What Did the 2nd Age Mean To Tolkien?
Not enough to write a story set in it…
(Picture: Elrond & Gil-Galad fighting together in Mordor, at the end of the 2nd Age)
Tolkien wrote a good deal about the First Age, starting when he was serving in the British Army in World War One. He lived through the war - barely - and he continued to write about the terrible battles and heroic sacrifices made by his Elven and Human characters for the next ten years. Then he stopped as he had arrived at Oxford, and now he had to devote his time to the serious duties of being a professor at the most prestigious university in the English-speaking world, in addition to being a father of four children, and a husband.
In early 1932, about four years after Tolkien put aside his 1st Age stories, he started writing a new book which became The Hobbit. It was a glorified children’s story, intended for his children. By happy circumstance, the book was picked up by a London book publisher and it achieved a measure of public success. The publisher, George Allen & Unwin, asked for a sequel and in late 1937, Tolkien started work on a new book to follow The Hobbit.
At first, Tolkien had little intention of bringing more lore from his First Age writings into the sequel. The First Age has only the slightest connection to The Hobbit and he had already offered some of his First Age material to his publisher and they had politely rejected it. Up until this time, Tolkien had not invented the 2nd Age. He didn’t need to invent it.
However as Tolkien worked on the sequel to The Hobbit he realized that Bilbo’s Ring would make a good focus for the new book and that opened up a very fruitful line of thought. The Ring became important and so it needed both a maker, and there had to be a reason why it was found by Gollum. The entire history of the 2nd Age was created just to give Tolkien a backstory for Bilbo’s ring! From an authorial perspective, it would seem Tolkien put entirely too much effort into the backstory for Bilbo’s ring, but it gave his book such an air of depth and realism that his work paid off.
Now, keep in mind, Tolkien had total control over the sequel to the Hobbit. He was under no obligation to write anything more than a sequel to The Hobbit, and even that was hardly an obligation, as Allen & Unwin gave him no money, no time table, and no assurance they would even publish a sequel. Tolkien could have written another children’s story about the further adventures of Bilbo and left it at that. Tolkien had never said when the Hobbit took place, nor had he published anything related to the First Age. If he had chosen, he could have eliminated the 2nd Age entirely. Numenor, the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, all this and more could have been left uncreated and unmentioned.
Instead, Tolkien spent a great deal of time and effort working out several thousand years of history for the 2nd Age, and then an additional 2,500 years for the 3rd Age, just to begin what turned into The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien could have written a dozen novels set in the 2nd Age, yet he choose not to. Instead, the 2nd Age was summarized briefly at Council of Elrond, and a few events in it were hinted at elsewhere in the book. At the very end of the The Return of the King, Tolkien wrote an appendix which listed the dates and a few important events of the 2nd Age.
Tolkien himself was dismissive of the 2nd Age in a few letters which he wrote to people who asked him for more details. After the huge success of the Lord of the Rings, he choose to spend the last decades of his life working on fixing up the stories he had written about the 1st Age. The 2nd Age held little appeal for J.R.R.Tolkien.
Why was the 2nd Age Not Worth Writing About?
The Second Age started with great promise but it turned into a disaster. The creation of the Rings of Power was a great evil and the assault on Valinor by the army of Numenor was an even more terrible evil, which resulted in the deaths of perhaps a million inhabitants of Numenor - and the separation of the Valar from the world they were supposed to be protecting. The Last Alliance of Elves and Men produced a Pyrrhic victory as nearly all the leaders of the winning side died in the fighting, and Sauron’s ring was not destroyed, thus allowing Sauron to reform shortly before the start of The Lord of the Rings.
In historical analogy the 2nd Age looks like a combination of the legend of the Tower of Babel, the fall of Atlantis, and a grim realization on Tolkien’s part that the hard-won victory in the Great War (World War One) had not brought about a lasting peace, or really anything desirable.
The making of the Rings of Power looks like a version of the creation of the Tower of Babel, where man attempted a God-like feat and evil stepped in to make everything much worse than if the attempt had not been made at all.
The similarities between the destruction of Numenor and the fall of Atlantis are obvious. Both were islands with an advanced civilization. Both were destroyed by the Gods for reasons that vanished when the seas overwhelmed the once glorious civilization. Since Tolkien had defined his Gods (the Valar) as essentially good, that meant that Numenor had to have done something very bad to justify the destruction of the once great island.
