As I mentioned in my first #JamesAndTheSecondAge post, I’m choosing to tackle the material about the Second Age from The Silmarillion next, even though chronologically we could argue for handling it last – it’s composed, as I mentioned, by Christopher Tolkien (assisted by a young Guy Gavriel Kay) from his father’s notes after J.R.R.’s death, and given that at the time Christopher had no notion of publishing all his dad’s manuscripts in a massive series, it presumably represents what he thought the “final version” of events was. But I’m treating this more as a “let’s work from the most definitively canonical take on the Second Age out to the stuff we’re least sure of” and seeing this book as the next stop as what Chris, at least, thought was closest to "official". Also, from the perspective of trying to take on the lore of the Second Age that Tolkien fans know best, if you own anything beyond The Hobbit and The LOTR, you presumably own The Silmarillion. If you’ve never picked it up to read it, well, the bits about the Second Age are very accessible, much more so than its opening passages (my apologies, Ainulindale, but you are a challenging place to start from for a lot of folks). So this post is a reflection on those Second Age bits – the Akallabeth, which is the tale of the fall of Numenor, and the first chunk of Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age. Instead of treating them separately, though, I’m going to mix material from those two pieces together, as I reflect on the ways this much more detailed account of the Second Age alters or adds to what we saw in The Lord of the Rings in my previous posts. Away we go!
I mentioned previously that the Second Age begins in a tough, ambiguous place, given the weird feelings for Elves who’d chosen to remain in Middle-earth (despite being offered forgiveness and a pathway back to the blessed realm) and for humans (“Men” in Tolkien’s parlance) who’d been in Morgoth’s service in the First Age. But I can add to that now the bad feelings of basically everybody else in Middle-earth: Tolkien’s take on Numenor in the Akallabeth is that the Numenoreans are jealous of the Elves, given that even those members of the Eldar who rebelled have been given the chance to head back to immortal happiness near Valinor. It doesn’t seem fair to folks in Numenor, who resent the “doom” of humans to die and move on to some other place. And Sauron, who in the Silmarillion is much more clearly a big player in the First Age, kicks the Second Age off as, of all things, a repentant sinner, begging forgiveness of the angelic emissary Eonwe who’s settling things after Morgoth’s defeat. Tolkien presents Sauron as plausibly actually sorry (or at least hopeful of some leniency), but when Eonwe says, “look, guy, you and I are both at the same pay-grade here, I can’t clear you, you’ve got to go to Valinor and deal directly with the Valar,” Sauron doesn’t want to face Middle-earth’s archangels, and runs away. In hiding, he starts to get fired up for evil again, with the interesting distinction in the text that he “hates” the Elves, but he “fears” Numenor. It’s the Second Age, folks, and everybody’s got baggage. Except maybe the Dwarves?
The bad vibes here lead to sort of a perfect storm – Numenor grows increasingly suspicious of the outside world, and instead of sailing east with gifts for those they find back in Middle-earth, they start to treat the coastal human settlements as opportunities for plunder. Sauron’s conversion is almost the opposite of this in shifting from being domineering in the First Age to being a (treacherous) gift-giver: he takes on a pleasing form, and presents himself as Annatar, which literally means “Lord of Gifts”, ready to help others. He can make inroads into some of these human kingdoms (since they aren’t getting much support from Numenor anymore) but his big hope is to corrupt the Elves, given how powerful he knows them to be. And ultimately, though “Annatar” is not trusted by Gil-galad or Elrond (who don’t know his real identity, but can smell a rat from a mile away), he persuades the elves of Eregion (as we know) to work with him…but here we learn how he does it. Annatar tells the Elves that he, like them, just wants to make Middle-earth beautiful and happy – that if they’re choosing not to go back to Valinor, it must be because they agree with him that they can make Valinor right here in Middle-earth. He’s turning them away from the path to reconciling with the Valar, and towards a vision of creating a rival Heaven, essentially.
