"Why don't you sing, little bird
The way you used to sing before?"
"Ah, but how may I warble?
How did I warble before?
They have cut my little wings,
They took our beloved city.
They took our city and Hagia Sophia from us.
The Holy Mother of God weeps bitterly."
—A Lament for Constantinople, by Nektaria Karantzi
On May 29, 1453, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Turks after a 53-day siege. The greatest city in Christendom, the capital of Constantine and Theodosius, of Justinian and Heraclius, of Basil the Bulgar-slayer and Alexios Komnenos, which for over a thousand years had only once before been stormed by an enemy army, was lost as the mighty Theodosian Walls were breached by the grandfather of the siege artillery that J.R.R. Tolkien would be well acquainted with from the Battle of the Somme. Some historians trace the end of the Middle Ages to this date; all acknowledge that the last memory of Rome, the unquestioned security of walled cities, and easy hopes for the reunion of Latin and Eastern Christianity ended on that day. Although the Turks would go on to make Constantinople once again the heart of a great new empire and civilization in their turn, the city’s loss is still a wound that, for the psyche of Eastern Christians both Catholic and Orthodox, hasn’t fully healed even 570 years later. As can be seen by the haunting beauty of Nektaria Karantzi’s lament for Constantinople, quoted above and provided below:
Many peoples of Middle-earth would experience a similar wrenching sense of loss. We only need to listen to Gimli sadly chanting of the past glory of Khazad-Dum as the Fellowship picks its way through the long dark of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring. We can see how in the pilot of Season 1 of The Rings of Power, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) can show us how much she misses the holy light of Valinor with just her expressive blue eyes. We read in The Two Towers how Faramir and his fellow Rangers, just before their evening meal, face to the West in a moment of silence in lieu of saying grace. And we can see in the Extended Edition of The Return of the King how Faramir (David Wenham) justifies carrying out an almost suicidal order from his father thusly: “This is the city of the Men of Numenor. I would gladly give my life to defend her beauty, her memory, her wisdom.” It is the last of these psychological and emotional wounds that The Fall of Numenor, one of the most recent releases of the writings of Tolkien, can help us to more fully understand in a way that hasn’t been possible before.
In a way, telling the story of Numenor and its downfall served as a psychological release for Tolkien as well. In 1964 he wrote a letter to Christopher Bretherton where he discussed a dream that had troubled him constantly in his childhood. “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.” Eventually in 1936 an opportunity for “exorcism” as Brian Sibley, the scholar responsible for this compendium, puts it in the Introduction. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis challenged each other to write about time travel and space travel respectively; while Lewis succeeded with the Space Trilogy, Tolkien was less successful. Two different attempts were made to tell a story where a time-traveller from England ends up in an event similar to both the legend of Atlantis and the account of the Flood from Genesis were begun, but fizzled out after the first draft. But peace would eventually come, when Tolkien gave to Faramir in The Return of the King a version of his own childhood. Thus his “time-travel” stories no longer needed to stand alone, but rather could form part of his mighty saga of Middle-earth.
One thing should be made clear up front. If anyone has read the Akallabeth (the chapter of The Silmarillion that provides a summary of the history of Numenor), the section of Unfinished Tales that deals with the Second Age (two essays on Numenor’s geography and royal line, the story of Aldarion and Erendis, and “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”), relevant sections of The History of Middle-earth and Carl Hotstetter’s recent compendium The Nature of Middle-earth, and Tolkien’s letters, none of the written material present in this book will be new. And in his reverence for Tolkien’s writings and Christopher’s hard work editing them, Sibley even has refrained from offering his own commentary. So one may well ask: what purpose, exactly, does this new book serve? Aside from the Tolkien Estate capitalizing on the release of The Rings of Power, which is more of an unintended side-effect; Sibley certainly hadn’t planned it to be a tie-in for the show, and indeed legally the show can’t explicitly use the majority of the materials found within these pages.