The Last Alliance of Elves and Men sees Gil-Galad, the leader of the Elven army dead, as well as Elendil, the leader of the army of men, and the death of both of Elendil’s sons, though Isildur is killed in a random attack, a month after Sauron is defeated. Question: How often do kings die when their armies win a battle? Answer: Almost never, as Tolkien must have known. Kings rarely die in battles at all (Harold and Richard III are the only English kings that died in battle, and both battles were effectively lost before they died). Winning kings almost never die in any battles throughout world history. Consequently, the Last Alliance looks to me like a heavily modified retelling of the First World War. In 1918, Great Britain and France seemed to have won a solid victory, albeit purchased at great cost. However, twenty years later, Germany was back - more powerful than before - and under the control of a leader far more evil than Kaiser Wilhelm had ever been.
Thus the Second Age is a era of hubris. An era of high aspirations which were easily subverted by Satan (Sauron). An age which made such a mess of things that the people of the Third Age have to clean up the problems left behind by the 2nd Age and with much less to work with.
On an emotional level, Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings for his children, who were grown men at the start of the Second World War. He himself had fought in the Great War of the 2nd Age, and the victory, about which so much was promised, actually left England weaker than when it started. Indeed, the result of World War One was a bitter pill for nearly all Europeans to swallow. To see the victory turn into yet another world war just 21 years after the Great War ended was a terrible blow to every rational European. What, after all, had been the point to the war, if Germany was resurgent and the victors, England and France, weaker than they had been in 1914? What a terrible mess the leaders of Europe had made in Tolkien’s lifetime!
When Tolkien started writing the Lord of the Rings he did not know if England would even win this Second World War, and he stopped all work on the novel in 1943. When victory seemed increasingly likely he started sending new chapters to his youngest son, Chris, who served in the British RAF in 1944 & 45. Then Tolkien completed the first draft of the novel after the war had ended with all his family alive and England still standing, amidst the rubble of what had been Europe’s age of power.
It’s no wonder Tolkien didn’t want to write more about the 2nd Age. When Elrond talks about the end of the Second Age and the failure of Isildur to destroy the Ring of Power, that’s Tolkien’s speaking about the monumental failures by all of the European leaders from 1918 to 1939.
What Can We Say About the Second Age Today?
In the year 2022, how does the Second Age look? In the USA, we look back on the end of Europe’s age of power with some measure of indifference. We fought on the winning side in World War I, though only for a bit more than a year, and our casualties were modest compared to the millions of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Turks who died fighting from August 1914 till November of 1918. The USA ended World War One stronger than when we started, unlike almost every other participant.
Although the Great Depression hit us hard, two years of preparation was enough time for us to be ready when Japan attacked our fleet at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. The USA came out of World War II the greatest power the world had ever known.
For the USA, the Second Age - so disastrous for Europe - led to the transfer of wealth and technology to us. We were the prime beneficiaries of World War One, and the same thing happened after World War Two, only more-so. Both wars were good wars from our perspective.
If an American were to tell the story of the 2nd Age, Numenor would be a stand-in for the USA, and it would never have fallen. Numenor would never have invaded the land of Valinor. Instead Numenor’s army would have marched up to Morder, in the last days of the 2nd Age, shattered Sauron’s forces, and then headed home with a cheerful goodbye, leaving the Ring of Power behind in the hands of Isiludur.
In the 3rd Age, instead of a desperate hail Mary attempt to win the new war against Sauron, there would have been a successful appeal to an even more powerful Numenor by the Elves and men of Gondor, to save their cities - again. This time, the Numenorian army would have shown up at the shores of Middle Earth with magical weapons and Eagles by the thousands. Sauron would have been defeated in battle, after battle. The war would have ended with the Nuemnorians casting the ultimate fireball upon Baradur itself, vaporizing Sauron and all his Nazgul in a flash of blinding light. The Ring of Power would never have been used. The USA - Numenor -didn’t need some magical weapon of Sauron to win the war.
My point is: an American cannot write a drama encompassing Tolkien’s Second Age. Only a European, filled with the knowledge that they had most of the world under their control in 1900 and then threw it all away - could write that story. The story of the Second Age is deeply depressing and - unforgivably to an American audience - it ignores the rise in power of the United States.
I have no idea what the show runners for Amazon’s Rings of Power TV series have in mind for their TVshow. Will they use the fall of Numenor as a metaphor for the implosion of the USA in this decade? Since the USA hasn’t collapsed just yet, I rather doubt they will be so bold, but I don’t know.
Update January, 2023: the Sage still has not seen The Rings of Power, TV series.