Vanir House Publishing

THE NEW MYTHOLOGY - A NEW VISION FOR A NEW ERA



In his book, Classical Mythology: A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans, author William Hansen writes, “Like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, the fictional Old West and Feudal Japan in Samurai films, classic mythology contains not only a corpus of stories but also of a world, one with geography and a history as well as relationships and rules and narrative conventions.” (Hansen xiii) It is from an author’s understanding of myth that he or she is imbued with the power to “create” a reality beyond everyday experience. It is with this premise that composers and writers such as Richard Wagner, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert E. Howard and the myriad of popular fantasy novelists, film writers and game designers have given mythology a whole new role in our modern society. This new literary tradition sustains our connection to the ancient past, while at the same builds the mythology of the present. “The result is a sort of ethnography of the imaginary.” (Hansen xiii) This chapter examines just a few of these examples.

According to Wikipedia, the creation mythologies, along with the divine lineages of the gods and their first emergence, vary from author to author, work to work, unlike the Christian idea of a single set of holy scriptures detailing the immutable truth of God’s creation on Earth.”
Later in the same article, Wikipedia continues:

• The pre- or early Hellene Pelasgian (from c. 3,500 B.C.) belief was that Eurynome produced the universal egg and her son, Ophion, wrapped around it, breaking it in half — revealing the entire universe, the deities, and humans.

• In Homer (an oral tradition of 700 or 600 B.C.), Tethys and Ocean are the parents of all the deities.

• In Hesiod, (c. 700 B.C.) Chaos (“void,” “gap”) stands at the beginning, followed by Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros. After these forces manifest on their own, they have children through various methods, including Erebus, Pontus, Ourea, the Titans, Nyx, and Aether. (See Protogenoi)

• Alcman (c. 600 B.C.) made the water-nymph Thetis the first goddess, producing poros “path,” tekmor “marker” and skotos “darkness” on the pathless, featureless void.

• Orphic poetry (c. 530 B.C.) made Nyx the first principle, night, and her offspring were many.

• Also in the Orphic tradition, Phanes (a mystic Orphic deity of light and procreation, sometimes identified with the elder Eros) is the original ruler of the universe, who hatched from the cosmic egg. (1)

• Aristophanes (c. 456–386 B.C.) wrote in Birds, that Nyx is the first deity and that she produced Eros from an egg.
Philosophers of Classical Greece also constructed their own metaphysical cosmogonies with their own primordial deities:

• Pherecydes of Syros (c. 600-550 B.C.) made Chronos (“time”) the first deity in his Heptamychia.

• Empedocles (c. 490–430 B.C.) wrote that Aphrodite and Ares were the first principles, who wove the universe out of the four elements with their powers of love and strife.
Plato (360 B.C.) introduced the concept that Timaeus, the demiurge, modeled the universe on ideas.

THE GERMAN ROMANTICS

In the early nineteenth century, beginning with the works of the Brothers Grimm, a new brand of nationalist Romanticism swept through Northern Europe and then beyond to America. These new Romantics had a deeply rooted affection for the primordial age of antiquity; this was especially so in Germany. They were artists who sought an idealistic age when the culture of the pureblooded German race was untarnished by alien or Christian influence. One of the most exhaustively used materials was that of the ancient Germanic gods, derived primarily from the Prose Eddas, compiled by the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson in the fourteenth century A.D. In the twentieth century, this form of mythological drama would evolve into the new genres of epic and dark fantasy, and sword and sorcery, a whole new form of literature born from the novels and musical dramas that defined the world of art a century earlier.

