Something About Tolkien Just Struck Me

We know from the essay On Fairy-Stories that he appreciated "Morlocks and Eloi" which are from the H. G. Wells novel or story The Time Machine.

In that story (shorter than most novels I've read, hence my hesitation on classifying it as one) a man from our time is projected into a far off future where neither Eloi nor Morlocks look perfectly like us. But they have in their contrast a certain affinity to Tolkien's own Eldar and Orcs.

Meanwhile, The Time-Machine is putting the visitor in a time so far into the future, that it's well beyond any reasonable expectation of Harmageddon. That's how our kind came to develop into Eloi and Morlocks.

And Tolkien's mythos in most of its forms, certainly after Book of Lost Tales, puts the Eldar and Orcs into a time far older than any Christian calculations of Creation or at least Flood. That's how we forgot about them, mostly.

I wonder how many stories of travelling back in time existed before Tolkien nearly wrote one in The Lost Road. From my childhood I recall a comic book with Tarzan where Tarzan and Jane get from their jungle home to Pal Ul Don, but on their way back get into Ancient Egypt. Very clearly a direct time travel story about back in time ... but is it from Edgar Rice Burroughs or from someone else on the franchise?

Wait ... The House of Arden and Harding's Luck are from 1908 and 1909, by E. Nesbit. However, this is within the Anno Domini era (even since it's general adoption by c. 1100 AD).

Pierre Boitard's Paris avant les hommes is to Rahan a bit like Tolkien's unfinished The Lost Road is to Silmarillion (specifically Akallabêth) and ultimately to The Lord of the Rings.

The progressive H. G. Wells had fun? We can have fun too ... basically./HGL