In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (2002) Bradley J. Birzer describes the Athrabeth as ‘possibly Tolkien’s most theological and profound writing in the entire legendarium, and it is essential to one’s understanding of Tolkien’s mythological vision’. On Andreth’s statement of men’s belief that they are ‘born to life everlasting’, Birzer comments that ‘she misinterprets it to mean the life of the body’ (p. 56).
Maria Kuteeva in ‘“Old Human”, or “The Voice in Our Hearts”: J.R.R. Tolkien on the Origin of Language’, in Between Faith and Fiction: Tolkien and the Powers of His World, ed. Nils Ivar Agøy (1998), describes the Tale of Adanel as not only offering ‘the most detailed account of the Fall of Man ever written by Tolkien’, but also containing ‘a fairly explicit account of the origin of human language’ (p. 84). Andreth, telling the story, says: ‘We understood the Voice in our hearts, though we had no words yet. Then the desire for words woke in us, and we began to make them’ (Morgoth’s Ring, p. 345).
In a comment on the work itself rather than on its theological content, David Bratman thinks that the Athrabeth ‘stands with the Council of Elrond [The Lord of the Rings, Book II, Chapter 2] as one of the great conversations in Tolkien’s work, and it certainly contains more dialogue, as opposed to narration, than anything else he wrote about the Elder Days’ (‘The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth’ in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), p. 77).
See further, Renée Vink, ‘The Wise Woman’s Gospel’, Lembas-extra 2004 (2004). See also *Mortality and Immortality.
Atlakviða. Old Norse poem in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript compiled c. 1260 but containing poems from a much earlier period, often in corrupt form. Atlakviða was one of Tolkien’s chief sources for his Guðrúnarkviða en nýja (see *The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún). According to *Christopher Tolkien, his father
devoted much time and thought to Atlakaviða, and prepared a very detailed commentary (the basis for lectures and seminars) on this extraordinarily difficult text. It is a poem that he much admired. Despite its condition, ‘we are in the presence (he wrote) of great poetry that can still move us as poetry. Its style is universally and rightly praised: rapid, terse, vigorous – while maintaining, within its narrow limits, characterization. The poet who wrote it knew how to produce the grim and deadly atmosphere his theme demanded. It lives in the memory as one of the things in the Edda [the Elder Edda] most instinct with that demonic energy and force which one finds in Old Norse verse. [The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, pp. 311–12]
Two portions of Atlakviða translated by Tolkien into alliterative Old English were published in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), pp. 369–70 and 374–6, with Modern English translations and commentary by Christopher Tolkien, as ‘Fragments of a Heroic Poem of Attila in Old English’. These comprise forty lines (eight stanzas) from the beginning of the poem and twenty-eight lines from near the end.
In the first portion, brothers Guðhere and Hagena have given their sister as wife to Ætla, ruler of the Huns. A messenger comes from Ætla inviting them to visit him and offering them gifts, land, and treasure. Guðhere is not tempted – he already has enough – but he asks Hagena’s opinion. Hagena is suspicious: a ring their sister sent is wound with a wolf’s hair.
The second text begins with Hagena’s laugh as the Huns cut out his heart. It then tells how Guðhere, now the only one who knows where in the Rhine the Niflungs’ treasure has been thrown, refuses to reveal the place. The portion ends with Guðhere in a snake pit, playing a harp.
More than one copy exists of each translation by Tolkien, with minor progressive movement. Most of the second part was set in type for an unknown purpose, probably for student use, with the title Gunnar’s End. Christopher Tolkien thinks it ‘very probable’ that his father made the translations during his ‘earlier years at Oxford after his departure from Leeds’, thus c. 1926–30.
Atlantis. From his youth Tolkien experienced dreams which he came to call his ‘Atlantis-haunting’ or ‘Atlantis complex’.
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 exorcized 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. [letter to Christopher Bretherton, 16 July 1964, Letters, p. 347]
In a letter to *W.H. Auden on 7 June 1955 Tolkien wondered if he might have inherited this dream from his parents, since he had then recently discovered that his son Michael, to whom he had never mentioned his own dreams, had similar experiences. At this time Tolkien did not think that he had had the dream ‘since I wrote the “Downfall of Númenor” as the last of the legends of the First and Second Ages’, which bears strong similarities to the legend of Atlantis (Letters, p. 213; see also *Númenor); but his letter to Christopher Bretherton in 1964 suggests that the dream still occasionally recurred.
The story of Atlantis is recounted in two works by Plato (c. 429–347 BC), the Critias and the Timaeus, repeating one that Solon (d. c. 560/559 BC) is said to have heard in Egypt, told to him by an Egyptian priest. Thousands of years earlier, Plato says in the Timaeus, the powerful island realm of Atlantis was defeated in its attempt to extend its power to Greece and Egypt, ‘but afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night’ Atlantis ‘disappeared in the depths of the sea’ (Benjamin Jowett translation, in The Dialogues of Plato, 1905 edn., vol. 2, p. 521). In the Critias Plato describes how Poseidon settled some of his offspring by mortal women on the island of Atlantis, and how the realm prospered and then lost the favour of the gods.
For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the gods, who were their kinsmen; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, practicing gentleness and wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them. … But when this divine portion began to fade away in them, and became diluted too often and with too much of the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, then they, being unable to bear their fortune, became unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see, they began to appear base, and had lost the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they still appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were filled with unrighteous avarice and power. [Jowett translation, The Dialogues of Plato, 1905 edn., vol. 2, p. 607]
The work breaks off as Zeus decides that people of Atlantis must be punished, ‘that they might be chastened and improved’.
Tolkien ended early versions of his *‘Silmarillion’ mythology with the overthrow of Morgoth at the end of the First Age. He said little of the fate of Men after that event, other than that by the judgement of the Valar the Outer Lands (Middle-earth) were to be for Mankind. Then, in 1936 or 1937, he extended his legendarium into a Second Age, centred on a new version of the Atlantis legend. As he told Christopher Bretherton: ‘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 [land] was to be called Númenor, the Land in the West’ (16 July 1964, Letters,