RICHARD WAGNER

One of the most pretentious leaders in this new genre of nationalistic art was the German musician and composer Richard Wagner. It was he who brought all of the elements of “German myths and legends” together. His opera, The Ring of the Nibelungs (Der Ring des Nibelungen), was a four-part epic cycle consisting of Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. Although he first devised the basic idea in 1848 during his failed revolution against the Saxon monarchy, it wasn’t finished for another twenty-five years (Grolier Interactive, 1999).
It was Wagner, who stated that Germans, rather than being brutal conquerors, should take their unique talents of art and intellectual brilliance, and become “ennoblers” of the world. (Shirer 100–106) Richard Wagner with “his towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death, [that] inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung ... [His works have] always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul.” (Shirer 101) Max Mell, one of Wagner’s true successors, wrote a contemporary interpretation of the Wagnerian mythic cycle, stated: “Today, only little has remained of the Greek gods that humanism wanted to implant so deeply into our culture ... But Siegfried and Kriemhild were always in the people’s soul!” (Shirer 101)

HOWARD’S EARLY WRITINGS


Robert E. Howard was an important figure in the spreading of this “new mythology” of modern fantasy and historical interpretation, a phenomenon of popular culture this author calls “Primordialism.” The Kull stories were published in 1929, though only two of them and a poem actually ever saw print. The rest were either rejected or left unfinished. Later, Howard’s writings gave birth to sword and sorcery, a genre of fantasy based on war, fighting and magic. Indeed, many consider him the father of the genre in the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien is considered the father of epic fantasy. “Howard created one of the most popular of all fantasy characters in the barbarian warrior Conan, whom he based on a Celtic warrior, drawing inspiration from his own Scottish-Gaelic descent. Conan first appeared in December 1932. To add realism and depth to his new character, Howard developed the fictional Hyborian Age. His other characters include the Atlantean King Kull, the Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane, the Pict Bran Mak Morn, drawn from the pre-Celtic people that inhabited Scotland till the early Medieval Period, and the female warriors Dark Agnes de la Fere and Red Sonya of Rogatino, the latter the prototype for the better-known Red Sonja of Marvel Comics fame.
Kane was the steely-eyed duelist of the sixteenth to eighteenth century swashbucklers, but given Howard’s taste for the dour Bran, he was the idealized image of his “lost race” vision of the Picts and gave him the chance to depict the barbarian’s struggle against Rome. Yet, each contained smatterings of his older pre-Conan prehistory as did the unfinished modern tale The Isle of the Aeons.
Howard dropped all his other fantasy characters once Conan seized his imagination in 1932. Although the initial Conan story was merely a rewrite of an unsold Kull tale with a supernatural aspect added, it sold and Howard then jumped back to chronicle Conan’s youth. If Kull’s dreamy reflection echoed Howard himself, Conan was the man he wished he’d been. Howard, unlike some other fantasy writers, half-believed in reincarnation and “racial memory.” “Howard was considered by friends to be eidetic (i.e., had a photographic memory), and astounded them with his ability to memorize lengthy reams of poetry with ease after one or two readings. Another barbarian hero, an Irishman named Cormac Mac Art, was descended from Kull and had a Dane friend called Wulfhere the Skull-Splitter.” (“Robert E. Howard,” 2008)
Without Howard, it is clear that the popular form of fantasy fiction, so vividly expressed in Dungeons and Dragons, fantastic literature, popular films and television programs and video games, would never have emerged. “Voracious reading, along with a natural talent for prose writing and the encouragement of teachers, conspired to create in Howard an interest in becoming a professional writer. From the age of nine he began writing stories, mostly tales of historical fiction centering on Vikings, Arabs, battles, and bloodshed.” At fifteen, Howard first sampled the popular world of pulp magazines, especially Adventure and its star authors Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb. Like a lightning bolt striking, his fate was sealed — come hell or high water, he was going to be an adventure writer. The next few years saw him creating a variety of series characters: El Borak (a Texan cross between John Rambo and T. E. Lawrence), a cowboy hero named the Sonora Kid, the puritan avenger Solomon Kane, and the last king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. Soon, the fifteen-year-old was submitting stories to pulps such as Adventure and Argosy. Rejections piled up, and with no mentors or instructions of any kind to aid him, Howard became a writing autodidact, methodically studying the markets and tailoring his stories and style to each.

