Authors: J. R. R. Tolkien
Sauron Defeated
The second part is an edition of the previously unpublished Notion Club Papers. This was written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the interval between The Tv o Towers and The Return of the King. These mysterious Papers, discovered in the early years of the twenty-first century, report the discussions of a literary club in Oxford in the years 1986-7, in which, after an account by one of the members of the possibilities of travel in space and time through the medium of 'true dream', the centre of interest turns to the legend of Atlantis, the strange communications received by other memhers of the club out of the remote past, and the violent irruption of the legend into the North-west of Europe. Closely associated with the Papers is a new version of the Numenorean legend, The Drowning of Anadune, which constitutes the third part of the book. At this time the language of the Men of the West, Adunaic, was first devised, and the book concludes with an elaborate though unfinished account of its structure provided by Arundel Lowdham, a member of the Notion Club, who learned it in his dreams.
CONTENTS.
Foreword. page xi.
PART ONE: THE END OF THE THIRD AGE.
I The Story of Frodo and Sam in Mordor 3
II The Tower of Kirith Ungol 18
III The Land of Shadow 31
IV Mount Doom 37
V The Field of Kormallen 44
VI The Steward and the King 54
VII Many Partings 61
VIII Homeward Bound 75
IX The Scouring of the Shire 79
X The Grey Havens 108
XI The Epilogue 114
Appendix: Drawings of Orthanc and Dunharrow 136
PAKT TWO: THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS.
Introduction 145
Foreword and List of Members 155
The Notion Club Papers Part One 161
The Notion Club Papers Part Two 222
Major Divergences in Earlier Versions of Part Two
(i) The earlier versions of Night 66 299
(ii) The original version of Lowdham's 'Fragments' 309
(iii) The earlier versions of Lowdham's 'Fragments'
in Adunaic 311
SAURON DEFEATED
(iv) Earlier versions of Edwin Lowdham's
Old English text 313
(v) The page preserved from Edwin Lowdham's
manuscript written in Numenorean script 318
PART THREE: THE DROWNING OF ANADUNE
(i) The third version of The Fall of Numenor 331
(ii) The original text of The Drowning of Anadune 340
(iii) The second text of The Drowning of Anadune 357
(iv) The final form of The Drowning of Anadune 387
(v) The theory of the work 397
(vi) Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language 413
Index 441
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Arundel Lowdham's 'Fragments' page ii -iii The Tower of Kirith Ungol 19
Mount Doom 42
First copy of the King's letter 130
Third copy of the King's letter 131
Orthanc I 138
Orthanc II 139
Orthanc III 139
Dunharrow I 140
Dunharrow II 141
Title-page of The Notion Club Papers 154
The surviving page of Edwin Lowdham's manuscript:
Text I, recto 319
Text I, verso 320
Text II 321
To
TAUM SANTOSKE.
FOREWORD.
With this book my account of the writing of The Lord of the Rings is completed. I regret that I did not manage to keep it even within the compass of three fat volumes; but the circumstances were such that it was always difficult to project its structure and foresee its extent, and became more so, since when working on The Return of the King I was largely ignorant of what was to come. I shall not attempt a study of the history of the Appendices at this time. That work will certainly prove both far-ranging and intricate; and since my father soon turned again, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, to the myths and legends of the Elder Days, I hope after this to publish his major writings and rewritings deriving from that period, some of which are wholly unknown.
When The Lord of the Rings had still a long way to go -
during the halt that lasted through 1945 and extended into 1946, The Return of the King being then scarcely begun - my father had embarked on a work of a very different nature: The Notion Club Papers; and from this had emerged a new language, Adunaic, and a new and remarkable version of the Numenorean legend, The Drowning of Anadune, the development of which was closely entwined with that of The Notion Club Papers. To retain the chronological order of writing which it has been my aim to follow (so far as I could discover it) in The History of Middle-earth I thought at one time to include in Volume VIII, first, the history of the writing of The Two Towers (from the point reached in The Treason of Isengard) and then this new work of 1945 - 6, reserving the history of The Return o f the King to Volume IX. I was persuaded against this, I am sure rightly; and thus it is in the present book that the great disparity of subject-matter appears - and the great difficulty of finding a title for it. My father's suggested title for Book VI of The Lord of the Rings was The End of the Third Age; but it seemed very unsatisfactory to name this volume The End of the Third Age and Other Writings, when the 'other writings', constituting two thirds of the book, were concerned with matters pertaining to the Second Age (and to whatever Age we find ourselves in now).
Sauron Defeated is my best attempt to find some sort of link between the disparate parts and so to name to the whole.
