The Second Age Read Along - Part 3 - Week 8: HoMe9: The Notion Club Papers - Major Divergences

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#What we’re reading today

This week we’ll be wrapping up the Notion Club Papers. We’re starting from “Note on 'The Death of Saint Brendan'”, which you’ll find in HoMe IX Sauron Defeated, Part Two: ‘The Notion Club Papers’ a few pages before the first table of contents entry for “Major Divergences in Earlier Versions of Part Two”. We’ll be reading until Part 3: ‘The Drowning of Anadûnê’.

#Resources

Images from the text

• iii. Arundel Lowdham’s ‘Fragments’ (from the frontispiece)
• v. The surviving page of Edwin Lowdham's manuscript - Text I - recto
• v. The surviving page of Edwin Lowdham's manuscript - Text I - verso
• v. The surviving page of Edwin Lowdham's manuscript - Text II
• v. Tengwar Commentary I
• v. Tengwar Commentary II
• v. Tengwar Commentary III
• v. Tengwar Commentary IV
• v. Tengwar Commentary V
• v. Tengwar Commentary VI

Other

• “Tolkien's Experiment with Time: The Lost Road, "The Notion Club Papers" and J.W. Dunne” by Verlyn Flieger

#Before you read

This week we’ll be reading six appendices to Christopher’s treatment of The Notion Club Papers. These are mainly concerned with, showing further development Tolkien made after abandoning the work, showing earlier or alternate versions that predate the version Christopher used to make the text, and analysing the various “fragments” Tolkien created to go along with the tale. These all concern The Notion Club Papers Part Two (last week’s reading), so if you haven’t read that then there won’t be much value in this week’s reading. However you do not need to have read Part one (two weeks’ ago reading).

#After you read

We read six short sections today.

The first was concerned with the further development of the poem “The Death of Saint Brendan”, which Tolkien rewrote several times and eventually published it in the 1955 periodical Time and Tide under the title “Imram”. Christopher talked a little bit about its development and then shared the final form.

The second covered some of the earlier versions of Night 66. In these versions there was a plot thread where Jeremy remembers seeing tengwar from a dream of a library that he can’t place, and then later remembers that it was actually from a manuscript called Quenta Eldalien, being the History of the Elves, by John Arthurson (Tolkien’s father’s name was Arthur) that he once saw washed up in a second-hand room of a bookshop. Discussion of this leads to discussion of Numenor and its appearances in C.S. Lewis’s books.

Also, in these versions, the two languages that Lowdham hears are not Quenya and Adûnaic, but Quenya and Sindarin (or at least the languages that would later become Quenya and Sindarin). Christopher suggests that Adûnaic was only created during the revising of The Notion Club Papers.

The next two sections show earlier successive versions of the Lowdham’s translation ‘fragments’, first in just Quenya, and then in Quenya and Andunic.

The last two sections show earlier versions of Edwin Lowdham's Old English text, and then the tengwar transcriptions of them Tolkien made, along with some handwritten commentary from Christopher about Tolkien’s use of tengwar.

#Discussion questions

• In your opinion, to what extent had Tolkien been working on Adunaic in the NCP, was it something he’d only thought of for this text or was it only it’s first exposition in his works?
• Are Tolkien’s careful construction when producing fake in-universe documents that accompany his stories telling of his nature?
• Tolkien has released his Imram poem in a magazine shortly before his publishing of LotR, why do you think this was? Could he be gauging his audience?