But to provide background for this, he wrote *The Fall of Númenor, a brief history of a fictional island realm which has more than a few similarities with the story of Atlantis. Given by the Valar to Men as a reward for fighting against Morgoth, Númenor lay in the West of the Great Sea; and there for nearly 2,000 years its people flourished, becoming great mariners. Returning at times to Middle-earth, at first they sought to teach and help lesser men, but in their third millennium they sought instead dominion and tribute. Also they began to fear death, and at last defied a ban imposed by the Valar against sailing west beyond sight of Númenor. Vainly seeking immortality, the king’s fleet invaded Valinor in the West, upon which the Valar appealed to a higher power, and Eru (God) changed the shape of the world, destroying Númenor and most of its peoples. (See further, *Númenor.)
In The Fall of Númenor (c. 1936–7) it is said that
Valinor was sundered from the earth, and a rift appeared in the midst of Belegar [the Sea] … and into this chasm the great seas plunged, and the noise of the falling waters filled all the earth and the smoke of the cataracts rose above the tops of the everlasting mountains. But all the ships of Númenor … were drawn down into the great abyss and drowned. …
But Númenor being nigh upon the East to the great rift was utterly thrown down and overwhelmed in sea, and its glory perished. [*The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 15–16]
In *The Drowning of Anadûnê (end of 1945–mid-1946) Tolkien added portents warning the last king not to proceed with his invasion plans: ‘the land shook under them, and a groaning as of thunder underground was mingled with the roaring of the sea; and smoke appeared upon the top of [Meneltarma, the holy mountain in the centre of Númenor]’, and in the destruction of Númenor ‘last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam took to its bosom Ar-Zimrahil the Queen’ (*Sauron Defeated, pp. 371, 373). This seems to be the first hint in Tolkien’s writings that Meneltarma was volcanic. In the *Akallabêth (c. 1948) the eruption of Meneltarma contributes to the destruction of Númenor: ‘Then suddenly fire burst from the Meneltarma, and there came a mighty wind and a tumult of the earth, and the sky reeled, and the hills slid, and Númenor went down into the sea …’ (*The Silmarillion, p. 279).
Many of these details in Tolkien’s fiction have counterparts in writings of the first half of the twentieth century in which the legend of Atlantis was tied to the history of the eastern Mediterranean. Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations in Crete from 1899 to 1945 revealed the existence there in the second millennium BC of a previously unknown civilization which he called ‘Minoan’, after Minos, king of Crete in Greek legend. Minoan Crete was revealed as a trading and maritime power which had suffered a sudden and unexplained disaster. Later K.T. Frost suggested in two articles that Plato’s Atlantis preserved a memory of Minoan Crete and the sudden ending of its glory: ‘The Lost Continent’, The Times (London), 19 February 1909, and ‘The Critias and Minoan Crete’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 33 (1913), both cited in the ‘Atlantis’ entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica (14th edn. 1938). Then in 1939 Spyridon Marinatos put forward the theory that the sudden disaster which so damaged Minoan civilization was the cataclysmic eruption in the middle of the second millennium BC of the volcanic Cycladean island of Thera, north of Crete (‘The Volcanic Destruction of Minoan Crete’, Antiquity 13 (1939)). During the eruption the greater part of Thera collapsed into the sea, huge tsunamis ravaged nearby Crete, and pumice and other debris covered the ground. From this point it was no great leap to link, as Marinatos did in 1950, the sinking of Thera, the disaster suffered by Minoan civilization, and the story of Atlantis as a reflection of actual events.
In his 1955 letter to W.H. Auden Tolkien wrote that he had ‘bequeathed’ his dream of the Great Wave to Faramir in *The Lord of the Rings. In that work (Book VI, Chapter 5) Faramir tells Éowyn that the mountain of darkness they see from the walls of Minas Tirith reminds him of ‘[Númenor] that foundered and of the great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness inescapable’.
In *The Notion Club Papers, written during Christmas 1945 and first half of 1946, but purporting to be records of a society in 1987, during a thunderstorm two members of the Club seem to experience ancestral memories of the fall of Númenor. One of them cries out (pp. 251–2): ‘The King hath set forth his might against the Lords of the West. … The Eagles of the Powers of the World have arisen in anger. The Lords have spoken to Ēru, and the fate of the World is changed! … See! The abyss openeth, The sea falls. The mountains lean over. … All hath passed away. The light hath gone out!’
Tolkien also mentioned to Christopher Bretherton that he ‘used to draw [the wave] or write bad poems about it’ (Letters, p. 347), possibly a reference to his poem *The Horns of Ylmir and his drawing Water, Wind & Sand (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 42). Otherwise, there are only two drawings which might be connected with the wave among his art preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (*Libraries and archives): one of them, a decorative frieze, is reproduced in Artist and Illustrator as fig. 59.
Writing to *Elizabeth Jennings on 21 December 1955, Tolkien commented on her poem ‘New Worlds’, which concerns Atlantis as a dream of ‘swelling waters’ to ‘be ignored forever’, losing even its name, now that one knows actual ‘countries in space’. Tolkien ‘passionately’ agreed with this, ‘except that I do not think that it was hope that made (makes: it is very real to me) Atlantis real. “Hope” maybe imparts such reality as “countries in space” may possess for the mind. But to me Atlantis is a myth of regret. Both can be terrible deceits, must be so to any mind completely involved in the world (of the senses) but they seem to me quite different’ (British Library MS Add. 52599).
Attacks of Taste. Collection of statements by authors regarding the books they loved as teenagers, compiled and edited by Evelyn B. Byrne and Otto M. Penzler and published by the Gotham Book Mart, New York, in December 1971. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B29.
For this volume Tolkien briefly wrote, in a single paragraph, that during his teenage years he was not interested in ‘literature’ – perhaps forgetting the *Kalevala, which he read at that time – but mostly in works of science, ‘especially botany and astronomy’ (p. 43). His ‘most treasured volume’ was Flowers of the Field by C.A. Johns, first published c. 1850.
Auden, Wystan Hugh (1907–1973). As an undergraduate at Christ Church, *Oxford, W.H. Auden had a special admiration for Old and Middle English poetry and attended at least one of Tolkien’s lectures on *Beowulf. It was, he said, an ‘unforgettable experience’: ‘the voice was the voice of Gandalf’, the good wizard in *The Lord of the Rings (quoted in Biography, p. 133). Tolkien later said that Auden possessed an ear for Old English poetry while others were deaf to it. But Auden’s scholarship was wanting, and in 1928 he earned only a Third from a panel of examiners which included Tolkien and *David Nichol Smith. He was not interested in literary analysis, but in literature as art, and in whatever could help him become a great poet, a goal he confided to his tutor *Nevill Coghill. Indeed, Auden came to be considered one of the great poets of the twentieth century, as well as a distinguished playwright and critic. In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he lived until almost the end of his life.
Auden long admired Tolkien’s *Hobbit, and enthusiastically welcomed The Lord of the Rings. In 1954 he warmly reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring for the New York Times and the magazine Encounter, in 1955 gave a radio talk (which Tolkien disliked) on The Lord of the Rings on the BBC Third Programme, and in 1956 reviewed The Return of the King for the New York Times and the complete Lord of the Rings for Commonweal. Before writing about The Return of the King he sent Tolkien a series of questions and received a lengthy reply (Letters, pp. 211–17), the beginning of a long correspondence.
Also in 1956 Auden was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford for a five-year term. He was required to give only three lectures per year, and usually spent only four weeks out of the year in Oxford. In