The Lost Road

The Lost Road and Other Writings

Editor	Christopher Tolkien
Author	J. R. R. Tolkien
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	High fantasy Literary analysis
Publisher	George Allen & Unwin (UK)
Publication date	1987
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	464 (paperback)
ISBN
Preceded by	The Shaping of Middle-earth
Followed by	The Return of the Shadow

The Lost Road and Other Writings is the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth, a series of compilations of drafts and essays written by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was edited and published posthumously in 1987 by Christopher Tolkien.

The Lost Road and Other Writings contains the following pieces:

The title pages of each volume of the History of Middle-earth have an inscription in Tengwar, written by Christopher Tolkien and describing the contents of the book. The inscription in Book V reads: "Herein are collected the oldest Tale of the Downfall of Númenor, the story of the Lost Road into the West, the Annals of Valinor and the Annals of Beleriand in a later form, the Ainulindalë, or the Music of the Ainur, the Lhammas, or Account of tongues, the Quenta Silmarillion or History of the Silmarils and the history of many words and names."

The Lost Road itself was the result of a deal between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, where they agreed to an attempt at writing science fiction. Lewis ended up with writing a story about space travel, which would become The Space Trilogy, and Tolkien would try to write something about time travel, but he never completed it. It is just a fragmentary beginning of a tale, including a rough structure and several chunks of narrative, including four entire chapters dealing with modern England and Númenor, from which the entire story as it should have been can be glimpsed. The scheme was of time-travel by means of 'vision' or being mentally inserted into what had been, so as to actually re-experience that which had happened. In this way the tale links first to Saxon England of Alfred the Great, then to the Lombard Alboin of St. Benedict's time, the Baltic Sea in Old Norse days, Ireland at the time of the Tuatha Dé's coming (600 years after the Flood), prehistoric North in the Ice Age, a 'Galdor story' of Third Age Middle-earth, and finally the Fall of Gil-galad, before recounting the prime legend of the Downfall of Númenor/Atlantis and the Bending of the World. It explores the theme of a 'straight road' into the West, now only in memory because the world is round.