Unlike the last three Histories, this one contains only about 130 pages of Lord of the Rings (Book VI) in which there is no longer as much observable change to the narrative as in previous stages. The most interesting reads are the development of "The Scouring of the Shire" and the eventually abandoned epilogue with Sam Gamgee's family.

The largest part of the book is consumed by "The Notion Club Papers", a weird text that I found extremely boring to read (it consists basically of minutes from conversations between fictionalized "Inklings") and of which I eventually skipped large parts. Together with the variations of "The Fall of Númenor" in the last part of the book, however, it perfectly showcases Tolkien's way of thinking - how interested he was in describing myth and oral tradition. Even though he knew and reflected that his writings and fictional languages were conceived purely in his own head, it was very important to him to give them a path from a mythic past through time into this world. Thus, "The Notion Club Papers", in which the main character describes how a language and its corresponding story (recognizably a variation on the Atlantis mythos, as all characters agree) came to him in a sort of dream state, like transmissions from a realm just outside our own.

It's interesting to observe the mind of Tolkien at work like this, who was apparently never satisfied just to be an isolated craftsman and inventor, but always had to conceive of himself, his characters and tales as mere glimpses into a large river of the Whole Story. Christopher Tolkien puts it very well at the end of the book with respect to the discontinued Adunaic language: "[H]ad he returned to the development of Adunaic (...) it would doubtlessly have been reduced to a wreck, as new conceptions caused shifts and upheavals in the structure. More than likely, he would have begun again, refining the historical phonology - and perhaps never yet reaching the Verb. For 'completion', the achievement of a fixed Grammar and Lexicon, was not, in my belief, the over-riding aim. Delight lay in the creation itself, the creation of new linguistic form evolving within the compass of an imagined time. 'Incompletion' and unceasing change, often frustrating to those who study these languages, was inherent in this art." (Emphasis mine)

A very enjoyable part that finishes off the History of the LoTR.

Although that part makes up only 1/3rd of the entire book. The next two parts might be even more intriguing then Tolkien's usual stuff. The Notion Club Papers is a story unlike any other I've read. It's part autobiography about Tolkiens time in the Inklins, part surreal scifi dream spacetravel, part philological language creation course and part mystery discovery of an ancient mythical land.
Oh yeah, it's one awesome mess.

The last 1/3rd of this book is basically the telling of the legend of the Drowning of Numenor, but written or remembered as by Humans many years later, and it's quite interesting with the conceptions in that regard.

All in all, an amazing book.

“Sauron Defeated” marks the ninth volume of Christopher Tolkien’s epic “History of Middle Earth” project. In the first part, Christopher reviews the final stages of the drafting of The Lord of the Rings. The most interesting early fragments come from The Scouring of the Shire. Early drafts show what could have been, with Frodo taking on a warlike persona which feels clearly “wrong”, but nonetheless fascinating. There is also a rather delightful epilogue with Sam’s children that is excellently written and reinforces the themes of wonder and melancholy of LoTR.

But the real gem in this book is “The Notion Club Papers”, specifically Part Two. Here, Tolkien lays out a metatextual narrative, with a character hearing echoes and dreams of languages and stories from Middle Earth. This lines up well with how Tolkien himself has described “discovering” or “finding” the stories of Middle Earth, rather than “inventing” them. We can only wonder how much this fictional account reflected some of Tolkien’s genuine feelings: “I’ve been painfully trying to indicate that I do *not* believe that this stuff is ‘invented’, not by me at any rate.”

I place this at 4 stars despite these wonderful sections because I freely admit that the first part of The Notion Club Papers, and the philological discussions at the end of the book, sailed over my head. Fans of C. S. Lewis’ science-fiction novels may find more to enjoy from Part One of The Notion Club Papers. But I still heartily recommend this book, particularly to anyone who has ever been intrigued by Tolkien’s musings that he did not “invent” Middle Earth, but rather “discovered” it.

If you think the title itself is a spoiler, don't read this book. ;)

In this volume, Christopher Tolkien completes his study of his father's writing of The Lord of the Rings, at least to the end of the narrative. JRRT had set aside the story with Frodo and Sam in the tower of Cirith Ungol at the beginning of Book VI of The Return of the King, but once that predicament had been resolved, the rest of the long-considered conclusion was written in fairly close to its final form.

