Sauron Defeated (25 page)

17. I do not know of any other reference to this northern journey of Aragorn in the early years of his reign.

18. In the manuscript (which had ai forms, later emended, in the names Iorhail, Perhail, Panthail) Elanor calls her father Panthail-adar.

19. only a week today: see note 7, at end.

20. My father's transliteration has ar ennas i aran Gondor ar Arnor ar Hir iMbair Annui anira...

21. 61 = 16, i.e. year 16 of the Fourth Age, which means that the Fourth Age began in 1421 (see Appendix D to The Lord of the Rings, at end).

22. In all the texts of 'The Grey Havens' from the earliest draft Sam said to Rose when he returned to Bag End Well, I m back. Well, I've come back' does not mean the same thing.

APPENDIX.

Drawings of Orthanc and Dunharrow.

When I wrote Volume VIII, The War of the Ring, it entirely and most regrettably escaped my memory that there are several unpublished drawings of Orthanc and Dunharrow in the Bodleian Library. As these are of much interest I reproduce them belatedly here, as a final appendix to the history of The Lord of the Rings.

The upper drawing on the page called here 'Orthanc I' shows a conception essentially similar to that of the little sketch 'Orthanc 3' '

reproduced in VIII.33 and described in the first manuscript of the chapter 'The Voice of Saruman', VIII.61. In this, the tower was founded on a huge arch spanning the great cleft in the rock; flights of stairs led up on two sides to a narrow platform beneath the arch, whence further stairs ran up 'to dark doors on either side, opening in the shadow of the arch's feet'. But in the present drawing the rock of Orthanc is enormously much greater in relation to the tower than in

'Orthanc 3'; the tower has only three tiers (seven in 'Orthanc 3' and in the description associated with it, VIII.32 - 3); and the horns at the summit are very much smaller.

In the lower drawing on this page, showing the Circle of Isengard in Nan Gurunir between the mountains' arms, is seen the feature described in the original drafting of the chapter 'The Road to Isengard'

but rejected from the first completed manuscript (VIII.43, note 23): the western side of the Circle was formed by the mountain-wall itself.

The dark letter C was a change made later to the faintly pencilled name of the Wizard's Vale, Nan Gurunir becoming Nan Curunir.

The page 'Orthanc II' carries two designs for 'Orthanc's roof'; and on 'Orthanc III' the final conception is seen emerging, in which the

'rock' of Orthanc becomes itself the 'tower'. The drawing on the right has in fact been previously published: it was used in The Lord of the Rings Calendar 1977, and so appears in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 27 (see VIII.44, note 26).

The two pages of drawings of Dunharrow are not easy to interpret, more especially 'Dunharrow I' (for the early conceptions of Dunharrow and the first sketches see VIII.235 ff.). Of 'Dunharrow I' it can at least be said that this idea of the approach to the Hold was never described in words. Apparently, the path winding up from the valley passed near the top of the cliff through the great door in the foreground and entered a steeply ascending tunnel, climbing up by stairs inside the cliff, the head of which can be seen emerging from a large opening or hole in the flat land above. The single menhir, first mentioned in the text F of the original work on the chapter 'The Muster of Rohan' (VIII.246) as standing in the rock-ringed floor of the Hold, is seen; but since there is no sign of the lines of standing stones across the upland (nor of the Pukel-men at the turns in the climbing path) I would be inclined to place this drawing after the earliest drafts of the chapter and the little sketches reproduced in VIII.239 but before the writing of the text F.

A very puzzling feature of this drawing is the wavy line at bottom left, hiding one of the bends in the climbing path.

