#game trails

Yes, it takes a certain degree of insanity/genius to invent several languages and the entire (incredibly well crafted) mythos and history of a whole world. This is known. Everyone knows this. This is just scratching the surface. As I was doing a bit more research on older versions of The Silmarillion, I came across the lovely character of Ælfwine. 10th century Anglo-Saxon narrator stumbling upon Aman and bringing back its stories. He gets a lot of iterations as a framing character under slightly different names and circumstances. Anyway, knowledge of this guy eventually got me to The Lost Road, and then The Notion Club Papers.

Both of these works are Númenor-adjacent, both abandoned, both prior to the integration of Númenor into the greater mythos. Both of them are also about…pre-incarnative time travel. Okay bud. Notion Club is especially curious because it is an unashamed self-insert piece of himself and The Inklings. We get a main character plagued by nightmares of another time and world’s doom in the same fashion Tolkien described his own Atlantis nightmares. He learns of the language and culture and history of Númenor through these lucid dreams, is implied to be an incarnation of Elendil?? and of course…the work was abandoned as a fascinating little fragment.

Reading up on it immediately reminded me of something that has been sitting in the back of my brain for many many years and I kind of freaked out when I realized, and then confirmed it. It’s JW fucking Dunne. It’s fucking serialism at the scene of the crime.

There is a bizarre sect of people who seem to honestly believe Tolkien discovered and translated his manuscripts and that this represents their status as real actual history. These people do not know what a framing device is, but they’d probably like to know what serialism is!

JW Dunne was, from the outside, a decently grounded and scientific man. He contributed a fair bit to early aeronautical engineering. He had some great insights on fly fishing. And then he decided to get into philosophy, inspired by his own precognitive dreams, with the writing of An Experiment with Time. The gist of it is this: the linear experience of time and dimension is a result of limitations imposed by the consciousness. Dreams of certain kinds free us from that imposition. This is as bare bones as I can get it because if I completely described serialism in this post it would be its own website. Tolkien was influenced by these ideas in his pair of time traveling dream works, and to a degree, the movement of time within Lórien. This could well be a case of one man’s philosophical ideas being used as another man’s fictional device, but Tolkien himself was plagued by dreams of Atlantis that would become Númenor. His son had the same dreams. He certainly wasn’t translating a literal pile of mysterious scraps he found at Oxford, but he could have seen himself as translating his own dreams of a metaphysical but existent world.

All this to say there is a nonzero chance that Tolkien unironically believed his stories to be true to some universe and it was up to him to decode the things being beamed into his noggin and embellish them. Do I subscribe to this? Not really. Did he? Probably not. But I think serialism is really interesting, so did he, and I respect the hustle if Tolkien was indeed that special kind of unhinged.