Included are two versions of a sweet, unpublished Epilogue involving Sam Gamgee finishing the Red Book and conversing with his family (notably precocious daughter Elanor and wife Rose) about an upcoming visit from the King, and ending with the last of the Ringbearers hearing the call of the sea.

The remaining two-thirds of the book relate to JRRT's other writings of the time. "The Notion Club Papers", are minutes of a fictional Oxford club loosely based on the "Inklings", and set forty years in Tolkien's future. A couple of its members (Lowdham and Jeremy) become involved in a form of time-travel through dreams to the Fall of Numenor, and encounter the languages of Avallonian and Adunaic. This allows JRRT to further play with his tales of the First and Second Ages, as well as his languages.

"The Drowning of Anadune" is essentially notes on JRRT's development of a human tradition on the Fall of Numenor, including errors in interpretation of "what really happened". As a result, versions of it are inconsistent and conflict with the Elvish tradition.

The book concludes with "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language". Unless your working vocabulary and interests turn to glottal stops, voiceless back-spirants, and dental nasals, most readers will not find this of interest.

More fo rthe Tolkien completists. It dos contain the text of 'The Notion Club papers' so that's something, and some notes on the Adunaci language, but it's hard going. I would use it more for reference purposes.

It does have a a somewhat clearer explantion fo the cosmography or cosmology of Middle Earth than is explained in [b:The Silmarillion|7332|The Silmarillion (Middle-Earth Universe)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1336502583s/7332.jpg|4733799] so that's something.

Parts of this were interesting, but I have very little interest in the grammar or phonology of invented languages, and that's what the book closes with.

Here's something from p. 433 that I liked:

But members of the royal house seem often to have lived to be close on 300; while kings seem normally to have been succeeded by the grandsons (their sons were as a rule as old as 200 or even 250 before the king 'fell asleep', and passed on the crown to their own sons, so that as long and unbroken a reign as possible might be maintained, and because they themselves had become engrossed in some branch of art or learning).

And there's some interesting discussion of fairy-stories at 169-170. That's where we see probably the best or most famous quip from the Notion Club papers, Guildford's claim to have determined "the only known or likely way in which any one has ever landed on a world." He teases the others, in response to their inquiries, that "it's not private, though I've used it once." The big reveal? His method is "Incarnation. By being born."

I often find the final installment of a series to be alternately satisfying and mundane. Satisfying, because it's the conclusion of so much that I've invested in. Mundane, because by that point the only things that can happen are the things that absolutely must happen before the story ends. [b:Sauron Defeated|23600|Sauron Defeated The End of the Third Age The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Four (The History of Middle-earth #9)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388198133s/23600.jpg|2963740] (Part Four of [b:The History of the Lord of the Rings|2329|The History of the Lord of the Rings (The History of Middle-earth #6-9)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1322037593s/2329.jpg|6340] within Volume IX of [b:The History Of Middle-Earth|214175|The Complete History Of Middle-Earth (Middle-Earth Universe)|Christopher Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1334597698s/214175.jpg|18608966]) is like that. I'm still interested to see [a:Tolkien|656983|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1383526938p2/656983.jpg]'s process as he figures out how to bring [b:The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1388181159s/33.jpg|3462456] to a conclusion. But it's the weakest and least interesting part of The History of the Lord of the Rings. Unlike the first part of the series, [b:The Return of the Shadow|15351|The Return of the Shadow The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One (The History of Middle-Earth, #6)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348021528s/15351.jpg|2963703], which showed the wildly different directions Tolkien might have gone with "the Hobbit sequel," the end shows Tolkien connecting the loose ends and bringing things to the end that is required. There are fewer diversions, fewer surprises--not much trivia that is fun or amusing to bring up in conversation with other people. A number of times throughout the text, [a:Christopher|9533|Christopher Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1235772383p2/9533.jpg] says something like this: "In the first draft of this chapter my father again achieved for most of its length an extraordinarily close approach to the final form" (44). It's the end of the writing of The Lord of the Rings (except for the Appendices, which Christopher doesn't cover in this series), but it's not an especially interesting read. And this final part of the history is but one small part of the whole Volume IX of the Middle-Earth history--it takes only the first 141 pages, out of the total 482.

