J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel story about an Oxford academic is titled The Lost Road.
Tolkien began the work in the 1930s after C.S. Lewis proposed that they each write a story involving time travel. Tolkien’s contribution connected a modern father and son with earlier ages, including legendary and imagined histories associated with Númenor and Atlantis.
The project was abandoned before completion, but its surviving material is important because it links Tolkien’s modern world with the mythology he was developing. Christopher Tolkien published the fragments in The Lost Road and Other Writings, the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth, in 1987.
The Lost Road is often confused with The Notion Club Papers, another unfinished time-travel-related work. The two projects share themes and historical echoes, but they are separate texts. The Lost Road also predates Tolkien’s later, more developed treatment of Númenor’s downfall.