The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-Earth, #5)
byJ.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (Editor)
This book compiles some unfinished manuscripts and snippets of stories from Tolkien, along with earlier manuscripts of The Silmarillion, and etymologies of languages and names in Elvish.
The first snippet of a story is an outline of the Fall of Numenor, with three different versions, each slightly different and more evolved.
That dovetails perfectly into the second section which is the unfinished manuscript of The Lost Road, a story about a modern man and his son who have dreams of the ancient past that lead them to Atlantis/Numenor. There they witness the dark days of Numenor when Sauron was spreading his lies and the Numenorians were obsessed with defeating death. A Numenorian father and son much like themselves are debating what to do about the spread of Sauron’s power, and they are worried about spies reporting them to Sauron. But then the manuscript finishes right there, with some notes from Christopher Tolkien about his father’s plans to rework the story, which never came to fruition.
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