J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English writer, poet, and academic who created the most fully realized secondary world in literary history — Middle-earth — across The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), The Silmarillion (1977, posthumous), and an enormous body of supplementary material edited and published by his son Christopher Tolkien. He was Professor of Anglo-Saxon and then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, and his academic expertise in medieval language and mythology pervades every aspect of his creative work.

Biographical Context

Tolkien was born in South Africa but moved to England as a child after his father’s death. His mother died when he was twelve, leaving him and his brother in the care of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan, whose guardianship profoundly shaped Tolkien’s religious development. He was a devout Catholic throughout his life, and Catholic theology and mythology — the Fall, Providence, the relationship between death and immortality — inform Middle-earth at a structural level that Tolkien himself was sometimes reluctant to make explicit.

He served in World War I, including at the Battle of the Somme, where he lost most of his closest friends. This experience of industrial-scale death and destruction is visible throughout his work in the elegiac tone that pervades Middle-earth — the persistent sense of a world in decline, of great things passing, of the cost of creation and preservation.

His friendship with C.S. Lewis (and membership in the Inklings literary circle) was formative in both directions: Tolkien is often credited with helping Lewis return to Christianity, and Lewis was among the first readers to recognize the importance of The Lord of the Rings.

His academic concept of “sub-creation” — the idea that human beings exercise their highest imaginative faculty when they create coherent secondary worlds, participating in the creative act of a God who made the primary world — is the theoretical foundation of his fictional practice.

Core Ideas

The Mythology of the Second Age: Númenor and the Fall

The Fall of Númenor (edited by Brian Sibley from Tolkien’s posthumous notes) collects materials relating to the Second Age of Middle-earth — the age preceding the events of The Lord of the Rings. The centerpiece is the story of Númenor: a great island kingdom granted to the Men who fought against Morgoth, situated between Middle-earth and the Undying Lands. Númenor is Tolkien’s most direct engagement with the myth of the Fall.

The Númenóreans are given everything: long life, great knowledge, a fair island, the friendship of the Elves. They are given one prohibition: the Ban of the Valar, which forbids them from sailing west toward the Undying Lands. And this prohibition — like all prohibitions in Tolkien’s mythology — is not arbitrary but rooted in a deep cosmic principle: that mortals cannot claim immortality without destroying what makes them mortal and therefore human:

“The Downfall is partly the result of an inner weakness in Men — consequent, if you will, upon the first Fall (unrecorded in these tales), repented but not finally healed. Reward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment! The Fall is achieved by the cunning of Sauron in exploiting this weakness. Its central theme is (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor (author’s note)

The three stages of the Númenórean fall are laid out with almost theological precision:

“There are three phases in their fall from grace. First acquiescence, obedience that is free and willing, though without complete understanding. Then for long they obey unwillingly, murmuring more and more openly. Finally they rebel — and a rift appears between the King’s men and rebels, and the small minority of persecuted Faithful.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor

This is the structure of any Fall: voluntary compliance becomes grudging compliance becomes open rebellion — and the rebellion, when it comes, is not the product of external oppression but of internal corruption, aided by a tempter (Sauron) who exploits the weakness already present.

The Rings of Power: Corruption Through Desire for Preservation

The Second Age is also the age in which the Rings of Power are forged — an event that sits at the center of everything that follows in Middle-earth’s history. Tolkien’s account of the Rings is philosophically precise:

“The chief power (of all the rings alike) was the prevention or slowing of decay (i.e. ‘change’ viewed as a regrettable thing), the preservation of what is desired or loved, or its semblance — this is more or less an Elvish motive.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor

This is a crucial point: the Rings are not straightforwardly evil in their initial design. The Elven desire to preserve beauty, to slow the inevitable passage of time, is understandable — even sympathetic. But it is a desire that Sauron can exploit precisely because it involves grasping for something that should be let go: the present moment, the beloved friend, the beautiful thing. The Ring of Power is, at its deepest level, the desire to stop time — and that desire, Tolkien argues, corrupts everything it touches.

