Talk:The Notion Club Papers

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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This review is transcluded from Talk:The Notion Club Papers/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 22:05, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Planning to review this by the end of the week. —Kusma (talk) 22:05, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:12, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

An enjoyable article, but it could be better. It seems to me you are assuming too much reader knowledge about the writing of LotR and its context in the biography of JRRT; if you could give more such background information, the article would benefit a lot. See below for detailed comments; source spot checks to follow soon. —Kusma (talk) 21:04, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

• Added "Context".

Content review

• Lead: contains a few things not mentioned below (writing, publication, length) and doesn't do the "dream of time travel" full justice.

• Added a short section on "Writing and publication"; extended the lead to cover the dream mechanism and its results.

• Plot: What are these "other times and places"? Seem to be only in the lead?

• Of earlier times, the point being that dreams transmit (a la Dunne) tales all the way back to Elendil and Númenor.

• There are two links called "frame story" in quick succession; a reader not paying attention is unlikely to notice that they go to different places. Perhaps make it clearer by reordering a bit? ("The Notion Club Papers is an elaborately constructed example of Tolkien's use of frame stories"?)

• Rearranged.

• The structural comments are not strictly "plot" and could be better elsewhere.

• Mm, but the mentions of the frame are necessary to introduce the otherwise very slippery interactions of present and past and future. I don't think that fragmenting this would help, quite the reverse. I've renamed the section "Structure and plot" which makes the intention clearer.

• "Tolkien created the work in 1945" is sort of repeated a bit later.

• Edited.

• I am curious in what way the book is unfinished: is it a completed first draft that never went anywhere? I guess I'd like to know whether the "plot" seems to be complete.

• It's unfinished in every sense: abandoned, incomplete, unpolished, with a rough plot-sketch.

• A "Background" section for the benefit of people unaware of Tolkien seems to be missing (who he is, that the Lord of the Rings hasn't been published yet at the time of writing, that he has written but not published a massive amount of material)

• Added a "Context" section with brief bio and dates.

• Similarly, I am looking for a "Publication" section that tells us when and how the material was published.

• Added.

• "describes The Notion Club as a 'thinly disguised' Inklings" had to read this a few times to parse it correctly (I first read "Inklings" as a plural noun describing the members of the club, not a singular noun describing the club). Can you make this easier to read? Also, does this describe the club in general or are its individual members reflections of Inklings members as in a roman à clef?

• Edited. The allusion to the Inklings are general; Flieger 2001 states that Tolkien started out thinking he'd be specific, but decided against it.

• Time travel: Can you give a three word description of The Lost Road? What is the theory of J. W. Dunne?

• Incomplete time-travel novel. It was a first attempt to link the "history" of Middle-earth to the present day. It used father-son pairs of characters, as the article already says.
• Added description of Dunne's theory.

• "Tolkien finally managed to incorporate time travel in The Lord of the Rings" (a) I am a bit unconvinced that the "time passing differently among the Elves" is the same as "time travel" and (b) we don't really learn much from the article how this work is connected to LotR.

• Described in more detail, and reworded the links. Tolkien didn't like the "time machine" gadgetry of time travel, preferring more traditional means like dream and visits to places where time seemed to pass slowly.

• "The modern name 'Alwin'..." the whole paragraph is very much about "The Lost Road"; it is a bit unclear how this applied to the Notion Club Papers.

• Reordered and glossed to tie it all in more evidently.

• Some of the section gives a little bit of "reception", but is there anything more explicit to say about reception?

• I don't think so; the novel was never completed or published; its release in a fragmentary state in the 12-volume History of Middle-earth has not earned it a wide fan-base. I've renamed the section to "Analysis" to reflect the fact that the attention given to the work is mainly scholarly.

GA criteria

• Well-written, no major concerns with MoS (but see comments about lead section above).

• Noted.

• Verifiable: Sources look to be of good quality and are formatted nicely. See below for spot checks.

• Noted.

• Broad: I have concerns here (background/writing/connection to other works/reception/publication are missing or underdeveloped).

• Fixes described above.

• Focused: At the current length, the discussion of elf-friend names seems a bit overly detailed, but I would prefer to see other sections fleshed out to this bit cut down.

• Added background and other details.

• I think it is neutral (I'll see from source checks whether the time travel aspect is over-emphasised).

• Noted.

• No concerns with stability.

• Noted.

• Image is suitably licensed and captioned (but I would suggest to consider a more high resolution one from commons:Category:Eagle and Child, Oxford).

• Done.

Source checks

• Flieger 1996 (a) checks out for Lewis/Tolkien doing space/time stories (is CSL and JRRT not liking other stories in the letters?). Lots of background information about Dunne here that could be useful to incorporate.

• I think that with the recent gloss we have enough here. The linked article Time in J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction says more; I've also linked Dunne's An Experiment with Time which goes further. I had looked at Dunne's text for a diagram but decided it wasn't going to help really.

• Luling 2012 checks out. "Tolkien had reason to abandon it: the existing chapters are unsuccessful, though with gleams." could be used for "reception".

• Added.

• Flieger's books look like excellent sources. No problems with their use that I can see. pp. 126–127 of "A Question of Time" answer my question above about identification of Notion Club members with individual Inklings members.

• Noted.

• Great Storm stories check out.

No concerns here, you have excellent sources that seem to contain also the answers to my queries above. —Kusma (talk) 08:28, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

• Many thanks! I think we're all done now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:05, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

  Almost, yes. My main complaints have been addressed to my satisfaction. I think I still need to clarify my thoughts on the lead section. I generally occupy the position that the lead should be just a summary of the rest, meaning that the lead and the body should be able to be read (almost) independently depending on how much detail the reader would like, and there should be strictly more detail in the lead than the body. With that in mind, I would like to ask whether you can move "Tolkien's versions of European legends: King Sheave, and The Death of St. Brendan" into the body; these seem to be detail, not something for a bird's eye view summary.

• Done.

• "Writing" could be a bit more fleshed out (I think CJRT says there were five or six different versions of the story, some manuscript, some typoscript) to clarify the state in which the story was abandoned and how much energy had gone into it. But that issue isn't something that would hold up GA promotion. —Kusma (talk) 12:06, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

• Mentioned.

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.