Sauron Defeated (26 page)

The diverse and shifting elements in all this work, not least the complex but essential linguistic material, have made the construction (* Adunaic is always so spelt at this time (not Adunaic), and I write it so throughout.)

of a readily comprehensible edition extremely difficult, requiring much experimentation among possible forms of presentation. Since The Notion Club Papers are now published for the first time, the final typescripts D of Part One and F of Part Two must obviously be the text printed, and this makes for difficulties of presentation (it is of course very much easier to begin with an original draft and to relate it by consecutive steps to a final form that is already known). The two Parts are separated, with notes following each Part. Following the text of the Papers I give important sections that were rejected from or significantly changed in the final text, earlier forms of the 'Numenorean'

fragments that 'came through' to Arundel Lowdham and of the Old English text written by his father, and reproductions of the

'facsimiles' of that text with analysis of the tengwar.

Although the final text of Part Two of the Papers and The Drowning of Anadune were intimately connected,(5) especially in respect of Adunaic, any attempt to combine them in a single presentation makes for inextricable confusion; the latter is therefore treated entirely separately in the third part of this book, and in my commentary on Part Two of the Papers I have not thought it useful to make continual reference forward to The Drowning of Anadune: the interrelations between the two works emerge more clearly when the latter is reached.

There are some aspects of the framework of the Papers, provided by the Foreword of the Editor, Mr. Howard Green, and the list of members of the Notion Club, which are better discussed here than in the commentary.

The Foreword.

The original manuscript A of Part One, as already noticed, has no title or introductory statement of any kind, but begins with the words

'When Ramer had finished reading his latest story...' The first page of B begins thus:

Beyond Lewis

or

Out of the Talkative Planet.

Being a fragment of an apocryphal Inklings' Saga, made by some imitator at some time in the 1980s.

Preface to the Inklings.

While listening to this fantasia (if you do), I beg of the present company not to look for their own faces in this mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your own, but belong to other members of the company -

if to anybody.

Night 251.

When Michael Ramer had finished reading his latest story...

This was heavily emended and then struck through, and was replaced by a new, separate title-page (made when B had been completed): Beyond Probability (6)

or

Out of the Talkative Planet.

The Ramblings of Ramer

being Nights 251 and 252 of The Notion Club Papers.

[Little is known about this rare book, except that it appears to have been written after 1989, as an apocryphal imitation of the Inklings' Saga Book. The author identifies himseif with the character called in the narrative Nicholas Guildford; but Titmouse has shown that this is a pseudonym, and is taken from a mediaeval dialogue, at one time read in the Schools of Oxford. His real identity remains unknown.]

An aside to the audience. While listening to this hotch-potch (if you do), I beg of the present company not to look for their own faces in my mirror. For the mirror is cracked...

This is followed by a list of the persons who appear (see p. 151). It seems clear that at the stage when the text B was written my father's idea was far less elaborate than it became; intending perhaps, so far as the form was concerned, no more than a jeu d'esprit for the entertainment of the Inklings - while the titles seem to emphasise that it was to be, in patt, the vehicle of criticism and discussion of aspects of Lewis's 'planetary' novels. Perhaps he called to mind the witty and ingenious method that Lewis had devised for his criticism of The Lay of Leithian in 1930 (see The Lays of Beleriand, p. 151). - So far as I can see, there is no indication that at this stage he envisaged the form that Part Two of the Papers would take, and definite evidence to the contrary (see pp. 281 - 2).

There are several drafts for a more circumstantial account of the Papers and of how they came to light, preceding the elaborate form in the final text that follows. They were found at the University Press waiting to be pulped, but no one knew how they had got there; or they were found 'at Messrs. Whitburn and Thoms' publishing house'.(7) The mediaeval dialogue from which the name Nicholas Guildford is derived is The Owl and the Nightingale, a debate in verse written between 1189 and 1216. To the Owl's question, who shall decide between them, the Nightingale replies that Maister Nichole of Gulde-forde is the obvious choice, since he is prudent, virtuous, and wise, and an excellent judge of song.

The List of Members.

At the top of a page that preceded the manuscript A and is almost certainly the first setting down of the opening passage of Night 60 of ', the Papers (see p. 211, note 7) my father wrote these names: Ramer Latimer Franks Loudham Dolbear

Beneath Ramer he wrote 'Self', but struck it out, then 'CSL' and 'To', these also being struck out. Beneath Latimer he wrote 'T', beneath Franks 'CSL', beneath Loudham 'HVD' (Hugo Dyson), and beneath Dolbear 'Havard'.

This is the only actual identification of members of the Notion Club with members of the Inklings that is found. The name Latimer (for Guildford) remained that of the Club's 'reporter' in manuscript A; it is derived from Old French latinier ('Latiner', speaker of Latin), meaning an interpreter. Loudham (so spelt in A and B, and initially in the manuscript E of Part Two) would obviously be Dyson even without

'HVD' written beneath (see Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, pp.

212 - 13); and since Franks (only becoming Frankley in the third text C) is here Lewis, I suppose that my father felt that the name was appropriate to his character. The other two names were presumably

'significant', but I do not know what the significance was. Dolbear is an uncommon surname, but there was a chemist's shop in Oxford called Dolbear & Goodall, and I recollect that my father found this particularly engaging; it may be that he simply found in Dolbear the chemist a comic appropriateness to Havard, or to Havard as he was going to present him. Ramer is very puzzling; and here there is no certain identification with one of the Inklings in the list. The various dictionaries of English surnames that I have consulted do not give the name. The only suggestion that I can make is that my father derived it from the dialectal verb rame, with these meanings given in the Oxford English Dictionary: 'to shout, cry aloud, scream; keep up the same cry, continue repeating the same thing; obtain by persistent asking; repeat, run over'; cf. also the English Dialect Dictionary, ed. Joseph Wright (with which he was very familiar: he called it 'indispensable', Letters no. 6), ream verb 3, also raim, rame, etc., which gives similar meanings, and also 'to talk nonsense, rave'. But this seems far-fetched.

