The Time Is Out Of Joint -- Erroneous Dates in The Notion Club Papers

One of my many peculiarities is being fascinated by things that go on in the background.  When watching a film, I look at what is going on behind the main characters.  I look at the shops and street signs, or if the scene is indoors I try to make out the titles of any books I might see. When reading, I check into historical events and characters mentioned by the author, I look up books and poems that are cited or quoted.  And I check dates given against the days of the week on which the author claims they fall. 

So, recently I was looking at The Notion Club Papers in Sauron Defeated, the ninth volume of The History of Middle-earth series, and found the following days and dates listed for meetings of The Notion Club. I give them below as written in the text, only adding citations.

• night 54 Thursday, November 16, 1986 (HoME IX.161).

• night 60 Thursday, February 20, 1987 (HoME IX.161).

• night 61 Thursday, February 27, 1987 (HoME IX.173). 

• night 62 Thursday, March 6th, 1987 (HoME IX.222).

• night 63 Thursday, March 13, 1987 (HoME IX.222).

• night 64 Thursday, March 20, 1987 (HoME IX.223).

• night 66 Thursday, May 22nd, 1987 (HoME IX.233). 

• night 67 Thursday, June 12th, 1987 (HoME IX.245).

• night 68 June 26th, 1987 (HoME IX.253) -- no day of the week given, but it is fourteen days after night 67 and thus would be the same day.

• night 69 Thursday, 25 September, 1987 (HoME IX.260).

• night 70 Thursday, 2 October, 1987 (HoME IX.277).

It's Thursday nights, I imagine, because that's when the Inklings met in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen. But I noticed a curious fact when I pulled up calendars for 1986 and 1987. The dates don't correspond with the days.  The dates given for nights 60 through 70 are actually all Fridays, and, what is even stranger, the date for night 54 is a Sunday. 

I checked Christopher Tolkien's notes, but he seems not to have noticed the discrepancy. Fortunately, we can explain almost all of the error by changing 1987 to 1986, when the days and dates for nights 60-70 match perfectly. 

Unfortunately, I cannot reconcile night 54 in this way.  16 November in 1985 fell on a Saturday. The two nearest years in which 16 November was a Thursday were 1978 and 1989.  I have played around with the calendar a little and I am unsure if there can be year in which 16 November falls on a Thursday, followed by a year in which all the other given dates are also Thursdays.

So did Tolkien simply miscalculate?  Perhaps.  Probably even. Yet this would be surprising since he was so meticulous about chronology, dates, and moons, in The Lord of the Rings, and he wrote The Notion Club Papers in 1945, precisely when he was most involved with trying to synchronize the multiple narrative streams of the divided fellowship.  There is also the irony of getting the dates wrong in a story about time-travel, which makes me wonder if the whole error is actually an exceptionally obscure and entirely donnish joke. I like to think so, but I doubt we could ever be sure.

Ray Bradbury -- Night and Ice Cream

"You realize you are alone. You and your mother. Her hand trembles.

"Her hand trembles.

"Your belief in your private world is shattered. You fell Mother tremble. Why? Is she, too, doubtful? But she is bigger, stronger, more intelligent than yourself, isn't she? Does she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below [in the ravine]? Is there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? no sanctuary in life? no flesh citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flush you. Ice cream lives again in your throat, stomach, spine, and limbs; you are instantly cold as a wind out of December-gone.

"You realize that all men are like this. That each person is to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If you should scream, if you should holler for help, would it matter?"

Ray Bradbury

The Night

I love the way Bradbury, having expanded the child's consciousness beyond any thought or fear he has ever before conceived, reduces him down to a little kid again, subverting even ice cream into a metaphor for terror. And then binds him in helpless silence -- "if you should" implies "but you likely won't."

Elrond and the Last Sons of Fëanor (FR 2.iii.281)

As the Fellowship is about to depart Rivendell, Elrond offers them these final words:

'... no oath or bond is laid on you to go further than you will. For you do not yet know the strength of your hearts, and you cannot foresee what each may meet upon the road.' 

'Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,' said Gimli.  

'Maybe,' said Elrond, 'but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.'  

'Yet sworn word may strengthen quaking heart,' said Gimli.  

'Or break it,' said Elrond. 

(FR 2.iii.281)

Few among the living in Middle-earth would have known this truth as well as Elrond. For he had been raised by Maedhros and Maglor (Silmarillion 246-247; HoME IV 150, 153, 162, 309), the last surviving sons of Fëanor, who were driven to heartbreak, murder, and their own destruction by the oath they had sworn to regain the Silmarils at any cost:

Then Eönwë as herald of the Elder King summoned the Elves of Beleriand to depart from Middle-earth. But Maedhros and Maglor would not hearken, and they prepared, though now with weariness and loathing, to attempt in despair the fulfilment of their oath; for they would have given battle for the Silmarils, were they withheld, even against the victorious host of Valinor, even though they stood alone against all the world. And they sent a message therefore to Eönwë, bidding him yield up now those jewels which of old Fëanor their father made and Morgoth stole from him. 

