The ships have set sail at last …. Behold, the mountain smokes and the earth trembles! … Woe to this time and the fell counsels of Sauron! Tarkalion hath set forth his might against the Lords of the West …. The Lords have spoken to the Maker … and the fate of the world is overturned …. The ships of the Númenóreans are drowned in the abyss. They are lost for ever. See now the eagles of the Lords overshadow Númenor. The mountain goes up to heaven in flame and vapour; the hills totter, slide, and crumble: the land founders. The glory has gone down into the deep waters. [p. 251, emended from notes 63–4, p. 290]
Lowdham addresses Jeremy as ‘Voronwë’, and Jeremy addresses Lowdham as ‘Elendil’. Both rush into the freak storm and do not return for some months. Then they begin to tell of their travels round the western coasts of Britain and Ireland, and of a shared dream in which they were in tenth-century England, Lowdham as the minstrel Ælfwine, Jeremy as Tréowine from the Marches.
Tolkien abandoned The Notion Club Papers with this account only partly told. Only a few notes and fragments indicate how the story might have continued. One note suggests that Tréowine and Ælfwine were to sail west, find the Straight Road, see the round world below, then be driven back. Another has ‘sojourn in Númenor before and during the fall ends with Elendil and Voronwë fleeing on a hill of water into the dark with the Eagles and lightning pursuing them’, and ‘at the end … Lowdham and Jeremy have a vivid dream of the Fall of Númenor’ (p. 279).
In association with The Notion Club Papers Tolkien wrote a new account of the fall of Númenor, The Drowning of Anadûnê. This differs significantly from The Fall of Númenor, which had ended with the words: ‘And here endeth the tale of the ancient world as it is known to the Elves’ (The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 29). There is no reason to doubt that when Tolkien wrote those words he intended that the Elves’ knowledge of the world and its history, deriving from the Valar and their own experiences, should reflect what actually occurred. Nothing is said about if, and how, this Elvish tradition was passed on to Men. The Drowning of Anadûnê is intended to show how events in the First Age and the history of Númenor might have been remembered in the traditions of Men after being passed down through many generations: filtered, changed, distorted, and with much forgotten. But this was also a time when Tolkien began to doubt whether he should include in his mythology elements contrary to scientific knowledge, such as a flat world made round, and considered whether to make fundamental changes, or alternatively, changes in perception and knowledge, even writing a version of the *Ainulindalë in which the world was round from Creation. In The Fall of Númenor a flat world is made round at the time of the Downfall, but in The Drowning of Anadûnê the world was always round.
Tolkien made three rough preliminary sketches before beginning The Drowning of Anadûnê, then produced four successive typescripts. There are considerable differences in the story told in these texts, and Christopher Tolkien concludes ‘that the marked differences in the preliminary sketches reflect my father’s shifting ideas of what the “Mannish tradition” might be, and how to present it; he was sketching rapidly possible modes in which the memory, and the forgetfulness, of Men in Middle-earth, descendants of the Exiles of Númenor, might have transformed their early history’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 407). If one assumes that the Elvish traditions of events in the First Age recounted in the Quenta Silmarillion, the *Annals of Beleriand, and The Fall of Númenor record what actually happened, then it is clear that these versions of ‘Mannish tradition’ preserve only faint and erroneous memories of events. They are particularly confused about the Valar and the Elves, sometimes making no distinction between them, and uncertain about their dwelling places in the West.
In the preliminary sketches and in The Drowning of Anadûnê Tolkien pays much attention to what the Númenóreans thought or were told about the shape of the world. Although he made no authorial statement on this matter, a careful study of internal evidence suggests that this world was round from the beginning. In the first sketch the Númenóreans ‘believe the world flat, and that “the Lords of the West” (Gods) dwell beyond the great barrier of cloud hills – where there is no death and the Sun is renewed and passes under the world to rise again’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 400), but are told by the Elves that the world is round. By emendations it is Sauron, not the Elves, who tells the Númenóreans that the world is round, but in the third sketch (in a section later struck through) ‘the ancient Númenóreans knew (being taught by the Eledāi [= Elves]) that the Earth was round; but Sauron taught them that it was a disc and flat …’ (p. 404). In the first version of The Drowning of Anadûnê the Avalāi (= confused mixing of the Valar and the Elves), who live in Avallondē, tell the Númenóreans that the world is round ‘and that if they sailed into the utmost West, yet would they but come back again to the East and so to the places of their setting out, and the world would seem to them but a prison’ (p. 345); while Sauron ‘bade them think that the world was not a closed circle; and that therein there were many lands for their winning …; and even yet, when they came to the end thereof, there was the Dark without, out of which came all things’ (p. 347). A note written beside the text says that after the disaster, the Númenóreans continued to believe Sauron’s lies that the world was flat until their fleets, seeking for the remains of Númenor, sailed around the world. In the second and later versions of The Drowning of Anadûnê the Valar send messengers to the last king (now called Ar-Pharazôn) and tell him that ‘the fashion of the Earth is such that a girdle may be set about it. Or as an apple … it is round and fair, and the seas and lands are but the rind of the fruit …’ (p. 364). But Zigûr (= Sauron) refutes this with similar words as in the first version. There is no reference in any of the texts to the Númenóreans seeing the Gates of Morning, as there was in The Fall of Númenor.
The sketches refer only briefly to the cataclysm that destroyed Númenor and its aftermath. In various texts of The Drowning of Anadûnê men do not know exactly what happened, for there were no surviving human witnesses of anything but the destruction of Númenor itself. In the first version, ‘those that are wisest in discernment aver’ that when the Númenórean fleets sail into the West the Avalāi (= Valar) ‘laid down their governance of Earth. And Eru overthrew its shape, and a great chasm was opened in the sea’ into which the fleets fall, and Avallondē and Númenor are destroyed, ‘and the Avalāi thereafter had no local habitation on earth …’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 351). The second version says that men later heard from the Nimri (= Elves) that Eru ‘changed the fashion of the world; and a great chasm opened in the sea between Anadûnê and the Deathless Land [= Aman, the home of the Valar] … and the world was shaken’. The Númenórean fleet fell into the abyss, and Aman and Númenor which stood on either side of it were destroyed (pp. 372–3).
In neither version is there any suggestion that the world was ever anything but round, nor is there any mention of a Straight Road. But in both the Númenóreans think that some blessed with a special sight might be able to see, in some fashion, the lands that once had been, and they comment that all the ways are crooked that once were straight (pp. 352, 374). In the third version, Tolkien made an addition to explain this:
For in the youth of the world it was a hard saying to men that the Earth was not plain [flat] as it seemed to be, and few even of the Faithful of Anadûnê had believed in their hearts this teaching; and when in after days, what by star-craft, what by the voyages of ships that sought out all the ways and waters of the Earth, the Kings of Men knew that the world was indeed round, then the belief arose among them that it had so been made only in the time of the great Downfall, and was not thus before. Therefore they thought that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the Earth went on towards heaven …. [p. 392]
There were rumours of mariners who found this road and reached the Land of Aman. Christopher Tolkien points out that whereas ‘the author of The Fall of Númenor knows that “of old many of the exiles of Númenor could still see, some clearly, and some more faintly, the paths to the True West”, but for the rationalising author (as he may seem to be) of The Drowning of Anadûnê the Straight Road was a belief born of desire and regret’ (p. 395).