Akallabêth = As in the Days of Noah

Tolkien may have believed in a limited, though not just local, Flood.

Or he may simply have seen the "sinking of Atlantis" (whether pre- or post-Noah's-Flood) as a parallel to it, and therefore Atlantis (on which Akallebêth is his fan fiction) just before the sinking as a parellel to the pre-Flood world just before the Flood.

Either way, it seems he knew a thing or two on how things behave at sea. He researched phases of the Moon in painstaking accuracy for Lord of the Rings, we can be sure he researched waves and giant waves and tsunamis in detail before writing Akallabêth.

Here is a quote or paraphrase from it, in Girl Next Gondor's summarising of Númenor's fall:

although The 19:35 Great Wave should have claimed their 19:36 ships along with everything else they 19:38 are instead Swept Away by a terrific 19:41 wind that snaps their masts and blows 19:43 them all the way to Middle Earth

Now, this is actually impossible, even this. Hence, it is impossible if the ships had been sailing on the sea, that they would not have been buried in the Flood. This also goes for the Ark.

Instead we must imagine that the Ark only started floating once the waters were far higher and already very much calmer. In fact, the Ark must have been very high up. I would say Noah knew where the single highest mountain on the pre-Flood world was, he built the Ark there, and he knew that the water line of the Ark would be half the way up. 15 cubits of the 30 cubits height.

Now read the appropriate verses of Genesis:

And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered The water was fifteen cubits higher than the mountains which it covered
[Genesis 7:19-20]

The Ark never was near one of those big waves from when vast land masses suddenly came under water. The seas around the mountain were as wide as the world and as deep as that mountain was high, and when that "tip of the iceberg" sank and the Ark floated, it suffered no great commotion.

But, oh boy, what a fool Noah must have looked to people when they realised he was building a ship on the back then equivalent of the top of Mount Everest. Meanwhile, as God does not break His promise, we can rule out the theory that the Flood looked just like Valencian province some time ago, with lots of houses and hilly parts of Valencia still well above the water surface.
/Hans Georg Lundahl

Inklings on the Fall

While I am a fan of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, generally, both as artists and as theologians, usually with more reservations about CSL's Protestantism, I have already noted that CSL's view on the Fall as expressed in The Problem of Pain was inadequate, because among other things it involved a collective fall. I am afraid, after confrontation with Tale of Adanel, that Tolkien was not all that much more orthodox.

the fall of humanity 5:35 goes as follows the race of men were 5:37 born into the world with the first 5:39 coming of the Sun in the Far Eastern 5:41 land of Hildórien they were bare and 5:43 primitive and their lives were free and 5:45 without burden and they felt the very 5:47 voice of God within them one day a 5:49 stranger appeared and he came to them 5:51 with gifts he increased their luxury he 5:53 housed them and he fed them and he 5:55 increased their appetite even though 5:57 they had lived without burdens before 5:59 him now that they had received his gifts 6:01 they wanted more but the stranger would 6:03 not teach them his ways he wished for 6:05 them to rely entirely upon him for these 6:08 gifts Humanity realized their dependency 6:10 on him and the race of men confronted 6:12 the stranger and asked him for knowledge 6:14 The Stranger grew angry and accused men 6:17 of ingratitude claiming that the voice 6:19 they felt within them was that of 6:21 Darkness at that the stranger left and 6:23 he did not return for a long while and 6:25 he left mankind distraught as they had 6:27 grown accustomed to the laxury he proved 6:29 divided but which they could not produce 6:31 on their own the voice of God had tried 6:33 to warn them repeatedly not to trust the 6:35 stranger but mankind did not listen in 6:38 the midst of their desperation the sky 6:39 grew dark and the sun vanished and men 6:42 were terrified that it was the darkness 6:44 from within coming to consumed them at 6:46 that thought the stranger returned and 6:48 offered them salvation the only thing 6:51 that he asked and returned was that they 6:52 worshiped him as their lord and God he 6:55 was the stranger no longer for now he 6:57 was the master the master was not as 6:59 generous as before and he only gave gift 7:02 when his orders were obeyed and his name 7:04 revered with the worship of the master 7:06 however something else also changed men 7:09 started to age and die this had never 7:11 happened before

Tolkien’s Scrapped Version of the Garden of Eden and the Original Sin
Ink and Fantasy | 23 March 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sk1eudyvlw

One good point: men are "born into the world with the first 5:39 coming of the Sun", fine. Day 4, Sun, Day 6, Adam and Eve. If Eden is East of Jerusalem (Adam dying West of Eden, where he had been created, where Calvary was), and Beleriand is supposed to be like lost parts of land West of the British Isles, it's not wrong to call the origin of man "a far eastern land" either.

