Sauron Defeated (71 page)

. . .

But at last Sauron's plot comes to fulfilment. Tar-Calion feels old age and death approaching, and he listens to the last prompting of Sauron, and building the greatest of all armadas, he sets sail into the West, breaking the Ban, and going up with war to wrest from the gods 'everlasting life within the circles of the world'. Faced by this rebellion, of appalling folly and blasphemy, and also real peril (since the Numenoreans directed by Sauron could have wrought ruin in Valinor itself) the Valar lay down their delegated power and appeal to God, and receive the power and permission to deal with the situation; the old world is broken and changed. A chasm is opened in the sea and Tar-Calion and his armada is engulfed.

Numenor itself on the edge of the rift topples and vanishes for ever with all its glory into the abyss. Thereafter there is no visible dwelling of the divine or immortal on earth. Valinor (or Paradise) and even Eressea are removed, remaining only in the memory of the earth. Men may sail now West, if they will, as far as they may, and come no nearer to Valinor or the Blessed Realm, but return only into the east and so back again; for the world is round, and finite, and a circle inescapable - save by death. Only the 'immortals', the lingering Elves, may still if they will, wearying of the circle of the world, take ship and find the 'straight way', and come to the ancient or True West, and be at peace.

Three years later my father said in a letter to Hugh Brogan (18

September 1954, Letters no. 151):

Middle-earth is just archaic English for {q oixovpivq}, the inhabited world of men. It lay then as it does. In fact just as it does, round and inescapable. That is partly the point. The new situation, established at the beginning of the Third Age, leads on eventually and inevitably to ordinary History, and we here see the process culminating. If you or I or any of the mortal men (or hobbits) of Frodo's day had set out over sea, west, we should, as now, eventually have come back (as now) to our starting point. Gone was the 'mythological' time when Valinor (or Valimar), the Land of the Valar (gods if you will) existed physically in the Uttermost West, or the Eldaic (Elvish) immortal Isle of Eressea; or the Great Isle of Westernesse (Numenor-Atlantis).

After the Downfall of Numenor, and its destruction, all this was removed from the 'physical' world, and not reachable by material means. Only the Eldar (or High-Elves) could still sail thither, forsaking time and mortality, but never returning.

A week later he wrote to Naomi Mitchison (25 September 1954, Letters no. 154):

Actually in the imagination of this story we are now living on a physically round Earth. But the whole 'legendarium' contains a transition from a flat world (or at least an {osxovpivq} with borders all about it) to a globe: an inevitable transition, I suppose, to a modern

'myth-maker' with a mind subjected to the same 'appearances' as ancient men, and partly fed on their myths, but taught that the Earth was round from the earliest years. So deep was the impression made by 'astronomy' on me that I do not think I could deal with or imaginatively conceive a flat world, though a world of static Earth with a Sun going round it seems easier (to fancy if not to reason).

The particular 'myth' which lies behind this tale, and the mood both of Men and Elves at this time, is the Downfall of Numenor: a special variety of the Atlantis tradition.

I have written an account of the Downfall, which you might be interested to see. But the immediate point is that before the Downfall there lay beyond the sea and the west-shores of Middle-earth an earthly Elvish paradise Eressea, and Valinor the land of the Valar (the Powers, the Lords of the West), places that could be reached physically by ordinary sailing-ships, though the Seas were perilous. But after the rebellion of the Numenoreans, the Kings of Men, who dwelt in a land most westerly of all mortal lands, and eventually in the height of their pride attempted to occupy Eressea and Valinor by force, Numenor was destroyed, and Eressea and Valinor removed from the physically attainable Earth: the way west was open, but led nowhere but back again - for mortals.

NOTES.

1. The name Eledai occurs in DA II (and subsequent texts) $5, as the name of the Nimri (Nimir) in their own language. On Michael Ramer's Enkeladim see pp. 199, 206 and note 65, 303.