 But Eönwë answered that the right to the work of their father, which the sons of Fëanor formerly possessed, had now perished, because of their many and merciless deeds, being blinded by their oath, and most of all because of their slaying of Dior and the assault upon the Havens. The light of the Silmarils should go now into the West, whence it came in the beginning; and to Valinor must Maedhros and Maglor return, and there abide the judgement of the Valar, by whose decree alone would Eönwë yield the jewels from his charge. Then Maglor desired indeed to submit, for his heart was sorrowful, and he said: The oath says not that we may not bide our time, and it may be that in Valinor all shall be forgiven and forgot, and we shall come into our own in peace.  

But Maedhros answered that if they returned to Aman but the favour of the Valar were withheld from them, then their oath would still remain, but its fulfilment be beyond all hope; and he said: 'Who can tell to what dreadful doom we shall come, if we disobey the Powers in their own land, or purpose ever to bring war again into their holy realm?'  

Yet Maglor still held back, saying: 'If Manwë and Varda themselves deny the fulfilment of an oath to which we named them in witness, is it not made void?'  

And Maedhros answered: 'But how shall our voices reach to Ilúvatar beyond the Circles of the World? And by Ilúvatar we swore in our madness, and called the Everlasting Darkness upon us, if we kept not our word. Who shall release us?' 

'If none can release us,' said Maglor, 'then indeed the Everlasting Darkness shall be our lot, whether we keep our oath or break it; but less evil shall we do in the breaking.' 

Yet he yielded at last to the will of Maedhros, and they took counsel together how they should lay hands on the Silmarils. And they disguised themselves, and came in the night to the camp of Eönwë, and crept into the place where the Silmarils were guarded; and they slew the guards, and laid hands on the jewels. Then all the camp was raised against them, and they prepared to die, defending themselves until the last. But Eönwë would not permit the slaying of the sons of Fëanor; and departing unfought they fled far away. Each of them took to himself a Silmaril, for they said: 'Since one is lost to us, and but two remain, and we two alone of our brothers, so is it plain that fate would have us share the heirlooms of our father.'  

But the jewel burned the hand of Maedhros in pain unbearable; and he perceived that it was as Eönwë had said, and that his right thereto had become void, and that the oath was vain. And being in anguish and despair he cast himself into a gaping chasm filled with fire, and so ended; and the Silmaril that he bore was taken into the bosom of the Earth. 

And it is told of Maglor that he could not endure the pain with which the Silmaril tormented him; and he cast it at last into the Sea, and thereafter he wandered ever upon the shores, singing in pain and regret beside the waves. For Maglor was mighty among the singers of old, named only after Daeron of Doriath; but he came never back among the people of the Elves. And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters. 

(Silmarillion 253-54)

Elrond thus appears not to be merely trading proverbial barbs with Gimli, but alluding to personal knowledge of the destructive power oaths can wield.

C. S. Lewis, in hospital in France, 12 February 1918

It is nothing unusual for soldiers at war to try to put the best face on their predicament when writing to friends and family back home.  Some years back I read the letters my eldest brother wrote from Vietnam to our parents. If you believe those letters, my brother, who was in the combat engineers, did nothing except build schools and hospitals and airstrips.  He made it sound like he was in the Peace Corps inoculating cows and small children. I know better.

The closest I can remember him coming to writing about the risks to which he was exposed day and night was when he told a story about setting off a dummy booby trap during training. "Boom, I'm dead," he wrote. "Well, I won't make that mistake again."  I found something similar in C.S. Lewis, who remarked to his father that "only once [had he been] in a situation of unusual danger, owing to a shell falling near the latrines while I was using them" (letter of 4 January 1918).  A little earlier in the same letter he told his father that, given "the number of shells that went singing over our heads to fall on the batteries far away behind," he was actually safer in the infantry than in the artillery, into which his father was trying to get him transferred, believing it to be safer. So "if mentioning danger, always make a joke of it," would seem to be one rule my brother shared with Lewis.

Thus the first letters he wrote after arriving in France were no surprise to me.  As so often, he spoke about the books he was reading, about the people around him, and asked about things at home.  All of it little different from the letters he wrote from Oxford, Bookham, or Malvern. This comforting continuity he complements with warm descriptions of how bad things aren't:

You will be anxious to hear my first impressions of trench life.  This is a very quiet part of the line and the dugouts are very much more comfortable than one imagines at home. They are very deep, you go down to them by a shaft of about 20 steps: they have wire bunks where a man can sleep quite snugly, and brasiers for warmth and cooking. Indeed, the chief discomfort is that they tend to get too hot, while of course the bad air makes one rather headachy. I had quite a pleasant time, and was only once in a situation of unusual danger, owing to a shell falling near the latrines while I was using them. 