The rest is less good.

Here are the corrections:

• The first two sins among men were individual ones, not collective ones. Eve was fooled, Adam wasn't, hence his sin is the actual fall. It is a momentary sin, which in a moment changed everyone originated from him in any way (including Eve, come from his side!), with exception for the redemptive rescue task force of Mary and Jesus, from originally just to original sinners.
• Mankind was created in an original couple. Not in a collective. Collective creation of mankind, that's a Babylonian error, you find echos of it in Gilgamesh, and basically a direct statement in Enuma Elish, but the Hebrew truth has one original couple. The different views have consequences, among other things in how the relation between the civic state and the Christian or even just natural marriage are viewed.
• There was no prior race of roughly speaking human shape, like Elves, appearing much earlier, under stars and before the Moon.
• The sin was a refusal to obey God, not a direct allegiance to the serpent.
• It was not slow. It did not involve getting accustomed to things.
• God was not absent. He cursed the serpent. Man did not have to seek salvation on his own. God had told Adam and Eve, in general, but sufficiently detailed, words how salvation was to come about.
• It is highly doubtful that Adam would have, before his body took on a new vulnerability at the fall, even found a house comfortable, but it is impossible to imagine that he could see a house and not be able to figure out how to build it! When the Scientific Revolution was a programme (I am not saying it started science, just that it imagined itself as doing that), part of the idea was, Adam had so much knowledge of the natural world, which was lost to us through sin and later even more by chaos like surviving a Flood, spreading from Babel, and so on, and it was a question of recovering parts of what he had known, not of bypassing it. By and large, barring some observations not available to him, this is a correct assessment.

Let's recall, despite being a Catholic, Tolkien was also an Oxford don. They are not incompatible, but Oxford as such was a source of some errors in theology.

Had the "three houses of Edain" really existed, this kind of story would have been a result from confusing the fall in Eden with the descent of the watchers, if Henoch is correct, and of overdoing rejection of "watcher connected" technology into idealising an overall technology poor society. Fair enough that houses were not needed in Eden, but after the fall, they did become an asset.

This was probably the background to some real, pre-Flood, people's attempts at avoiding Nod, as the Neanderthals and Denisovans and even some Cro-Magnon had some tribes, and the Solo men whole populations perhaps, who were in "palaeolithic" societies, hunters and gatherers. The pre-Flood part of archaeology seems to show very many of them (though not all) did succumb to devil worship in the form of cannibalism before the Flood.

One can reject Industrialism or aspects of it like Mass production, for nearly every asset, without wanting a generally technology poor society. Becoming Indians does not damn us, but it also does not save us. Christ does, and He was a carpenter.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Palm Sunday
24.III.2024

... and a Davidic King, of course!

Hosanna filio David: benedictus, qui venit in nomine Domini: hosanna in altissimis.

Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

As so often, so also on this topic, a Tolkien like scenario would make much more sense than glueing the Biblical history onto an Evolutionary one. It would still not be actually good.*

What co-divides with "animal rationale mortale" (definition of man)? Well, there is not just "animal irrationale" (automatically also "mortale" in scholastic philosophy) but also, in Neo-Platonic philosophy (since I am citing the tree of Porphyry) "animal rationale immortale".

Before we proceed, how would one spell Beren and Luthien in Old Greek? Not Modern Greek, where the man's name would start in MP, but in Old Greek. One option would be BEPEN and ΛOYΘIEN, especially in Attic or Ionic, but in Doric, at least older such, and Homeric dialect, it might perhaps be more like BEPEN and ΛYΘIEN, since Y was not [ü] but [u]. Opting for a Doric spelling would perhaps be appropriate, since her dialect of Sindarin was called Doriathrin. Or inappropriate, since both normal Sindarin and Doriathrin actually have an [ü] to spell Y, if using the Greek Alphabet, and might use OY to spell [u]. Anyway, I'll deal with the spelling inspired by Doric:

B	E	P	E	N
		100				100
				50		50
2	5		5			12
Λ	Y	Θ	I	E	N
	400						400
30			10		50		90
		9		5			14

BEPEN would add up to 162 and ΛYΘIEN to 504. What does the total equal? Well, a number I partly got in the post-number on the first draft I opened for this post. Three consecutive sixes.

Now, bear this in mind.