Well, despite this caveat, the book is still of great worth. For one thing…not everyone has yet had the chance to read all of the materials that I’ve mentioned above. Starting with yours truly. Aside from brief surgical strikes into History and Nature and somewhat more extended visits to the Letters, I’ve currently only read the Trilogy, The Hobbit, the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien. So the story of Aldarion and Erendis, the description of the natural life of Numenor, the first account of how the Numenoreans first met the “Low Men” of Middle-earth, and other elements of the Second Age might not be familiar to more casual Tolkien fans. And even more dedicated Tolkien readers will doubtless be grateful for having all this information in one dedicated volume, in a similar fashion to how Christopher’s compilations of Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin assemble in single volumes all the material related to these tales. And beautifully illustrated too; veteran Tolkien artist Allan Lee has once again returned to the fray, providing numerous full color and black-and-white illustrations. Moreover, The Fall of Numenor is structured along the lines of “The Tale of Years” found in Appendix B, with for the most part each “chapter” being a year and its corresponding entry. Not only that, but the chronological list of the Kings of Numenor from Unfinished Tales is fitted in, so we are able to see the Kings in their historical context. And even though the selections from Tolkien’s earliest writings are too different tonally to fit cleanly into the narrative, Sibley has still included them in the form of a meaty Appendix, and we are richer for it, for here we get a look at both Elendil in more detail than ever before, but also at Tolkien’s philosophy regarding modern technology.
I’d like to return to a word I mentioned earlier: Context. That’s probably the greatest gift that this book has to offer. Being able to see the scattered elements of the Second Age in one chronological volume allows us to gain a fuller picture of this period of history, how various events relate to each other, and how various attributes of both races and individual characters have a bearing on future events.
Being told that Elrond the loremaster and historians of Gondor remember Numenor as a paradise is one thing, but actually seeing how it’s a Promised Land is truly special. This is a land where the bears love honey, are welcomed as neighbors into the homes of men, and will even invite them to their dances (although it is very important that you not clap or laugh or make any other loud noises). Here the squirrels are special friends of the fair maidens of the land and will frequently live with them as pets, the foxes are highly esteemed for helping to keep the rabbit population under control, and there is an almost mystical connection between the Numenoreans and their horses. Here we can see a direct correlation between an absence of sharks in the waters around Numenor and the prowess of the Men as both swimmers and sailors. We have been told before of their skills in sailing, medicine, farming, building and craftsmanship, and how they were revered by the Low Men for teaching them; but here we learn just how it was possible, thanks to their long friendship with the Elves, their own love of learning, and their gift of long life that they had specifically asked of the Valar so they could learn more. Numenor as the Garden of Eden mixed with Constantinople in her glory truly comes to life, which makes her apostasy and eventual downfall all the more tragic.
But we’re not just given a taste of Numenor in her Golden Age; thanks to the events that are recounted here, we can see a clear line for how she would eventually fall. When the Numenoreans, coming to teach and comfort the men of Middle-earth, experience gold and silver and jewels in quantities unknown to them on their island, we can see the seeds of their coming as imperialists to take these precious metals by force. When King Tar-Minastir sends his huge army and fleet to rescue Gil-galad from a resurgent Sauron, the resulting battles and prolonged exposure to the Elves awakens the Numenoreans’ jealousy of Elvish immortality, their dreams of exploitation and empire, and their lust for war for its own sake. We already know from the Akallabeth that the Valar sent dark clouds in the shape of eagles in a last attempt to warn Pharazon against launching his assault on Valinor, but the new knowledge that a pair of eagles used to live as guests in the palace at Armenelos, and stood vigil over the holy mountain Meneltarma, makes this particular piece of psychological warfare all the more tragic.
Perhaps nowhere can the seeds of future tragedy be seen so tangibly as in the tragic story of Aldarion and Erendis’s doomed romance. On the face of it, is a pretty self-contained story; but setting it in context of the story of Numenor makes it a sort of microcosm of Numenor’s decline. Aldarion tries to find fulfillment in cosplaying as Prince Henry the Navigator, and wins glory for himself and Numenor in so doing, but he can never find peace; the later Numenoreans also struggled to find peace, and they lacked his friendship with Gil-galad and reverence for the Valar. Here we can see just how Aldarion and Erendis, in their anger towards each other and their selfishness, used their poor daughter Ancalime as a weapon against each other, in stark contrast to how the early Numenoreans wouldn’t even marry if they thought they might harm prospective children. In a gesture of defiance towards her father, Ancalime when she ascends to the throne deliberately lets the alliance with the Elves fade, facilitating both Sauron’s initial success in the War and the need for Numenor to militarize beyond the point of no return. Meanwhile Aldarion, in a fit of anger, changes the laws of Numenor so that nobody of the House of Elros can marry anyone whose blood isn’t as pure as their own. With such racism present even in Numenor’s time of joy, and to their own people, is it really surprising that their later wars and conquest of the men of Middle-earth also included racism and genocide?
