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I do not know whether evidence exists that would date the conversation that led to the writing of Out of the Silent Planet and The Lost Road, but the former was finished by the autumn of 1937, and the latter was submitted, so far as it went, to Allen and Unwin in November of that year (see III.364).

The significance of the last sentence in the passage just cited is not entirely clear. When my father said ‘But I found my real interest was only in the upper end, the Akallabêth or Atalantie’ he undoubtedly meant that he had not been inspired to write the ‘intervening’ parts, in which the father and son were to appear and reappear in older and older phases of Germanic legend; and indeed The Lost Road stops after the introductory chapters and only takes up again with the Númenórean story that was to come at the end. Very little was written of what was planned to lie between. But what is the meaning of ‘so I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Númenor into relation with the main mythology’? My father seems to be saying that, having found that he only wanted to write about Númenor, he therefore and only then (abandoning The Lost Road) appended the Númenórean material to ‘the main mythology’, thus inaugurating the Second Age of the World. But what was this material? He cannot have meant the Númenórean matter contained in The Lost Road itself, since that was already fully related to ‘the main mythology’. It must therefore have been something else, already existing when The Lost Road was begun, as Humphrey Carpenter assumes in his Biography (p. 170): ‘Tolkien’s legend of Númenor… was probably composed some time before the writing of “The Lost Road”, perhaps in the late nineteen-twenties or early thirties.’ But, in fact, the conclusion seems to me inescapable that my father erred when he said this.

ssss1 for The Lost Road are extant, but they are very rough, and do not form a continuous text. There is one complete manuscript, itself fairly rough and heavily emended in different stages; and a professional typescript that was done when virtually all changes had been made to the manuscript.^† The typescript breaks off well before the point where the manuscript comes to an end, and my father’s emendations to it were very largely corrections of the typist’s errors, which were understandably many; it has therefore only slight textual value, and the manuscript is very much the primary text.