In the fall of 1922, when Howard was sixteen, he temporarily moved to a boarding house in the nearby city of Brownwood to complete his senior year of high school, and it was in Brownwood that he first met friends his own age who shared his interest not only for sports and history but also writing and poetry. The two most important of these, Tevis Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson, shared his Bohemian and literary outlook on life, and together they wrote amateur papers and magazines, exchanged long letters filled with poetry and existential thoughts on life and philosophy, and encouraged each other’s writing endeavors.
Howard also spent his late school years engaging in a self-created regimen of exercise and sparring, eventually building himself into a muscled, burly specimen. He began boxing locally in seedy drinking and gambling venues such as the local Cross Plains icehouse, gaining a reputation for toughness and seldom if ever losing a fight. All of this real-life experience with physical struggle began factoring heavily in his stories, giving them a frighteningly realistic aura and power seldom seen in literature. (“Robert E. Howard,” 2008)
Howard originally appears to have put the epoch of Kull about 100,000 years ago and it was not certain that the great cataclysm, which destroyed Atlantis, was anytime soon thereafter. His Atlantis was a small island continent roughly commensurate in size to the combined British lsles but not located as far north. It was tropical to subtropical with incongruous animals like tigers. Since he referred to them as striped, I believe he meant the Asiatic type, not saber-tooth. He does not make clear how far Atlantis was from Eurasia where the Thurian civilization ruled the so-called “Seven Empires.” They were a mixture of Medieval and Roman cultures with lots of made-up exotica for spice.
Whereas his Atlantis was at an idealized level of Iron-Age barbarism, the Thurian civilization was tottering with antiquity. Off to the south, pre-human serpent-men and the giant elder race of men ruled, roughly in Africa. There had been “wolf-men,” “bird-men,” as well as “serpent-men” and possibly others. They ruled the world before mankind existed and well afterwards. It was hinted at that the wolf-men learned to physically transform into the semblance of humans, once the latter grew more numerous and powerful. The serpent-men did this via illusion. Though vague, it was implied that lead by the elder race that had become sorcerers themselves, men rebelled against their pre-human masters and eventually overthrew them after about 1000 years of war. Because of the dark magic and shape shifting of the pre-humans, many men who battled them were driven insane. This was approximately 6000–7000 years prior to Kull.
The pre-humans and elder race claimed to have seen Atlantis rise from beneath the sea. Since Howard depicted massive Earth changes, this might’ve been as recently as the wars between humanity and their predecessors. The Hindu Nagas and the mythic Chinese Dragon kings may have influenced Howard. At any rate, the eponymous Thurians seem to have been later than the elder race while still ancient. Some of the elder races like Akivasha of later Stygia and Thulsa Doom became virtually immortal. He was desiccated like a living skeleton or mummy and she was a vampiress. She, however, only appeared in the Conan stories after the chronology was altered to fit the Hyborian age. Presumably, the Thurians were equivalent to the Hyborians.
The early Picts inhabited a vast chain of islands far to the west of Atlantis that much later became the mountains of western North and South America. They were almost equal with the Atlanteans’ technologically, but better organized politically and allied to at least Valusia, the westernmost and greatest of the seven empires. To reach the mainland, they were better seafarers than the xenophobic Atlanteans. They somewhat resembled certain Amerindian tribes combined with the Polynesians in this epoch. The biggest difference between Howard’s original and later conceptions was that the Atlanteans had millennia to achieve the civilization they were fabled for, while subsequently they remained barbarians even if slightly more advanced ones than in Kull’s day. This might have been true of the Lemurians and Murians as well.
The Lemurians inhabited an island chain in the Far East and were great mariners, pirates and slavers. Mu was a continent south and possibly east of them at least in the Isle of the Aeons. The Murians had a civilization that grew decadent before their continent sank, but they were merely a name in the Kull stories.
