The Fall of Númenor Read online

  Initially, Tolkien’s readers were only aware of the book itself, not its forensically, even obsessively, constructed foundation that was the disciplined labour of an academic mind. Only later, and gradually, did the public become aware of the vast, labyrinthine structure of linguistics, chronologies, genealogies and histories underpinning the epic (yet intimate and particular) narrative of the War of the Ring. Part of that foundation was a work-in-progress known as ‘The Silmarillion’, an intricate mosaic of imaginative writings constituting the prehistory of The Lord of the Rings and the genesis of the Middle-earth legendarium.

  In 1951, Tolkien was seeking a publisher who was willing to not only consider the new-minted The Lord of the Rings but who was also prepared to commit to simultaneously publishing ‘The Silmarillion’ a project on which he had, by then, been intermittently engaged for some thirty-seven years.

  To promote his cause, Tolkien wrote out what he referred to as ‘a brief sketch’ (although it ran to more than 7,500 words) to serve as a résumé of both ‘The Silmarillion’ and The Lord of the Rings and which took pains to detail the co-dependency of the two projects.

  He first outlined the making of Middle-earth – a creation myth of considerable literary power and beauty – followed by opulently crafted histories of its different races and the mighty deeds they wrought and great tragedies that befell them across the generations that comprised what he referred to as the First Age. Then, turning to the events of the Age that followed, Tolkien wrote, ‘The next cycle deals (or would deal) with the Second Age. But it is on Earth a dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told.’3

  This was a curious statement, since Tolkien had already written down much of that history – in many detailed drafts of considerable length – including the origin and rise of Sauron, titular character of The Lord of the Rings, the forging of the Rings of Power and of the One Ring to rule them all.

  Similarly, from the same span of more than 3,400 years, he had recorded an account of the establishing of the island of Númenor with its geography and nature, its people and their political, social and cultural history and, finally, the events that led to their eventual corruption, decline and catastrophic downfall.

  Tolkien’s ambitious plan to present readers with the full breadth of the mythology, legend and history of his created world as a prelude to the drama of The Lord of the Rings came to naught – publishers being understandably wary of such a costly and uncertain investment – and he was left with no alternative but to accept that the tale of Frodo Baggins and the Company of the Ring would need to stand alone.

  Nevertheless, the creation and eventual ruin of Númenor and the making of the Rings of Power were central events in the chronology of Middle-earth and when, in July and November 1954, the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers – were eventually published by George Allen & Unwin, readers had their first tantalizing glimpses of that past history, providing a richly tapestried backdrop to the struggle by the Free Peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron and the forces of Mordor. These potent elements, though peripheral to the main narrative, proved to be – as, indeed, they have remained – an integral part of the book’s appeal.

  When, in 1955, The Return of the King was published as the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien added more than one hundred pages of Appendices that provided many details about Middle-earth: its languages, the lineage of its Kings and Rulers and a chronological timeline of the events of the Second and Third Ages. For many years, these appendices, as amended in 1966 for the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, were the only gleanings of information available to the average reader seeking background knowledge to the published adventures of Mr Bilbo Baggins and the later quest undertaken by his nephew, Frodo.

  As Tolkien wrote in 1965 in his Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings: ‘This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it.’ With the author’s death on 2 September 1973, it might have seemed that there would be no further insights into that ‘yet more ancient history’ of Middle-earth; but, in May 1977, Humphrey Carpenter published J. R. R. Tolkien, A Biography, which not only revealed more fully than had otherwise been understood the vast scope of the work that Tolkien had created but also offered new and enticing details of specific verse and prose narratives, such as ‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’ and ‘The Fall of Gondolin’: alluring references that would herald the appearance, in September the same year, of The Silmarillion as presented for publication by Christopher, a project to which he had tirelessly devoted himself for the preceding four years, as he sought to offer readers the opportunity to revel in his father’s grand vision of the First Age of Middle-earth.

