The Second Age Read Along - Part 3 - Week 4: HoMe5: The Lost Road - The unwritten chapters

#What we’re reading today

This week, we’re wrapping up The Lost Road. You find the final segment in HoMe V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, from Part One: ‘The Fall of Númenor and The Lost Road’, section III: ‘The Lost Road’, segment (iii): ‘The unwritten chapters’. (This is the last thing we'll be reading from this volume. Next week we will move to HoMe IX: Sauron Defeated)

#Resources

Similar to last time, we’ll link the wikipedia articles for the historical references made in this section. Again, Christopher gives pretty much all of the historical information needed to understand the references. These links are just here for those who wish to look further into the topics!

• Sceaf (or King Sheave)
• Tuatha-de-Danaan
• Saint Brendan
• Tir-nan-Og

#Before you read

If you’ve been following along with our other The Lost Road readings, you know that this writing was originally intended to be a time-travel story. As Christopher mentions at the start of this week’s segment, he is unsure whether the decision to have the Númenóean portion of the story be the climax was made before ‘The Númenóean chapters’ were finished being written. Therefore, it’s possible last week’s reading written without the interpolating portions of the time-travel narrative in mind. That being said, the eventual decision was to have tales in between Alboin/Audoin and Elendil/Herendil. The readings for this week are mostly a discussion on what those chapters would have looked like, as well as some early drafts of their tales.

This reading is almost entirely made out of historical references, so definitely don’t feel bad if you don’t know everything that is being discussed in the text. Additionally, you may feel safely ignorant of any mention of the work The Notion Club Papers - it is the subject of our next readings in the read along. Just about all of the info you need regarding the historical aspects are explained by Christopher, so don’t feel a need to understand every single reference.

As an additional note, Ælfwine is a significant character in that Tolkien used him as a storyteller for many of his early versions of stories from the legendarium. You don’t really need to know more than that, I’m just mentioning it so you know why that character is so significant.

#After you read

Christopher has compiled in this reading the various drafts and notes his father wrote that related to the list of potential tales for the The Lost Road his father gave. Of primary focus are the potential tales of Galdor/Agaldor, Ælfwine, Sceaf, Tuatha-de-Danaan, and Saint Brendan/Tir-nan-Og. These different pieces of tales are linked to various historic legends/episodes.

• Galdor/Agaldor was a ‘prophet’ that foresaw a coming Flood.
• Ælfwine and Eadwine have several versions for their tale, but their story centers around Anglo-Saxon troubles and eventual travel, related to Irish folklore, and eventually Ælfwine sails the Straight Road and lands at Eressëa. The outline of their tale related them to most of the other suggested tales.
• Sceaf (or King Sheave) was a story based on Northern Germanic legends (Beowulf as well as two chroniclers) regarding a boy that arrived at a village in a boat decorated in gold and with him was a sheaf of corn, and the village eventually made him king.
• Tuatha-de-Danaan, a Celtic race of legend, was related to an Irish legend regarding the ‘oldest man in the world’ Finntan that had survived since the biblical Flood.
• The last major potential story discussed is one regarding “Tir-nan-Og”, a Paradise land of sorts to the west, related to legends of Saint Brendan (‘subject of the most famous of the tales of seavoyaging told of early Irish saints’). Tolkien ends up altering the poem involving Tir-nan-Og to be a ‘Song of Ælfwine’. From these various parts, we glean the general idea and structure that would’ve gone into the unwritten chapters of The Lost Road.

#Discussion questions

• Ælfwine seems to have the most developed potential of the assorted ideas, most likely due to his relation to the rest of the legendarium. If you had to pick one to equal this development, which other idea would you choose?
• What other moments in history/legend would you have proposed to be in this list of potential ideas for the ‘time-travel’ novel?
• Is there one idea you would strike from the list? Why?
• Now that you have seen the complete work done on The Lost Road, what do you think of it as a medium for telling the story of Númenor? Would you prefer this to the historical narrative version (like that in The Silmarillion)?