At any rate, this list is interesting as suggesting that my father started out with the idea of a series of definite 'equivalences', distorted no doubt but recognisable. But I think that this plan very quickly dissolved, because he found that it would not suit his purpose; and not even in the earliest text does there seem to be any clearer association with individual Inklings than there is in the final form of the Papers, with the possible exception of Lowdham. In A his interventions are limited to jocular facetiousness, and the interest that in the later form of part One (pp. 199 - 201) he shows in 'Old Solar' and in Ramer's names of other worlds is in A given to Dolbear (and then in B to Guildford).

It would not suit my father's purpose, because in 'The Ramblings of Ramer' he wished to allow his own ideas the scope, in the form of a discussion and argument, that they would never have had in fact, in an actual meeting of the Inklings. The professional knowledge and intellectual interests of the members of the Notion Club are such as to make this symposium possible. On p. 149 I have given the second version of a title-page, in which after the author's 'aside to the audience', warning them 'not to look for their own faces in my mirror', there follows a list of the members of the Club. At this stage only six members were listed (plus Cameron); and of these six, Ramer is Professor of Finno-Ugric, Guildford is a Comparative Philologist, and Loudham has 'special interests in Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon', while the chemist Dolbear 'concerns himself with psychoanalysis and related aspects of language'. At this stage Frankley is a lecturer in French, changed to the Clarendon Reader in English Literature, 'with a taste for the Romance literatures and a distaste for things Germanic', while the statement of Jeremy's position and interests is much as in the final list. Ramer, Jeremy, Guildford and Frankley all have 'a taste for romances of travel in Space and Time.'

The enlarged list of members in the final form (pp. 159 - 60), most of whom do not have even walk-on parts, served the purpose, I suppose, of creating an impression of a more amorphous group surrounding the principals. The polymathy of the monk Dom Jonathan Markison extends to some very recondite knowledge of Germanic origins, while Ranulph Stainer appears in Part Two as a sceptical and rather superior onlooker at the strange proceedings. The surname of the apparently speechless undergraduate John Jethro Rashbold is a translation of Tolkien (Toll-kuhn: see Letters no. 165 and note 1). In Part Two appears 'old Professor Rashbold at Pembroke', the Anglo-Saxon scholar described by Lowdham as 'a grumpy old bear' (p. 256 and note 72). There are no doubt other hidden puns and jokes in the list of members.

In my view it would be useless to seek even any 'intellectual equivalence' with historical persons, let alone portraiture (for a list of those who came often - but not all at the same period - to the Inklings, with brief biographies, see Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, Appendix A). The fact that Lowdham is 'loud' and makes jokes often at inappropriate moments derives from Dyson (but he was wittier than Lowdham), yet Lowdham is the very antithesis of Dyson in his learning and interests; no doubt Frankley's horror borealis is a reminiscence of Dyson also, though it is profoundly un-Dysonian to have read mediaeval works on Saint Brendan (p. 265). In earlier drafts of the list of members Dolbear has no position in the University, and with his red hair and beard and his nickname in the Club (see Letters no. 56) he can be seen as a sort of parody of Havard. But these things are marginal to the ideas expounded and debated in the Papers; essentially, the members of the Notion Club are fictions, and become more obviously so in Part Two.

Scarcely a sentence remained entirely unchanged between text A and text D of Part One, but in my notes all this development is largely ignored when (as for the most part it is) it is a matter of improvement in the expression or of amplification of the argument. Similarly, the ascription of speeches to speakers underwent many changes in the earlier texts, but in general I do not record them.

I do not enter in this book into any critical discussion of the topics and issues raised in 'The Ramblings of Michael Ramer'. This is partly because I am not well qualified to discuss them, but also because they fall somewhat outside the scope and aim of The History of Middle-earth, which is above all to present accurate texts accurately ordered (so far as I am able) and to elucidate them comparatively, within the context of 'Middle-earth' and the lands of the West. With very limited time at my disposal for this book I have thought that I could better devote it in any case to clarification of the complexities of the

'Numenorean' material. The notes are therefore very restricted in scope and are often trivial in relation to the content of the discussion, being mostly concerned with the elucidation of references that may be obscure and not easily tracked down, with comparison of earlier forms of certain passages, and with citation of other writings of my father's. I do not suppose that many readers of this book will be unacquainted with the novels of C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945), but I have provided a few explanations and references.

Why my father abandoned The Notion Club Papers I do not know.

It may be that he felt that the work had lost all unity, that 'Atlantis'

had broken apart the frame in which it had been set (see pp. 281 - 2).

But I think also that having forced himself to return to The Lord of the Rings, and having brought it to its end, he was then deflected into the very elaborate further work on the legends of the Elder Days that preceded the actual publication of The Lord of the Rings. However it was, the Notion Club was abandoned, and with it his final attempt to embody the riddle of AElfwine and Eadwine in a 'tale of time'. But from its forgotten Papers and the strange figure of Arundel Lowdham there emerged a new conception of the Downfall of Numenor, embodied in a different tradition, which would come to constitute a major element in the Akallabeth many years later.

NOTES.

1. In a note to this passage in my father's letter Humphrey Carpenter remarks: 'Lewis's next published novel after That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Tolkien is, however, almost certainly referring to some other book of Lewis's that was never completed.' The Great Divorce was published in 1946; Lewis was reading it aloud in April and May 1944 (Letters no. 60, 69, 72).