Once the Hyborian age was invented, it’s possible that the human but non-Thurian civilization of the Far East descended from Mu as they reputedly came from an unnamed continent across the sea to the southeast, though Australia or South America are possibilities. The descendants of the Lemurians were Turkic types. But the Far Eastern culture was not the ancestor to the Chinese since its descendants later founded Stygia. By implication, they somewhat resembled the Tamil Dravidians, some of whom were once connected to certain East Africans. As islanders, the Lemurians doubtless equated to the Indonesian/Southeast Asian sea-faring peoples.
Aside from the unpublished Isle of the Aeons, the Kull stories and the Bran MAK Morn tale “Kings of Night” bear this out. (Kull came forward to ca. 200 A.D. to aid Bran against the Romans with the help of a Pictish sorcerer.) The unpublished Curse of the Golden Skull fits this pattern too with Kull cited offstage. Solomon Kane, during a visit to Africa, finds a hidden remnant of an Atlantean colony, revealing that they did build a civilization.
Then, the Hyborian Age was created and Conan placed within 500 years of its end, amidst war and finally a cataclysm that resulted in the world we know. To parallel that Kull was similarly set about five centuries prior to the great cataclysm that sank Atlantis, Mu and the Lemurian Isles while raising the Pictish Isles too become the mountain peaks of the Americas.
The Atlantean colonies on the mainland became the Cimmerians as the Pictish colonies became the Picts of Conan’s age. The Hyborians were Thurian refugees that fled north because of the cataclysm. There they met a ferocious breed of snow apes they drove further north. These were believed to be ancestors to the Nordheimer of later times (the Aesir and Vanir) like the Norse gods. Howard not only wrote of sudden global cataclysms but also evolution and devolution within a matter of centuries, physical as well as cultural.
The chronology of all this is a bit uncertain. Howard seemed to put the end of the Hyborian Age not long before the rise of Egypt and Sumer that for us means 4000–3000 B.C. though in his day could’ve been as far back as 5000-4000 B.C. Howard's figures, depending upon how one interprets them, could have the Hyborian Age lasting anywhere from 5000-8500 years, since some of the periods cited may overlap or run parallel to each other. If we leave Atlantis’ demise at Plato’s literal dates, the Hyborian Age would have ended between 4000 and 1000 B.C. The latter may be too late but anywhere between 3000 and 4000 B.C. could work, using a shorter Hyborian Age (5–6000 years). Still, most of the pastiches and comics presume that the Hyborian Age ended ca. 9500 B.C. or before present (7500 B.C.). Marvel comics that published Conan from 1970–96, originally used the higher dating but their handbooks now cite the lower one. They now accept that the Hyborian Age lasted 8500 years, that Atlantis sank between 18–16,000 B.C. and that Kull lived 18,500–16,500 B.C., with Conan at 10,000–8000 B.C.
For myself, the lower range ca. 5000–3500 B.C. for Conan seems likeliest and 10,000 B.C. for Kull. Still, Howard did include advancing glaciers at the close of the Hyborian Age that meshes better with the earlier dates; not that any of this is meant as valid history. However, it is evocative at least. Howard’s elder race and perhaps his birdmen (depicted in Queen of the Black Coast) suggest the fallen angel myth. His shape-shifting serpent-men mirror interdimensional reptiloids. As the latter rule us through illusion and blood sacrifice, Howard’s serpent-men crept back amongst mankind replacing human leaders in order to control humanity. Worse yet, they forever enslaved the spirits of those they slew and replaced. Some New Age adherents believe one or other extraterrestrial or intercessional races are after human souls. This author wonders if any of them read Howard. Many scholars in the previous two centuries have sought something beyond Plato’s classical model of the lost civilization of Atlantis, and instead began searching the far north for Thule, or the North Sea for Atland, remnant of the great Atlantis of the north. J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are vital in understanding the Northern Atlantis. His search for a revived Anglo-Saxon mythology for Britain brought him into contact with non-Germanic cultures. His views are also relevant to the concept of Atlantis and a lost European civilization. Tolkien was always fascinated by the Atlantis story because of his recurring nightmares of a sinking continent and the burning and torment of the Earth. He was also steeped in classical studies and his aptitude in the field was reflected in his writings. This familiarity with Platonic scholarship obviously inspired him to consider the possibilities of a lost European civilization. Still, he didn’t incorporate it into his personal mythology until 1936, just prior to the publication of the Hobbit (1937). Tolkien began work on Lord of the Rings in December, 1937. Aragorn, or “Strider,” now depicted as the last heir to the Numenorean (Atlantean) kings was originally conceived as a Hobbit.
