# Old straight road

The old straight road or the "lost road" is J. R. R. Tolkien's conception, in his fantasy world of Arda, of the route that his Elves are able to follow to reach the earthly paradise of Valinor, realm of the godlike Valar. The Elves are immortal, but may grow weary of the world, and then sail across the Great Sea to reach Valinor. The men of Númenor are persuaded by Sauron, servant of the first Dark Lord Melkor, to attack Valinor to get the immortality they feel should be theirs. The Valar ask for help from the creator, Eru Ilúvatar. He destroys Númenor and its army, in the process reshaping Arda into a sphere, and separating it and its continent of Middle-earth from Valinor so that men can no longer reach it. But the Elves can still set sail from the shores of Middle-earth in ships, bound for Valinor: they sail into the Uttermost West, following the old straight road.
Scholars have noted the importance of the theme to Tolkien, as he revisited it repeatedly. Possible inspirations for the theme include a novel by John Buchan, and a literary crux in Beowulf in the shape of the character Scyld Scefing. He arrives in the world as a baby in a boat filled with gifts, and he departs from it in a ship-burial, with the odd feature that the ship is not set on fire, as in the typical Viking ritual. The scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien may have imagined that Scyld is being sent back to the gods, and that Tolkien perhaps created his Valar to explain that gap in Beowulf.

## Narratives
### The Silmarillion

In the Second Age of Middle-earth, the godlike Valar give the island of Númenor, in the Great Sea to the West of Middle-earth, to to the three loyal houses of Men who had aided the Elves in the war against him. Through the favour of the Valar, the Dúnedain were granted wisdom and power and longer life, beyond that of other Men. Indeed, the isle of Númenor lay closer to the Valar's earthly paradise of Valinor, on the continent of Aman, than to Middle-earth. The fall of Númenor came about through the influence of Sauron, the chief servant of the fallen Vala Melkor, who wished to conquer Middle-earth.
The Númenóreans took Sauron prisoner. He quickly enthralled their king, Ar-Pharazôn, urging him to seek the immortality that the Valar had apparently denied him. Sauron persuaded them to wage war against the Valar to seize the immortality denied them. Ar-Pharazôn raised the mightiest army and fleet Númenor had ever seen, and sailed to Valinor. The Valar called on the creator, Ilúvatar, for help. When Ar-Pharazôn landed, Ilúvatar destroyed his forces and sent a great wave to submerge Númenor, killing all but those Númenóreans who had remained loyal to the Valar. The world was remade, and Aman was removed beyond the Uttermost West, so that Men could not sail there to threaten it.
The Elves, however, can still sail into the "Uttermost West", on what to Men is the lost road to Valinor; Cirdan the Shipwright, at the Grey Havens of Lindon, still builds ships in the Third Age for Elves who wish to leave Middle-earth.
Sauron's physical form was destroyed. The loyal Númenóreans, led by Elendil, escaped by ship to Middle-earth.

### Two unfinished time travel novels

Tolkien made two attempts at a time travel novel, both remaining unfinished: first in the 1936 The Lost Road, and then in 1945 The Notion Club Papers. In both of them, he provides a frame story in which a father-and-son pair of modern Englishmen visit past times in dreams, successively going further back until they reach Númenor and discover the story of the lost road. In each case, one of the time travellers has a name which means "Elf-friend", tying him directly to the loyal Númenórean Elendil, whose name has the same meaning in the classical Elf-language, Quenya.
Time-travelling frame story characters with the periods they visit :
| Period | Second Age Over 9,000 years ago | Lombards (568–774) | Anglo-Saxons (c. 450–1066) | England 20th century | |
| Language of names | Quenya (in Númenor) | Germanic | Old English | Modern English | Meaning of names |
| Character 1 | Elendil | Alboin | Ælfwine | Alwin | Elf-friend |
| Character 2 | Herendil | Audoin | Eadwine | Edwin | Bliss-friend |
| Character 3 | Valandil ("Valar-friend") | ——— | Oswine | Oswin, cf. Oswald | God-friend |

