What is the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel novel about Númenor?

The Lost Road is J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel novel about Númenor.

Tolkien began The Lost Road in 1936 after his publisher requested another book following The Hobbit. The story was intended to connect modern characters with earlier eras of Tolkien’s mythology through a recurring father-and-son pattern and visions or memories spanning time.

Its historical material includes Númenor, the island civilization whose destruction became one of the central tragedies of Tolkien’s legendarium. The project was abandoned before completion, and Tolkien later turned his attention to The Lord of the Rings.

The surviving text was published posthumously in The Lost Road and Other Writings, the fifth volume of Christopher Tolkien’s The History of Middle-earth. The Notion Club Papers is a separate, later time-travel-related work that also draws on Númenórean themes, which makes the titles easy to confuse.