J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel novel published posthumously in 1987 was The Lost Road.
The Lost Road and Other Writings was edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1987 as the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth. The unfinished novel explores a father and son who experience connections across different historical periods, including settings linked to Tolkien’s legendarium and the destruction of Númenor.
Tolkien began the project in collaboration with C.S. Lewis, who was working on a related time-travel idea. The plan did not develop into a completed novel, but Tolkien’s surviving drafts reveal important links between ordinary twentieth-century characters, imagined ancient worlds, and recurring stories of catastrophe.
The published volume contains more than The Lost Road. It also includes The Etymologies, a substantial linguistic record, and other writings connected with Tolkien’s mythology. Readers should distinguish it from The Notion Club Papers, another unfinished time-travel-related work published later in The History of Middle-earth.