And not just for the Numenoreans. While they are the main characters in this story, they have to share Middle-earth with others, and seeing how and why they in turn behave the way they do is equally helpful. In one of the biggest surprises of the book, all the material given about Sauron presents, perhaps not a rehabilitation, but a startling shade of gray to a character who in the Trilogy and the Silmarillion is just a lesser evil than Morgoth. Here by contrast is a character who, at the end of the War of Wrath, seriously considered repentance and seeking absolution, and who ultimately chose not to more out shame and fear than a desire to succeed Morgoth. That would come later, of course, but even then the road wasn’t straight. For Sauron never did achieve quite the same levels of nihilistic darkness that his master was capable of, and actually began his second career from rather commendable motives, a love of order and distaste for chaos. His sin was eventually allowing these motives to become the ends in themselves, and in his pride believing that he alone could do what needed to be done. Elrond would later speak truly when at the Council of Elrond he would say “Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.” And the Elf whom he would fall the hardest for his lies, Celebrimbor? The discussion that occurs in the beginning of the book that explains the motivations for the Elves remaining in Middle-earth is immensely valuable to understanding how he could be seduced by Sauron.
The book isn’t perfect, of course. For one thing, there’s no map of Numenor itself, except for a fairly bland and general one on page 12. It’s serviceable, showing Numenor’s starlike shape, the location of the main cities and of the holy mountain Meneltarma, and the main regions. But “serviceable” is about it; there’s no terrain differentiators, no distinct geographical features except Meneltarma, and overall it’s very small. It’s a far cry from the much more detailed maps of Middle-earth that we have in the Trilogy, the wild lands of the north from The Hobbit, In addition, Sibley makes some baffling editorial decisions, such as placing the destruction of Khazad-Dum in the Second Age, nearly a thousand years before it actually happened. And he doesn’t really give a reason for this. Also, unlike Christopher he never does explain the relationship between contradictory events and retellings. This is most noticeable when both accounts of the founding of Eregion and the forging of the Rings of Power have to coexist without any attempt to bridge the gap, even though they are extremely different. In The Silmarillion Celebrimbor establishes the realm because the Dwarves have discovered Mithril, and is solely responsible for Sauron making his first successful overtures to the Elves; but in Unfinished Tales it is Galadriel who founds Eregion as a buffer against the dangers of the East, her interactions with Sauron are fraught even as she cannot see through his fair disguise, and he has to outmaneuver her politically using Celebrimbor, a mighty smith but of no royal pedigree. Similarly, a reference from History of Middle-earth where Miriel is enamored with Pharazon and willingly marries him has to coexist with the more traditional account where he marries her by force and through her usurps the crown; again, no attempt is provided by Sibley to explain the discrepancy.
There is of course, the elephant in the room. How does the book interact with Rings of Power? Does it strengthen it as Unfinished Tales does, or does it make the show suffer by comparison to the source material, as the actual Appendices weaken their corresponding scenes in The Hobbit trilogy? That’s…an interesting question. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, although personally I think it tends closer to the former.
On the one hand, we can only wonder what might have been if showrunners Adam Payne and Patrick McCay had been able to “legally” access more of the legendarium than just the Appendices, as opposed to the implicit references that do crop up. For instance, could the story have been set earlier in the Second Age? There is of course a limit to how far back the show could go, owing to the mortality of all the characters except Galadriel, Elrond, Gil-galad, Celebrimbor, Arondir, the Stranger, and Sauron; and this goes double when we consider just how much longer Numenoreans would have lived than Harfoots or humans like Bronwyn and Theo. But with a careful use of time jumps, and a willingness from both the show and the audience for half the cast to change each new season, could we perhaps have seen Numenor in her days of glory, in contrast to the show taking place in her twilight years? Perhaps Galadriel could have played a role in the story of Aldarion and Erendis; after all, we read that during his voyages, at one point Aldarion sailed up the Gwaethlo and met Galadriel while she was Lady of Eregion. Even within the restraints of the show’s existing setting, things could have been different. The political complications of Adunaic vs the Elvish languages could have been explored in more detail; after all, before he seized the throne the man we know as Pharazon was called Calion. Perhaps Arondir, instead of being a Silvan Elvish ranger, could have been a soldier of Numenor’s empire reaching inland from Pelargir. The Dancing Bears have excited the fandom far beyond their limited appearance in the text; were they to appear in the show, they would bring down the house. But alas, barring some new generosity from the Tolkien Estate, the best we can hope for is some bear-shaped decorations and heraldry.
