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Nordor
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Post Tirion Abandoned?
on: October 31, 2015 10:26
Tirion was the Noldor capital in Valinor. I've recently seen that the city was abandoned at the time of Ar-Pharazon's invasion. Was the city abandoned prior to the invasion or in response to it? If in response, since the city was " on the high ground" why wouldn't the Noldor try to defend it? If the city was abandoned prior to the invasion, why? I've also seen that the city may have been destroyed by the great landslide that buried Ar-Pharazon and his army. If so, where did the Noldor end up? Moved back to Tol Eressa?
Gandolorin
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on: November 01, 2015 01:43
I can only add some tidbits from my encyclopedias (Robert Foster, older version, and a rather larger German book by one of Germany's leading Tolkien experts).

Originally Tirion was the city of the Vanyar, probably including Noldor inhabitants. After the Vanyar moved into Valinor, it was then a Noldorin city, ruled by Finwë. I can find nothing offhand on who was the - probably - regent while Finwë joined his son Fëanor in the latter's twelve-year exile in Formenos (in Valinor).

After Finwë's death at Formenos in Melkor's attack, the rebellion of the Noldor led by Fëanor, and joined reluctantly by Fingolfin and at first Finarfin, Tirion may have temporarily been deserted. But after Finarfin turned back from the Noldorin exodus after the Prophecy of Mandos, he was then the Ruler of Tirion.

Ah, The Silmarillion part "The Akallabêth" makes a statement a few pages from its end:

"And a host of the Númenóreans encamped in might about Túna, whence all the Eldar had fled."

Túna was the hill in the Calacirya upon which Tirion was built, so Tirion was abandoned at the time of Ar-Pharazon's invasion.
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Elthir
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on: November 02, 2015 01:18
Abandoned

I think the Elves fled Tirion at the time because they thought this predicament was beyond their judgement. The Numenoreans came ready for war because they expected to be resisted, but even the Valar had no answer to this "appalling folly and blasphemy" (letter 131) and do not strike without first appealing to Eru.

The Valar had no real answer to this monstrous rebellion -- for the Children of God were not under their ultimate jurisdiction: they were not allowed to destroy them or coerce them with any 'divine' display of powers they held over the physical world. They appealed to God; and a catastrophic 'change of plan' occurred.

JRRT (draft) letter 156, 1954


Granted the Elves could have fought the Numenoreans, but again I think they did not see it as their place to answer this question.

Earlier Tolkien had said [letter 131, probably late 1951] that the Numenoreans directed by Sauron could have wrought ruin in Valinor itself, but that the Valar: "receive the power and permission to deal with the situation; the old world is broken and changed."

Destroyed

I can't find any evidence, in Akallabeth itself anyway, that Tirion was destroyed when the Numenoreans were covered by falling hills. Granted "hills" is suggestive since Tirion was built upon one, but one might wonder why the Valar would use Tuna to destroy the Numenoreans, as the Noldor were not at fault here.

That said, when Tolkien later noted (on an envelope that contained The Drowning of Anadune)...

"Contains very old version (in Adunaic) which is good -- in so far as it is just as much different (in inclusion and omission and emphasis) as would be probable in the supposed case:

(a) Mannish tradition
(b) Elvish tradition
(c) Mixed Dunedanic tradition


... in my opinion he "ratified" (DA) The Drowning of Anadune here, now as a viable "late" text meant to stand along with Akallabeth...

... and in DA the land of Aman was destroyed along with Numenor!

Or was it destroyed (upon the earth) and also retained by the Valar in another sense, so that the Elves could continue to live and sail there, but Men would find only the Sea, and "realize" the world was round.


It's interesting that according to both the letters referred to above: "A chasm is opened in the sea and Tar-Calion and his armada is engulfed." Or from the later letter: "At the moment that Ar-pharazon set foot upon the forbidden shore, a rift appeared: Numenor foundered and was utterly overwhelmed; the armada was swallowed up;..."

In short, seemingly no fallen hills. This could be missing due to brevity... or not.

The letter of 1954 appears to be later than all texts of the Akallabeth (if I read the textual history correctly), aside from a later typescript [possibly circa 1958] not made by Tolkien himself but upon which he: "made only a very few and as it were casual corrections" according to Christopher Tolkien, which doesn't sound like a true or full revision to me.


Still, I can't get around my own opinion that DA was later ratified by Tolkien as a viable late text, as written (especially since it agrees with the Elves of the West knowing the true shape of the world when it was made, that is, round).

