stories about Númenor in _Unfinished Tales_. 

Even if you aren’t particularly interested in Númenor, though, you should read the Epilogue to the _Return of the King_. It provides a fuller, more cathartic ending to _Lord of the Rings_; but of course, it was also abandoned.


----------



## grimalkin (Jan 4, 2016)

Wow, thanks for this in depth explanation Alcuin... Ill be buying them... Happy New Year :b


----------



## Matthew Bailey (Jul 1, 2016)

I definitely think it time I re-read _The History of Middle-earth_ again, prior to returning to UCLA and/or USC to Finish my second/third Degrees and for Grad School.

The last time I read this was just prior to entering UCLA in 2011 (As I mentioned, for Second and Third Degrees in the Hard Sciences, where I studied the Arts and Humanities when I was younger in the 1980s - Art History/Fine Arts, focusing upon Sacred Art of the Early Christian Church and the Heretical Sects that arose during that time. This included a lot of coursework on comparative religion and mythology, mostly focusing upon Joseph Campbell's work).

It is interesting that Tolkien was influenced by the topics of Time-Travel and Space-Travel (although the two are essentially the same - Travel through Space *IS* travel through Time... Although people generally see Time Travel as going back in time, rather than forward).

MB


----------

