Okay, so, these #JamesAndTheSecondAge posts – already nearly as arcane and niche as they could possibly be—are going to get, uh, more arcane and niche. If you’re up for a very deep dive into the mind of an author inventing a world, where what I’m talking about is not only “not canonical” in the world of The Lord of the Rings, but is better described as “hastily scribbled bullet points on the back of an envelope, half of which is so illegible we’re not 100% sure what it says”, well you’ve come to the right place. Why am I doing this? Partly, because my interest in the Second Age of Middle-earth is high enough that absorbing literally anything I can about what Tolkien imagined about it (even if it’s material that never really made it into his finished thinking about his world) is worthwhile to me. But also! It’s undeniable that the showrunners for the Amazon Prime series are in a similar position to Tolkien the worldbuilder – they’ve got a lot of things to make up to fill in gaps that weren’t necessarily designed to be filled, initially. Unlike him, though, they know that a lot of fans are going to be very critical of them for literally everything that’s not 100% present in the existing published material. So if I was them, I’d want some inspiration from the old professor, drawing from his ideas about his world to generate new ideas about that same world. That’s where we’re going today, and surely if you’re still here after that long paragraph, you’re 100% on board, so let’s goooooooo.
The source books for this post and the next couple of posts are volumes from a series that Christopher Tolkien called The History of Middle-earth (HoME). The HoME books are Christopher’s attempt to archaeologically reconstruct the evolution of his father’s magnum opus—the fictional world in which all his stories take place. So each book on its own is a snapshot of a collection of materials from a particular point in J.R.R. Tolkien’s life, when he was working on something in particular (often several somethings), and what you read is a combination of Christopher’s best guess at how these handwritten snippets and fragments fit together, followed by extensive notes after every piece that help explain what it is and why it is. First I’ll talk about what this week’s fragments are, and then I’ll talk a little about the themes and content I found in them that I think has some value for anybody trying to make a series out of the Second Age.
The material I’m focused on in today’s book, The Lost Road and Other Writings, HoME V, comes from an abandoned attempt Tolkien made in 1936-1937 to compose a “time travel” novel, driven by an agreement he made with his then-close friend C.S. Lewis that each of them should write a fantastical novel that represented what they wanted to see in fiction (Lewis’s book, a “space travel” novel, becomes Out of the Silent Planet, which he not only publishes, but follows up with two sequels in the 1940s: they’re well worth checking out if you never have). At the time, Tolkien had done extensive work on the earlier history of Middle-earth (what we would now call the First Age), and of course he had just finished writing a children’s book called The Hobbit which he had almost accidentally set at some later time in that same landscape (what we would now call the Third Age), but an effort to tie all these things together hadn’t really happened yet—The Hobbit won’t even be published and out for sale until the fall of 1937. So he stumbles into the material he’s working on in either late ‘36 or early ‘37, “discovering” as he does so a big chunk of the history of Middle-earth that he had never really envisioned or planned. Even at the end of this, he’s still not calling it “The Second Age” yet, but at least he’s developed some ideas – the existence of an idyllic western island called Numenor, doomed to “fall” thanks to human folly which will ensure that it is buried beneath the waves, and in particular the existence of tension in Numenor between those who trust the distant Valar who have forbidden western travel, and those who are tempted to ignore the orders they’ve been given and sail west to conquer Heaven itself.
These ideas appear first in two collections of fragmentary manuscripts that constitute the very first ideas he put down on paper (as far as I know) about the Second Age: first, three accounts of the Fall of Numenor (hereafter, Outline, FN I, and FN II, as Christopher Tolkien calls them). Then, in four chapters from his abandoned “time travel” novel, The Lost Road, all of which reference Numenor, but the final two chapters of which are set in Numenor itself. I’ll take them in chronological order.
First, Outline – at this point, in 1936(?), Tolkien’s conceived of this dark spirit, Morgoth, who had been defeated by some combined forces assault of Elves and Men and the mighty Valar, and he understands that Middle-earth’s history must have continued long after Morgoth’s defeat, but as yet, he’s done little to connect things together. Sauron’s presence in The Hobbit as “The Necromancer” is, as JRR admitted, accidental and fleeting – at the time he needed something to get Gandalf out of the way, and it’s only later that he backfills in the understanding that “The Necromancer” must have been a servant of Morgoth named Sauron, and who Sauron was, anyway. With all that in mind, the Outline is pretty remarkable, with JRR inventing out of whole cloth some basic facts: first, that the Men who had fought Morgoth earned a gift from the Valar, a land in the West called Atalante (because, yes, this is Tolkien starting from the idea that it would be cool to work the story of Atlantis, an empire sunk beneath the waves, into his legendarium). He made them great sailors who traveled basically everywhere on earth, Valinor included, and people who are upset about death and fear it. So they’re set up for a fall here, as long as someone’s ready to push them off the ledge they’re on, but Morgoth’s gone, so who’s going to engineer their destruction? Well, there’s this character named Thu, or Thu-Morgoth, a servant of Morgoth, who’s still around somehow, and the people of Atalante worship him as a false god, effectively, and then make war on the Valar, who choose to turn the flat world round and drown the island kingdom of Atalante in judgment. Thu escapes somehow and is fought elsewhere and driven into the midst of Earth’s forests, and the surviving people of Atalante wish they could get back to Valinor again, and invent flying boats, but they can’t fly high enough to get back there. The entirety of the Outline is only slightly longer than this paragraph.
