Greidanus's The Final Sacrifice, or Quest for the Lost City (I'm not sure which title is the original one, but "the last sacrifice" is a line in the movie for what it's worth), posits that Canada—well, southern Alberta, I guess—was once ruled by a tremendously advanced race called the Ziox, long before the Indigenous population was ever there.

This general idea is VERY popular with racısts in North America, who struggle against the fact that the European brigands and settlers who came to the Americas in the last few centuries were relative newcomers to the continent. Hence there's long been an undercurrent of belief, unsupported by the slightest shred of archaeological or historical evidence, that the invading whıte Europeans were actually descendants of an even older civilization, one that was far mightier than anything that's actually been shown to exist, but which has vanished without a trace.

~Chara (cont'd)

Some of these notions about a prehistoric golden-age civilization that's left no surviving traces have been abroad for a while, in some form or another. There's the ancient Greek myth about the far-northern Hyperboreans (q.v. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbor…), there's the famous Atlantis of Plato and Donovan (q.v. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis), there's Lemuria popularized by Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky (q.v. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuria), there's the notion of an Ultima Thule (another Greek borrowing, q.v. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule) and I'm sure that's not an exhaustive list.

The persistent belief in such a conveniently untraceable lost civilization, one which whıte supremacists assert to be the true original masters of North America and far superior in learning and technology to any known ancient civilization, merges by degrees with related notions about colonization of Earth by ancient space-faring peoples (therefore giving the "whıte race" a unique and superior origin) and also with #fantasy writing which occupies a deliberately blurry territory between known history and outright fiction. R. E. Howard, for example, wrote stories set in such a setting, depicting as it were an alternate version of Earth's pre-history.

~Chara (cont'd)

island in the far north in classical European literature

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And that brings me to Professor J. R. R. #Tolkien, and lost Númenór.

Tolkien's enormous body of mythopoeic fiction is intended to be, as far as Prof. Tolkien's abilities were able to make it, a distinct "subcreation". His "Arda marred" is—strictly speaking—not Earth. Arda has its own story of Creation, its own sort of Fall that is not like the canonical story of humanity's Fall, and the peoples of Arda and of Middle-Earth are distinct from those of Earth. Tolkien was intensely concerned with giving his subcreation an independent life, and thus he thought poorly of the slapdash worldbuilding which #CSLewis put into #Narnia, which freely mixes up fantasy and Earthly elements together.

However, even though Tolkien tried very hard to build a kind of parallel Universe to Earth, he was also trying to give his "legendarium" as he called it (q.v. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%…) a specifically English character.

~Chara (cont'd)

At least, that's the story I learned back when I was reading about the #Inklings in my SDSU undergraduate days. And it seems to be the conventionally accepted narrative about #Tolkien and the motivation for his incredibly voluminous and detailed writings: he was attempting to create a kind of national mythology for England, in analogy to the 19th-century Finnish Kalevala (q.v. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_mythol…).

And his legendarium includes what might as well be a recapitulation of the story of Atlantis or lost Lemuria, a story that appears in The Final Sacrifice in capsule form: Númenór is the lost homeland for the human beings who fought alongside the Elves in the cataclysmic battles against Morgoth in Tolkien's "First Age". Those human beings, the Edain, were once friendly with the Elves and ruled by a great king who was himself "half-Elven" (Elros, son of Eärendil) and possessed wisdom and technology far superior to any other human beings who'd survived the disasters of the First Age. The Elves gave the Númenóreans the seven far-seeing stones, the palantíri.

~Chara (cont'd)

literary analysis of Tolkien

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We are on familiar ground here: the Númenóreans were better in every way, they lived longer, sickness and senescence were unknown to them, they respected the old gods...but it was not to last. Númenóreans became corrupt, their lifespans dwindled, they spurned their gods and their traditions and their friendship with the Elves, and eventually—after one last spasm of ambition, one last grand expenditure of Númenór's strength—the gods destroyed their land and changed the very shape of the world so that no human being could ever again sail to the blessed lands. The seas were now bent.

Thus did #Tolkien, in writing his own version of a "lost Atlantis" tale, hint at a mechanism, an explanation for why there was no trace to be found of lost Númenór: the gods—or God, if you are cheeky enough to equate his Eru Ilúvatar with the Creator of Heaven and Earth—had punished humanity by warping the very geometry of Earth.