But it’s not all bad news. For one thing, the book only comes to 296 pages including two Appendices and a healthy series of endnotes. That’s…rather thin considering that Second Age lasted for 3,441 years. And with the exception of Aldarion and Erendis and some specific moments in the Akallabeth, what we have is a lot of dates and dry chronological material that doesn’t lend itself to being straightforwardly adapted. So the show’s decision to include a lot of original material becomes far more defensible. We know this already, but this point bears repeating: there simply isn’t that much story for the show to adapt even if they had the rights to the full body of Tolkien’s lore. Even if, for example, Aldarion and Erendis (I hope you’ll understand, dear reader, why I keep bringing up this particular story) and their doomed romance had been a plotline, a whole lot of filler would have been needed to either carry it or to supplement other storylines. And just imagine if Morfydd’s Galadriel, proud, impetuous, driven and haunted, had featured. Her clashes with the very similar, but much less merciful and understanding, Erendis would have made her conflicts with Miriel in the show look like a church picnic; although perhaps in that case Galadriel’s detractors wouldn’t have turned their guns solely on her?
And even if the show can’t explicitly mention much of what happens that isn’t featured in the Appendices, a lot still shows up implicitly. Just as Unfinished Tales shows that Morfydd’s Galadriel is indeed faithful in spirit to Tolkien’s vision even if not in every detail, so does The Fall of Numenor show that Charlie Vickers’ Sauron, unquestionably evil but still coming from complex and gray motivations, is not something cooked up out of thin air. Nowhere is the Numenoreans’ love of horses that we see in the show, especially in the relationship between Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and his horse Berek, explicitly stated in the Appendices, but guess where it does feature. On first glance, names such as Kemen or Ontomo or Berek sound rather harsh and jarring for a race that learned its language from the Elves; yet the Adunaic names of characters we meet in Aldarion and Erendis such as Ibal and Soronto sound equally harsh and jarring, and yet they come straight from Tolkien’s pen. The idea that Numenor would have no regular soldiers aside from its Sea Guard and palace troops to go to Middle-earth when Miriel calls her banners takes some getting used to, but once we read how Numenor took five years from receiving Gil-galad’s final plea for help and finally sending an army, it becomes somewhat more understandable. And Miriel’s hesitancy to go to war for Galadriel has its precedent, in how King Meneldur’s response to Gil-galad’s letter was a great deal of angst and soul-searching about the wisdom of training his peaceful people for war. And after seeing the show and reading this book, one cannot help but notice how while Galadriel is treated with mockery and racist contempt by the court and people of Armenelos, the Elves were welcomed as honored guests to the wedding of Aldarion and Erendis hundreds of years before. It’s deeply tragic, and we can relate to Galadriel’s sorrow at the sundering of relations between her people and the Edain, and her determination to reawaken the faith of Miriel and Elendil not only to aid in her crusade, but for their own salvation as well.
When I first began this essay five (!) months ago, I had initially thought only of trying to reference the fall of Constantinople when writing about The Fall of Numenor, since in some ways The Rings of Power’s depiction of Armenelos and Numenorean culture and costume strongly evokes Byzantine society. But with time and exposure come insight, and I realized that the Lament that opens this essay is oddly fitting. For when the Elves came to the wedding of Aldarion and Erendis, they brought marvelous gifts for the newlyweds; Aldarion received a magnificent white sapling, and Erendis received two wonderful grey songbirds. When she asked how to keep them, the Elves responded “Let them fly and be free. For we have…named you, and they will stay wherever you dwell. They mate for life, and that is long. Maybe there will be many such birds to sing in the gardens of your children.” Alas, such is not to be. Six years later, Aldarion would set out on another voyage, promising to return in two years. Erendis’ birds tried to comfort her, but she was disconsolate and dismissed them, whereupon they flew into the West and never returned. Thus with the silence of the Birds of the Eldar, the story of Aldarion and Erendis turned from romance to tragedy, and things would be set in motion that would contribute to the Fall of Numenor. But thanks to being set in its historical context, we can see that the story goes on. And even as Numenor is lost forever centuries later, Elendil and the Faithful will survive, and will establish successor realms in Middle-earth where the memory of Westernesse will endure. While the text doesn’t specifically say that he sang upon washing ashore, perhaps he did. And Aragorn singing his vow when he becomes the heir of Numenor is a beautiful touch by the Peter Jackson films.