(Letter of 4 January 1918, emphasis original)

This may be the best piece of persuasive prose of Lewis' young life.  Beginning with a sly concession of the anxiety his father must feel, he piles up phrase after phrase to emphasize how "quiet," "comfortable," "deep," "snug," warm and full of food "trench life" is. Then he underlines the comforts by suggesting that they are excessive. It can be a bit hot, and the lack of ventilation gives him a headache. Nevertheless he declares it all "quite a pleasant time," and concludes with a joke about artillery and latrines.  What a cunning and endearing attempt to allay his father's fears.

His sang-froid isn't quite so icy, however, in the next letter we have.  Writing to his friend, Arthur Greeves, a month later, he says he is "safely ensconced in a bed in hospital, miles away from the line, thank the gods" (2 February 1918). Nor were his fellow soldiers quite the intellectual company he might have wished for ("godless Philistines"), and the charms of the trenches appear not so great as he told his father: "You are lucky you know; it must be grand to look forward to an endless prospect of regular night's sleep & comfortable chairs & good meals & books & everything decent & civilized."

A week later (9 February) he writes explaining to his father that his illness is nothing to worry about: "In spite of its alarming name, Pyrexia is not much more serious than influenza" -- a chilling remark in hindsight --  and being ill was "not a bad thing, as it has kept me out of the line and in a good bed for a season." Again he chooses the right tack, aiming to defuse his father's concerns about his illness by using them against his greater fear. 

In his next letter, however, the ice briefly cracks. Right around the time he wrote to his father on the 9th, he received a letter from Arthur Greeves that his friend had mailed thirteen months earlier. For most of Lewis' lengthy reply, he seems to be writing an ordinary letter like those he had written to Arthur before he went to France, full of books and friends and family matters. But suddenly, in the middle of the letter, a rogue paragraph bursts in:

"Shall we ever be the same again'"[?] Oh, how far we have travelled, you and I.  To think of the things we've done: do you remember that day we walked up the glen in the rain, & everything was soaking? Or the evening up in Tiglath's field at dusk -- the only real evening walk we ever had? Or the days of scheming over Loki when I first showed you any work of mine, and you used to play over bits from the unborn opera?  And the night we first broached the 'nameless secrets of Aphrodite' and walked up and down that bit of road in the dark? And now -- well, umph.  However, we may have good times yet, although I have been at war and I love someone.

(12 February 1918)

What a desperate sense of loss, far beyond the "you are lucky you know" of his previous letter to Arthur.  That was about comfort, even if more serious things lurked in its depths. This is about loss and fear.  Those more serious things have broken through his composure for a moment, even if he regains it by the paragraph's end, and then steers the conversation back to books for the rest of the letter. By the time he next writes to his father (16 February) and Arthur Greeves (21 February) he is all books and assurance once more. 

Now doubtless Lewis had seen more things in his time in the trenches than he lets on, but he had also been quite ill, far from home, and in a hospital which was full of his wounded and dying fellow soldiers.  Into this moment intruded a letter from another time, a time in which this war was not yet his, when shells did not go singing overhead day and night, when he had no need of the dark comedy of nearly being blown up in the latrine, when he had not even arrived at Oxford yet and seen the lives that other men had left behind when they left for the war.  If this letter, written to another Jack in another time, had allowed his fears to emerge momentarily, would anyone be surprised? 

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"Shall we ever be the same again" appears to be a quote from chapter eleven of an 1864 novel by Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards, called Barbara's History.

Why Does the Roaring of the Sea Disquiet the Valar?

The Sea -- Copyright © Ted Nasmith. All rights reserved.

A well known theme that runs throughout Tolkien's legendarium is that longing or unquiet which the Sea causes in Elves and Men.  Many will recall Legolas speaking of it in The Last Debate:

'Look!' he cried. 'Gulls! They are flying far inland. A wonder they are to me and a trouble to my heart. Never in all my life had I met them, until we came to Pelargir, and there I heard them crying in the air as we rode to the battle of the ships. Then I stood still, forgetting war in Middle-earth; for their wailing voices spoke to me of the Sea. The Sea! Alas! I have not yet beheld it. But deep in the hearts of all my kindred lies the sea-longing, which it is perilous to stir. Alas! for the gulls. No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm.'  

(RK 5.ix.873)

This passage clarifies the 'dark words' which Galadriel had sent to Legolas through Gandalf:

Legolas Greenleaf long under tree
In joy hast thou lived. Beware of the Sea!
If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,
Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.