At a cursory glance my edition of The Notion Club Papers and The Drowning of Anadune may appear excessively complicated; but I have in fact so ordered them that the works themselves are presented in the clearest possible form. Thus the final texts of the two parts of the Papers are each given complete and without any editorial interruption, as also are two versions of The Drowning of Anadune. All account and discussion of the evolution of the works is reserved to commentaries and appen-dages which are easily identified.
In view of the great disparity between Part One and Parts Two and Three I have thought that it would be helpful to divide the Index into two, since there is scarcely any overlap of names.
I acknowledge with many thanks the help of Dr Judith Priest-man of the Bodleian Library, and of Mr Charles B. Elston of Marquette Unversity, in making available photographs for use in this book (from the Bodleian those on pages 42 and 138-41, from Marquette those on pages 19 and 130). Mr John D.
Rateliff and Mr F. R. Williamson have very kindly assisted me on particular points in connection with The Notion Club Papers; and Mr Charles Noad has again generously given his time to an independent reading of the proofs and checking of citations.
This book is dedicated to Taum Santoski, in gratitude for his support and encouragement throughout my work on The Lord of the Rings and in recognition of his long labour in the ordering and preparation for copying of the manuscripts at Marquette, a labour which despite grave and worsening illness he drove himself to complete.
Since this book was set in type Mr Rateliff has pointed out to me the source of Arundel Lowdham's allusion to 'the Pig on the Ruined Pump' (p. 179), which escaped me, although my father knew the work from which it comes well, and its verses formed part of his large repertoire of occasional recitation. It derives from Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, chapter X - where however the Pig sat beside, not on, the Pump:
There was a Pig, that sat alone,
Beside a ruined Pump.
By day and night he made his moan:
It would have stirred a heart of stone
To see him wring his hoofs and groan,
Because he could not jump.
In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, chapter XXIII, this becomes the first verse of a poem called The Pig-Tale, at the end of which the Pig, encouraged by a passing Frog, tries but signally fails to jump to the top of the Pump:
Uprose that Pig, and rushed, full whack,
Against the ruined Pump:
Rolled over like an empty sack,
And settled down upon his back,
While all his bones at once went 'Crack!'
It was a fatal jump.
On a very different subject, Mr Noad has observed and communicated to me the curious fact that in the Plan of Shelob's Lair reproduced in The War of the Ring, p. 201, my father's compass-points 'N' and 'S' are reversed. Frodo and Sam were of course moving eastward in the tunnel, and the South was on their right. In my description (p. 200, lines 16 and 20) I evidently followed the compass-points without thinking, and so carelessly wrote of the 'southward' instead of the 'northward'
tunnels that left the main tunnel near its eastern end.
PART ONE.
THE END OF THE
THIRD AGE.
I.
THE STORY OF FRODO AND SAM
IN MORDOR.
Long foreseen, the story of the destruction of the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom was slow to reach its final form. I shall look back first over the earlier conceptions that have appeared in The Return of the Shadow and The Treason of Isengard, and then give some further outlines of the story.
The conception of the Fiery Mountain, in which alone the Ring could be destroyed, and to which the Quest will ultimately lead, goes back to the earliest stages in the writing of The Lord of the Rings. It first emerged in Gandalf's conversation with Bingo Bolger-Baggins, predecessor of Frodo, at Bag End (VI.82): 'I fancy you would have to find one of the Cracks of Earth in the depths of the Fiery Mountain, and drop it down into the Secret Fire, if you really wanted to destroy it.' Already in an outline that almost certainly dates from 1939
(VI.380) the scene on the Mountain appears:
At end
When Bingo [> Frodo] at last reaches Crack and Fiery Mountain he cannot make himself throu the Ring away. ? He hears Necro-mancer's voice offering him great reward - to share power with him, if he will keep it.
At that moment Gollum - who had seemed to reform and had guided them by secret ways through Mordor - comes up and treacherously tries to take Ring. They wrestle and Gollum takes Ring and falls into the Crack.
The mountain begins to rumble.
Two years later, in a substantial sketch of the story to come ('The Story Foreseen from Moria') it was still far from clear to my father just what happened on the Mountain (VII.209):
Orodruin [written above: Mount Doom] has three great fissures North, West, South [> West, South, East] in its sides. They are very deep and at an unguessable depth a glow of fire is seen. Every now and again fire rolls out of mountain's heart down the terrific channels. The mountain towers above Frodo. He comes to a flat place on the mountain-side where the fissure is full of fire - Sauron's well of fire. The Vultures are coming. He cannot throw Ring in. The Vultures are coming. All goes dark in his eyes and he falls to his knees. At that moment Gollum comes up and wrestles with him, and takes Ring. Frodo falls flat.