And if so, and if Tolkien left the conceptions under consideration here alone, I would then have a Mannish text (DA) in which both the land of Aman and Numenor were destroyed in the rift. And I can't say it was only a mannish idea that Aman was also destroyed, as in DA it is noted that this conception hails from the Elves, as the Men who were there perished and so could not relate what actually happened...

... along with a second tradition, the Akallabeth (a "mixed tradition" in my opinion) in which the Undying Lands, including Tol Eressea, were taken from the Circles of the World, and in which hills fell on the Numenoreans seemingly before all was taken away (incidentally, this idea was taken from yet another version of this tale, titled The Fall of Numenor).

Appendix A

According to a version published by JRRT himself:

"But when Ar-Pharazon set foot upon the shores of Aman the Blessed, the Valar laid down their Guardianship and called upon the One, and the World was changed. Numenor was thrown down and swallowed in the Sea, and the Undying Lands were removed for ever from the circles of the world."


Although here one could argue that perhaps brevity obscures the finer details, and that even if the Undying Lands were also destroyed on the physical earth, they were "removed" in any case.

[Edited on 11/02/2015 by Elthir]
Gandolorin
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on: November 02, 2015 04:30
I would hesitate to belabor some of the variants, especially later ones, of some stories or aspects thereof. Tolkien had toyed with the concept of Tol Eressëa = England in the Book(s) of Lost Tales, but rejected it as being to explicit and unworkable (the Celts and Romans had been there before the Anglo-Saxons).
And I remember at least hints that he had become more and more dissatisfied with the flat earth / the Two Trees as precursors of the sun and the moon etc. concept. The Elves, being so much more knowledgeable than men, would have known their astronomy way before our Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo (and the odd Greek possibly 2000 years earlier). All of the "silly" mythology would have possibly become garbled mannish traditions. But where would men have gotten these "silly" traditions about things occurring before the Akallabêth in The Sil, in which they had absolutely no part?
I think I once half-jokingly, half-seriously suggested that had Tolkien been given Elros's lifespan, he would still have been hard-pressed to finish The Sil. He was a self-confessed niggler of the extreme sort, and can you imagine a niggler with four centuries of time to fritter away???
And, he had painted himself into several corners with the publication of the LoTR as far as leeway for alternative story-lines for The Sil was concerned. It was, by many accounts the story closest to his heart, with the story of Beren and Lúthien being at the heart of the heart. But he could no longer niggle away in just any direction that caught his fancy after the LoTR.
But his true genius was bringing together The Hobbit and The Sil in the LoTR. Bringing together Bilbo and Beren (in his far descendant Aragorn, and just look from whom else Aragorn is also descended!). And my feeling is that theses two, Bilbo and Beren, are his two avatars in Middle-earth.
Being something of a purist (on the Lang side of the Lit / Lang divide of his profession in his time), he may not have realized his own genius in this melding fully. He certainly was bemused by (some aspects of) his fame in his later years.
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Elthir
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on: November 02, 2015 06:34
The example of Tol Eressea being England is an example of one (very early) idea being rejected, and for clarity I am not suggesting The Drowning of Anadune is meant to replace Akallabeth but to be read in tandem with it.

For me these various perspectives make Tolkien's world richer and more interesting. And though far briefer obviously, to my mind it's not wholly unlike the detail in Appendix A where it's said that the Dwarves had a tradition that one of their Rings of Power was given to them by the Elves, not Sauron.

But this too "should" have its limits I think, which is why I am often enough reluctant to simply accept external variations as internal variations, simply because they exist. Since Tolkien arguably intended a certain measure of contradiction or obscurity, to simply characterize all variants as internal is peppering "the soup" for him in my opinion.

Anyway The Drowning of Anadune is, to my mind, an intended internal variation. And even Christopher Tolkien thinks (his father probably meant that) Akallabeth was a mixed tradition, but CJRT was reluctant to give any of the tales in the 1977 Silmarillion any kind of "in story" frame...

... and seemingly regretted this however, according to comments made in The Book of Lost Tales (as I read them anyway).

[Edited on 11/04/2015 by Elthir]
Gandolorin
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on: November 03, 2015 04:00
We have been drifting off the topic of "Tirion Abandoned", but then my guess is that we (actually mostly you, Elthir ) have covered the ground available.

But as JRRT himself noted in the "Foreword To The Second Edition" (1966?), "... except one [error] that has been noted by others: the book is too short."

That statement in no longer entirely true for the appendices. Besides those printed in RoTK, there are now fourteen more books that expand on the compressed information of the appendices included in RoTK: The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales, and the twelve volumes of The History Of Middle-earth.

And perhaps The Children of Hurin, but I must say there was not much new to me after having read HoMe.
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