Between 1937-1951, Tolkien developed Gondor and Arnor, the Atlantean successor realms, during the process of writing the trilogy. Most of their elaborate history arose as he did the appendices 1951–1966. He wrote further background material on Numenore as late as 1972, the year before he died. It came to play a pivotal role in his mythos as the bridge between the earliest ages of the gods (Valar), the elves and those of mortal men. The quasi-elven Numenorians took on the role of the heroes or demigods in many pagan mythologies. Tolkien’s earliest ages were fully mythological in that they preceded the sun and moon and mortal men. The world then really was flat, as the ancients appear to have conceived it. The sun and moon began as the final fruit of the magical gold- and silver-leaved trees that once lit the western paradise of the gods until Melkor, the Satan figure, destroyed them. Sauron, the “dark lord” of the trilogy was a lesser-fallen angelic servant of Melkor, who remained in Middle-Earth after his master’s defeat. He was a shadow of the shadow, very Zoroastrian for such a devout Catholic as Tolkien. It was the cataclysm that destroyed Numenore that saw the world made round as we know it. The sun and moon were previously accompanied by two of these lesser angelic beings in magical boats, as was one of three gems called the “Silmarils” over which a centuries-long war was fought at the end of the first age. The Silmarils encapsulated the light of the two trees and were stolen by Melkor when he slew the trees. The elves followed him against the will of the gods back to Middle-Earth to retrieve the jewels that one of their princes had made. They lost the long war but the gods were convinced to send aid and their host toppled Melkor, who was exiled from the physical world. Earendel was the messenger who obtained the help of the gods back to Middle-Earth to retrieve the jewels. Earendel had been in possession of one of the Silmarils that got him to the realm of the gods, and his ship, bearing the Silmaril, became a star that later guided the first Numenorians to their new island home. Elena, the land of the star or gift, was in the shape of a five-pointed star. Though not specified to be volcanic, it was said to have risen from beneath the sea to serve as the home of the three tribes of men who had aided the elves in fighting Melkor. Most men had served him. Earendel’s star was what we call Venus, which has often been linked to catastrophes and sometimes to Atlantis. Earendel’s twin sons, Elrond and Elros, were given the choice of which race they wished to follow because they shared the blood of both. Elrond chose to become like one of the elves, and so was physically immortal. He appears in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Elros chose to live and die as a human, though granted a lifespan of about 500 years. He became the first king of Numenore, distant ancestor to Aragorn from the trilogy. Numenore was first settled in the thirty-second year of the second age and endured until the year 3319. Sauron was defeated but not destroyed in 3441. The trilogy takes place 3018–3019 years after that. According to Tolkien, that was between 5000 and 4000 B.C., comparable to the biblical creation dates. His version of Atlantis dates to 7000–8000 B.C., not 9400–9600 B.C. The western most part of Middle-Earth (Beleriand) had sunk at the end of the first age, soon after Melkor’s defeat by the gods, ca. 10,462–11,462 B.C. The sun had initially arisen 500–600 years before, about a decade after the death of the two trees that darkened the realm of the gods. In an earlier version, it had been 80–100 years. The gods had created their western paradise 20–25,000 years before the sun rose, and Melkor, overthrew the lamps that then lit the world. They had been atop mountainous pillars of ice to the north and south that later became inland seas while the great western ocean (the Atlantic) widened. The Americas did not then exist.