The One Ring is the master because Sauron made it to govern all the others:

“Now the Elves made many rings; but secretly Sauron made One Ring to rule all the others, and their power was bound up with it… And while he wore the One Ring he could perceive all the things that were done by means of the lesser rings, and he could see and govern the very thoughts of those that wore them.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor

Sauron: The Servant Become the Master

One of the most important theological observations in the Númenor materials concerns the relationship between Sauron and Morgoth — the comparison that clarifies Sauron’s particular mode of evil:

“Sauron was ‘greater’, effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First. Why? Because, though he was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low. Eventually he also squandered his power (of being) in the endeavour to gain control of others. But he was not obliged to expend so much of himself.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor

The mechanism of evil here is precise: both Morgoth and Sauron “expend their being” in the attempt to dominate others. Evil, in Tolkien’s metaphysics, is not simply wrong choice but a kind of ontological self-destruction — the dispersal of power outward in the attempt to control what cannot ultimately be controlled. Sauron, having put most of his power into the One Ring, becomes dependent on it: destroy the Ring, and you destroy him. The attempt to achieve total domination produces total vulnerability.

Galadriel: Strength, Mercy, and the Refusal of Power

Galadriel is perhaps the most fully realized character in the Númenor materials — not as protagonist but as one of the few characters who genuinely understands what is happening across the long span of the Second Age:

“Galadriel was more far-sighted in this than Celeborn; and she perceived from the beginning that Middle-earth could not be saved from ‘the residue of evil’ that Morgoth had left behind him save by a union of all the peoples who were in their way and in their measure opposed to him.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor

What Tolkien emphasizes about Galadriel is not her power but her judgment — and specifically her ability to see through Sauron’s disguises while others are deceived. Her gift is political and moral perception rather than martial strength. And her greatest act, in The Lord of the Rings (referenced throughout), is the refusal of the Ring when Frodo offers it — the refusal of the power that she could wield with benevolent intent but that would nonetheless corrupt the wielder. This is Tolkien’s deepest political statement: that the refusal of power, when power would corrupt, is among the highest of virtues.

The Craft of Collaboration: Celebrimbor and the Dwarves

One of the most humanly appealing passages in the Númenor materials describes the collaboration between the Elven smith Celebrimbor and the Dwarves of Moria — an alliance that produces extraordinary work precisely because of the complementarity of their different gifts:

“Both Elves and Dwarves had great profit from this association: so that Eregion became far stronger, and Khazad-dûm far more beautiful, than either would have done alone.” — Tolkien, The Fall of Númenor

The friendship between Celebrimbor and the Dwarf craftsman Narvi is one of the rare instances in Tolkien’s legendarium where the usual suspicion between the races is overcome through shared craft — a motif that anticipates Legolas and Gimli’s friendship in The Lord of the Rings and suggests that Tolkien saw in the practice of making something that transcended the usual barriers of identity and tradition.

The Source in This Library

The Fall of Númenor is a compilation of Second Age materials edited for accessibility by Brian Sibley, drawing on the posthumous volumes edited by Christopher Tolkien (Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth). The highlights focus on Númenor’s fall, the forging of the Rings, Sauron’s strategy, and Galadriel’s character — the mythological scaffolding that explains why Middle-earth looks the way it does in The Lord of the Rings.

Connections to Other Authors in This Library

• Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Tolkien’s Númenor both explore the same structural myth: the society given great gifts that gradually corrupts itself through the desire for more — specifically for the one thing it is not permitted to have
• Mark Manson’s concept of the “Uncomfortable Truth” — that we are mortal, temporary, and ultimately insignificant — is the truth the Númenóreans cannot accept, and their refusal to accept it is the driver of their fall
• Isaac Asimov’s concern with civilizational decline and the mechanisms by which great societies destroy themselves parallels Tolkien’s extended meditation on the same theme across thousands of years of mythological history
• Hermann Hesse’s mystical insight that every symbol is a gate through which few actually pass resonates with Tolkien’s Ban: the Undying Lands are always there, always visible on the horizon, but the attempt to reach them by force destroys rather than fulfills