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MERP.COM Essay: The magical mythical Numenor tour

June 07, 2003 at 02:35:08

Michael Martinez has posted another essay at MERP.COM. This month, he takes a look at how J.R.R. Tolkien drew extensively upon Plato for details about Numenor/Atlantis.

In 1964, J.R.R. Tolkien answered one of the Inevitable Questions (readers liked to ask him) for Christopher Bretherton in what became Letter 257. The question is not provided, although it most likely began with something like, "How did you begin ...." But, begin what? In an early paragraph of the letter, Tolkien wrote, "With regard to your question. Not easy to answer, with anything shorter than an autobiography. I began the construction of languages in early boyhood: I am primarily a scientific philologist...."

But what Tolkien went on to explain was how he composed his own legends and mythologies. After outlining what we now know as The Book of Lost Tales and the first two Silmarillion mythologies, he discussed the basic elements of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but suddenly shifted course. "Another ingredient [of these legends], not before mentioned, also came into operation in my need to provide a great function for Strider-Aragorn," he said. "What I might call my Atlantis-haunting. This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcised by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water. I used to draw it or write bad poems about it. When C.S. Lewis and I tossed up, and he was to write on space-travel and I on time-travel, I began an abortive book of time-travel of which the end was to be the presence of my hero in the drowning of Atlantis. This was to be called Numenor, the Land in the West...."

The time-travel story was called "The Fall of Numenor", and Christopher Tolkien published the earliest version of the tale in The Lost Road and Other Writings, the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth. The story is rich with a curious blend of names and events from both earlier Tolkienic legends (from The Book of Lost Tales) and the as-yet unrealized Middle-earth mythology of The Lord of the Rings. The name of a great Eldarin king, for example, is given as "Amroth", and he with Elrond and descendants of Earendel (sic) passes inland from Beleriand and storms the citadel of Thu, who had been instrumental and seducing the Numenoreans (Atlanteans) to fall into evil.

Incorporating the Atlantis legend itself into his evolving mythological traditions allowed Tolkien to draw upon the rich Greek literary and mythological traditions which had fascinated him in his youth. Although Tolkien's goal by this period (the mid- to late 1920s) had shifted from creating a mythology for England (that is, a mythological history to explain Old English words and names) to creating a self-contained mythology, he never fully abandoned the idea of incorporating English mythological needs into his work. Those needs included the inexplicable, or the controversial, words of lost or forgotten meaning which intrigued Tolkien.

Read the full article at MERP.COM