It’s difficult to deal with Numenore without discussing Middle-Earth as a whole since it is all wrapped so tightly together. Also, as I wrote before, there is the long internal history of Middle Earth covering 37,062 years in the final version of its chronology, and ending at the start of the fourth age, “when the dominion of men began.” Aside from that, however, is the history of the creation and development of that world by Tolkien over the course of his life. The oldest-known snippets of his mythos were written ca. 1915–1917 after he was invalided out of active service in World War I. The final phase of his work was done as an appendix for the Lord of the Rings beginning in 1951 after the trilogy’s completion, yet before its full publication in 1954. The full version of these appendices only appeared in the 1966 paperback editions that had been forced on Tolkien, at least in the U.S. by an unauthorized pirate edition in 1963. He continued to work fitfully on his original epic about the elves in the first age as well as other essays regarding Middle-Earth until his death in 1973. As I’m sure you know, it was left to his son Christopher to compile and edit a version of the Silmarillion in 1977. Since then, Christopher Tolkien has published an entire series on the gradual development of his father’s life’s work. The main point here is that the chronology sometimes changed over the decades, such as when he added 200 “years of the sun” to the era of the War of the Jewels (Silmarils) at the close of the first age or added twelve kings to his list of the rulers of Numenore, for a total of twenty-five instead of thirteen, as it had stood in 1951. Given the great length of each reign, this might have increased the duration of the second age by one-third to one-half, but no explicit chronology survives for the older version. It’s not widely known that the Hobbit was not closely tied to the overall mythos at first save by a few almost accidental references. The trilogy, intended as a sequel to the Hobbit (1937) was begun at the end of the same year and the conceptions of the second and third ages crystallized while he wrote the epic (1937–1951). Somewhat earlier in 1936, Tolkien attempted to write a time-travel story that resulted in the formalized idea of Numenore as his version of the Atlantis story, although the legend had long fascinated him because of repeated nightmares involving a giant tsunami, a dream image unwittingly shared with one of his sons. The story could more accurately be described as reincarnation, despite the fact that he was a devout Catholic. It involved successively older incarnations of a father and son, the “modern” pair a thinly veiled version of Tolkien himself and one of his sons, presumably the one who shared the dream. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, made frequent use of reincarnation and racial memory too in the 1920s and 1930s, apparently more than half-believing in it himself, although too embarrassed to admit it openly. His Hyborian Age, like the third age of Middle Earth, was “post-Atlantean,” yet still technically prehistoric. Such a conception was unique at the time, so far as I know. Similarly, Howard created the earlier epoch first in his Kull series, of which only two stories and a poem were sold within his lifetime, 1906–1936. The first published Conan tale Phoenix on the Sword was a revision of the unsold Kull story “By this Axe I Rule.” But instead of ignoring the unpublished tale, Howard chose to set it in a subsequent age after Atlantis sank, half-hinting that Conan was Kull’s reincarnation. The Cimmerian people descended from the Atlanteans and later became the Celts especially the Gaels. However, the usual dates assigned to the Hyborian Age do not quite fit what Howard implied, ending it when Plato said Atlantis sank ca. 9500 B.C., 500 years after Conan. Prior to Conan’s creation in 1932, it was inferred that Kull lived up to 100,000 years ago, as his Atlantis was still barbaric, rather like a tropical version of the British Isles in the classical era. A lengthy epoch of a civilized Atlantis was to have followed the age of Kull, as at least two epochs of culture preceded him on what have become the Eurasian and the African mainland. Once Conan appeared, it was suggested that Kull too lived about 500 years before Atlantis went down. Another global cataclysm ended the Hyborian Age although wars had devastated much of it already by then. Tolkien who set the War of the Ring ca. 5000–4000 B.C. near the Biblical creation dates implied something similar indirectly and the onset of history as it was dated in the years when Tolkien was educated ca.1897–1914. The Shire, for instance, where the hobbits lived was conceived to equate to the English Midlands but were not part of an island at