The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien
of the New World, and found them like to those of the Old, and subject to death; and they reported that the world was round. But upon the Straight Road only the Gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves of Avallon could journey. For the Road being straight, whereas the surface of the earth was bent…’
The paragraph concludes: ‘Therefore many abandoned the Gods, and put them out of their legends. But Men of Middle-earth looked up with wonder upon them, and with great fear, for they descended out of the air; and they took the Númenóreans to be Gods, and some were content that this should be so.’
§13 The paragraph begins: ‘But not all the hearts of the Númenóreans were crooked; and the knowledge of the days before the ruin, descending from their fathers and the Elf-friends, and those that had held converse with the Gods, was long preserved among the wise. And they said that the fate of Men …’
‘But the fate of Men … is not complete within the world.’
‘there were wars of faith among the mighty of Middle-earth’
§14 But there remains still a legend of Beleriand: for that land in the West of the North of the Old World, where Morgoth had been overthrown, was still in a measure blessed and free from his shadow; and many of the exiles of Númenor had come thither. Though changed and broken it retained still in ancient days the name that it had borne in the days of the Gnomes. And it is said that in Beleriand there arose a king, who was of Númenórean race, and he was named Elendil, that is Elf-friend. And he took counsel with the Elves that remained in Middle-earth (and these abode then mostly in Beleriand); and he made a league with Gil-galad the Elf-king who was descended from Fëanor. And their armies were joined, and passed the mountains and came into inner lands far from the Sea. And they came at last even to Mordor the Black Country, where Sauron, that is in the Gnomish tongue named Thû, had rebuilt his fortresses. And they encompassed the stronghold, until Thû came forth in person, and Elendil and Gil-galad wrestled with him; and both were slain. But Thû was thrown down, and his bodily shape destroyed, and his servants were dispelled, and the host of Beleriand destroyed his dwelling; but Thû’s spirit fled far away, and was hidden in waste places, and took no shape again for many ages. But it is sung sadly by the Elves that the war with Thû hastened the fading of the Eldar, decreed by the Gods; for Thû had power beyond their measure, as Felagund, King of Nargothrond, had found aforetime; and the Elves expended their strength and substance in the assault upon him. And this was the last of the services of the Firstborn to Men, and it is held the last of the deeds of alliance before the fading of the Elves and the estrangement of the Two Kindreds. And here endeth the tale of the ancient world as it is known to the Elves.
Commentary on the second version of The Fall of Númenor
§1 On ‘Orcs, that are mockeries of the creatures of Ilúvatar’ see QS §18 and commentary. – It was said in FN I §5 that Morgoth ‘did not come in person, but only in spirit, and as a shadow upon the mind and heart.’ Now the idea of his ‘return’ in any sense seems to be denied; but there appears the concept of his malevolent and guiding Will that remains always in the world.
‘such as obeyed dwelt again in Eressëa’: in FN I ‘the Elves were summoned to Valinor, as has been told, and many obeyed, but not all.’ In the Quenta (IV. 162) ‘the Gnomes and Dark-elves rehabited for the most part the Lonely Isle … But some returned even unto Valinor, as all were free to do who willed’ (retained in QS, pp. 331–2 §27). The name Avallon (‘for it is hard by Valinor’) appears, but as a new name for Tol Eressëa; afterwards, in the form Avallónë (‘for it is of all cities the nearest to Valinor’), it became the name of a haven in the isle: Akallabêth p. 260.
§2 At first my father preserved exactly the rewriting of FN I given in the commentary on FN I §2, whereby Atalantë is the name of the city Andúnië after the Downfall. I have suggested that he did not in fact intend this; at any rate he corrected it here, so that Atalantë again becomes the name of Númenor drowned. Númenos now reappears from FN I §2 as originally written, where it was the name of the western city, but becomes the name of the high place of the king in the centre of the land (afterwards Armenelos).
Elrond (see the commentary on FN I §14) now becomes the first King of Númenor and the builder of Númenos; his brother Elros has still not emerged.
The statement here that the Númenóreans ‘took on the speech of the Elves of the Blessed Realm, as it was and is in Eressëa’ suggests that they abandoned their own Mannish tongue; and that this is the meaning is shown in The Lost Road (p. 68). In the Lhammas it is said (p. 179) that ‘already even in [Húrin’s father’s] day Men in Beleriand forsook the daily use of their own tongue and spoke and gave even names unto their children in the language of the Gnomes.’ The words ‘as it was and is in Eressëa’ would contradict any idea that the Lonely Isle was destroyed in the Downfall (see the commentary on FN I §7). But the difficult passage which suggests it was preserved in the present text, §7 (though subsequently struck out).
§4 The association of the longevity of the Númenóreans with the radiance of Valinor (see the commentary on FN I §4) is abandoned, and is attributed solely to the gift of the Valar.
§5 In all probability the name Sauron (replacing Sûr of FN I) first occurs here or in the closely related passage in The Lost Road (p. 66). Its first occurrence in the ‘Silmarillion’ tradition is in QS §143. The story of Sauron’s coming to Númenor is changed from that in FN I, and it is explicit that he could not have come had he not been summoned. The story as told in the first version here, in which the ships returning from Middle-earth were cast upon Númenor far inland by a great wave, and Sauron stood upon a hill and ‘preached a message of deliverance’, is told in more detail in The Lost Road; but the second version in FN II, omitting the element of the great wave, looks as if it were substituted for the first almost immediately (on the significance of this see p. 9).
The temple to Morgoth is now raised upon the Mountain of Ilúvatar in the midst of the land, and this (or in The Lost Road) is the first appearance of the Meneltarma. The story was later rejected: in the Akallabêth ‘not even Sauron dared to defile the high place’, and the temple was built in Armenelos (pp. 272–3).
§11 The addition in FN II, ‘Therefore they built very high towers in those days’, must be the first reference to the White Towers on Emyn Beraid, the Tower Hills. Cf. The Lord of the Rings Appendix A (I. iii), where it is told of the palantír of Emyn Beraid that ‘Elendil set it there so that he could look back with “straight sight” and see Eressëa in the vanished West; but the bent seas below covered Númenor for ever.’ Cf. also Of the Rings of Power in The Silmarillion, p. 292. But when the present text was written the palantíri