Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (i) Númenor

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A black, white, and dark blue striped header image with text reading Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (i) Númenor

Continuing with my miniseries on the Appendixes at the end of The Lord of the Rings, I came to the first part of the first section of the Appendix A, which focused on First and Second Age history of the Valar, Elves, Númenóreans, and magical objects. J.R.R. Tolkien packed an excessive amount of information into these six pages, which explained references found in the Prologue and dialogue portions of the books. I imagine scholars have written postgraduate papers on the subject, likely pairing these descriptions with additional material found in the Silmarillion and other prequels. To make this material manageable for a blog post, I will focus on how these people, places, and things relate to similar examples found in real-world mythology and folklore.

Three Jewels, Two Trees, One Greedy Valar

The large number of powerful rings floating around Middle-earth were not the first form of magic objects gone bad to be made in Arda, the Earth-like planet where Middle-earth was a continent. Before the rings were the Silmarilli, three magic jewels. The explanation is about to get a bit convoluted, so if you come to The Lord of the Rings via the movie, bless you, and please bear with me. These three jewels were crafted by Fëanor, one of the Eldar, meaning that his group of elves had migrated to Valinor before it was the land across the Sea. (Incidentally, Fëanor was also the creepy great-uncle of Galadriel. More on him will come later.) The early residents of Valinor were Valar, who parallel a mix between angels in Abrahamic religions and minor gods in Western paganism. The Two Trees, Telperion or Silver Tree and Laurelin or Gold Tree, gave light to Valinor. Fëanor used the light from the Two Trees to make his Three Jewels. One Valar called Morgoth the Enemy got greedy, stole the Three Jewels, destroyed the Two Trees, and went to live in his evil fortress in Middle-earth. Got all that?

As complex as this story sounds, most elements of the story fit neatly into tropes explained in the Motif-Index of Folk Literature, which I described in “Prologue, 4 Of the Finding of the Ring” and will use as a resource going forward because it is available for free online and not trapped behind a paywall. The Silmarilli are magic jewels (D1071) and incandescent jewels (D1645.1). Three is extensively used as a magic number in folklore (D1273.1.1). Like the Two Trees, objects often come in contrasting pairs like yin and yang, a concept found in Chinese philosophy. Additionally, heroes make the sun and moon from trees and send them alternately into the sky (A717), which happened to Telperion and Laurelin after they were destroyed. As for Valinor, many traditions have a home of the gods (A151) or a pagan otherworld identified with Christian paradise (F160.0.3).

Unions of Eldar and Edain

The elves of Valinor were immortal and fair, the Tolkienese term for incredibly beautiful according to the beauty standards of Arda. However, elf-maidens apparently found certain Edain, or Men of the West, more attractive than their elf counterparts. This was recorded three times — there is magic number three again — and each of these marriages was a big deal. The first pair was Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren of the First House of the Edain. Lúthien herself had what early 21st century people call biracial ancestry; both she and her mother fit the motif of goddesses in love with men or lesser beings (A188), while Lúthien also matches the motif of a god enamored of mortal (T91.3.3).

Her mother, Melian, was “of the people of the Valar”, while her father, King Thingol Grey-Cloak of Doriath, was an Eldar. The phrasing to describe Melian’s heritage is interesting. Her race is not named, and her identity is marked solely as belonging to another race. Elsewhere, Tolkien calls her people “the Maiar”, a race of beings created to serve the Valar and belonging to them. Reading this through the lens of post-colonial theory, the relationship between Maiar and Valar was literally chattel race-based slavery, where the enslaved people of one race existed as lifelong property of the enslavers from another race. This was the same institution used in the Transatlantic trade, especially in the United States. While relationships between Maiar and Valar were frequently seen as positive, this did not change the status of the Maiar from second-class immortals even when not kept under the power of a Valar.

Melian was not alone; Maiar proliferated in the Silmarillion, while the other Maiar appearing in The Lord of the Rings include Gandalf, Radagast, Saruman, and Sauron. As a side note, Gandalf evidently thought of other Maiar as his cousins, as he called Radagast his cousin in The Hobbit (“Chapter VII: Queer Lodgings”, 119). If used literally, this would make Lúthien his first cousin once removed. Equally likely was the figurative use, as many real-world peoples affected by colonialism and enslavement call members of their own group by familial terms.

Some readers would question whether Tolkien could possibly have had such an interpretation in mind, particularly when some of his descriptions of nonwhite-coded characters left something to be desired. While Tolkien may not have been anti-colonial by modern standards — and as an upper middle class white man living in the 1950s, the only exposure he would have received to these narratives would be through actively seeking them far outside his daily life — his ambiguity allows for readings of his text that support these theories.

Back to the appendix, for the next generation of elves, Idril Celebrindal daughter of King Turgon of Gondolin married Tuor from the Third House of the Edain. Their son Eärendil the Mariner married Elwing granddaughter of Lúthien and Beren, and the couple had twins Elrond and Elros. Here appears another motif: twin gods where one is mortal and the other immortal (A116.1). Elrond chose immortality and lived among the Eldar. Elrond’s children likewise were forced to choose, and all were implied to have chosen mortality. Elros chose mortality and lived among the Edain until his death. He became King Tar-Minyatur and ruled the land of Númenor, where mortals lived three times as long as other Men. Besides recognizing another appearance of the magic number three, put a pin in that mention of longevity; this will be important thousands of years later within the timeline of Middle-earth. This entire continent was a gift from the Valar with only one rule: stay here and do not go to the Undying Lands, another name for Valinor.