FN I, then, drives the ball forward – JRR’s decided that Atalante means “the Fallen” or something, and is a nickname the drowned island got after its destruction. So he fills in that the people of the island kingdom at the time called it Numenor (or Westernesse, or Andunie…yeah, the dude never stopped coming up with alternative names for anything or anyone). A lot of what’s in the outline is still here, but he’s worked out that he shouldn’t let them casually sail to Valinor, so they’re not allowed past the island of Tol-Eressea where the Elves are gathered, west of Numenor. That bad dude, Thu, is now maybe named Sur, and Sur flies to Numenor in the shape of a giant bird and prophesies the second coming of Morgoth—the king and queen (Angor and Istar) are promised immortality and splendor if they’ll worship Morgoth, and they do, setting up a temple to him. The king and queen keep aging, though, and to deal with their increasing panic, Sur switches his tune and indicates that they can only beat death by conquering Valinor. The king sets sail with a vast navy, and the events unfold as we expect them to (except that Tol-Eressea is drowned also, and the Elves there “pass through the gates of death”). Now we get the first glimpse of the Second Age continuing AFTER Numenor, since Tolkien resolves that surely some Numenoreans had waited east of the island and fled the destroying wave – they sail east and become kings, establishing civilizations that are in some ways wiser than Numenor, but are fundamentally paralyzed by that same fear of death and obsessions with tombs and burial rites, etc. Some fixate on reaching the lost lands to the West, building those flying boats alluded to in the Outline (which appear nowhere else in Tolkien, not as routine technology—Earendil’s Vingilot is a different kind of thing), but can’t get there anymore: the Straight Road is closed to all but the Eldar. But others understand how Numenor fell, and focus instead on hunting down and opposing Thu and his evil servants, wherever they and their temples stand. Tolkien now conceives that there will need to be a great alliance between Elves and Men to stop this Thu dude, though at this point it’s an alliance between Amroth King of “Beleriand” and Elrond son of Earendel, leader of the Elves remaining in Middle-earth. They find Thu, and fight him—Amroth is killed, but Thu is thrown down and driven into a dark forest (presumably Mirkwood? This is intended as the Necromancer’s backstory, I think?), expending the last strength of the Elves, who he says won’t have any ability to wage this kind of war again. (Again, he’s riffing here—he’s got no idea of the Rings or what he’s going to do with an unimagined Third Age yet.) FN I, as you can see, is both very unlike the final version of the Second Age and also surprisingly close to it—given that this is a handful of paragraphs sketched out by a guy warming up to write a time travel novel, based on nothing but his imagination in late 1936 or early 1937.
FN II is an amendment of the narrative in FN I: a lot of it is very similar, so I won’t repeat the arc of the narrative I’ve just described. There’s more consideration of what Morgoth might have left behind him (demons, dragons, monsters, and Orcs). Tolkien works out that Numenor would be ruled by the half-Elven son of Earendel, but he hasn’t yet invented the nifty solution of having Elrond AND Elros so one can go Elven and the other Human, so he puts Elrond down as the first king of Numenor. Wait, you might say, Elrond attacks Valinor? No, one of his descendants as King does that…it’s not clear to me if Tolkien had thought through where Elrond went, since we know he’s alive much later to cameo in The Hobbit. Anyway, at this point JRR’s renamed Thu again—now, finally, his name is Sauron—and there’s this element where the King of Numenor plans to summon Sauron to pay him homage, and the Valar send messages to Numenor telling him that Sauron will wreck everything but he won’t come to Numenor unless the King compels him, so just don’t invite the dude and you’ll be fine. But the Valar are ignored, and Sauron is brought back—the sea is “unquiet” on his arrival and a great wave washes Sauron’s ship up onto a high hill, and he steps off prophesying and preaching about saving them all from death and working some miracles (yeah, there’s weird Antichrist imagery happening here) and beguiling the people to follow him in the worship of Morgoth. The whole fall of Numenor unfolds basically as it does in FN I, and then Elendil, king of some Numenoreans living in Middle-earth, connects with an Elven king, Gil-galad (here he is!), who in this version is a descendant of Feanor (you remember him, the angriest elf in history). And they march on Mordor (hey, here that is too!) and cast down Sauron’s fortresses there: Sauron kills both kings but his form is broken and he runs away into the forests and hides. This is the last great service the Elves ever do for humanity (again, did you ever wonder why Tolkien called it “The Last Alliance of Elves and Men”, given that Elrond is clearly still working with humans in the Third Age? It’s all driven by how he originally imagined it, and the War of the Ring isn't yet on his radar). The notes conclude by saying “here endeth the tale of the ancient world as it is known to the Elves”. There are some scraps afterwards that show the tale still evolving—Gil-galad becomes a descendant of Finrod Felagund, and we get two human kingdoms post-Numenor, one in the North ruled by Elendil and one in the South (named Ondor…we’re SO close to Gondor at this point) ruled by his brother, someone named Valandil. But it seems like this is basically where he halts his playing with the idea of Numenor in time to depict it in a novel he intends to call The Lost Road.
