Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Ned’s choice of topic: The Notion Club Papers. Written in 1945 during a creative pause in completing the final third of The Lord of the Rings, The Notion Club Papers found Tolkien on familiar ground, creating a set of purported notes from regular club meetings among a group of Oxford professors much like himself and his fellow members of the famed Inklings. While not advancing beyond a couple of drafts and far from complete, the papers tell first of a professor who, due to a discussion on how spacecraft would work in science fiction, avers he has himself been able to travel in dreams through the reaches of space and meet other minds before returning to earth. One initially skeptical member over time then tells of his own unusual dream experiences, building up to a sudden moment during a massive storm where he invokes the language and imagery of the downfall of Númenor, in much the same fashion as The Lost Road did nearly a decade prior; related manuscripts found Tolkien revisiting the Númenorean story in particular, as well as speaking in detail about his invented language for the society. How does the novel’s complicated structure work creatively, if at all, and is there something there that could have been developed further in later drafts? What does it mean that Tolkien seemed most at ease exploring the possible sources of his own creativity in such a second-hand fashion, even if the means by which he did so ended up being incredibly insular? What were the contemporary sources and inspirations for this effort among his fellow Inklings and beyond, and are there any parallels he acknowledges or, perhaps notably, ignores? And who wouldn’t want to talk over the evident problems of medieval life while getting a haircut from Norman Keeps?