the era of the war nor indefinitely afterwards. However, Tolkien did reveal that the twentieth century was in the sixth or even seventh age. During the last 6000–7000 years, therefore, the fourth, fifth and possibly sixth and some of the seventh ages have passed. Each, as in Hindu lore, was successively shorter, although Tolkien did not say by how much nor did he give any dates. He may not have thought of them as proportionally shorter in a mathematical progression like the Hindu Yugas. In the Kull stories, it was hinted that the current age might have begun 6000–7000 years before and that the first humans, a sort of elder race, had defeated pre-humans such as the snake-men then, even before Atlantis rose from the sea! Conventionally, the essay on the Hyborian Age, written at the start of the Conan series but not published until after Howard’s death, accorded 8000 years to it but the text itself includes no such computation. The total has to be calculated from various figures within the essay for apparently successive periods but some of which could overlap reducing the total to maybe 6000 instead. If that were done, l would put it after Plato’s date for “Atlantis’” demise, ca. 9500–3500 B.C., with Conan at 4000 B.C. and Kull at 10,000 B.C. Therefore, Conan appears to have been meant to live a few centuries before the dawn of recorded history, as was Tolkien’s trilogy. Normally, it is claimed that Howard set Kull about 18,000 B.C. and Conan at 10,000 B.C. Curiously, Howard’s serpent race, though influenced by the Hindu Nagas, eerily presaged the shape shifting “reptilians” of British conspiracy theorist, David Icke. Similarly, Howard’s elder race sounds like the dark mirror of Tolkien’s elves, though not inherently immortal. Both compare to the version of the Elohim/ Watchers of Andrew Collins or Knight and Lomas, as well as Lawrence Gardiner. The latter at least acknowledges Tolkien openly but seems unaware of the pulpier Howard, an American. Also, the hints in Howard’s writing are more scattered and require extraction and interpretation not usually expended on such a writer save by a fan. The interface of fantasy, horror and science fiction with occultism and “New Age” alternative history is a fascinating subject on its own aside from whatever really happened in prehistory. The fiction writers were often influenced by the earliest occultists like the Theosophists, yet more commonly and deeply by the same myths and legends examined by the alternative history theorists. Tolkien’s Numenore (west land) was given to the three tribes of “faithful” men, who had aided the high elves in their war to regain the magical Silmaril gems from the Satan-like Melkor. He was one of the arch angelic Valar who played the role equivalent to the pagan gods in Tolkien’s scheme, and was the original dark lord, hence known as the Morgoth. He had stolen the jewels that contained the light of the two trees that lit the home of the Valar before the creation of the sun and moon. Melkor used an evil, monstrous, supernatural spider to poison the trees before fleeing with the stolen gems that he later set in his iron crown as Lord of Middle-Earth. The greatest and most vain elven artificer, Feanor, who vowed to regain them, had created the jewels. This resulted in much tragedy when one tribe of elves joined him in rebelling against the Valar and returning to Middle Earth whence their ancestors had come about 9000–10,000 years before, 900–1000 cycles of the trees. The war against the Morgoth was ultimately hopeless and few were left when the Valar relented and invaded Middle Earth to punish Melkor and regain the stolen gems. His deed had darkened the home of the Valar, called Valinore. Each tree magically produced a final fruit before it died. That of the golden tree became the sun and the one from the silvery tree ended up as the moon both “guided” by one of the Miar, the lesser angelic companions to the Valar. In the trilogy, the “wizards” like Saruman and Gandalf were actually incarnate Miar. So was the chief villain Sauron, the former principal servant of Melkor. Just as the elves “awoke” when the Valar sowed the stars, men arose with the sun; however, the moon appeared slightly before the first sunrise. The first age ended soon after the final defeat of the Morgoth, as he was thrust into the outer darkness beyond the walls of the world that was then still flat and vaguely in the shape of a ship.