Trickster God and Greedy Kings

Naturally, this Ban on Valinor vacations aligns with a set of motifs: the one forbidden place (C610), forbidden direction: west (C614.1.3), and forbidden country (C617). With a rule so specific, much like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2), the reader knows it will inevitably be broken. As the line of Númenórean kings and queens proceeded over hundreds of years, the descendants fell away from their roots and began persecuting “The Faithful”, a group of Númenóreans who continued to speak the elvish language Eldarin and remember their heritage.

One thing these rulers did get right was disregarding gender when determining who inherited the throne. While giving the scepter to the most qualified child would have been a better decision, Tolkien had his fictional prehistoric civilization replace male-preference primogeniture inheritance with absolute primogeniture inheritance when he published in 1955, fifty-eight years before the Succession to the Crown Act (2013) in Great Britain. Tolkien was likely inspired by Act of Succession (1953) in Denmark, which guaranteed his friend and illustrator Princess Margarethe as heir to the throne, since the act declared that a king with no sons would be followed by his daughter, rather than a younger brother. The act was updated in 2009 so a princess would not be displaced by younger brothers in the line for the throne.

The last of these increasingly cruel and greedy kings was Ar-Adunakhor, whose regal name meant “Lord of the West”, an insult to the Valar. This king challenged Sauron with his navy, and Sauron cleverly surrendered. While imprisoned for a time (A173.2), Sauron ultimately tricked (A177.1) the Númenóreans by telling them to sail west and break the Ban. The Valar called on the One, the creator of Arda who had many names. Tolkien called him the Great Writer in interviews and letters, while the Silmarillion refers to him as Iluvatar, and he may speak to Frodo as the Voice in the final chapter of Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Breaking of the Fellowship” (451). At this time, the One caused a massive flood (A1015) as a punishment for breaking the Ban (A1018), permanently drowning Númenor like the lost city of Atlantis. In some branches of the Legendarium, this is when Arda became a round planet instead of a flat world.

Not all Númenóreans drowned in the flood. Like other flood myths, as first mentioned in “Perspectives on the Sea”, the Faithful survived the flood. Led by Elendil and his sons, the survivors left for Middle earth with nine ships, seven “seeing-stones” later called the Palantíri, and a seedling of Nimloth. In a book filled with trees, this was an extra special tree. According to the Silmarillion, the mother of Nimloth was Galathilion, who was created to look exactly like the Silver Tree Telperion minus its glow. Galathilion appeared on the Door to Moria, also known as Khazad-dûm, and its last known descendent was planted by Elassar II, born Aragorn son of Arathorn. You will never get anywhere in Arda without running into magic things related to other magic things, each of which have several names.

The objects of this journey each align with multiple motifs. The extraordinary boats (F841) were a magical nine in number (D1273.1.3.1) matching the “Nine [rings] for mortal men doomed to die”. The seeing-stones seemed similar to the crystal balls condemned by the medieval church but beloved by the Victorians, and they come in a magical set of seven. Finally, the seedling of Nimloth was a marvelous tree that survived a deluge (A1029) causing paradise to be lost (A1331) for the residents of Middle-earth and creating an overseas otherworld in the west (A692.1) accessible only to Elves and mortals permitted entry by the Valar.

Sauron died during the incident but did not stay dead for long, being one of a handful of Tolkien characters who apparently has received unlimited get-out-of-death-free cards, another seemingly being Frodo Baggins. As a deity reincarnated (A179.5), Sauron came back ugly and mad, hanging out in Mordor not far from his favorite volcano, Oroduin, also known as Mount Doom or Amon Amarth. Volcanoes were not popular in the Motif Index, since the only Western volcano god was the Greek smith Hephaestus or Hephaistos, called Vulcan in Latin. This type of god appears more frequently in mythologies associated with Pacific cultures due to the Ring of Fire, the many volcanoes caused by the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates. However, the death by deluge and rebirth near a volcano may reference two of the classical elements, water and fire (A654). These elements will continue to appear throughout the text, and therefore throughout my essays.

By the end of the section, Gil-Galad the High King of the Ñoldor elves — a group of the Eldar — formed the Last Alliance with Isildur son of Elendil and King of the Númenóreans. Together, the two armies overthrew Sauron, and Isildur took the One Ring, ending the Second Age. This set the stage for the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which mainly took place near the end of the Third Age.

Conclusion

Many of Tolkien’s concepts are not new. In fact, they are ancient, predating written stories and passed along through oral storytelling. Tolkien’s skill as a storyteller came in part from his ability to study the motifs of mythology and synthesize them into an original narrative. The stories feel familiar to frequent readers of folklore, as if this history fits alongside the tales of Germanic and Gothic pagan cultures after Christianization, the flavor of sanitized Greco-Roman myths told in the Victorian Era, and hints of Celtic stories recovered during the Celtic Revival. While these motifs act as a shorthand to imply an underlying darkness to the text, they also allow for surface level abstraction, allowing readers to study the work like a textbook or provide a detached interpretation mostly appropriate for children.

Both the knowledge of these motifs and the information found in this first section of Appendix A are crucial to understanding the core of the narrative in the dialogue sections of the book, but I imagine many first time and one-time readers have run out of steam by the time they reach the end. To overcome Tolkien fatigue during the hypothetical animated musical, I would include this type of information in abstracted, artistic documentary style sequences narrated by primary characters. The nerds of the Fellowship are canonically overeager to share their culture, at least to Frodo, and an overview of the early history of Middle-earth would bring much needed clarity to the ancient people, places, things, and events mentioned during the dialogue portion of the books.


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