(TT 3.v.503)

But Legolas is not the first character on whom the sound of the Sea has a disquieting effect. For even before the hobbits have left The Shire Frodo had a dream:

Then he heard a noise in the distance. At first he thought it was a great wind coming over the leaves of the forest. Then he knew that it was not leaves, but the sound of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. Suddenly he found he was out in the open. There were no trees after all. He was on a dark heath, and there was a strange salt smell in the air. Looking up he saw before him a tall white tower, standing alone on a high ridge. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea. He started to struggle up the ridge towards the tower: but suddenly a light came in the sky, and there was a noise of thunder.

(FR 1.v.108)

We can trace this troublous longing, this Sehnsucht, all the way back to the beginning of Tolkien's works, to the longing of Eriol and Ælfwine for the Sea and to the earliest version of The Music of the Ainur in The Book of Lost Tales. It is particularly prominent in Tuor from his beginning in The Fall of Gondolin and the bones of The Tale of Eärendel within The Book of Lost Tales, through the earliest versions of The Quenta Silmarillion and Annals of Beleriand, to Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales, and in the end to The  Grey Annals, to The Tale of Years, and to the published Silmarillion.¹ And while the term 'The Unquiet of Ulmo' seems coined almost especially for him, it would apply equally well to Aldarion in The Tale of Aldarion and Erendis (UT 175-76, 178, 185).  There is even the hint that it may have affected Hobbits, including one and perhaps two Took uncles of Bilbo (FR Pr. 7; RK App. C 1103 [Isengar and Hildifons]; The Hobbit 11, 13-14).

As we can easily see, the sea-longing is not something particular to Elves.  Mortal and Immortal alike feel it.  If we turn next to a passage from The Ainulindalë, we shall see that the longing and disquiet caused by the Sea is fundamental in the profoundest sense. Ilúvatar grants the Ainur a vision of the Music they have just sung:

But the other Ainur looked upon this habitation set within the vast spaces of the World, which the Elves call Arda, the Earth; and their hearts rejoiced in light, and their eyes beholding many colours were filled with gladness; but because of the roaring of the sea they felt a great unquiet. And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the

Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.

(The Silmarillion, 19)

What's most curious here is the reaction of the Ainur to the sound of the Sea, which causes them 'a great unquiet.'  We are used to thinking of Elves and Men, the Children of Ilúvatar, as beset by such disquiet and longing, but not the Valar themselves. Since the Valar have not yet entered Arda, which so far exists only in thought (20), the sea's effect extends beyond 'the circles of the world' and suggests that all sentient beings, whether of flesh or of spirit, are within its reach. That this is so even in a vision attests the power of what they have seen, or, to be more precise, what they have heard, because that is clearly the avenue through which the unquiet and longing come to them.

But why? What is it about the 'voices of the Sea' that is so poignant? '[T]hat in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur' is not a sufficient answer in itself, since it does not explain why the Valar find this reminder of their own music disquieting.  Two clues may help us here.  The first is that Elves and Men do not recognize what they hear, but presumably the Valar do. The second is that Ulmo -- 'of all [the Valar] most deeply was he instructed by Ilúvatar in music' (19) -- has a conversation with Ilúvatar even as the music was being envisioned before them, in which Ilúvatar demonstrates to him that the worst efforts of Melkor have but made water and the world more beautiful than Ulmo had imagined in his music. This harks back to Ilúvatar's statement to Melkor that 'no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall but prove mine instrument in devising things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined' (17).

If the themes which the Ainur elaborated in making their music come from Ilúvatar, then it is the voice of Ilúvatar that Valar, Elves, and Men all hear in the 'voices of the sea.' The Valar recognize this. Elves and Men, who have not seen Ilúvatar face to face, as it were, do not.  But all who hearken long for the creator from whom the world divides them, or, in the case of the Valar who are about to enter into Arda and be bound there until the end, will divide them.²

What would the echo of God's voice evoke if not longing?

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¹ Eriol and Ælfwine (BoLT 1.46; 2.6, 314); The Music of the Ainur (BoLT 1.56); Tuor (BoLT 2.151-52, 156, 196, 254); The Quenta Silmarillion and The Annals of Beleriand  (HoME IV.37, 142-43, 145, 149, 151-52, 214, 308); Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin (UT 24-25, 34); The Grey Annals and The Tale of Years (HoME XI.90-91, 348, 352);  Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin (The Silmarillion 238, 244-45; cf. 246).

² To be strictly accurate the Valar are a subset of the Ainur who entered the world after the Music:

Thus it came to pass that of the Ainur some abode still with Ilúvatar beyond the confines of the World; but others, and among them many of the greatest and most fair, took the leave of Ilúvatar and descended into it. But this condition Ilúvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World. 

(Silmarillion 20)