2. Sketch I has here: 'The Great Central Land, Europe and Asia, was first inhabited. Men awoke in Mesopotamia. Their fates as they spread were very various. But the Enkeladim withdrew ever west.'

3. Ljos-alfar: Old Norse, 'Light-elves', mentioned in the 'Prose Edda' of Snorri Sturluson.

4. Cf. DA II (and subsequent texts) $16: For as yet Eru permitted the Avaloi to maintain upon Earth... an abiding place' (DA I 'an abiding place, an earthly paradise').

In my father's exposition of his work to Milton Waldman in 1951 there is a passage of interest in relation to the opening of this sketch (Letters no. 131, pp. 147 - 8):

In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of the Christian myth. These tales are 'new', they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

There cannot be any 'story' without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.

So, proceeding, the Elves have a fall, before their 'history'

can become storial. (The first fall of Man, for reasons explained, nowhere appears - Men do not come on the stage until all that is long past, and there is only a rumour that for a while they fell under the domination of the Enemy and that some repented.) The main body of the tale, the Silmarillion proper, is about the fall of the most gifted kindred of the Elves...

Notable here is my father's reference to 'a rumour that for a while

[Men] fell under the domination of the Enemy and that some repented', and see also the further citation from this letter on p. 408; with this cf. DA II (and subsequent texts) $$3-4: At the appointed hour Men were born into the world, and they were called the Eru-hin, the children of God; but they came in a time of war and shadow, and they fell swiftly under the domination of Mulkher, and they served him.... But some there were of the fathers of Men who repented, seeing the evil of the Lord Mulkher and that his shadow grew ever longer on the Earth; and they and their sons returned with sorrow to the allegiance of Eru, and they were befriended by the Avaloi, and received again their ancient name, Eruhin, children of God.

Of this there is no suggestion in the Quenta Silmarillion (V.274 -

6); cf. however the suggestions in Chapter 17 of the published Silmarillion ('that a darkness lay upon the hearts of Men (as the shadow of the Kinslaying and the Doom of Mandos lay upon the Noldor) [the Eldar] perceived clearly even in the people of the Elf-friends whom they first knew').

At the head of the following page of the text is a very rough and disjointed note in which are named the Eruhildi, sons of God, descended from Shem or Japheth (sons of Noah).

5. Meleko: a footnote to the text states: 'He had many names in different tongues, but such was his name among the Numenoreans, which means Tyrant.' This is the form of the name in DA I, but with long first vowel: Meleko.

6. Eresse is the form in the earlier version of Edwin Lowdham's Old English text, pp. 313 - 14. - On the haven of Avallon(de) see note 12. In 'whose chief haven was westward' read 'eastward'.

7. In The Fall of Numenor ($10) ship-burial came to be practised by the Exiles on the western coasts of Middle-earth.

8. This (presumably) contradicts the earlier, bracketed, statement in this same text (p. 400): The Enkeladim told them that the world was round, but that was a hard saying to them.' The statement here is of course the opposite of the story in The Drowning of Anadune ($$23, 31), where Sauron taught that the world was flat, contradicting the instruction of the messengers of the Avaloi(m). In Sketch III (p. 404) 'The ancient Numenoreans knew (being taught by the Eledai) that the Earth was round; but Sauron taught them that it was a disc and flat, and beyond was nothing, where his master ruled.'

9. The Pillar of Heaven is volcanic: cf. Lowdham's comment on Frankley's poem (p. 265): 'Your Volcano is... apparently a last peak of some Atlantis.'

10. On Ilu, Iluve, see IV.241, V.47, 63, and the Etymologies, stem IL, V.361. The word menel first occurs here or in the manuscript E of Part Two of The Notion Club Papers, in the name Menelminda of the Pillar of Heaven (p. 302).

