The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are seminal works of fantasy fiction whose rich mythology draws deeply from the real history, legend and sacred narratives that fascinated its author J.R.R. Tolkien.
Rings of Power, the Amazon Prime original series based on The Lord of the Rings, continues the tradition, elaborating its fantasy world by appearing to borrow from ancient history to feed its ancient history of Middle Earth.
In an episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis is joined by Tolkien expert Dr. Chris Snyder who explains that Tolkien would have had a lot of material to be inspired by as he explored the story of Númenor, central to Rings of Power, which is an advanced civilization that can be washed away by the sea like mythical Atlantis.
Snyder is a medieval historian and author of The Making of Middle-earth: The Worlds of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings.
“I think the Númenóreans are key because they’re the civilization that brings civilization to other parts of Middle Earth,” says Snyder. “They’re expert ship-builders and farmers and things. I’ve made an argument that there’s a lot of ancient [history], up to the early middle ages […] on top of the Second Age of Middle Earth, especially as we see it in The Silmarillion.”
“If you look at Gondor as the great Númenórean civilization, the great empire, it has around it these other civilizations of men like the Rohirrim who are noble but not as technologically advanced. They live in timber halls as opposed to stone palaces, and I think Tolkien is throwing us a clue there about looking at the Roman world in comparison to the world of the barbarians, i.e., much of western Europe and northern Europe at the time.”
“The Germanic and Celtic worlds,” explains Snyder, “who had a nobility, who had a great mythology, who were great warriors, but do not come from that Mediterranean civilization like the Gondorians did originally as an island empire itself.”
Diver with a statue of the Greek god Dionysus, in the underwater Roman ruins of Baiae, Italy.
Image Credit: anbusiello TW / Alamy Stock Photo
Númenor, an island west of Middle Earth, ultimately suffers destruction from the waves in events preceding The Lord of the Rings.
“The Atlantis myth appears first in Plato and that’s a powerful myth about a great civilization but one that is now lost under the sea,” says Snyder. “There’s a version in Celtic mythology of a world that is underneath the sea as well, either off the coast of Cornwall or off the coast of Brittany.” Tolkien was clearly drawn to the notion of a wave engulfing the world – it appears as a nightmare in The Lord of the Rings.
Scholars have also interpreted civilizational collapse in Tolkien’s works as being informed by the fall of man in Biblical storytelling and the fatalism of Norse mythology, which envisions the world ending in violent cataclysm.
In other ways, Rings of Power alludes to Middle Earth’s past as an age of prosperity to be recovered, in a way familiar to a medieval historian like Dr. Chris Snyder.
“I thought that Rings of Power season one was really interesting because the series is about the Second Age, of the story of Númenor primarily, but it begins in the First Age with this flashback of Galadriel in a golden age,” says Synder, referring to the Elf character played by Morfydd Clark in Rings of Power and Cate Blanchett in Peter Jackson’s trilogy.
“[This is] an age before there was even a sun and a moon, all the light in the world of Eä was being cast by these two trees. And so you get this glimpse of Galadriel’s past, that she’s that old that she goes back thousands and thousands of years to this age in which the elves are living in proximity to these angelic figures, the Valar.”
“The elves are living with them and then they have this rebellion. They don’t do what the Valar tell them to do and Galadriel is one of those who leaves this great world behind to go to Middle Earth. So even there you have this devolution.”
Can we also overlay the geopolitics of the early 20th century onto Tolkien’s Middle Earth? On this note Snyder is more circumspect. “He very much didn’t want us to make political allegories out of his writings,” he says, and refers to his resistance to readers’ allusions in the 1950s linking the ring and nuclear weapons.
He suggests that Tolkein’s love of German literature discounts links between Mordor and Germany, and is wary of linking the Middle East with the eastern portion of Middle Earth. Snyder does concede, however, that the Shire is basically an amalgamation of Oxfordshire and the Midlands.
Sign up to History Hit for advert-free listening to this episode, with early access and bonus episodes for subscribers.
