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The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien set out to explore time travel and distortions in the passage of time in his fiction in a variety of ways. The passage of time in The Lord of the Rings is uneven, seeming to run at differing speeds in the realms of Men and of Elves. In this, Tolkien was following medieval tradition in which time proceeds differently in Elfland. The whole work, too, following the theory he spelt out in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", is meant to transport the reader into another time. He built a process of decline and fall in Middle-earth into the story, echoing the sense of impending destruction of Norse mythology. The Elves attempt to delay this decline as far as possible in their realms of Rivendell and Lothlórien, using their Rings of Power to slow the passage of time. Elvish time, in The Lord of the Rings as in the medieval Thomas the Rhymer and the Danish Elvehøj (Elf Hill), presents apparent contradictions. Both the story itself and scholarly interpretations offer varying attempts to resolve these; time may be flowing faster or more slowly, or perceptions may differ. Tolkien was writing in a period when notions of time and space were being radically revised, from the science fiction time travel of H. G. Wells, to the inner world of dreams and the unconscious mind explored by Sigmund Freud, and the transformation of physics with the counter-intuitive notions of quantum mechanics and general relativity proposed by Max Planck and Albert Einstein. In 1927 J. W. Dunne wrote an influential book proposing a theory that time could flow differently for different observers. A network of writers who were influenced by Wells, including Henry James, Dunne, and George du Maurier created a literary environment that enabled Tolkien to explore time travel in his own way, first in the unfinished The Lost Road, then in the unfinished The Notion Club Papers, and finally in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien mentions both the mortal desire to escape from death, and the Elvish desire to escape from immortality. The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger suggests that these illustrate a Christian message, that one must not attempt to cling to anything as worldly things will change and decay; instead, one must let go, trust in the unknown future, and in God. This theme is, she argues, demonstrated in the protagonist Frodo Baggins, who is saved by having the courage to face loss, to move, and to change. Context Turning away from present time The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger wrote that at the end of the nineteenth century, thinkers in several fields were turning away from present time and exploring other ways to view the world. In 1895 H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, a science fiction novella in which a machine allows an observer to travel forwards and backwards in time. In 1900, Sigmund Freud published his The Interpretation of Dreams, exploring the inner world of the unconscious mind. That same year, Max Planck postulated that energy is quantized, paving the way for the counter-intuitive theory of quantum mechanics. In 1905, Albert Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity, relating space and time in a new way in physics. The cultural historian Modris Eksteins remarked that "rational man [had] undermined his own world". Flieger wrote that fantasy writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, David Lindsay, E. R. Eddison, and Mervyn Peake were both turning away from modernism and using modern theories to seek to escape, "at once reactionary and avant-garde". Time in different dimensions In 1927, the soldier and pioneer aviator turned philosopher J. W. Dunne published his book An Experiment with Time, in which he presented a multi-dimensional theory of time, suggesting that dreams could combine memories of both past and future events, and that time could flow differently for observers in different dimensions. The theory did not gain scientific acceptance, not least because it led to an infinite regress of dimensions, but attracted the interest of contemporary writers including H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, Jorge Luis Borges, John Buchan, James Hilton, Graham Greene, Rumer Godden, and two members of the Inklings literary group, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien. Space or time Tolkien recorded in his letters that Lewis proposed to him that since there was too little of what either man liked in literature, they would have to write stories themselves. He further wrote that they tossed a coin for the choice of subject: Lewis got space travel, and Tolkien got time travel. Lewis published the first of his three "space romances", Out of the Silent Planet, in 1938. Tolkien began The Lost Road, abandoning the draft after four chapters in 1937; he tried the theme again in The Notion Club Papers, written between 1944 and 1946, which he also dropped; and finally made use of some of these ideas in The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954–1955. The Inklings scholar John D. Rateliff describes Tolkien's two time travel novels and Lewis's The Dark Tower, all incomplete, as a "triad". Lewis's work, written sometime between 1939 and 1946, and published posthumously in 1977, is a possible sequel to Out of the Silent Planet; its protagonists use a "chronoscope" to view an alien world in "Othertime". Development of ideas Desire "to go back" in time Christopher Tolkien, reviewing the motivations for his father's writings, commented that He felt that he could say that his most permanent mood … had been since childhood the desire to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship. But in any case to see with eyes and to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days. Devin Brown, writing in Mythlore, argues that storytelling itself is "the ultimate time travel machine", noting that Tolkien's 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories" stated that a defining characteristic of a fairy story is "its ability to transport the reader outside of time to realms otherwise inaccessible". Successive attempts at a time-travel novel The Lord of the Rings was preceded in Tolkien's writings by two unfinished time-travel novels, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers. Both texts make use of variants of the character Ælfwine to provide a frame story for the time travel. The Old English name Ælfwine means "Elf-friend", as does the later Quenya name Elendil, and the Old High German and Lombard equivalents, Alwin and Alboin, respectively; all these names (boldface in the table) appear in the texts as incarnations of the protagonist in the different times visited. The different time-travel novels indicate the development of Tolkien's ideas and his skill in expressing them. Flieger comments that had either The Lost Road or The Notion Club Papers been finished, we would have had a dr.... Discover the Lucy Le Guilcher Phyllis B Lassner popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Lucy Le Guilcher Phyllis B Lassner books.