The Notion Club Papers
The Notion Club Papers is an abandoned novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in 1945 and published posthumously in Sauron Defeated, the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth.
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and a medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe.
His intention to create what has been called "a mythology for England"[4] led him to construct not only stories but a fully-formed world, Middle-earth, with invented languages, peoples, cultures, and history.
During these meetings, Alwin Arundel Lowdham discusses his lucid dreams about Númenor, a lost civilisation connected with Atlantis and with Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Embedded within the story are Tolkien's versions of European legends: King Sheave, and The Death of St. Brendan, a three-page poem also titled 'Imram'.
[1][6] The 120-page fragment was published posthumously by George Allen & Unwin in the UK and by Houghton Mifflin in the US, within Sauron Defeated, the 9th volume of The History of Middle-earth, in 1992.
[14] Tolkien's biographer John Garth adds that The Notion Club Papers character Lowdham's middle name, Arundel, is both an English place-name and an echo of the legendarium's Éarendel (an ancestor of Elendil[15]).
[18][19] According to Christopher Tolkien, had his father continued The Notion Club Papers, he would have linked the real world of Alwin Lowdham with his eponymous ancestor Ælfwine of England, the fictional compiler of The Book of Lost Tales, and with Atlantis.
One of the members of the Notion Club, Michael George Ramer, combines lucid dreams with time-travel and experiences the tsunami that sank Númenor.
[21] Virginia Luling writes of The Notion Club Papers that "Tolkien had reason to abandon it: the existing chapters are unsuccessful, though with gleams.
"[13] Flieger comments that had either The Lost Road or The Notion Club Papers been finished,[9] we would have had a dream of time-travel through actual history and recorded myth which would have functioned as both introduction and epilogue to Tolkien's own invented mythology.
