4UT p. 223

  5Akallabêth, p. 269

  6UT, p. 223

  7Akallabêth, p. 269

  8Peoples, pp. 159–62. These three passages appear in a section that Christopher Tolkien titles, ‘Note on the marriage of Míriel and Pharazôn’ about which he comments that his father did ‘much work’ on this story but that the surviving manuscript is both ‘very rough’ and ‘extraordinarily difficult to decipher’. The name ‘Zimraphil’ in these passages has here been amended to its later version, ‘Zimraphel’. In a note on the reference to Amandil, he notes that his father had added, in the margin of the manuscript: ‘3rd in line from Eärendur and 18th from Valandil the First Lord of Andúnië’. The addition of the words [courage and] are taken from Peoples, p. 162.

  9These three passages incorporate material from Peoples, pp. 160–62 Bracketed words preceded by a question mark indicate words where Christopher Tolkien found difficulty in deciphering his father’s hasty handwriting. In another sentence on p. 161, Tolkien refers to Míriel not just being loved by Elentir, but to the couple being ‘betrothed’.

  10Akallabêth, p. 269

  11Akallabêth, pp. 269–70

  3255 – AR-PHARAZÔN THE GOLDEN SEIZES THE SCEPTRE

  1Akallabêth, p. 270. Further to p. 278 note 7 above, ‘three’ in the source text has been emended to ‘four’.

  2Appendix A, p. 1036

  3Peoples p. 160

  4Peoples, p. 162

  5Peoples, p. 160

  6Letters, No. 131, pp. 154–5. Tar-Calion is an early name for Ar-Pharazôn.

  3261 – AR-PHARAZÔN SETS SAIL AND LANDS AT UMBAR

  1Peoples, pp. 181–2

  2Lost Road, p. 26 §5

  3The phrase ‘gleaming with red gold’ is an amendment to that published in The Silmarillion ‘gleaming with red and gold’; this follows Christopher Tolkien’s correction in Peoples, p. 155 §41.

  4Akallabêth, pp. 270–1.

  5Peoples, p. 182

  3262 – SAURON IS TAKEN AS PRISONER TO NÚMENOR; 3262–3310 SAURON SEDUCES THE KING AND CORRUPTS THE NÚMENÓREANS

  1Rings, p. 290

  2Akallabêth, p. 271

  3Peoples, p. 182

  4Akallabêth, pp. 271–4

  5Peoples, p. 183

  6Akallabêth, pp. 274–5

  3310 – AR-PHARAZÔN BEGINS THE BUILDING OF THE GREAT ARMAMENT

  1Unless otherwise indicated the narrative which follows is from Akallabêth, pp. 275–81.

  2Peoples, p. 183

  3The phrase ‘there is no hope in Men’ is an amendment to the wording ‘no hope for Men’ as published in The Silmarillion; this follows Christopher Tolkien’s correction in Peoples, p. 156 §57

  3319 – AR-PHARAZÔN ASSAILS VALINOR. DOWNFALL OF NÚMENOR. ELENDIL AND HIS SONS ESCAPE

  1Unless otherwise indicated, the narrative which follows is from Akallabêth, pp. 277–82.

  2Peoples, p. 183. Christopher Tolkien notes, immediately following this: ‘No such statement is found elsewhere. In the Akallabêth (The Silmarillion p. 280), in a passage taken virtually without change from The Drowning of Anadûnê ([Sauron], p. 374, §52), there is no reference to any named region or river.’ He further adds (Peoples, p. 187 note 23): ‘This appears to be the sole reference in any text to Tolfalas, apart from a mention of its capture by Men of the South in an outline made in the course of the writing of The Two Towers ([The Treason of Isengard], p. 435). The isle and its name appeared already on the First Map of Middle-earth ([Treason] pp. 298, 308), but on all maps its extent appears much greater than in the description of it here.’

  3As noted elsewhere, other tellings of the Downfall and the reshaping of the world are to be found in Sauron Defeated Part Three: ‘The Drowning of Anadûnê’ (i)–(iv) and The Lost Road and Other Writings, ‘Part One: The Fall of Númenor and The Lost Road’ I ‘The Early History of the Legend’, and II ‘The Fall of Númenor’ (i)–(iv).