And Sauron’s power is truly vast here – we never really grapple with it in The Lord of the Rings, but here Tolkien makes it clear that the moment Sauron put the Ring on, he could see into (and maybe wield influence over?) literally every Elvish ringbearer, and there were dozens of them wearing rings of minor as well as major magical strength. The Elves all hastily removed their rings and couldn’t use them at all while he wielded his: even the Three Elven Rings that we know from the rhyme couldn’t be used, and were hidden until after Sauron’s defeat at the end of the Second Age. The timeline here is a little unexpected, too, if you’re only familiar with the LOTR rhyme: the Dwarf and Men ring distribution scheme happens AFTER Sauron puts on the One Ring and alienates the Elves. So, whatever the state of Dwarf-Elf relations was in Middle-earth at the time, it apparently wasn’t good enough for seven Dwarven rulers to get a message from their Elvish neighbors saying “hey, seriously, dude, return any packages from Annatar unopened” (or else they got such messages and ignored them). Tolkien specifies very little about who gets these rings – we don’t know the identities of six of the seven Dwarven kings, for example, or any of the humans, other than that it can’t be the King or Queen of Numenor, given what we know about that line and its destiny.
All this Sauron drama, though, is a Middle-earth problem, very distinct from Numenor, which is handling its own internal conflict between “The King’s Men” who want to break the rules, sail west, and demand/claim immortality, and the Elendili (the “Faithful”) who want to continue to follow the Valar’s rules. The narrator adds, though, that all of them feared death, even the Elendili, so that really Numenor’s great tragic flaw is, perhaps strangely, an inability to accept mortality. I wonder how this can play out in a television series, but I’m looking forward to them trying to (we already have cast members in interviews referencing “The King’s Men” so whatever Amazon’s deal is vis-a-vis The Silmarillion, they’re fine using that term apparently). Anyway, there’s a lot of ocean traffic in the middle of the Second Age: Elendili are being harassed into emigration, with the kings allowing them to buy one-way tickets to Lindon out of the hopes that ridding all ties with the Elves will keep Numenorean plans safe from “the Spies of the Valar”. Meanwhile, Sauron, having survived an initial defeat in fighting the Elves, continues to grow his kingdom out of Mordor – he still wears that mask of wisdom and beauty with humans that he used to trick the Elves, bewitching them into trusting him and then dominating them as a ruler. He raises increasingly terrifying orc armies, and the Elves go through “the Days of Flight” with ship after ship leaving Lindon for Valinor.
That whole Ar-Pharazon-sails-against-Mordor and Sauron-surrenders-but-undermines-Numenor arc from the Appendices is here in greater detail, and it’s increasingly clear that Sauron’s surrender to Ar-Pharazon is partly out of fear of Numenor’s strength, but more than that it’s a Brer Rabbit “oh please don’t take me back to Numenor and listen to all my ideas about the Valar” move, where Sauron realizes the one way to destroy his enemy in Numenor is by luring them into fighting the Valar and crushing themselves in the process. This version’s a lot darker than the Appendices, too – Sauron comes across more as a false prophet, creating a sort of “Melkor, Lord of Darkness” tent revival in the capitol, and increasingly issuing his own orders as someone whose word is 100% trusted by the king. Elendil’s family realizes that Sauron means to ruin everything, and so Isildur sneaks into the palace and steals the fruit of Nimloth, the White Tree descended from the Two Trees that once lit the world. Sauron, who had forbidden anybody to get near Nimloth, uses the situation as an excuse to cut down the tree and burn it in connection with blood sacrifices, as Numenor becomes effectively taken over by his cult. And then Numenor falls, again as we’ve seen in the Appendices, though again there’s a lot more interesting detail here – Elendil’s father, for instance, Amandil, is such a close friend of the Elves that he believes he can do what his distant ancestor Earendil did, and sail West to plead for aid from the Eldar and from the Valar themselves. He goes and never returns – we don’t know what happened there, other than the narrator’s comment that the Valar must have decided that one big bailout should have been enough (it’s always hard to get voters to pass a second levy in rapid succession).
