Inspiration for Tolkien’s World - Akallabêth

Hello everyone. As always, this information is found in An Encyclopedia of Tolkien the History and Mythology That Inspired Tolkien’s World by David Day. This post is about Akkallabêth.

Day starts, “The downfall of Númenor” is Tolkien’s reinvention of the ancient Greek Atlantis legend. Tolkien often mentioned that he had “an Atlantis complex,” which took the form of a “terrible recurrent dream of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and the green fields.” He appears to have believers that this was some kind of racial memory of the ancient catastrophe of the sinking of Atlantis, and stated on more than one occasion that he had inherited this dream from his parents and had ed it on to his son Michael. In the writing of Akallabêth, however, Tolkien found that he had managed to exorcise this disturbing dream...

“Evidently, the dream did not reoccur after he dramatized the event in his own tale of the catastrophe. The original legend of Atlantis comes from Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias (both c. 360 BC), which include the story of an island kingdom that some nine thousand years before had been home to the mightiest civilization the world had ever known. Atlantis was an island about the size of Spain in the western sea beyond the Pillars of Heracles. Its power extended over all the nations of Europe and the Mediterranean, but the overwhelming pride of these powerful people brought them into conflict with the immortals...

“Finally, a great cataclysm in the form of a volcanic eruption and a tidal wave resulted in Atlantis sinking beneath the sea. Tolkien used Plato’s legend as an outline for Akallabêth. However, Tolkien seems to have been incapable of doing what most authors would have done-writing a straightforward dramatic narrative based on the legend. Typically, he just couldn’t help adding little personal touches such as the como elation of three thousand years of detailed history, sociology, geography, linguistics, and genealogy” (20).