The Fall of Númenor
by J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Brian Sibley
William Morrow, 2022
[ #23 Pixies and Dryads and Elves, oh my! : A high fantasy ]
I am backposting this review, as I finished the book only a few days before the end of 2024.
Let’s hope 2025 is a little better, eh?
To begin with, let me say I’d never read anything before of the LOTR background material — that is, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc. I’d assumed it was all way too dry, going by the few glimpses I had over the years. And I do remember when The Silmarillion was first published, way back in 1977. The seismic waves it caused in fantasy fandom led to more and more Tolkien ephemera being released over the years, with Christopher Tolkien acting as father’s curator. But I was never interested enough to dive into it.
However, when the first season of The Rings of Power was released on Netflix, (which I reviewed here) I was happy enough with it to buy The Fall of Númenor, which was released, perhaps, to coincide with and take a ride on the hoopla. However I still found it a little intimidating and wasn’t inspired to crack it open until 2024.
I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining and readable it was. Like The Silmarillian, The Fall of Númenor is a compilation of material from Tolkien’s copious background writings, the worldbuilding you could say, arranged to show the origin and the end of his equivalent of Atlantis. For me, it enriched and added to the trilogy itself.
(But you don’t need to read it to enjoy the main work. The two are very different. One is a pseudo-scholarly appendix, the other an adventure novel.)
It was Tolkien’s style which made it enjoyable: part Biblical, part Norse and Germanic myth. The material itself, not so much. As a long-time fantasy reader I know the story of an island civilization sunk for its hubris had been done before Tolkien, and since him. He was not an innovator of the concept. Númenor itself wasn’t even as exotic as most Atlantises, being a sort of an idealized Iron Age. The inhabitants are friends with the birds and squirrels, like Disney’s Snow White, and are always looking to the West and longing for the sea. That got old, but as the book was compiled, not written as a whole, understandable. Still, I wish Tolkien had included a few dinosaurs, flying cars, or death rays.
To summarize the contents, in the first age of Middle Earth, the gods known as The Valar together with elves and men battled against the evil deity Melkor, later known as Morgoth, who had stolen the light-giving gems known as the Silmaril. The humans fought so well the Valar created a paradisical island for them to live on in the middle of the western sea, halfway between Middle Earth and Valinor, the Undying Land and their own kingdom. Furthermore, the Valar gave those humans extended lifespans of up to four centuries, and their first ruler was Eärendil, Elrond’s brother. (Since both he and Elrond had a human dad, they were allowed to choose which race they wanted to belong to — Elrond the elves, Eärendil, the humans.)
But as the centuries dragged on, the Númenoreans began to get restless and bored, and began colonizing Middle Earth. First they were wise teachers of the lesser men, then cruel overlords, their misdeeds only hinted at. (And actually, a lot of things were only hinted at. We’re told again and again how the Númenoreans crafted things or how beautiful their women are, yet never get anything concrete. This is in the way of legend, yes, but I do wish Tolkien had gone, somewhere, into specifics. This is odd in that he was also an artist, leaving behind many watercolors of his world.)
The best parts, IMO, are the detailed chapters about the marital problems of Aldarion, the son of (King) Tar-Menelder, whose lovely wife takes issue with him always going off adventuring on the sea. Psychologically insightful, yet simply told. Of this Tolkien was a master.
In fact, the realism of this story, and some other details about Númenor, made an odd contrast with the mythic elements, like that four-century lifespan. Reading the book I could see Tolkien straining to accommodate the two in a way that made sense. When the Númenoreans finally raise a huge fleet and sail to invade the land of the Valar (egged on by Sauron) the gods in their anger rearrange the world: what was once flat becomes round: a true planet like our own, and in the tumult Númenor sinks and is destroyed. The survivors sail to Middle Earth, begetting the realms of Arnor and Gondor and the line that leads to our favorite hero, Aragorn.
Since Tolkien was primarily a linguist, The Fall of Númenor is full of his invented languages and many places and beings had two, three, four and even five different names. Which frankly made it confusing to read in parts, especially geographical names, making it necessary for me to keep referring to the map on the endpage. The map there was very nice, the closest version there is to Tolkien’s original, but some of the print was way too small to read without a magnifier, so that is another complaint. The similarity of names also made things confusing: Andor and Arnor, for example, and the many Celebs-, Celebrimbor, Celebrant, Celebrian. I don’t necessarily fault Tolkien for this. It’s just a personal complaint on my part.
So, how does what’s in the book differ from the TV series? Quite a lot in fact. The book spans thousand of years in which events move slowly; the series, perhaps a few years. The show adds a lot of new characters and condenses others, and supplies a reason for the elves’ decline: they don’t have enough mithril. It’s all made up, a fanfic riffing, and that’s fine. The two can co-exist.
Despite my kvetching, I had such a positive experience with this I’m ready to tackle The Silmarilion next.
