The Second Age Read Along - Part 3 - Week 6: HoMe9: The Notion Club Papers - Part One

#What we’re reading today

Following last week’s reading, we’re in HoMe IX, Part Two: ‘The Notion Club Papers’, section 3: ‘The Notion Club Papers (Part One)’. We’re stopping right before the section ‘The Notion Club Papers Part Two’.

#Before you read

As you may remember from the intro we read last week, the Notion Club Papers are the minutes of a fictional Oxford literary club, not unlike the Inklings (which included both Tolkien and CS Lewis). This is set significantly in the future of when Tolkien lived, so most of the Notion Club members had grown up reading Lewis’s space trilogy books and were innately familiar with them. Do not expect to see much Numenor this week, but there are a lot of references to other works of literature, most of which are explained by Christopher in the notes.

#After you read

Michael Ramer reads a space travel story he had written to the Notion Club (story not included in the text), and the club critiques his framing device, and then discuss which framing devices they each like or dislike most in science fiction stories. Rubert Dolbear then remarks that the content within the framing device was not Ramer’s style and he most have got the story from elsewhere.

The following week the club meets again and Ramer explains that he had been experimenting with traveling his consciousness during his dreams. This generally requires a vehicle, such as tracing the history of a meteorite he had seen as a child. Sometimes on these dreams he encounters other minds going on similar journeys, but the two minds cannot communicate. However the dreams are very fragmentary and Ramer digresses to compare this to finding an isolated scrap of something you once wrote and to remember that it was important without knowing why. He shares some very brief glimpses of these fragments (e.g. “There is the empty throne on the top of a mountain. There is a Green Wave, whitecrested, fluted and scallop-shaped but vast, towering above green fields“), and a few of them seem like they could be Numenor related - Lowdham seems to pay special attention to these as if he knows something. There is also some discussion about the languages observed in the dream and whether the observer will be able to remember any of the actual words spoken or just the ideas expressed.

#Discussion questions

• Reading the various proposed space-travel framing devices suggested by the club members, which do you prefer the most? Which do you think Tolkien prefered the most? Do you think the club would have appreciated the story they themselves are in?
• Is this version of time travel / dream travel better or worse than what Tolkien used in The Lost Road?
• What should the librarian in Ramer’s story have done with the will?