After the conclusion of The History Lord of the Rings, Christopher turns back to where he left off in Volume V, [b:The Lost Road and Other Writings|260109|The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-Earth, #5)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328193180s/260109.jpg|2964303], with Tolkien's continued writings on the Fall of Númenor/Akallabêth/Drowning of Anadûnê mythology. The second part of Volume IX comprises drafts of The Notion Club Papers, an unfinished and unpublished idea that Tolkien worked on after finishing LR. What exists of the Notion Club is in two parts, and the first part begins very much in the subgenre that I think of as "Oxford Dons in Supernatural Adventures." It's a subgenre that blossomed in the mid-20th century, mostly pioneered by the Inklings. [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg] was the master of this kind of story, and [a:C.S. Lewis|1069006|C.S. Lewis|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1367519078p2/1069006.jpg] was also very good (in The Ransom Trilogy and other short stories like "The Dark Tower"). Tolkien didn't make many contributions in this area, but The Notion Club Papers may have become a significant entry. The first part is about the possibility of intergalactic travel through dreams and memories. Discussion among the dons centers on the difficulty of finding a good method of travel in sci-fi stories, and then one of the members, Ramer, explains the methods of dream- or memory-travel that he has been cultivating. Though I found this quite a jarring change coming right after the Lord of the Rings, once I got my mind into it I found it a nice slow build-up an intriguing narrative style, and slightly (pleasantly) creepy and disturbing. Part Two is where things begin to be muddied. It brings a return to the Lost Road idea of people throughout history being connected to the Eärendil story, a narrative device designed ultimately to bring us back to the Númenor story. This is all complicated by plot elements that just don't make sense to me. The main character in Part Two is suddenly Lowdham, who seemed in Part One to be rising as the dark, shadowy antagonist. Ramer fades into the background as Jeremy, a character of only minor importance in Part One, becomes the secondary protagonist of Part Two. There are also leaps in logic and narrative that are somehow accepted by the characters but to me don't fit right with the pace of the story. The growing complexities of multiple ancient languages being revealed, mysterious connections between prehistory and present-day, some kind of travel between eras . . . it all just gets to be too much to keep track of, turning into a story only a Tolkien could love. As Christopher says, the writing had become "a conception so intricate that one need perhaps look no further for an answer to the question, why were The Notion Club Papers abandoned? (282) In the end, the Númenor mythology would continue to develop apart from the narrative frame Tolkien played with in The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers.

The Notion Club includes some enjoyable discussions about language, including this prescriptive/descriptive debate:

'And I detest it, when philologues talk about Language (with a capital L) with that peculiarly odious unction usually reserved for capitalized Life. That we are told "must go on" - if we complain of any debased manifestations, such as Arry in his cups. He talks about Language as if it was not only a Jungle but a Sacred Jungle, a beastly grove dedicated to Vita Fera, in which nothing must be touched by impious hands. Cankers, fungi, parasites: let 'em alone!

     'Languages are not jungles! They are gardens, in which sounds selected from the savage wilderness of Brute Noise are turned into words, grown, trained, and endued with the scents of significance. You talk as if I could not pull up a weed that stinks!'

     'I do not!' said Lowdham. 'But, first of all, you have to remember that it's not your garden - if you must have this groggy allegory: it belongs to a lot of other people as well, and to them your stinking weed may be an object of delight. More important: your allegory is misapplied. What you are objecting to is not a weed, but the soil, and also any manifestations of growth and spread. All the other words in your refined garden have come into being (and got their scent) in the same way. You're like a man who is fond of flowers and fruit, but thinks loam is dirty, and dung disgusting; and the uprising and the withering just too, too sad. You want a sterilized garden of immortelles, no, paper-flowers. In fact, to leave allegory, you won't learn anything about the history of your own language, and hate to be reminded that it has one. . . . For the One Speaker, all alone, is the final court of doom for words, to bless or to condemn. It's the agreement only of the separate judges that seems to make the laws. If your distaste is shared by an effective number of the others, then pants will prove - a weed, and be thrust into the oven.

     'Though, of course, many people - more and more, I sometimes feel, as Time goes on and even language stales - do not judge any longer, they only echo.' (225-26)

The final part of Sauron Defeated gives several drafts of the Númenor story, now using the newly developing Adunaic language for the names. There are significant differences in the various versions of the story--especially the conception of the world as either always round, or at one point flat and then re-made round.

My reviews of the other volumes in The History of the Lord of the Rings series:

The Return of the Shadow

The Treason of Isengard

The War of the Ring