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leesmyth's review
3.0
Here's something from p. 433 that I liked:
But members of the royal house seem often to have lived to be close on 300; while kings seem normally to have been succeeded by the grandsons (their sons were as a rule as old as 200 or even 250 before the king 'fell asleep', and passed on the crown to their own sons, so that as long and unbroken a reign as possible might be maintained, and because they themselves had become engrossed in some branch of art or learning).
And there's some interesting discussion of fairy-stories at 169-170. That's where we see probably the best or most famous quip from the Notion Club papers, Guildford's claim to have determined "the only known or likely way in which any one has ever landed on a world." He teases the others, in response to their inquiries, that "it's not private, though I've used it once." The big reveal? His method is "Incarnation. By being born."
neilrcoulter's review
4.0
I often find the final installment of a series to be alternately satisfying and mundane. Satisfying, because it's the conclusion of so much that I've invested in. Mundane, because by that point the only things that can happen are the things that absolutely must happen before the story ends. [b:Sauron Defeated|23600|Sauron Defeated The End of the Third Age The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Four (The History of Middle-earth #9)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388198133s/23600.jpg|2963740] (Part Four of [b:The History of the Lord of the Rings|2329|The History of the Lord of the Rings (The History of Middle-earth #6-9)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1322037593s/2329.jpg|6340] within Volume IX of [b:The History Of Middle-Earth|214175|The Complete History Of Middle-Earth (Middle-Earth Universe)|Christopher Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1334597698s/214175.jpg|18608966]) is like that. I'm still interested to see [a:Tolkien|656983|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1383526938p2/656983.jpg]'s process as he figures out how to bring [b:The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388181159s/33.jpg|3462456] to a conclusion. But it's the weakest and least interesting part of The History of the Lord of the Rings. Unlike the first part of the series, [b:The Return of the Shadow|15351|The Return of the Shadow The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One (The History of Middle-Earth, #6)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348021528s/15351.jpg|2963703], which showed the wildly different directions Tolkien might have gone with "the Hobbit sequel," the end shows Tolkien connecting the loose ends and bringing things to the end that is required. There are fewer diversions, fewer surprises--not much trivia that is fun or amusing to bring up in conversation with other people. A number of times throughout the text, [a:Christopher|9533|Christopher Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1235772383p2/9533.jpg] says something like this: "In the first draft of this chapter my father again achieved for most of its length an extraordinarily close approach to the final form" (44). It's the end of the writing of The Lord of the Rings (except for the Appendices, which Christopher doesn't cover in this series), but it's not an especially interesting read. And this final part of the history is but one small part of the whole Volume IX of the Middle-Earth history--it takes only the first 141 pages, out of the total 482.
After the conclusion of The History Lord of the Rings, Christopher turns back to where he left off in Volume V, [b:The Lost Road and Other Writings|260109|The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-Earth, #5)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328193180s/260109.jpg|2964303], with Tolkien's continued writings on the Fall of Númenor/Akallabêth/Drowning of Anadûnê mythology. The second part of Volume IX comprises drafts of The Notion Club Papers, an unfinished and unpublished idea that Tolkien worked on after finishing LR. What exists of the Notion Club is in two parts, and the first part begins very much in the subgenre that I think of as "Oxford Dons in Supernatural Adventures." It's a subgenre that blossomed in the mid-20th century, mostly pioneered by the Inklings. [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg] was the master of this kind of story, and [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1367519078p2/1069006.jpg] was also very good (in The Ransom Trilogy and other short stories like "The Dark Tower"). Tolkien didn't make many contributions in this area, but The Notion Club Papers may have become a significant entry. The first part is about the possibility of intergalactic travel through dreams and memories. Discussion among the dons centers on the difficulty of finding a good method of travel in sci-fi stories, and then one of the members, Ramer, explains the methods of dream- or memory-travel that he has been cultivating. Though I found this quite a jarring change coming right after the Lord of the Rings, once I got my mind into it I found it a nice slow build-up an intriguing narrative style, and slightly (pleasantly) creepy and disturbing. Part Two is where things begin to be muddied. It brings a return to the Lost Road idea of people throughout history being connected to the Eärendil story, a narrative device designed ultimately to bring us back to the Númenor story. This is all complicated by plot elements that just don't make sense to me. The main character in Part Two is suddenly Lowdham, who seemed in Part One to be rising as the dark, shadowy antagonist. Ramer fades into the background as Jeremy, a character of only minor importance in Part One, becomes the secondary protagonist of Part Two. There are also leaps in logic and narrative that are somehow accepted by the characters but to me don't fit right with the pace of the story. The growing complexities of multiple ancient languages being revealed, mysterious connections between prehistory and present-day, some kind of travel between eras . . . it all just gets to be too much to keep track of, turning into a story only a Tolkien could love. As Christopher says, the writing had become "a conception so intricate that one need perhaps look no further for an answer to the question, why were The Notion Club Papers abandoned? (282) In the end, the Númenor mythology would continue to develop apart from the narrative frame Tolkien played with in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers.