  In the latter volume (pp. 11–12), Christopher Tolkien includes what he refers to as ‘The text of the original “scheme” of the legend… written at such speed that here and there words cannot be certainly interpreted. Near the beginning it is interrupted by a very rough and hasty sketch, which shows a central globe, marked Ambar [‘the inhabited world’], with two circles around it; the inner area thus described is marked Ilmen [‘the region above the air where the stars are’] and the outer Vaiya [‘the sky’ or ‘the air enfolding the world’]. Across the top of Ambar and cutting through the zones of Ilmen and Vaiya is a straight line extending to the outer circle in both directions.’ It is most likely that this is Tolkien’s first diagrammatic attempt at depicting the concept of the World Made Round and the Straight Path.

  As Christopher Tolkien further notes: ‘…this remarkable text documents the beginning of the legend of Númenor, and the extension of “The Silmarillion” into a Second Age of the World.’

  The passage reads, in part, as follows:

  …The Atalanteans [Númenóreans] fall, and rebel… They build an armament and assail the shores of the Gods with thunder.

  The Gods therefore sundered Valinor from the earth, and an awful rift appeared down which the water poured and the armament of Atalantë [Númenor] was drowned. They globed the whole earth so that however far a man sailed he could never again reach the West, but came back to his starting-point. Thus new lands came into being beneath the Old World; and the East and West were bent back and [?water flowed all over the round] earth’s surface and there was a time of flood. But Atalantë being near the rift was utter[ly] thrown down and submerged. The remnant of… the Númenóreans in their ships flee East and land upon Middle-earth…

  The old line of the lands remained as a plain of air upon which only the Gods could walk, and the Eldar who faded as Men usurped the sun. But many of the Númenórië could see it or faintly see it; and tried to devise ships to sail on it. But they achieved only ships that would sail in Wilwa or lower air. Whereas the Plain of the Gods cut through and traversed Ilmen [in] which even birds cannot fly, save the eagles and hawks of Manwë. But the fleets of the Númenórië sailed round the world; and Men took them for gods. Some were content that this should be so.

  For further discussion on the physical formation of Middle-earth, as created and as changed following the cataclysms at the end of the First and Second Ages, see Christopher Tolkien’s The Shaping of Middle-earth (Volume IV of The History of Middle-earth).

  4Appendix A, p. 1037

  5The account in the Akallabêth of Númenor’s fall was the result of many earlier texts, the complexities of which are addressed at length, and can be referred to, in those volumes of The History of Middle-earth cited on p. 282 note 3. Included here, however, for comparison with the ‘Epilogue’, is an extract from ‘The Drowning of Anadûnê’ (Sauron pp. 392–3) that contains a notably different account of the way in which the exiles viewed the reshaping of the world that had taken place after the Fall.

  ‘For even after their ruin the hearts of the Adûnâim were still set westward; and though they knew that the world was changed, they said: “Avallôni is vanished from the Earth, and the Land of Gift is taken away, and in the world of this present darkness they cannot be found; yet once they were, and therefore they still are in true being and in the whole shape of the world.” And the Adûnâim held that men so blessed might look upon other times than those of the body’s life; and they longed ever to escape from the shadows of their exile and to see in some fashion the light that was of old. Therefore some among them would still search the empty seas, hoping to come upon the Lonely Isle, and there to see a vision of things that were.

  ‘But they found it not, and they said: “All the ways are bent that once were straight.” For in the youth of the world it was a hard saying to men that the Earth was not plain* as it seemed to be, and few even of the Faithful of Anadûnê had believed in their hearts this teaching; and when in after days, what by star-craft, what by the voyages of ships that sought out all the ways and waters of the Earth, the Kings of Men knew that the world was indeed round, then the belief arose among them that it had so been made only in the time of the great Downfall, and was not thus before. Therefore they thought that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the Earth went on towards heaven, as it were a mighty bridge invisible. And many were the rumours and tales among them concerning mariners and men forlorn upon the sea, who by some grace or fate had entered in upon the ancient way and seen the face of the world sink below them, and so had come to the Lonely Isle, or verily to the Land of Amân that was, and had looked upon the White Mountain, dreadful and beautiful, ere they died.’

  *[The word] plain is used in the lost sense ‘flat’; but cf. the later spelling plane of the same word, and the noun plain.

  6Letters, No. 131, p. 156. A few years later, in 1954, Tolkien wrote (Letters, No. 154, p. 197) about the transformation of the world from flat to round: ‘In the imagination of this story we are now living on a physically round Earth. But the whole “legendarium” contains a transition from a flat world (or at least an οἰκουμένη* with borders all about it) to a globe: an inevitable transition, I suppose, to a modern “myth-maker” with a mind subjected to the same “appearances” as ancient men, and partly fed on their myths, but taught that the Earth was round from the earliest years. So deep was the impression made by “astronomy” on me that I do not think I could deal with or imaginatively conceive a flat world, though a world of static Earth with a Sun going round it seems easier (to fancy if not to reason).’