  Although The Silmarillion focused chiefly on the mythology and history of the ‘Elder Days’ of Middle-earth, it also contained two key works relating to the Second Age: the self-explanatory essay ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’ and ‘Akallabêth’. This latter text provided an account of the island kingdom of Númenor – gifted to the Men of Middle-earth who had loyally fought alongside the Elves in the War of Wrath at the conclusion of the First Age – and described how, through the corruption of Sauron, its destruction was accomplished. Tolkien’s original title for this narrative was ‘The Fall of Númenor’, later changed to ‘The Downfall of Númenor’. In The Silmarillion Christopher Tolkien used the title ‘Akallabêth’, meaning in the language of the Númenóreans ‘She that hath Fallen’ or ‘The Downfallen’, noting that whilst no version of the work bore that title, it was the name by which it was referred to by his father.4

  More Númenórean detail – historic, geographic and genealogical – was revealed when, in 1980, Christopher Tolkien published Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, a further selection of narratives, largely incomplete, drawn from his father’s writings recounting various moments of high drama during the Three Ages of Middle-earth.

  Like The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales sprang from Christopher’s dedicated study of his father’s papers and the book’s success, despite its fragmentary nature, initiated a unique endeavour in the sphere of literary research that would result, over a thirteen-year period, in the magisterial 12-volume series, The History of Middle-earth.

  Mention must be made of two further significant texts by J.R.R. Tolkien relating to Númenor. His fascination with his island creation and its eventual fate owed its origin, in part, to a recurring nightmare that began in early childhood and continued into adult life. In a letter, written in 1964, he described this experience: ‘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 up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it.’5

  An incentive for Tolkien to attempt such an exorcism arose in, as seems likely, 1936 as the result of an exchange with C.S. Lewis, his friend and fellow member of the literary group, the Inklings. Tolkien later recalled: ‘L[ewis] said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” We agreed that he should try “space travel”, and I should try “time-travel”.’6

  Lewis would write Out of the Silent Planet,7 the first of a trilogy using science fiction to allegorically address moral and theological themes. Tolkien’s attempt proved less successful. ‘I began,’ he wrote, ‘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 Númenor, the Land in the West.’8 The story was to span many generations of a family beginning with a father and son, Edwin and Elwin, and would trace their ancestry back through time to key characters at the time of Númenor’s fall. ‘My effort,’ he subsequently reflected, ‘after a few promis
ing chapters, ran dry: it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend.’9

  Although Tolkien wrote of what he referred to as his ‘Atlantis complex’ or ‘Atlantis-haunting’, obviously acknowledging a link to the fictional island described in Plato’s dialogues, he was more directly attracted by the romance of a civilization overtaken by an Atlantean tragedy, something that has exerted its hold on the human imagination across many centuries of popular culture.10

  In Tolkien’s interpretation, the cataclysmic sinking of Númenor beneath the waves is followed by the world being reshaped – or ‘bent’ – from flat to round and with the lands of the West being ‘removed for ever from the circles of the world’. A crucial element of this myth was the continuing existence of a Straight Road to the Ancient West which, though now hidden from view, might be travelled by any who could find it: a concept embodied in the proposed title for the book, The Lost Road.

  The literal rise and fall of Tolkien’s island (for it had been initially raised from the sea as a gift to Men) was informed not just by Plato’s philosophical allegory on the politics of statehood but also by the Judeo-Christian narrative of the frailty and fallibility of mankind as related in the Biblical Book of Genesis. This is evident in his description of The Downfall of Númenor as ‘the Second Fall of Man (or Man rehabilitated but still mortal)’.11

  It is clear from Christopher Tolkien’s detailed study of his father’s papers that the tale of the Númenóreans and their fate was conceived in complete harmony with ‘The Silmarillion’ and the continually developing history of Middle-earth and the natural and supernatural laws to which it was subject. The initial ‘contest’ with Lewis to write what Tolkien described as ‘an excursionary “Thriller”… discovering Myth’12 rapidly acquired far greater importance as a component in his legendarium – indeed Númenor became a keystone in Tolkien’s emerging structure for the events of the Second Age.

  Although incomplete, Tolkien had shown his publisher the first draft chapters of The Lost Road in 1937, but their discouraging response was that, even if completed, the book was unlikely to find commercial success.

  In 1945 Tolkien returned to the idea of a separate exploration of a time-travelling Atlantean concept (still linked to Middle-earth) when he began writing The Notion Club Papers, a planned novel that was to take the fanciful form of a discovery, in the then-distant year 2012, of assorted papers relating to the meetings of an Oxford literary circle and the attempts of two of their number to experiment with time-travel. The Notion Club is a punning reference to the Inklings, a similarly Oxford university-based club of self-confessed ‘amateur’ writers of fiction of which Tolkien and Lewis were prime movers. The name Inklings had, of course, been cleverly chosen to suggest both ‘ideas’ and those who are apt to dabble in ink and Tolkien’s choice of the word ‘notion’ was an obvious synonym for ‘inkling’; furthermore, Tolkien toyed with the idea that some of the characters listed as members of ‘the Notion Club’ were, perhaps, fictional portraits of himself and fellow Inklings.

