The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien

Númenor, the Land in the West.’ Moreover, ‘Númenor’ was from the outset conceived in full association with ‘The Silmarillion’; there never was a time when the legends of Númenor were ‘unrelated to the main mythology’. My father erred in his recollection (or expressed himself obscurely, meaning something else); the letter cited above was indeed written nearly thirty years later.

       II

       THE FALL OF NÚMENOR

(i)

       The original outline

The text of the original ‘scheme’ of the legend, referred to in the previous chapter, was written at such speed that here and there words cannot be certainly interpreted. Near the beginning it is interrupted by a very rough and hasty sketch, which shows a central globe, marked Ambar, with two circles around it; the inner area thus described is marked Ilmen and the outer Vaiya. Across the top of Ambar and cutting through the zones of Ilmen and Vaiya is a straight line extending to the outer circle in both directions. This must be the forerunner of the diagram of the World Made Round accompanying the Ambarkanta, IV.247. The first sentence of the text, concerning Agaldor (on whom see pp. 78–9), is written separately from the rest, as if it were a false start, or the beginning of a distinct outline.

Agaldor chieftain of a people who live upon the N.W. margin of the Western Sea.

      The last battle of the Gods. Men side largely with Morgoth. After the victory the Gods take counsel. Elves are summoned to Valinor. [Struck out: Faithful men dwell in the Lands]

      Many men had not come into the old Tales. They are still at large on earth. The Fathers of Men are given a land to dwell in, raised by Ossë and Aulë in the great Western Sea. The Western Kingdom grows up. Atalantë. [Added in margin: Legend so named it afterward (the old name was Númar or Númenos) Atalantë = The Falling.] Its people great mariners, and men of great skill and wisdom. They range from Tol-eressëa to the shores of Middle-earth. Their occasional appearance among Wild Men, where Faithless Men also [?ranged corrupting them]. Some become lords in the East. But the Gods will not allow them to land in Valinor – and though they become long-lived because many have been bathed in the radiance of Valinor from Tol-eressëa – they are mortal and their span brief. They murmur against this decree. Thû comes to Atalantë, heralded [read heralding] the approach of Morgoth. But Morgoth cannot come except as a spirit, being doomed to dwell outside the Walls of Night. The Atalanteans fall, and rebel. They make a temple to Thû-Morgoth. They build an armament and assail the shores of the Gods with thunder.

      The Gods therefore sundered Valinor from the earth, and an awful rift appeared down which the water poured and the armament of Atalantë was drowned. They globed the whole earth so that however far a man sailed he could never again reach the West, but came back to his starting-point. Thus new lands came into being beneath the Old World; and the East and West were bent back and [?water flowed all over the round] earth’s surface and there was a time of flood. But Atalantë being near the rift was utter[ly] thrown down and submerged. The remnant of [struck out at time of writing: Númen the Lie-númen] the Númenóreans in their ships flee East and land upon Middle-earth. [Struck out: Morgoth induces many to believe that this is a natural cataclysm.]

The [?longing] of the Númenóreans. Their longing for life on earth. Their ship burials, and their great tombs. Some evil and some good. Many of the good sit upon the west shore. These also seek out the Fading Elves. How [struck out at time of writing: Agaldor] Amroth wrestled with Thû and drove him to the centre of the Earth and the Iron-forest.

The old line of the lands remained as a plain of air upon which only the Gods could walk, and the Eldar who faded as Men usurped the sun. But many of the Númenórië could see it or faintly see it; and tried to devise ships to sail on it. But they achieved only ships that would sail in Wilwa or lower air. Whereas the Plain of the Gods cut through and traversed Ilmen [in] which even birds cannot fly, save the eagles and hawks of Manwë. But the fleets of the Númenórië sailed round the world; and Men took them for gods. Some were content that this should be so.

As I have said, this remarkable text documents the beginning of the legend of Númenor, and the extension of ‘The Silmarillion’ into a Second Age of the World. Here the idea of the World Made Round and the Straight Path was first set down, and here appears the first germ of the story of the Last Alliance, in the words ‘These also seek out the Fading Elves. How [Agaldor >] Amroth wrestled with Thû and drove him to the centre of the Earth’ (at the beginning of the text Agaldor is named as the chief of a people living on the North-west coasts of Middle-earth). The longevity of the Númenóreans is already present, but (even allowing for the compression and distortion inherent in such ‘outlines’ of my father’s, in which he attempted to seize and dash onto paper a bubbling up of new ideas) seems to have far less significance than it would afterwards attain; and is ascribed, strangely, to ‘the radiance of Valinor’, in which the mariners of Númenor were ‘bathed’ during their visits to Tol-eressëa, to which they were permitted to sail. Cf. the Quenta, IV.98: ‘Still therefore is the light of Valinor more great and fair than that of other lands, because there the Sun and Moon together rest a while before they go upon their dark journey under the world’; but this does not seem a sufficient or satisfactory explanation of the idea (see further p. 20). The mortuary culture of the Númenóreans does indeed appear, but it arose among the survivors of Númenor in Middle-earth, after the Downfall; and this remained into more developed forms of the legend, as did the idea of the flying ships which the exiles built, seeking to sail on the Straight Path through Ilmen, but achieving only flight through the lower air, Wilwa.^*

      The sentence ‘Thû comes to Atalantë, herald[ing] the approach of Morgoth’ certainly means that Thû prophesied Morgoth’s return, as in subsequent texts. The meaning of ‘But Morgoth cannot come except as a spirit’ is made somewhat clearer in the next version, §5.

(ii)

       The first version of The Fall of Númenor

The preliminary outline was the immediate precursor of a first full narrative – the manuscript described above (p. 9), placed with The Lost Road. This was followed by further versions, and I shall refer to the work as a whole (as distinct from the Akallabêth, into which it was afterwards transformed) as The Fall of Númenor, abbreviated ‘FN’; the first text has no title, but I shall call it ‘FN I’.

      FN I is rough and hasty, and full of corrections made at the time of composition; there are also many others, mostly slight, made later and moving towards the second version FN II. I give it as it was written, without the second layer of emendations (except in so far as these make small necessary corrections to clarify the sense). As explained in the Preface, here as elsewhere I have introduced paragraph numbers into the text to make subsequent reference and comparison easier. A commentary, following the paragraphing of the text, follows at its end.