~Chara (cont'd)

And even though the fall of Númenór is clearly intended to be seen as a moral failing, brought about by the dwindling faith of the Númenóreans and their kings in the old gods and the old ways as they became entranced by the prospect of worldly dominion and besotted by the fear of Death, at no time does Prof. #Tolkien ever pull completely away from a fixation on "blood" and special lineage. In both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien lays emphasis on the specially gifted origin of the Númenóreans:

To the Fathers of Men of the three faithful houses rich reward also was given. Eonwë came among them and taught them; and they were given wisdom and power and life more enduring than any others of mortal race have possessed...therefore they grew wise and glorious, and in all things more like to the Firstborn than any other of the kindreds of Men; and they were tall, taller than the tallest of the sons of Middle-earth; and the light of their eyes was like the bright stars.

~Chara (cont'd)

There is a steady drumbeat of references to this specially blessed origin of the Dúnedain, the "Men of the West" in The Lord of the Rings, and quite a bit more in that book's appendices. The great human kingdoms of Middle-Earth were great because they were founded by descendants of these Númenórean houses and their half-Elven king Elros son of Eärendil, Elrond's brother. So long as they remained relatively "pure of blood" these Men of the West lived long and had superior wisdom. They could see further, as #Tolkien sometimes puts it. Here's a characteristic passage from The Return of the King in which Prince Imrahil and his people are praised for their Númenórean blood:

Tirelessly Gandalf strode from Citadel to Gate, from north to south about the wall; and with him went the Prince of Dol Amroth in his shining mail. For he and his knights still held themselves like lords in whom the race of Númenór ran true. Men that saw them whispered saying: ‘Belike the old tales speak well; there is Elvish blood in the veins of that folk, for the people of Nimrodel dwelt in that land once long ago.’

~Chara (cont'd)

This is...unfortunate. It's deeply unfortunate to see how easily #Tolkien's narrative can be coaxed into line with the desires of the whıte supremacists who want to believe that they're the long-lost descendants of a special race of really super-duper people (from space, maybe) who once had a great civilization—Thule, Hyperborea, Númenór, wherever—that was conveniently nowhere to be found in any archaeological record.

If I might poetically address the shade of Professor J. R. R. Tolkien...I no longer know exactly how I'm supposed to regard you. I feel perhaps that I do not know enough, because I know at least that you had some regrets about your own writing. You felt you made some poor decisions, such as the writing of the Orcs. I would suggest that befriending #CSLewis was also a poor decision but you couldn't have known that...

~Chara (cont'd)

...all of these facts I know only extremely imperfectly and remotely. I haven't given the #Inklings as a group any serious examination since the 1990s.

No less than Sir Mordred Pendragon has asked me to read this book by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur. I know enough about the book, indirectly, to be scared of it. Sir Mordred is unhappy with how Tolkien wrote him, but that is not the chief point. The real issue is that Sir Mordred wants to know more about his father. Some vision of his father is to be found in the pages of this volume, The Fall of Arthur...I'm not sure I want to see it.

Do I need to see it? No. I could chuck the thing into a fire and solve the problem that way, simply...burn a powerful symbol of my one-time attachment to Tolkien and his legendarium. If this book had existed in 1994 I would have snapped it up instantly. I'm rather glad that wasn't actually possible.

~Chara (cont'd)

I do think this stuff matters. That silly Final Sacrifice film, in its half-assed way, shows why it matters. The movie's villains, led by the black-clad Satoris ("Garth Vader", as the #MST3K crew christen him) are thinly sketched. They believe that they're part of "the only race that was built to perfection", the Ziox race, and so they do crimes and stuff. That's all you really need to know about them, and the horrifying thing is, you don't really need to know that much more about the real-life whıte supremacists who behave in a similar fashion.

They feel like they're part of a special story, a secret history only guessed or glimpsed by a few, and they think that knowledge entitles them to do crimes. Thanks in part to the very flimsiness of such narratives, they tend to change frequently and swap tropes from other origin stories, and that chaotic burble of fantasized pseudo-history therefore tends to keep going and evolve over time. They absorb promising bits of fiction and pop culture...like they've enveloped #Tolkien.

~Chara (cont'd)