Tea at Trianon: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Doomed Island of Men

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Doomed Island of Men

From The National Review:

In the legendarium, Tolkien described the first three ages of the world, and offered a brief glimpse of the fourth. As Hostetter has so wisely argued, Tolkien’s ages correspond almost exactly to St. Augustine’s ages.

With this most recent volume, The Fall of Númenor, Sibley has beautifully and brilliantly done for Tolkien’s Second Age what Christopher Tolkien did for the First Age. That is, The Fall of Númenor is the equivalent of The Silmarillion, a proper and compelling compilation of Tolkien’s disparate stories and myths. Indeed, Sibley brings together pieces from The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, The Nature of Middle-earth, and Tolkien’s private letters to create a coherent and cohesive narrative of the Second Age.

While the First Age — as explored in detail in The Silmarillion — deals with the creation of the world and the fall of the elves (after taking a blasphemous oath against the gods), the Second Age witnesses the absolute heights and the absolute nadirs of Men, who were gifted with the paradise of Númenor, Tolkien’s version of Plato’s Atlantis. Sibley explains:
The literal rise and fall of Tolkien’s island (for it had been initially raised from the sea as a gift to Men) was informed not just by Plato’s philosophical allegory on the politics of statehood but also by the Judeo-Christian narrative of the frailty and fallibility of mankind as related in the Biblical Book of Genesis. This is evident in his description of The Downfall of Númenor as ‘the Second Fall of Man (or Man rehabilitated but still mortal.’
The gods (the Valar) gave Númenor as a gift to the houses of men that had stood with them in their war against the Satan figure (Melkor/Morgoth) of the mythology. Though that war ended with the Valar defeating and restraining Morgoth, his evil will remains as a tangible spirit in the physical world, corrupting whatever it touches, lessening the dignity of all creation. “Yet the lies that Melkor, the mighty and accursed, Morgoth Bauglir, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of elves and men are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days,” Tolkien wrote. This proves to be one of the essential themes in all of Tolkien’s works, but especially in what he wrote on the Second Age.

Even with Morgoth out of the picture, evil endures. Most prominently in the form of Sauron, the main bad guy of The Lord of the Rings. Sauron served as Morgoth’s lieutenant in the First Age but comes to the fore in the Second. “Sauron, however, inherited the ‘corruption’ of Arda, and only spent his (much more limited) power on the Rings; for it was the creatures of earth, in their minds and wills, that he desired to dominate. In this way,” Tolkien continues, “Sauron was also wiser than Melkor-Morgoth.” (Read more.)