## Analysis
### Major theme

In Tolkien's conception, Arda was created specifically as the place for Elves and Men to live in. It is envisaged in a flat Earth cosmology, with the stars, and later also the sun and moon, revolving around it. Tolkien's legendarium addresses the spherical Earth paradigm by depicting a catastrophic transition from a flat to a spherical world, the Akallabêth, in which Valinor becomes inaccessible to mortal Men. All that is left is the memory of the old straight road, or the tale of the Elves able to travel by it. When Men die, they leave the world of Arda entirely, perhaps to go to a heaven. Elves, on the other hand, cannot leave "the circles of the world", and are constrained to go to Valinor, or, if they die in battle, to the Halls of Mandos, from where they may be allowed to return to Valinor.
Because of the evil implanted by Sauron in the minds of the men of Númenor, the world became bent, so men could no longer sail the old straight road westwards to Valinor. Tom Shippey writes that Tolkien's personal war experience was Manichean: evil seemed at least as powerful as good, and could easily have been victorious, a strand which can also be seen in Middle-earth.
The image of the old straight road was, Shippey writes, evidently important to Tolkien, as he revisited it repeatedly in his legendarium. The two time travel novels both foundered on the problem that while they made perfect sense to him as frame stories, which he worked out in some detail, this was at the expense of their actual narratives, which he never got around to writing.
Verlyn Flieger writes that Tolkien's essay "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics", his "On Fairy-Stories", and The Lost Road all indicate his "desire to pass through that open door into Other Time." She adds that The Lost Road illustrated his "vision of the lost paradise and the longing to return to it" which "became a more and more powerful element in his later fiction", forming eventually the "underpinning" of The Lord of the Rings.
Among the possible inspirations for this is John Buchan's 1921 novel The Path of the King. It tells of how Abraham Lincoln inherits a ring that had once been owned by a King of the Vikings; he loses the ring, which is all right as the old story is over. Tolkien stated that he much liked Buchan's stories.

### Scyld Scefing

Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon poem that Tolkien knew well, contains, among its cruxes, its unexplained or problematic passages, a mention right at the start of Scyld Scefing. This, Shippey notes, has several odd features, making it the kind of thing that attracted Tolkien's interest. "Scefing" looks like a patronymic, but can't be as Scyld's father isn't known. It could equally mean "with a sheaf", evidently a symbol. When Scyld dies, he is given a ship burial, being placed in a ship supplied with many gifts for his one-way journey into the afterlife. However, and uniquely for a Viking ship burial, the ship is not set on fire, so in practical terms the ship would certainly have been looted. The cosmology of this story is not explained, beyond the cryptic statement that "those" had sent Scyld as a baby into the world. Shippey asks who they were, and whether the ship was to sail into the West on a lost road to return to them. He suggests that Tolkien wondered exactly who they were, and that this could have prompted him to create the Valar to fill this gap in Beowulf, just as he had invented his Elves, Ents, and Orcs to fill other gaps in the poem.
Further, Tolkien wrote a poem, "King Sheave" which touches on the Scyld Scefing theme. Sheave is the father of Barley ("Beow"), making him a corn-god. He is lost from his bed, but found again alive and well outside, recalling Christ's empty tomb and his being found alive, walking in a garden. The reign of King Sheave is described as "the Golden Years", linking him to Fróði, who is also a Christ-figure. Tolkien makes the connection with the time-travellers and Elendil, by having the story of the old straight road told by Ælfwine in the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred's hall.

## Legacy

Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series has been described as directly influenced by Tolkien. . The Tolkien scholar David Bratman writes that there is a recurring theme of locale in her fantasy stories, especially in her 1985 novel Always Coming Home. In that work, she named a path which roughly tracks California highway 29 as "The Old Straight Road". Bratman states that the story conveys "a sense of a mythology" of the region.