at the beginning of book v), my father wrote to me (letters no. 92) that he had seen c. s. lewis that day: 'his fourth (or fifth?) novel is brewing, and seems likely to clash with mine (my dimly projected third). i have been getting a lot of new ideas about prehistory lately (via beowulf and other sources of which i may have written) and want to work them into the long shelved time-travel story i began. c. s. l. is planning a story about the descendants of seth and cain.' his words are tantalizingly difficult to interpret; but by 'clash with mine' he surely meant that the themes of their books ran rather close.(1)

whatever lies behind this, it is seen that he was at this time turning his thoughts to a renewed attempt on the 'time-travel story', which would issue a year later in the notion club papers. in his letter to stanley unwin of 21 july 1946 (letters no. 105) he said that he hoped very shortly 'actually to - write', to turn again to the lord of the rings where he had left it, more than a year and a half before: 'i shall now have to study my own work in order to get back to it,' he wrote. but later in that same letter he said:

in an entirely different frame and setting what little had any value in the inchoate lost road (which i had once the impudence to show you: i hope it is forgotten), and other things beside. i hoped to finish this in a rush, but my health gave way after christmas. rather

silly to mention it, till it is finished. but i am putting the lord of the rings, the hobbit sequel, before all else, save duties that i cannot wriggle out of.

by any manner of means have been the work of a fortnight. to substantiate this, and since this is a convenient place to give this very necessary information, i set out here the essential facts of the textual relations of all this material, together with some brief indication of their content.

as the development of the notion club papers progressed my
father divided it into two parts, the second of which was never
completed, and although he ultimately rejected this division (2) i have
found it in every way desirable to preserve it in this book. part one
was 'the ramblings of michael ramer: out of the talkative planet', "
and this consists of a report in direct speech of the discussions at two
successive meetings (3) of 'the notion club' at oxford far in the future
at the time of writing. on the first of these occasions the conversation

turned on the problem of the vehicle, the machine or device, by which
'space-travellers' are transported to their destination, especially in
respect of its literary credibility in itself and its effect on the story
contained within the journeys; on the second, of which the report is..
much longer, one of the members, michael ramer, expounded his
ideas concerning 'true dreams' and his experiences of 'space-travel' in
dream.

the earliest manuscript, here called 'a', is a complete text of part
one. it is roughly written and hastily expressed, there is no title or
explanatory 'scene-setting', and there are no dates; but while the text
would undergo much expansion and improvement, the essential
structure and movement of the dialogue was already largely present.

the second manuscript, 'b', is also a complete text of part one,
but is much fuller than a, and (with many changes and additions)
advances far towards the final form. here also the two meetings, as the
text was first written, have no dates, and the numbers given to the
meetings imply a much longer history of the club than is suggested for
it subsequently. for the elaborate title or prolegomenon to this version
see pp. 148 - 9.

the third manuscript, 'c', is written in a fine script, but is not quite
complete: it extends to ramer's words 'so there does appear to be at
least one other star with attendant planets' (p. 207), and it is clear that
no more was written of this text (which, incidentally, it would have
taken days to write).

a typescript 'd', made by my father, is the final form of part one. in
one section of the text, however, d seems to have preceded c, since it-
has some b readings which were then changed to those of c; but the
final form of the text is scarcely ever in doubt, and even where it is the
differences are entirely trivial. where c ends, the typescript follows b,
the place of transition being marked on the b manuscript. (a second
typescript - not, i think, made by my father - was begun, but
abandoned after only a few pages; this has no independent value.)

records a number of further meetings of the notion club, continuous with those of part one. this second part is largely devoted to the intrusion of the matter of numenor into the discussions of the notion club, but of this there are only two texts, a manuscript ('e') and a typescript ('f').

the typescript f is a complex document, in that my father rejected a substantial section of it ('f 1') as soon as he had typed it, replaced it ('f 2'), and then continued on to the end, the structure of the text being thus f 1, f 1 > f 2, f 2 (see p. 237 and note 37).

notion club papers my father not only wrote a first draft of an entirely new version of the story of numenor but developed it through further texts: this is the drowning of anadune, in which all the names are in adunaic.

stanley unwin in july 1946 that 'three parts' of the work were written in a fortnight at the end of 1945? obviously it cannot be, not even on the supposition that when he said 'a fortnight' he greatly underesti- mated

extremely probable explanation, as it seems to me, is that at the end of that fortnight he stopped work in the middle of writing the manuscript e, at the point where the notion club papers end,

part two (closely associated with that of the adunaic language and the writing of the drowning

year, the earlier part of 1946. against this, of course, is the fact that the letter to stanley unwin in which my father referred to the papers was written in july 1946, but that letter gives no impression of further work after 'my health gave way after christmas'. but it is to be remembered that the lord of the rings had been at a halt for more than a year and a half,

the abandoned lord of the rings. he did not need to spell out to stanley unwin what he had in fact been doing! but he said that he was 'putting the lord of the rings before all else', which no doubt meant 'i am now going to put it before all else', and that included adunaic. to the interrupted notion club papers he never returned.

since the notion club papers are now published for the first time, the final typescripts d of part one and f of part two must obviously be the text printed, and this makes for difficulties of presentation (it is of course very much easier to begin with an original draft and to relate it by consecutive steps to a final form that is already known). the two parts are separated, with notes following each part. following the text of the papers i give important sections that were rejected from or sig- nificantly changed in the final text, earlier forms of the 'numenorean' fragments

although the final text of part two of the papers and the drown- ing of anadune were intimately connected,(5) especially in respect of adunaic, any attempt to combine them in a single presentation makes for inextricable confusion; the latter is therefore treated entirely separ- ately in the third part of this book, and in my commentary on part two of the papers i have not thought it useful to make continual reference

there are some aspects of the framework of the papers, provided by the foreword of the editor, mr. howard green, and the list of members of the notion club, which are better discussed here than in the commentary.