The Notion Club includes some enjoyable discussions about language, including this prescriptive/descriptive debate:
'And I detest it, when philologues talk about Language (with a capital L) with that peculiarly odious unction usually reserved for capitalized Life. That we are told "must go on" - if we complain of any debased manifestations, such as Arry in his cups. He talks about Language as if it was not only a Jungle but a Sacred Jungle, a beastly grove dedicated to Vita Fera, in which nothing must be touched by impious hands. Cankers, fungi, parasites: let 'em alone!
'Languages are not jungles! They are gardens, in which sounds selected from the savage wilderness of Brute Noise are turned into words, grown, trained, and endued with the scents of significance. You talk as if I could not pull up a weed that stinks!'
'I do not!' said Lowdham. 'But, first of all, you have to remember that it's not your garden - if you must have this groggy allegory: it belongs to a lot of other people as well, and to them your stinking weed may be an object of delight. More important: your allegory is misapplied. What you are objecting to is not a weed, but the soil, and also any manifestations of growth and spread. All the other words in your refined garden have come into being (and got their scent) in the same way. You're like a man who is fond of flowers and fruit, but thinks loam is dirty, and dung disgusting; and the uprising and the withering just too, too sad. You want a sterilized garden of immortelles, no, paper-flowers. In fact, to leave allegory, you won't learn anything about the history of your own language, and hate to be reminded that it has one. . . . For the One Speaker, all alone, is the final court of doom for words, to bless or to condemn. It's the agreement only of the separate judges that seems to make the laws. If your distaste is shared by an effective number of the others, then pants will prove - a weed, and be thrust into the oven.
'Though, of course, many people - more and more, I sometimes feel, as Time goes on and even language stales - do not judge any longer, they only echo.' (225-26)
The final part of Sauron Defeated gives several drafts of the Númenor story, now using the newly developing Adunaic language for the names. There are significant differences in the various versions of the story--especially the conception of the world as either always round, or at one point flat and then re-made round.
My reviews of the other volumes in The History of the Lord of the Rings series:
dorynickel's review
2.0
nonabgo's review
3.0
avalydia's review against another edition
2.0
slferg's review
4.0
I began buying and reading these when they first came out. I've had this one around a long time (it was published in 1992 and I probably bought it that year or soon after). I really like this one [I enjoyed the others, too] because it goes into more of Sam's story after Frodo and Bilbo left Middle Earth. It was Tolkien's original intention to end the Lord of the Rings with the story of Sam with his children, but he was advised not to. But I quite enjoyed the story he had intended. It is not such a mystical ending as was published, but a satisfying one.
That's the first third of this book. The next part is a look at the Notion Club Papers. Not sure if they were ever published (I think they may have been later), but just started on reading the evolution and ideas as they were formed.
vulturetime's review against another edition
3.75
pennwing's review
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.0
nwhyte's review
3.0
The end of the story of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, including Tolkien's attempts to plot out the very end of the story - Gollum always had a role in the destruction of the Ring, but exactly what that was took some time to work out; but Saruman only gradually emerged as the villain in The Scouring of the Shire, and a postscript of Sam and Rose and their children twenty years on was dropped on the advice of Tolkien's beta readers (I wonder if whether J.K. Rowling was given the same advice about the end of the Harry Potter series; if so, she ignored it).
The book also includes drafts of an unpublished novel called The Notion Club Papers, written in the mid-1940s, in which a club of academics - in 1987! - listens to one of their number who has uncovered, through his dreams, another variation on the story of Eärendil and the fall of Númenor which was one of the earliest elements of Tolkien's mythos and which he never quite got right. What's interesting about The Notion Club Papers is that it clarifies the reason for part of the failure: the characterisation is all in the framing narrative, and the epic mythos all in the Númenor bits without really much in the way of interesting personal glimpses. What Tolkine managed in The Hobbit and particularly in The Lord of the Rings was to unite the epic and the personal, but it was only after long years of effort and rewriting, and I don't think either half of The Notion Papers was really salvageable. Still, it's interesting to map the roads not travelled.
nwhyte's review against another edition
4.0