Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: The Lost Road. In 1937, Tolkien agreed to C.S. Lewis’s suggestion to try to write the kind of stories they enjoyed but didn’t see good examples of to their liking. Lewis’s efforts turned into what has been termed the Space Trilogy, starting with Out Of The Silent Planet. Tolkien’s goal was a time travel story called The Lost Road, but outside of a few chapters and some potential outlines, it never got any further, with the success of The Hobbit and his resulting focus of attention being The Lord Of The Rings stopping any further development. It was eventually published in the Christopher Tolkien-edited series The History of Middle-earth, and was revealed to be a fascinating if very incomplete early conception of what Númenor was, including some of its key protagonists and antagonists at the time of its fall. How much does the story’s self-evident autobiographical angle play into how we should regard the surviving chapters, and what do his choices about how to refocus or rewrite the story of his own life suggest in turn? What import do the specifically metaphysical elements of the story have for both Tolkien and his own conception of not only the legendarium but how he regarded language? Building off our previous discussion of the specifically Númenorean chapter in our episode on The Fall of Númenor, what is it about that sequence that is so unusual for Tolkien’s general writing on Middle-earth, and how does it fit within the larger context of this story as it is told, or as much of it as we have? And finally, have you all pre-ordered Jared’s book yet? Really, you should.