  At the time of its composition, Tolkien had still to complete The Lord of the Rings and The Notion Club Papers, like The Lost Road, was eventually abandoned, although not before a considerable part of the book had been drafted and a further considerable investment of time had been spent in creating a Númenórean language, Adûnayân – or, in its anglicized form, Adûnaic (‘Language of the West’). Having returned to and finally completed The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien failed to resume work on The Notion Club Papers due, doubtlessly, to him increasingly focusing his attention on the Elder Days of Middle-earth.

  Although the content of The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers as planned and partially completed have an important thematic connection with the Númenórean writings as found in The Silmarillion’s ‘Akallabêth’ and other posthumously published narratives of the Second Age, they are radically individual in their style and tone – especially in their time-travelling concepts involving partial ‘real world’ (and ‘future world’) settings.

  Readers wishing to further explore these discrete experiments in the chronicling of the Númenórean concept are encouraged to read two volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth: The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987) and Sauron Defeated (1992), though by way of illustration an extensive and particularly significant narrative, which is taken from The Lost Road and is referred to by Christopher in The Lost Road as ‘The Numenorean chapters’, is included in this volume in the form of an Appendix.

  Christopher Tolkien died in 2020 aged 95, after a lifetime of intimate involvement with the annals of Middle-earth and a near fifty-year career meticulously curating his father’s work. The unparalleled scholarly legacy that remains has immeasurably enriched readers’ understanding and appreciation of the book that, in 1997, was voted the best-loved work of fiction of the twentieth century and which now – via a variety of media – holds an unassailable place in the affections of an international audience.

  Without Christopher’s passion, dedication and skill, the story of the Second Age of Middle-earth would never have been told.

  BEFORE THE SECOND AGE

  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings had its foundation in the book we now know as The Silmarillion, eventually published in 1977 under the masterful editorship of his son, Christopher. It was a volume that drew together the whole matter of Middle-earth’s creation and its passage from an age of myth to a time where stories merge into histories – inspired, as its author would say, by his ‘basic passion… for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite.’

  In 1951, long before the publication of The Silmarillion with its tales of the First Age of Middle-earth – and, indeed, before even The Lord of the Rings had reached the hands of a reading public, Tolkien wrote to his friend, Milton Waldman, about the scope of his ambition as a teller of tales:1

  Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

  Ambitious, certainly, but – fortunately for us – not as absurd as Tolkien imagined in his more frustrated and doubtful moments and it was a concept to which he constantly returned and determinedly pursued, even though his mode of pursuit was that of a wandering traveller: picking up languages, making maps and ever ready to leave the highway of his central narrative in order to explore picturesque or dangerous byways, before returning to the road ahead – which explains, no doubt, why the idea of the ‘Road’ is one that runs, twisting and turning, through so much of his writing.

  Commenting on the grand imagined sweep of his ‘absurd’ scheme, Tolkien readily admitted that it had neither been conceived nor developed ‘all at once’; instead it had come together in a way that speaks to the very specific impact that his writing was to have – and still has – on a readership that spans continents and cultures. ‘The mere stories,’ he wrote, ‘were the thing. They arose in my
mind as “given” things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spend itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere: not of “inventing”.’

  Perhaps the power of all great literature lies in that audacious moment of suspended disbelief. Tolkien’s reference to ‘linguistics’ is, itself, key to that creative process since his love and great knowledge of languages infuses the fictional with antiquity. As he wrote:

  Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped, and of course, as a professional philologist (especially interested in linguistic aesthetics), I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in craft. Behind my stories is now a nexus of languages (mostly only structurally sketched). But to those creatures which in English I call misleadingly Elves are assigned two related languages more nearly completed, whose history is written, and whose forms (representing two different sides of my own linguistic taste) are deduced scientifically from a common origin. Out of these languages are made nearly all the names that appear in my legends. This gives a certain character (a cohesion, a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity) to the nomenclature, or so I believe, that is markedly lacking in other comparable things.