The Lost Road is J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel novel about an Oxford scholar visiting the past.
Tolkien began The Lost Road in the 1930s after a suggestion connected with C.S. Lewis. The incomplete work links a modern father and son with earlier incarnations or historical figures, eventually reaching Númenor and the legend of its destruction. Tolkien used the project to explore recurring identities, memory, language, and the relationship between modern life and ancient myth.
The Lost Road was never completed as a novel. Its surviving material was edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien in The Lost Road and Other Writings, the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth, in 1987. It should not be confused with The Notion Club Papers, another unfinished time-travel-related work from Tolkien’s later experiments.