Lastly, and maybe most fun for those of us really familiar with the events and places of the Lord of the Rings, we get a lot more about Elendil and his sons arriving in Middle-earth, having escaped the cataclysm that destroyed Numenor. The maelstrom drives them apart, so that Elendil is shipwrecked in Lindon and forges a close relationship with Gil-galad there before establishing the Kingdom of Arnor (capital in Annuminas), while Isildur and his brother Anarion find themselves driven south to the mouth of the River Anduin (on which a big chunk of the Fellowship’s journey took place). The brothers sail upriver, and settle themselves in a kingdom of their own, which they call Gondor – they build a great capital on the banks of the river called Osgiliath (movie watchers, this is the ruined city where Frodo nearly gives the ring to a Nazgul, and where Samwise makes his speech at the end of the Two Towers about there being good in the world worth fighting for). Each brother builds his own city in either direction. Isildur goes to the east, Minas Ithil, which in LOTR era is Minas Morgul, a city conquered by Sauron from which the armies of Mordor emerge under the command of the Witch-King of Angmar. Anarion goes to the west, Minas Anor, which in LOTR era we know as Minas Tirith, about which I hardly need say anything else. And the brothers are extraordinarily effective as co-kings – they head upriver further and build the Argonath (the gargantuan statues on either side of the river that Aragorn comments on as the Fellowship passed through), and even as far west towards their dad’s realm as the Gap of Rohan, where they build the Pinnacle of Orthanc at Isengard, the tower which in LOTR era is Saruman’s seat of power. Pretty cool stuff, eh? And I’m not done with these little details yet – Isildur and Anarion had carried with them that seed of Nimloth that will eventually yield the line of white trees that serve as Gondor’s emblem. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/File:Ted_Nasmith_-_The_White_Tree.jpg And also with them are seven seeing stones, powerful magic items that help the user see great distances – gifts from Elvish craftsmen to their grandfather known as the palantiri. You all remember the palantir possessed by Saruman that Pippin looks into (and later Aragorn), and Denethor had one of his own in the books (though not the films). Well, here Tolkien clarifies that three of the seven stones are sent to their dad (one of which is placed at Amon Sul, the ruin called Weathertop in the LOTR era where Frodo is stabbed by a Nazgul), while the sons divide the other four up, three in their cities by the Anduin, and the fourth at Orthanc (where, presumably, it will fall into Saruman’s hands somehow).
And lastly, we get more details about the final conflict of the Second Age – Sauron surviving the fall of Numenor but only able to take a terrifying shape now, and not the fair form of Annatar. Orodruin bursting into smoke and flame at his return, leading the people of Gondor to call it “Mount Doom”. Sauron seizes Minas Ithil and destroys the White Tree (though, once again, Isildur gets away with a seedling – thank goodness these Numenoreans were good gardeners, that tree would be as dead as a potted basil in my hands within six weeks). A huge battle is joined at Dagorlad, where so many die on both sides that their ruined forms still lie there, millennia later, to horrify Frodo and Sam as Gollum leads them through what remains of the battlefield (which by then has become a swamp known as the Dead Marshes). The narrator comments that every race in Middle-earth has folk fighting on both sides other than the Elves (raising the question, were there hobbits there really? And a second question: wait, EVIL hobbits?), although noting that few dwarves fight on either side other than the warriors led by Durin of Moria, who had answered Gil-galad’s summons. Dagorlad’s a victory for the good guys, who win, march on Mordor, and lay siege to Barad-dur…many die (including Gil-galad, Elendil, and Anarion) but as we all know, ultimately Sauron’s defeated and Isildur claims the Ring for himself, ending the Second Age.
What new thematic work can we do here, in addition to working with some of these new story details? Well, now that we know a lot more about Sauron’s situation here, there’s clearly some resonance with some themes in LOTR about how “all that glitters is not gold” and the conversation about how Strider doesn’t look “fair” or feel “foul”, unlike a servant of the enemy. Annatar gives us a lot of chances to work with impressions – what impresses the people Sauron’s trying to trick? Could we see different forms or qualities of Annatar in different situations, even? And what can the story do to add to that – I might look for chances to make The King’s Men in Numenor obsessed with aesthetics and beauty, and to have the Elendili be a bit rougher around the edges. Maybe some similar work within either Elf or Dwarf society, though I don’t see as natural an opportunity there.