In Tolkien's "Legendarium", as the collection of stories in certain books** and as the scenario joining them is called, there is a created kind intermediate between angels and men, called "elves" although they do not quite totally correspond to traditional folklore creatures of this name. He envisaged a story in which for each conttiguous pair, a female of the higher kind chose a man of the lower one. Tolkien's reasoning would have been like with a male angel on a human woman, there is too big a difference, it is total rape (confer what I have said about the idea of Adamites "marrying" creatures that did not have rational souls up to the marriage : rape. But - his reasoning went on - if there is an intermediate kind and if in each pair the weaker vessel is of the stronger kind, that would not necessarily be so. Hence he considered the offspring of Beren and Luthien would not have been damnable in origin as the Nephelim were. Obviously he realised that this intermediate kind was speculation for the convenience of the story.

Now, the scenario I will again propose without necessarily anyone believing it is, this were not so. There would have been a kind that is both "animal" (that is, a moving body animated by a soul) and "rationale" (man not beast, able to say "the grass is green") but unlike Adam's descendants after the fall instead "immortale".

This would obviously mean that any pre-adamite men we find would not have died naturally, they would have been casualties. And that we could some day run into a Neanderthal who was alive 20 000 years before Adam was created, or for that matter a Cro-Magnon of such description.

Those who married into Adam's kin would have been very well aware of what they were doing, as keenly aware as Luthien and Arwen in Tolkien's stories, that they were contracting death by doing so after Adam sinned.

There are people who consider, with an age difference of 30 years from man to teen girl - even if the girl is physically mature, not under the age of puberty - there would be a kind of rape, because the man would have had so much more experience. I disagree. I don't think it would have been wrong if Noah at age 500 married a girl of 50 (after being stopped from or willing to forego marriage up to then), as long as the girl of 50 had reached puberty and was not a case of Down's syndrome or any condition making physical adults to have child brains, I strongly disagree with the sentiment.

But if an immortal who had 500 000 years' experience came to meddle with for instance Cain or Seth, I think it would be that.

Other question, why would someone intermarry if that meant contracting death? Less problematic, it would be opting for getting a particular judgement before Doomsday, with the option of Redemption by (Faith in the yet to come) Christ rather than mix up and get judged a million years later without this help, and perhaps screwing up royally.

Where would they be now? Maybe on a well chilled part of Mercury, undertaking the upkeep of Enoch and Elijah until they return? Maybe inside the Earth (meaning they didn't get wiped off the surface of the earth at the Flood, because they weren't there in the first place), in a scenario reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar, also known as Hollow Earth? We don't seem to see such people now, and it seems the Irish tradition about a people inside the hills would come from the times when the "Anatolian Neolithic Farmers" from Babel came to replace an earlier population of "Western Hunter Gatherers, involved in the Genesis 10 spread.

You see, for the carbon date (not to be confused with real date) of the Flood to be 40 000 BP or 38 000 BC and for the carbon date of Babel to be between 9600 and 8600 (8200?) BC, you need to have a spread of mankind's peoples from the landing place before you have a dispersion of mankind's kingdoms from Babel. And this means, no, the Daoine Sidhe are not elves in the Tolkien sense, they are people who arrived on Ireland between Flood and Babel and hid from those arriving after Babel. This is then one of the arguments against "immortal, near-human" parents of Adam. Of course, the argument falls if one assumes old age. But if one does, one creates a problem for the population of Ireland. Unless one takes this fairly outlandish idea.

But the main issue is, such an intermediate kind between angels and men does not seem to exist. If it did, some things we know about Neanderthals seem to exclude them from such a role. Not the fact some were found with wounds, even a trepanation here (I seem to recall) and a cut off arm there (in Shanidar), that could be penalties for individual sins, within an overall still blessed kind, no, we have found genes for diabetes in their bones. Of course, it is possible that the gene which in us promotes a hastened mortality, with other combining factors could have contributed to an overall immortality, but it is not very likely.

Biblically as well as in anthropological archaeology, we do not find likely candidates for such an intermediate kind. Indeed, they would have had the kind of covenant that some Protestants attribute to Adam and Eve, which would be a fairly troubling thing with the things we do know of Adam and Eve. And of course, take the gematria of Beren and Luthien too. No, such intermarriage would not have been OK, notwithstanding the imagination of one of the clearest headed Old Earth compromisers, so, this also is no way out of the conundrum you pose yourself by saying "Adam wasn't created within 144 normal hours after the creation of the universe" - which therefore remains still preferrable.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Feast of Annunciation
25.III.2022***

* As in Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? I am refuting a position which may not be actually held by old earth compromisers, just for completeness.
** In order of publication, a) in his own lifetime: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (in three volumes), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; b) posthumously, published by his son Christopher: Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales from Númenor and Middle-Earth, and after that all of the "History of Middle-Earth" series, 12 volumes, starting with The Book of Lost Tales, two parts, and The Lays of Beleriand.
*** It is also a significant day in Tolkien fandom ...