The upper drawing on the page 'Dunharrow II' has a general likeness in the lie of the mountain side to the coloured drawing reproduced as the first frontispiece (but which should have been the second) to The War of the Ring, but there the resemblance ceases. In that other picture a double line of huge standing stones crosses the upland from the brink of the cliff to a dark cleft in the mountain, where the road so marked out disappears; and I suggested (VIII.250) that the dark cleft is '"the gate of the Hold", the "Hold" itself, the

"recess" or "amphitheatre" with doors and windows in the cliff at the rear, being in this picture invisible.' In the present drawing the Pukel-men are seen at the turns of the path coming up from the valley; at the top of the cliff the road continues to wind, but the turns are now marked by pointed stones. There is then a straight stretch across the upland field, unmarked by stones; and the road passing (apparently) between two stones or pillars leads into the Hold, in which the door into the cliff behind can be seen. In the left-hand lower drawing the Pukel-men reappear, and in the right-hand drawing a double line of cone-shaped stones leads across the upland and into the Hold, with a single stone standing in the middle of the 'amphitheatre'.

My guess is that the upper drawing on this page shows a stage in the development of the conception of Dunharrow when the Pukel-men had emerged, but not the double line of stones: these are seen at the moment of their emergence in one of the lower sketches. In relation to the manuscript evidence, 'Dunharrow I' would then belong with, but actually precede, the text F of 'The Muster of Rohan', in which both the Pukel-men (then called the Hoker-men) and the lines of stones are present.

(Orthanc I.)

(Orthanc II.)

(Orthanc III.)

(Dunharrow I.)

(Dunharrow II.)

PART TWO.

THE NOTION CLUB

PAPERS.

THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS.

Introduction.

On 18 December 1944, when The Lord of the Rings had reached the end of what would become The Two Towers (and a few pages had been written of 'Minas Tirith' and 'The Muster of Rohan' at the beginning of Book V), my father wrote to me (Letters no. 92) that he had seen C. S. Lewis that day: 'His fourth (or fifth?) novel is brewing, and seems likely to clash with mine (my dimly projected third). I have been getting a lot of new ideas about Prehistory lately (via Beowulf and other sources of which I may have written) and want to work them into the long shelved time-travel story I began. C. S. L. is planning a story about the descendants of Seth and Cain.' His words are tantalizingly difficult to interpret; but by 'clash with mine' he surely meant that the themes of their books ran rather close.(1) Whatever lies behind this, it is seen that he was at this time turning his thoughts to a renewed attempt on the 'time-travel story', which would issue a year later in The Notion Club Papers. In his letter to Stanley Unwin of 21 July 1946 (Letters no. 105) he said that he hoped very shortly 'actually to - write', to turn again to The Lord of the Rings where he had left it, more than a year and a half before: 'I shall now have to study my own work in order to get back to it,' he wrote.

But later in that same letter he said:

I have in a fortnight of comparative leisure round about last Christmas written three parts of another book, taking up in an entirely different frame and setting what little had any value in the inchoate Lost Road (which I had once the impudence to show you: I hope it is forgotten), and other things beside. I hoped to finish this in a rush, but my health gave way after Christmas. Rather silly to mention it, till it is finished. But I am putting The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit sequel, before all else, save duties that I cannot wriggle out of.

So far as I have been able to discover there is no other reference to The Notion Club Papers anywhere in my father's writings.

But the quantity of writing constituting The Notion Club Papers, and the quantity of writing associated with them, cannot by any manner of means have been the work of a fortnight. To substantiate this, and since this is a convenient place to give this very necessary information, I set out here the essential facts of the textual relations of all this material, together with some brief indication of their content.

As the development of The Notion Club Papers progressed my father divided it into two parts, the second of which was never completed, and although he ultimately rejected this division (2) I have found it in every way desirable to preserve it in this book. Part One was 'The Ramblings of Michael Ramer: Out of the Talkative Planet', "

and this consists of a report in direct speech of the discussions at two successive meetings (3) of 'the Notion Club' at Oxford far in the future at the time of writing. On the first of these occasions the conversation turned on the problem of the vehicle, the machine or device, by which

'space-travellers' are transported to their destination, especially in respect of its literary credibility in itself and its effect on the story contained within the journeys; on the second, of which the report is..

much longer, one of the members, Michael Ramer, expounded his ideas concerning 'true dreams' and his experiences of 'space-travel' in dream.

