J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1938 time-travel story about modern descendants of Númenórean exiles was titled The Lost Road.
Tolkien began The Lost Road during a collaborative challenge with C. S. Lewis, who was working on a time-travel story of his own. Tolkien’s unfinished narrative was designed to connect different historical periods through recurring father-and-son identities, eventually reaching the mythology of Númenor.
The surviving material includes modern English settings, earlier historical eras, and the fictional world of Middle-earth. It does not form a completed novel, and Tolkien abandoned the project while working on other writing.
The Lost Road was published posthumously in 1987 in The Lost Road and Other Writings, the fifth volume of Christopher Tolkien’s The History of Middle-earth. It is distinct from The Notion Club Papers, another unfinished time-travel-related work.