  * ecumene or oecumene, an ancient Greek term for the known, inhabited, or habitable world.

  7Towers, Book Three XI ‘The Palantír’ p. 597. Referencing this rhyme, Christopher Tolkien notes elsewhere (Peoples, p. 157 §80): ‘All the texts [of the Akallabêth] have “Twelve ships there were: six for Elendil, and for Isildur four, and for Anárion two”, but on the amanuensis typescript C my father changed the numbers to “nine: four, three, two”, noting in the margin: “Nine, unless the rhyme in LR [The Lord of the Rings] is altered to Four times three.”’ The rhyme was not changed, and Christopher Tolkien appropriately emended the ‘Twelve ships’ to ‘Nine’ when editing The Silmarillion.

  8Return, Book Six, V ‘The Steward and the King’ p. 963. In this strikingly autobiographic passage, Tolkien gives to Faramir his own repeated experience of an ‘Atlantean dream’ in which a mighty wave descends upon a landscape, see ‘Introduction’ pp. xx–xxiii above.

  3320 – FOUNDATIONS OF THE REALMS IN EXILE: ARNOR AND GONDOR. THE STONES ARE DIVIDED. SAURON RETURNS TO MORDOR

  1Letters, No. 131, p. 156. In this letter, Tolkien wrote: ‘Elendil, a Noachian figure, who has held off from the rebellion, and kept ships manned and furnished off the east coast of Númenor, flees before the overwhelming storm of the wrath of the West, and is borne high upon the towering waves that bring ruin to the west of the Middle-earth. He and his folk are cast away as exiles upon the shores.’ ‘Noachian’ references the patriarch Noah, who appears in the Biblical story of the Deluge (Genesis 6:11–9:19), both being faithful to their beliefs and prepared for what might befall.

  2Appendix A, p. 1037

  3Return, Book Six, V ‘The Steward and the King’ p. 968

  4Accounts of these rulers will be found in The Lord of the Rings, Appendices A and B; and in The Peoples of Middle-earth, Part One: The Prologue and Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, VII ‘The Heirs of Elendil’ and IX ‘The Making of Appendix A’. The narrative that follows is from Rings, pp. 290–2.

  5Also among those heirlooms was the sceptre that, on Númenor, had been the symbol of office of the Lords of Andúnië, of which was later written [Appendix A, p. 1043 footnote]: ‘The silver rod of the Lords of Andúnie, and is now perhaps the most ancient work of Men’s hands preserved in Middle-earth.’

  The sceptre of Númenor having perished with Ar-Pharazôn in the Fall, it now became the Sceptre of Annúminas, signifying the authority of the line of Númenórean kings in Middle-earth. Many years later it was among the heirlooms in the safekeeping of Elrond in Imladris, as is written in ‘The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’ [Appendix A, (v) pp. 1057 ff.].

  6See p. 179

  7Rings, p. 292. By the Third Age, knowledge of the stones’ continued existence would have been limited to a very few. Saruman had one in his possession at Orthanc and Denethor, the last Steward of Gondor, had another in Minas Tirith, while Sauron’s all-seeing Eye observed activity on those stones using a third held in Barad-dûr. Although the Orthanc stone played a significant role in the War of the Ring, the ultimate fate of most of the Palantíri would have been unknown at the time of this text.

  8Towers, Book Three, XI “The Palantír’ pp. 597–8. For a history of the Seeing-stones, see UT, Part Four, III ‘The Palantíri’ pp. 403 ff.

  9Rings, p. 292

  10Rings, p. 290

  11Appendix A, p. 1037

  12Rings, pp. 292–3

  13Appendix A, p. 1037

  14Rings p. 293. Herumor and Fuinur were among the Númenóreans who, during Sauron’s sojourn on the island, sailed east to establish fortresses and dwellings along the coast of Middle-earth and whose will was already subject to Sauron’s influence. These so-called ‘Black Númenóreans’ may have been among those Men whom Sauron conscripted when he prepared to attack Gondor in SA 3429.