The earliest manuscript, here called 'A', is a complete text of Part One. It is roughly written and hastily expressed, there is no title or explanatory 'scene-setting', and there are no dates; but while the text would undergo much expansion and improvement, the essential structure and movement of the dialogue was already largely present.

The second manuscript, 'B', is also a complete text of Part One, but is much fuller than A, and (with many changes and additions) advances far towards the final form. Here also the two meetings, as the text was first written, have no dates, and the numbers given to the meetings imply a much longer history of the Club than is suggested for it subsequently. For the elaborate title or prolegomenon to this version see pp. 148 - 9.

The third manuscript, 'C', is written in a fine script, but is not quite complete: it extends to Ramer's words 'So there does appear to be at least one other star with attendant planets' (p. 207), and it is clear that no more was written of this text (which, incidentally, it would have taken days to write).

A typescript 'D', made by my father, is the final form of Part One. In one section of the text, however, D seems to have preceded C, since ithas some B readings which were then changed to those of C; but the final form of the text is scarcely ever in doubt, and even where it is the differences are entirely trivial. Where C ends, the typescript follows B, the place of transition being marked on the B manuscript. (A second typescript - not, I think, made by my father - was begun, but abandoned after only a few pages; this has no independent value.) Part Two, 'The Strange Case of Arundel Lowdham', records a number of further meetings of the Notion Club, continuous with those of Part One. This second Part is largely devoted to the intrusion of the Matter of Numenor into the discussions of the Notion Club, but of this there are only two texts, a manuscript ('E') and a typescript ('F').

. goth end at the same point, with the next meeting of the Club arranged and dated, but never written.

The typescript F is a complex document, in that my father rejected a substantial section of it ('F 1') as soon as he had typed it, replaced it ('F 2'), and then continued on to the end, the structure of the text being thus F 1, F 1 > F 2, F 2 (see p. 237 and note 37).

For both Parts, but especially for Part Two, there is a quantity of rough, discontinuous drafting, often scarcely legible.

While Part Two was being further developed (that is, after the completion of the manuscript E so far as it went) the Adunaic *

language emerged (as it appears), with an abandoned but elaborate account of the phonology, and pari passu with The Notion Club Papers my father not only wrote a first draft of an entirely new version of the story of Numenor but developed it through further texts: this is The Drowning of Anadune, in which all the names are in Adunaic.

How is all this to be equated with his statement in the letter to Stanley Unwin in July 1946 that 'three parts' of the work were written in a fortnight at the end of 1945? Obviously it cannot be, not even on the supposition that when he said 'a fortnight' he greatly underestimated the time. Though not demonstrable, an extremely probable explanation, as it seems to me, is that at the end of that fortnight he stopped work in the middle of writing the manuscript E, at the point where The Notion Club Papers end, and at which time Adunaic had not yet arisen. Very probably Part One was at the stage of the manuscript B.(4) On this view, the further development of what had then been achieved of Part One, and more especially of Part Two (closely associated with that of the Adunaic language and the writing of The Drowning of Anadune), belongs to the following year, the earlier part of 1946. Against this, of course, is the fact that the letter to Stanley Unwin in which my father referred to the Papers was written in July 1946, but that letter gives no impression of further work after

'my health gave way after Christmas'. But it is to be remembered that The Lord of the Rings had been at a halt for more than a year and a half, and it may well be that he was deeply torn between the burgeoning of Adunaic and Anadune and the oppression of the abandoned Lord of the Rings. He did not need to spell out to Stanley Unwin what he had in fact been doing! But he said that he was 'putting The Lord of the Rings before all else', which no doubt meant 'I am now going to put it before all else', and that included Adunaic. To the interrupted Notion Club Papers he never returned.