That was in the 600th year of the sun. Earendel, a prince who combined Miar blood with that of elves and men used the light of one of the three Silmarils to reach Valinore and obtain the aid of the Valar against Melkor. Beren, a mortal hero and his future wife, Luthien, a half-elven half-Miar princess, had taken the gem he held at great cost from the Morgoth. Tolkien modeled her after an idealized image of his wife, Edith. In the trilogy, Aragorn and Arwen are latter-day echoes of Beren and Luthien. Though he had died in the first battle in Middle Earth before the sun rose, Feanor had passed on his vow to regain the jewels to his sons. That led to the destruction of Luthien’s realm, amongst other tragedies. Earendel was not permitted to return to dwell in the mortal world; instead, his ship was transferred to heaven, although his wife was allowed to join him. His Silmaril became a star that was evidently the planet Venus. This recalls Velikovsky’s claim that Venus appeared relatively late. Because of the war of the Valar against Melkor, after Earendel the star appeared, the western portion of Middle Earth was broken up and sank, save a few highlands that became islands, which was Tolkien’s concept of the British Isles and quite possibly became them before the development of the second and third ages, following ca.1936–1938. Numenore was a gigantic star-shaped volcanic island said to have risen from the sea when Beleriand (western Middle Earth) broke up and sank. It had five roughly equal peninsulas with a tall, central sacred peak, Meneltarma, the “Pillar of Heaven,” that proved to be volcanic near the end. When Numenore went down, only the sacred mountain remained above the waves as a small island, although that was only rumored because the descendants of the Numenoreans looked for it in vain. Numenore was also called “Andor” (land of the gift) and “Ellena” (land of the star, because of its shape and connection to Earendel, as the Evening Star.) Earendel was actually an obscure name for the evening star in archaic English poetry. It also led the original Numenoreans to the island from the foundering remnants of Beleriand in the year 32 of the second age. Earendel had sired twin sons: Elrond and Elros. The former chose to follow his elven blood and was permitted to become immortal as they were. Hence, he appears in the trilogy 6459 years after the end of the first age. Elros became the first King of Numenore. Granted exceptional longevity, he lived to be 500, reigning longer than any other mortal king. His people became the most elven of men yet remained mortal and were forbidden to seek the undying lands by sailing west beyond the sight of Numenore, although they explored the rest of the world. They became the greatest of mariners, initially returning to Middle Earth in the year 600 (568 years after they had left it.) In time, they colonized the world, especially western Middle Earth, and they helped the elves defeat Sauron when he first donned the ruling ring in his attempt to dominate the world. Unfortunately, they grew proud and greedy and began to fear death, especially under Sauron’s influence. He allowed himself to appear to be defeated and brought to Numenore, where he gradually subverted most of the people, the kings in particular. He convinced them to rear a domed temple to Melkor and to offer sacrifices in an effort to return the Morgoth to the world. A fleet was built to assail Valinore itself in the vain hope of seizing immortality there. It was called the “undying lands” because immortals dwelled there. However, Sauron made the Numenoreans believe that the place itself conferred immortality. The Valar called upon their creator for aid, laying aside their rule of the world. In the ensuing cataclysm, the world was “made round” and Valinore removed from it. Numenore was utterly destroyed save the Meneltarma, as it was nearest the “rift” when the world was “bent,” suggestive of the mid-Oceanic system of rifts and ridges that encircle the globe. New lands were created at this time, such as the Americas. This was the year 3319 of the second age. Sauron returned to Middle Earth in spirit to resume his “empire” centered on volcanic Mordor where he’d originally forged the “one ring” centuries before (ca.1595?). However, a last alliance of men and elves managed to defeat Sauron before he’d recovered fully from his escape from the downfall of Numenore (3434–3441). Sadly, the two leaders of the alliance, Elendil of Numenore and the elven king, Gilgalad, died battling Sauron. His spirit survived, though forced to flee, because the ring was not unmade when the opportunity occurred. As much of his power lay in the ring, losing it greatly weakened Sauron, but its continued existence ensured his own. Thus began the third age as the ring was lost while the elves and Numenoreans gradually faded, over the ensuing 3021 years.