Númenor

In the elder works of Professor Tolkien lies the history of the downfall of the realm of Númenor. Númenor or Atalantië represents a translation of a potent warning from the cultural experiences and insights from our own Collective Unconscious into the annals of Arda. The subject matter of that warning is the cyclic nature of the zenith, downfall, aftermath, and remnant of civilisations.

Like our own world, the mythology and history of Middle Earth features a number of civilisations that fall from greatness to be replaced by another. Each realm never entirely disappears, but continues to exist in the shadow of its former glories. The great civilisations of the Elves of Valinor, Gondolin, Eregion and Lothlorien each represent a great culture that diminished through its own ignored or unnoticed weaknesses being exploited by the perverting influences of external aggressors or internal strife.

However Númenor, as a distinctly human civilisation, becomes prone to a weakness that characterises every human empire, both past and present. It overstretches itself in its will to dominate others. What begins as an idyllic land of freedom, beauty, justice and structure deteriorates firstly through its voyages and empire building amongst the men of Middle Earth. Although a benevolent venture, the wars that the men of Westernesse eventually engage themselves in  with the ‘Free Peoples’ of Middle earth against Sauron, bring the Dark Lord’s attention, hatred and eventually his presence to the land of Númenor.

Although Sauron was originally a captive and known enemy of the Men of the West, after many years in captivity the Kings of Númenor begin to forget the conditions through which he came to their land and place him in a position of trust. Eventually he becomes the sole advisor to the King and corrupts and perverts the traditions of the West, urging them to adopt corrupted religions and traditions not of their own, with his own glory and the fall of his enemies remaining his only motivation. The reason and wisdom of the deceitful, yet irresistibly charming Dark Lord leads to the West losing itself to something that is not of its essence. A remnant of faithful men are persecuted and eventually flee Númenor for Middle Earth shortly before it falls to the wrath of the Valar who become incensed by the Númenoreans attempts to assail Valinor - the very root of their once exquisite culture.

Westernesse falls to the sea, taking the deceived men of Númenor and the infidel Sauron to oblivion, though Sauron is able to shed his physical form and flee back to Mordor in the east. The remnant of Númenor survives in Middle Earth and establishes the Kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor, though they are only a shadow of Númenor in terms of greatness. Eventually Arnor falls to the Witchking of Angmar, the lord of the Nazgûl, and the largest parts of its land become inhabited only by the ruins of its past. Eventually the line of Kings fails in Gondor as the memory of its traditions begins to fail, and the blood of the remnant of the West becomes irrevocably tainted with that of lesser men. A single white tree and a broken sword remain the only surviving links of the old ways.

These links are maintained and re-forged with the coming of Elessar (Aragorn) to the throne of Gondor. His ties to the old blood and the ways of Númenor are as strong as they can be in the age in which he lives, as is displayed by his two hundred year life span. He reunites Gondor with the lost Kingdom of Arnor and establishes the Reunited Kingdom. Still however, the glories of the past cannot be wholly rescued. The age of men is established with the coming of Elessar and the passing of the Elves from Middle Earth. We know that these events, which are entirely due to the influence of Sauron as a corrupting force, will mark only the beginning of further cycles of degeneration and eventually, the emergence of the age in which we currently dwell.

Sauron, in this context, represents the forces that seek to destroy extant culture. He is the personification of both the natural forces of degeneration and the influence of corruptive external elements upon culture and tradition. He is a necessary component in the eternal cycle of creation and destruction. Unlike Sauron, our modern despotic politicians don’t have much charisma or any real ability to persuade. They are puppets dangling from the strings of economic, industrial and global forces. They are figureheads of facelessness. Were they able to show signs of creating traditions rather than dissolving pre-existent ones into a bubbling mess (commonly mislabelled the ‘melting pot’) then maybe we could identify with their aims more.

Without creation (or re-creation) in some tangible form we will live in dark and perilous times. Dissolution may be a necessity in the wheel of time but rebirth is equally important. When we live in a dark age such as this certain small groups of individuals will begin to act as the impetus for rebirth. My personal fear is that the wheel of time is becoming buckled by the increasing complexity of human society. Never before have so many oppositional forces been in action in the world at the same time. This makes achieving balance – a necessity in terms of Culture and Self – an increasingly precarious task.

We live in an age where civilisations overlap, and have been forced to do so at a rate faster than they could have hoped to cope with. The aim of multiculturalism is to absorb the overlapping aspects of each culture into a melded whole that is neither one thing nor the other. Although I do not condone segregation, I personally feel that different, and very often opposing, cultures should not be forced to assilimate with each other in order to establish a whole that is weaker than its constituent parts. To attempt to control cultures in this way removes a great deal of identity from the collective and personal psyches within them. The resulting dislocation explains many of the problems of modern Western society.

More offensive to me than multiculturalism are the attempts of one people to force their culture upon others. Whether this is the American expansion campaign that has been ongoing in cultural and military terms since the Second World War, proselytes of any persuasion, or the increasing broach of alien cultures into the West, it is abhorrent.

Tolkien’s work is overwhelmingly traditionalist and aims from every angle to recreate myth, naturalism and heroism as vital forces in the modern age. That his work has been so incredibly popular in bookshops and cinemas over the past half century proves that a need for those things is both lacking and desired within the psyches of many millions of people today.

In terms of achievement and progression, human civilisations have tended to be (eventually) replaced by greater civilisations rather than lesser ones. The fact that Tolkien demonstrates the opposite in his own mythos seems to suggest that he believes the cultural deterioration that occurs over time worsens the further away we get from the roots of our values. This pattern follows the Greek model of the ages that begin with the Golden Age and gradually deteriorates to the Age of Iron, and the Christian idea of the Fall. My own viewpoint here is that there was no definitive period of human grace, and that deterioration only occurs after each new revolution of the wheel of time rather than persistently deteriorating with each revolution. 

Like Jung, Tolkien expertly communicates the origin, subject matter and purpose of myth in his work (though in an entirely different way). However, in a world that ignores the inherent wisdom, deeper truth and knowledge of myth (both real and synthetic), and only sees such things as trinkets and curiosities of bygone times, we cannot expect the lessons of ancient and universal wisdom to be adhered to. In a materialist era such as ours, humanity has become unilaterally obsessed with soulless, objective readings of myth and folklore, thus reflecting how many have become disconnected from the ancient cultural contexts of the individual psyche. It is for reasons such as this that modern man feels alone, disconnected, nihilistic and purposeless. It takes the work of great men such as Dr Steven Flowers, Carl Jung and J. R. R. Tolkien to help us reconnect to the roots of our personal cultural identities. Without such identities on the individual or collective level the psyche only has an oblique, inconsistent, perverse and deceptive reference point to identify with. The modern world.

There are many aspects of the cycles of degeneration and re-emergence in Middle Earth - and any other mythology - that can be learned from in these times. As the existence of the shards of Narsíl and the White Tree of Gondor reveal, there is always some strand of the mighty past – no matter how thin – that can be picked up by the worthy, and used to build the foundation of a renewed link to old traditions.