Tolkien’s second time-travel story, *The Notion Club Papers, purports to be the surviving part of the records of the meetings of an Oxford society during 1986 and 1987, discovered in sacks of waste-paper in 2012. Tolkien is the author, of course, not only of these records but of the foreword written (in the fiction) by Howard Green, to accompany his (fictional) edition of the papers published in 2014 and the note Green added to the second edition. In the foreword Green accepts the dates on the papers and notes the curious fact ‘that no such club appears ever to have existed’ (*Sauron Defeated, p. 155), nor can any of the people named be identified. The ‘note to the second edition’ cites the opinions of other scholars that the paper used for the records seems to date from the period just after the Second World War, though against this the text seems to refer to later events, including the ‘Great Storm’ of 12 June 1987.
The discussions of the members constantly refer to the *Inklings and their writings. The more relevant Tolkien allusions note that some members ‘read old C.R. Tolkien’s little books of memoirs: In the Roaring Forties, and The Inns and Outs of Oxford’, but only three ‘bothered with Tolkien père and all the elvish stuff’ (p. 219). Elsewhere someone remembers finding in a secondhand shop a manuscript, Quenta Eldalien, being the History of the Elves by ‘John Arthurson’ (= John R.R. Tolkien, son of *Arthur Tolkien), in which is found the name Nūmenor (sic); John Jethro Rashbold, an undergraduate member, classical scholar, and apprentice poet, is recorded as attending meeting but never speaks (‘Tolkien’ is said to derive from tollkühn ‘foolhardy’ = ‘rash, bold’; see *Names); and Professor Rashbold of Pembroke is requested to decipher and translate an Old English text written in Tengwar (see *Writing systems).
An early list of members of the Notion Club identifies some with individual Inklings, and a replacement first page describes the work, as then conceived, as ‘Being a fragment of an apocryphal Inklings’ Saga, made by some imitator at some time in the 1980s’. This is followed by a preface addressed to the Inklings: ‘While listening to this fantasia (if you do), I beg of the present company not to look for their own faces in this mirror. For the mirror is cracked, and at the best you will only see your countenances distorted, and adorned maybe with noses (and other features) that are not your own, but belong to other members of the company – if to anybody’ (pp. 148–9). Indeed, no one member seems exactly to represent Tolkien, and the question is compounded by changes in the lists of members and their academic interests.
Verlyn Flieger has commented that ‘early drafts of the [Notion Club] “Papers” show Tolkien assigning (and reassigning) specific Inklings identities to specific Notion Club characters.’ Tolkien was ‘Ramer’ at one point but was changed to ‘Latimer’ and then finally ‘Guildford’, ‘who not by accident is the Club’s recorder, and thus the author of the minutes of the meetings which make up the “Papers”’(‘“The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”: Myth, History, and Time-travel’ in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee, p. 165). But Tolkien soon abandoned definite equivalences, and his interests were scattered among the members. Michael Ramer shares his dream of the Great Wave (*Atlantis) and made other journeys in his dreams. Alwin Arundel Lowdham, like Alboin in The Lost Road, hears fragments of Elvish languages; both he and Wilfred Trewin Jeremy seem to be haunted by *Númenor, Tolkienian concepts such as a ‘native-language’ not necessarily the first learned, and ‘Elvish drama’.
Both *Leaf by Niggle and *Smith of Wootton Major have been seen as having autobiographical aspects. Niggle’s failure to complete his painting of the Tree, and the competing claims of art and social responsibility, are often compared to Tolkien’s struggles to complete The Lord of the Rings against professional, academic demands on his time; while some have seen in Smith, who is able to explore Faery by virtue of the star he wears but has to give it up so that it may pass to another, Tolkien recognizing his own declining capacity and saying farewell to his art. The latter receives support from Tolkien’s description of Smith of Wootton Major in a letter to *Roger Lancelyn Green as ‘an old man’s book, already weighted with the presage of “bereavement”’ (12 December 1967, Letters, p. 389).
Tolkien attributed the many parts of his legendarium to a series of witnesses, authors, and transmitters (see *‘The Silmarillion’, subsection ‘Internal sources’). In some early texts he imagined that true information about the fairies may have reached England through certain Anglo-Saxon figures who had heard stories from witnesses. For a time, the credentials of the originators or transmitters of the texts he produced were carefully recorded, often reaching back to the earliest Elvish loremasters. In later years he began to feel uneasy about presenting a cosmology which contradicted scientific facts, and towards the end of his life he wrote that ‘nearly all the matter of The Silmarillion is contained in myths and legends that have passed through Men’s hands and minds, and are (in many points) plainly influenced by contact and confusion with the myths, theories, and legends of Men’ (*The Peoples of Middle-earth, p. 390). He wrote three accounts of the fall of Númenor, later described as according to Mannish tradition, Elvish tradition, and Mixed Dúnedanic tradition.
On 20 September 1963 he wrote to Colonel Worskett about The Silmarillion as he hoped to prepare it for publication: ‘the legends have to be worked over … and made consistent; and they have to be integrated with [The Lord of the Rings]; and they have to be given some progressive shape. No simple device, like a journey and a quest, is available’ (Letters, p. 333). Also referring to ‘The Silmarillion’, Christopher Tolkien wrote that ‘in the latest writing [by his father] there is no trace or suggestion of any “device” or “framework” in which [the work] was to be set. I think that in the end he concluded that nothing would serve, and no more would be said beyond an explanation of how (within the imagined world) it came to be recorded.’ He does, however, note evidence which suggests that at least at one point Tolkien considered making Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish the source of The Silmarillion, but Christopher was ‘reluctant to step into the breach and make definite what I only surmised’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, pp. 5, 6).
So we return to Bilbo and the ‘Red Book of Westmarch’. In The Lord of the Rings, at the end of Book VI, Chapter 6, Bilbo gives Frodo ‘three books of lore that he had made at various times, written in his spidery hand, and labelled on their red backs: Translations from the Elvish, by B.B.’ In the ‘Note on the Shire Records’ in the second edition of the Prologue the ‘transmission history’ of the ‘translations’ is enlarged, and one copy in particular, the only one to contain ‘the whole of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”’, is described as ‘a work of great skill and learning in which, between 1403 and 1418 [in the Shire-reckoning] [Bilbo] had used all the sources available to him in Rivendell, both living and written. But they were little used by Frodo, being almost entirely concerned with the Elder Days.’
In a letter Tolkien wrote to Richard Plotz on 12 September 1965, he said of The Silmarillion: ‘It lacks a thread on which its diversity can be strung’ (Letters, p. 360). This suggests that Bilbo’s Translations were as yet only a possibility; but after he visited Tolkien on 1 November 1966 Plotz reported that Tolkien told him that one of the problems delaying The Silmarillion was that ‘of finding a story line to connect all the parts. At the moment Professor Tolkien is considering making use of Bilbo again. In the period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo was in Rivendell among all the Elves and Elven records and perhaps The Silmarillion will appear as his research in Rivendell’ (‘J.R.R. Tolkien Talks about the Discovery of Middle-earth, the Origins of Elvish’, Seventeen, January 1967, p. 118).
Bagme Bloma see Songs for the Philologists
Barfield, Arthur Owen (1898–1997). Owen Barfield went up to Wadham College, *Oxford in 1919 on a classical scholarship. By mid-1921, when he received his B.A. and began work on a B.Litt., he