We also have more to work with here in service of talking about how easy it is for power to be undermined and turned to evil ends – the Elves made a bunch of magic rings to ostensibly do good in the world and they all became sources of danger the moment Sauron put on the One Ring. Numenor raised a military power so terrifying it defeated and subdued Sauron…and all it did was persuade themselves that they could fight the angelic powers of Valinor themselves. There’s less clear messaging yet about the Dwarves and the non-Numenoreans, but their leaders were bewitchable by Annatar, and I have to believe similar stories could be told about them. We’re not ready for the story of the small overthrowing the mighty that LOTR will tell – at least, I think we have to leave that aside. But I think we do have to tell some element of that story – or else really engage with the fragility of the great and powerful – since ultimately we need an explanation for why Elrond and Galadriel (and the few other survivors of the Second Age) recognize the wisdom of the plan they ultimately push forward at the end of the Third Age. They’re not persuaded for a second that all we need is another “really big army”, let alone the use of some magical artifact. They know how treacherous that kind of strength can be.
I think there must be a minor element here too of the difference between facing evil and fleeing it – many of the Eldar leave Lindon and run from Sauron, which is maybe good for them but isn’t good for the effort to stop him later when Gil-galad is going to need an army. We know the Dwarves shut themselves into Moria (though we’re not clear about when, how long, or what specifically prompted them) – eventually the Dwarves of Moria show up at Dagorlad, but I do wonder what the ups and downs of that tale could be. But is flight always a bad thing? Had Elendil and his sons openly opposed Sauron in Numenor, they’d be dead – instead, they flee, and are the only reason there’s an organized opposition to Sauron in the first place. (Oooh, though, Isildur keeping the Ring is maybe a bad piece of evidence for “thank goodness Elendil’s kids were around”.) I think that tension between hiding/running away and knowing when to stand your ground has a lot of potential for a series like the one Amazon’s making (though who knows if they’ll explore it).
This is also a stretch where the idea of “faith” is more explicitly important than we generally saw in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron here is not just a big terrifying power, but a fallen angel trying to raise the worship of his dark master again. There’s a lot to examine about Sauron’s time in Numenor, but surely some of it has to help us understand why that people were so susceptible to something as seemingly shocking and brutal as human sacrifice. And the nature of faith for the “good guys” is interesting here just because it doesn’t fit neatly into a religious narrative – the Valar are good, sure, but they’re not coming to help this time. They’ll welcome the Eldar who are making a permanent voyage out of Middle-earth but whatever Amandil asked for, he didn’t get it. Does this become a commentary on the dangers of believing too much in a miraculous faith, one that promises interventions in the world? Or is it a reminder that the Valar’s religion is much more about finding harmony together (to cite a little of the Ainulindale) – that just as the archangelic orders sang the universe into being together, these free peoples of Middle-earth, Elf and Dwarf and Human (and maybe more besides), will need to create their own good world together, and that’s what we see in the overlapping of those powers as the age draws to a close? I’m more persuaded by the latter, but I think there’s more to reflect on here.
If any of this was appealing to you, I have to say, I’m only scratching the surface of these accounts of the Second Age – if The Silmarillion is on your shelf (or accessible at the library), I really encourage you to pick it up and use the Table of Contents to go straight to the Akallabeth (the other bits are there for you whenever you’re ready). You’ll catch on some details here that I am not dwelling on, and maybe find some things you want to call to my attention (which I welcome!). Today we didn’t learn much that really contradicts what we get in The Lord of the Rings' Appendices (and other bits and pieces) – it’s more an expansion of that account, which is great. But soon I’ll be back, and as I progress, you’ll encounter a wider range of ideas (at least sometimes overlapping/contradicting) than these details that Tolkien seems to have finally settled on at the end of his life – hopefully it’ll be fun!