  3429 – SAURON ATTACKS GONDOR, TAKES MINAS ITHIL AND BURNS THE WHITE TREE. ISILDUR ESCAPES DOWN ANDUIN AND GOES TO ELENDIL IN THE NORTH. ANÁRION DEFENDS MINAS ANOR AND OSGILIATH

  1Rings p. 293

  2Fellowship, Book One, II ‘The Shadow of the Past’ p. 52

  3430 – THE LAST ALLIANCE OF ELVES AND MEN IS FORMED

  1Rings, p. 293

  2Fellowship, Book One, XI ‘A Knife in the Dark’, p. 186

  3431 – GIL-GALAD AND ELENDIL MARCH EAST TO IMLADRIS

  1Rings, p. 293. Thangorodrim was the site of the War of Wrath fought in the First Age by the Host of Valinor, the Eldar and Men of the Three Houses of the Edain against the forces of Morgoth. It was for the valour of the Edain in aiding in the overthrow and defeat of Morgoth that they were given Andor, ‘The Land of Gift’, on which to dwell and which Men later named Númenor. See The Silmarillion, Quenta Silmarillion, XXIV ‘Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath’ pp. 246 ff.

  2Fellowship, Book Two, II ‘The Council of Elrond’, p. 243

  3434 – THE HOST OF THE ALLIANCE CROSSES THE MISTY MOUNTAINS. BATTLE OF DAGORLAD AND DEFEAT OF SAURON. SIEGE OF BARAD-DÛR BEGINS

  1Letters, No. 144, p. 179; see also Towers, p. 476

  2Rings, pp. 293–4

  3Rings, p. 294

  4UT, Part Two IV ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’ p. 243

  5UT, Part Two IV, Appendix B ‘The Sindarin Princes of the Silvan Elves’ p. 258. Christopher Tolkien notes here: ‘Malgalad of Lórien occurs nowhere else, and is not said here to be the father of Amroth. On the other hand, Amdír father of Amroth is twice (UT, pp. 240 and 243) said to have been slain in the Battle of Dagorlad, and it seems therefore that Malgalad can be simply equated with Amdír. But which name replaced the other I cannot say.’

  6Towers, Book Four, II ‘The Passage of the Dead Marshes’, p. 628

  7Rings, p. 294

  8Fellowship, Book Two, II ‘The Council of Elrond’, p. 243

  9Rings, p. 294

  3440 – ANÁRION SLAIN

  1Rings, p. 294

  2Appendix A, p. 1043 footnote 1, which continues: ‘But in the days of Atanatar Alcarin this was replaced by the jewelled helm that was used in the crowning of Aragorn.’

  3441 – SAURON OVERTHROWN BY ELENDIL AND GIL-GALAD, WHO PERISH. ISILDUR TAKES THE ONE RING. SAURON PASSES AWAY AND THE RINGWRAITHS GO INTO THE SHADOWS. THE SECOND AGE ENDS

  1Rings, p. 294

  2As recited by Sam Gamgee, as the hobbits and Strider make their way towards Weathertop in Fellowship, Book One, XI ‘A Knife in the Dark’, pp. 186–7

  3Rings, p. 294

  4Rings, p. 294

  5Fellowship, Book Two, II, ‘The Council or Elrond’ p. 244

  EPILOGUE

  1Rings, p. 295. Weregild is ‘man price’ or ‘blood money’ established in ancient codes of law as putting a monetary value on a person’s life, imposed as a fine on a killer and forming a restitution payment to the family of the victim. Tolkien would have been aware of the word, which appears in Beowulf, the Völsungasaga, the thirteenth-century Icelandic Egil’s Saga and elsewhere. An example of this law is also referenced by Tolkien concerning Túrin II, in Appendix A, ‘The Stewards’, p. 1054.

  2Fellowship, Book Two, II ‘The Council of Elrond’ pp. 252–3. The content of Isildur’s scroll is revealed to the Council of Elrond in the Third Age by Gandalf, who tells the company that he surmised it to have remained unread by any – since the line of kings failed – ‘save Saruman and myself’. Meaning of ‘glede’ = a live coal or an ember.

  3Rings, p. 295

  APPENDIX A

  1The narrative that follows is from Rings, pp. 295–303.

  APPENDIX B

  1Lavaralda (replacing lavarin) is not mentioned in A Description of Númenor (UT p. 165 [nor, as a consequence, in this volume]) among the trees brought by the Eldar from Tol-eressëa

  2seven twelves of years is an emendation of four score of years (first written three score of years); see note 10.

  3Vinya is written above Númenor in the manuscript; it occurs again in a part of the text that was rewritten (p. 240), rendered ‘the New Land’. The name first appeared in an emendation to FN [‘Fall of Númenor’] I [Road] p. 19, §2.