The chapters of The Lost Road that were actually drafted are kind of fascinating—it seems that Tolkien intended to depict a series of fathers and sons, maybe all grappling with some shared concern, although he never fully worked out how all the stories would tie together. The two segments he manages to write—one set in present-day England (well, “present-day” when he wrote it) featuring father Oswin Errol and his son Auboin, and eventually Auboin’s son Audoin (who, yes, are aware that their names are very odd); the other set in Numenor after it fell under Sauron’s influence, featuring father Elendil and son Herendil—both have some interesting echo features, scenes where fathers seek their sons and only find them outside on a wall looking at the sunset, moments where a character says “the eagles of the Lords of the West are coming to Numenor” and then don’t understand why they say it or where it came from. Ted Nasmith envisions such a scene here, and honestly there's lots of ways to interpret what might be happening in these passages: https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/a/ad/Ted_Nasmith_-_The_Eagles_of_Manw%C3%AB.jpg I won’t try to analyze the whole project (most of which exists only in scribbled outlines), but the Numenorean chapters are fascinating—extensive dialogue between dedicated Elf-friend Elendil who’s basically talking treason and his youngish son, Herendil, who’s grown up in a world where Lord Sauron and his temple to Morgoth are just part of life in Numenor, and who is increasingly panicked by his father’s comments since they sound like high treason. Elendil tells his son stories he’s long kept hidden—about who the Valar really are, and what danger Numenor is in by answering to Sauron—and they have a good talk about death, why Elendil sees it as the Gift of Men and why Herendil finds it, well, scary and unwelcome and something he’d gladly be rid of. Ultimately Elendil reveals that he’s basically the leader of the secret opposition to the king, and that he plans to openly oppose Sauron if necessary, and he asks Herendil whether or not he’ll stand by his father. Herendil is overwhelmed by emotion, but ultimately tells his father that he loves him, and that if he has to make this awful choice between the world he knows and the father he loves, he’ll stand by his father. The fragment basically stops there. There are suggestions that the English characters—specifically Auboin and Audoin—will in fact travel to Numenor via some weird dream pathway, and there’s a brief tantalizing conversation between Auboin and Elendil, but it reveals nothing about the Second Age. We’ll always have to wonder what this novel would have been like, but if he’d written it, maybe we’d never have gotten The Lord of the Rings, you know?
Okay, so, what do I piece together out of this? It’s striking how completely Numenor as a concept is fixated on death—it’s there literally from its first conception. It drives both the faithful and the faithless, it persists in post-Numenorean society: to avoid making this incredibly long post even longer, I’m skipping a bunch of quotations of this material, but it’s very detailed and evocative in thinking about how death fixates the Numenoreans, and the conversations between Elendil and his son Herendil definitely continue to circle this. Sure, Numenor developed further as a society in Tolkien’s imagination over time, but I’d say that we need this to be as central to Numenorean society as possible—characters should be thinking and talking about death a lot more than you’d expect them to, tombs and burial rites should be pretty visible elements in life on Numenor. I think it’s also important to recognize that, even though for us the Ring and the Rings are centrally important, Tolkien’s original vision of the age after the First Age was one of catastrophe. The collapse of Numenor is the real setpiece here, and the war with Thu/Sur/Sauron was a sort of necessary aftermath that he never unpacked as carefully. So it’s important to invest us in Numenor and its fall as hugely important on its own, rather than treating it as necessary business to get through so we can get back to the Rings. Sauron as a dark prophet/miracle worker/revival preacher is a strange mode for the Middle-earth we know, admittedly, but that element survived into later, more fully realized descriptions of Numenor’s fall, and I think the way it’s described here is compelling as a story (while also being incredibly creepy). Honestly, Christopher Tolkien in annotating all this comments on the fact that his father was clearly affected by the rise of European fascism in the late 1930s—the picture of Numenorean society is one of secrecy and punishment, of loyalty oaths and cruel oligarchs and a loss of freedom. It seems to me that the world we’re living in right now is ripe for exploring those elements, even if it does mean that a bunch of irritating cranks denounce the show as “woke” or “cancel culture in Middle-earth” or whatever nonsense they think expresses adequate fealty to the whims of a cheap crook who probably violated the Espionage Act (oh no, James is getting POLITICAL, better cut that out). Anyway, I think exploring the dangers of a whole society letting itself be ruled by fear and therefore by unscrupulous and abusive powers is a story with a lot of applicability to America in 2022, just as it was applicable to England in 1937 (and, alas, will be applicable to other places and times in the future, I’m sure).