11. The first occurrence of the word kemen in the texts, but cf. the added entry stem KEM - in the Etymologies, V.363.

u here they had always had as it were a habitation and centre in their early strife with Meleko: the legend that the isle on which the Valar dwelt before Morgoth overthrew the Lamps was also that on which Ulmo ferried the Elves to Valinor, and which Osse anchored to the sea-bottom far out in the ocean, so that it was named 'the Lonely Isle'. The original form of the story is found in The Book of Lost Tales ('The Coming of the Elves', I.118 ff.) and then in the successive versions of 'The Silmarillion': the 'Sketch of the Mythology' from the 1920s (IV.12, 14, 45), the Quenta Noldorinwa (IV.80, 86), and the Quenta Silmarillion (V.208, 221 - 2).

12. In the earlier version of the Old English text of the surviving page of Edwin Lowdham's manuscript (pp. 313 - 14) the Numenoreans were forbidden to land on Eresse. Here they may visit the isle, but only briefly, and only the haven of Avallon(de) and the city of

[Tuna >] Tirion 'on the hill behind'; subsequently the Powers, in their displeasure, transmuted this into a prohibition against landing on Eresse at all (p. 404). On the reference to 'the city of

[Tuna >] Tirion on the hill behind' see note 16.

In notes added to Sketch II (p. 399), as well as in the present passage, 'Avallon(de)' appears as the name of the haven in Eresse, and this is where the final application of the name (later Avallone') first appears (in FN III Avallon was still the name of the Lonely Isle, as it remained in the earlier Old English text referred to above).

13. tenth in the line from Earendel: this can be equated with the statement in DA II $20 (see the commentary, p. 381) if Earendel is himself numbered, as the first in the line though not the first king of Numenor.

14. This presumably implies that the idea of a land in the far West where the Gods dwelt was a lie of Sauron's. Earlier in the text (p. 402) it has been told that the Gods had dwelt in Eresse, but after the final overthrow of Meleko 'they had no longer any local habitation on earth' (cf. also Sketch I, p. 400: 'except among the wise the theory arose that the great spirits or Gods ... dwelt in the West in a Great Land beyond the sun'). See further p. 407.

15. Cf. VIII.164 and note 37.

16. A curious case is presented by the statement in Sketch III, p. 403, that 'the city of [Tuna )] Tirion' was 'on the hill behind the haven of Avallon(de)'; for Tun(a), Tirion was of course the city of the Elves in Valinor. One might suppose that Homer nodded here; but in the earliest draft of an Old English text for 'Edwin Lowdham's page' (p. 316), which closely followed The Fall of Numenor $6, it is told that the Numenoreans, landing in Valinor, set fire to the city of Tuna. The statement in Sketch III is therefore more probably to be taken as intentional, an example of a famous name handed down in tradition but with its true application forgotten.

(vi) Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language.

This is a typescript made by my father that ends at the bottom of its seventeenth page, at which point he abandoned it (there is no reason to suppose that further pages existed but were lost). That it belongs with the final texts DA III and DA IV of The Drowning of Anadune is readily seen from various names and name-forms, as Nimir, Azrubel, Adunaim, Minul-Tarik, Amatthani (see p. 388, $$5, 8, 13, 20, 23).

In printing 'Lowdham's Report' I have followed my father's text very closely indeed, retaining his use of capitals, italics, marks of length, etc. despite some apparent inconsistency, except where corrections are obvious and necessary. The only point in which I have altered his presentation is in the matter of the notes. These (as became his usual practice in essays of this sort) he simply interspersed in the body of the text as he composed it; but as some of them are very substantial I have thought it best to collect them together at the end. I have added no commentary of my own.

It may be noted that the 'we' of Lowdham's introduction refers to himself and Jeremy; cf. Footnotes 2 and 6 on pp. 432 - 3.

ADUNAIC.

It is difficult, of course, to say anything about the pre-history of a language which, as far as my knowledge goes, has no close relations with any other tongue. The other contemporary language that came through together with Adunaic in my earlier