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''The Notion Club Papers'' is the title of an abandoned novel by J. R. R. Tolkien , written during 1945 and published posthumously in '' Sauron Defeated '', the 9th volume of '' The History Of Middle-earth ''. It is a space/time/dream travel story, written at the same time as '' The Lord Of The Rings '' was being developed. The story itself involves the minutes of the meetings of an arts discussion club at Oxford , a fictionalization of (and a pun on) Tolkien's own Club, The Inklings . During these meetings, Alwin Arundel Lowdham discusses his lucid dreams about Númenor ; through these dreams, he "discovers" much about the Númenor story and the languages of Middle-earth (notably Quenya , Sindarin , and Adûnaic — the last very interesting since it is the sole source of most of the material on this language). While not finished, at the end of the given story it becomes clear Lowdham himself is a reincarnation of sorts of Elendil . (''Alwin'' is a modernisation of the name '' Ælfwine '', Old English for Elf-friend, or ''Elendil'' in Quenya.) Other members of the Club also mention their vivid dreams of other times and places. Tolkien not only created fictional meetings for these papers; he also created a fictional history for the manuscript of the papers. According to the papers, the meetings occurred in the . These papers, which make a number of comments on Lewis' Space Trilogy , remind one of C. S. Lewis ' commentary to Tolkien's poem '' The Lay Of Leithian '', in which Lewis created a fictional history of scholarship of the poem and even referred to other manuscript tradition to recommend changes to the poem. ''The Notion Club Papers'' may be seen as an attempt to re-write '' The Lost Road '', published and discussed in '' The Lost Road And Other Writings '', as being another attempt to tie the Númenórean legend in with a more modern tale. There is, however, no direct connection between the modern settings of the two stories within the fictional frame. By an odd coincidence ''The Notion Club Papers'' mentions a great storm occurring during 1987 in England , and indeed the fictional commentary notes that this provides evidence that it could not have been written in the 1940s. In real life the Great Storm Of 1987 occurred in October of that year. |
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