I’m a little carried away by the idea of The Lost Road as a story, so I want to point out the strength of that story—Elendil’s dialogue with his son is really powerful, and Tolkien was, I think, a pretty thoughtful depictor of the tensions that would be there in a father/son relationship where the father knows his son wants to be loyal to him, but doesn’t want to just compel him to take a given course of action. I think that would be really powerful to explore with Elendil and his kids (and maybe something you could explore with a “King’s Man” Numenorean family, either Ar-Pharazon and his dad, or maybe Ar-Pharazon and his kids, creating some interesting resonance/divergence). And as I thought about this, I was struck by the fact that Tolkien, a devoted father, makes fathers so absent from The Lord of the Rings—although most of the characters in the Fellowship have notable (or at least named) fathers, we literally never see them in dialogue with any of them. No, not Boromir and Denethor, nor Legolas and Thranduil—they’re never together “on screen” in the book. Gimli and Gloin are both in Rivendell but I don’t remember any dialogue between them. Aragorn and Frodo are orphans. Pippin and Merry have notable hobbit dads but maybe unsurprisingly they’re not important to the story. The closest we get is good old Hamfast Gamgee, “the Gaffer”---but if you’re thinking you remember him talking with Sam, well, tell me where it is. All I can find is Sam relating from memory a conversation with the Gaffer about his exchange with the Ringwraith in Hobbiton, the day they leave Bag End. At the story’s end, he’s keen to find his dad, and does so, but all we see is him delivering Hamfast to Frodo’s presence and a chat between Frodo and the Gaffer. It’s wild, actually—Elrond and Arwen are an important duo but in the book I recall no conversation between them; Theoden’s son Theodred is dead prior to our encountering him in Rohan; the only real father-child conversation we ever see, that I can think of, is Denethor and Faramir, of all people. Now, to be clear, Tolkien does a lot of great things with found family (both Bilbo and Gandalf as father figures to Frodo; Theoden’s close relationship to Eomer and Eowyn; etc.), but I’d still love to see genuine parent-child relationships not strained through madness (as Denethor’s was), and I think there’s a lot of potential in the kind of conversation we see in the Lost Road—I can imagine an impulsive young Isildur, for instance, who the audience knows will be bewitched by the Ring but his father of course doesn’t know that, being a really interesting conversation sparring partner with Elendil, his loyal, faithful dad, and that conversation drawing out both Isildur’s great virtues and the crack in his heart that will let the Ring in (though in fairness most of us have cracked hearts, by Tolkien’s standards).
Overall, HoME V draws out some cool elements for reflection. It’s clear that initially Tolkien had really never explored what might have come after the end of the Quenta Silmarillion that was his real obsession, all these stories of the First Age and the battles with Morgoth. So it’s fun to watch a new set of story arcs slowly emerging from nothing as he works on what he knows of Elves and Humans, and what it might be like to live in a world where the gods/archangels have basically left the handling of evil to those remaining in Middle-earth. In a sense it’s a preview of a journey he’ll take over the next few years as he composes The Lord of the Rings and discovers elements in that story that he will, necessarily, have to root deeply in the Second Age. And our own journey is going to keep pace with him, actually, since your next post from James will be from History of Middle Earth Volume 9, Sauron Defeated, which shares another unfinished draft novel of Tolkien’s that’s kind of a time travel story involving Numenor….one he literally writes while he’s got writer’s block in the middle of The Lord of the Rings, as World War II is coming to a conclusion. We’ll see how much Numenor has changed/developed in his head over the course of eight or so years on the back burner while he explores the Third Age of Middle-earth. Until then, cheers to you all, and thanks for reading what is probably my longest post yet!