Conference Paper: By the Waters of Anduin We Lay Down and Wept

Exilic Theology in the Akallabêth

On 2 July 2023, I was delighted to present a paper at the Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 Númenor, the Mighty and Frail. It was a wonderful day of leading-edge Tolkien scholarship - the other participants consistently impressed me with their insights into the island-kingdom whose meteoric rise and cataclysmic downfall form the core history of the Second Age of Middle-earth.

My paper was entitled “By the Waters of Anduin We Lay Down and Wept: Exilic Theology in the Akallabêth.” Here’s the abstract:

A once-glorious ancient civilization is laid low in a world-altering cataclysm; a mere handful of survivors escape from the wrack. Looking back from a distant land, the leaders of the faithful attempt to come to terms with the enormity of the catastrophe and answer the looming question: “How could God allow this to happen?” This synopsis could just as easily describe the Hebrew prophetic writings composed after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem n 586 BCE – or J.R.R. Tolkien’s account of Downfall of Númenor.

As Pamina Fernández Camacho (2012) has shown, the semitic character of Adûnaic and the theological concerns of the Akallabêth link Númenor, culturally and thematically, to the histories of Ancient Israel with which the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien was intimately familiar. In this paper I accept Tolkien’s frame narrative that Elendil is the in-universe author of the Akallabêth to explore how Elendil’s grappling with theodicy in the wake of the Downfall of the Land of the Gift mirrors the grappling of exilic and post-exilic biblical prophets such as Jeremiah with theodicy in the wake of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the conquest of the Holy Land. I argue that both Elendil and the Hebrew prophets come to similar conclusions: the faithlessness of the people and their falling away from God—especially in their worship and participation in the dominance-systems of Empire—are to blame for the cataclysm. Then, drawing upon the work of Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Bruegemann (1978/2018), process theologian Catherine Keller (2007), and Tolkien fan scholar Dawn Walls-Thuma (2016) to suggest counter-readings and counter-theodicies that critically engage the notion of a God who is willing to condemn an entire people to destruction for the failures of ruling elites.

If that sounds interesting to you, the Tolkien Society recently posted my paper, and all the others from this year’s seminar, on their YouTube channel. I urge you to check out the full playlist, and to subscribe to the TS channel (and to the Society itself) - they're a wonderful organization committed to supporting diverse Tolkien fandom and scholarship and I’m proud to count myself a member. All the papers were fascinating, but a special shoutout to my colleague Mercury Natis for his paper “Sauron’s Femme Fatale Sources and Their Role in the Númenor Narrative” which reads both Sauron and the Bible through a queer theory lens which readers of this newsletter should appreciate very much!

Here’s the video of me giving the paper and answering some audience questions at the end. Due to time constraints, the paper ended up only really filling out the first half of my abstract regarding the theodicy of the Akallabêth as published, but I’m excited to work out a process-theological alternative theodicy in the coming weeks and months!

By the way: I’m happy to make a copy of my paper available to anyone who would like to look over in writing what I say in the video. Leave a comment on this post or contact me at t.emanuel.1@research.gla.ac.uk and I can send a link your way.

Enjoy!

WORKS CITED

• Coogan, Michael, The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

• Coogan, Michael D. and Cynthia R. Chapman, A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: The Hebrew Bible in Its Context, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

• Cooper, Caryn L. and Kevin S. Whetter, “Hear, O Númenor!: The Covenantal Relationship of the Dúnedain with Ilúvatar”, Journal of Tolkien Research 11.2, Article 6 (2020), 1-11.

• Fernández Camacho, Pamina, “Cyclic Cataclysms, Semitic Stereotypes and Religious Reforms: A Classicist’s Númenor”, in The Return of the Ring: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Conference 2012, Vol. 1, ed. by Lynn Forest-Hill (Edinburgh: Luna Press Publishing, 2016), pp. 191-206.

• --- “Elven-Latin and Semitic Adûnaic: Linguistic, Religious, and Political Strife in Tolkien’s Island of Númenor”, Journal of Inklings Studies 13.1 (2023), 67-86.

• Flieger, Verlyn, “Drowned Lands”, in There Would Always Be a Fairy Tale: More Essays on Tolkien (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017), pp. 213-220.

• ---  Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005).

• Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003).

• Fontenot, Megan N. “The Art of Eternal Disaster: Tolkien’s Apocalypse and the Road to Healing”, in Tolkien Studies 16 (2019), 91-109.

• Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001).

• Jones, Jeffrey M., “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time”, Gallup News, 29 March 2021, <https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx> [accessed 26 June 2023].

• Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007).

• O’Connor, Kathleen, “Jeremiah”, in Women’s Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition, ed. by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), pp. 178-186.

• Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

• Tolkien, J.R.R., Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1980).

• --- The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

• --- Sauron Defeated, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

• --- The Peoples of Middle-earth, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

• --- The Silmarillion, 2nd edn, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).