For Tolkien, the crisis was not technological; it involved religion and the fear of death that haunted the original Numenorians. Many of Tolkien’s deeper themes involve mortality. Strider, for example, is mortal, but when he becomes king, he marries Arwen, an immortal. The Numenorians, in their day, had exceptionally long lives, but did not live forever. They began to envy the gods and the elves, who could live forever if they wanted. They became so haunted by the fear of death and the obsession with living forever that they became conquerors.
In fact, they sailed to Middle Earth with a plan to take as hostage Sauron, the Dark Lord. He gave himself over willingly to be their prisoner and was taken back to their astonishing civilization—but with a secret plan to take advantage of the Numenorians’ fear and destroy them. Eventually, he convinces the king that he and his people are better than the gods and goddess, who live in a land to the east (where they are forbidden to sail). Finally, he convinces them to wage war on the gods. And this they do. The psychology is clear: The fear of their own death leads them to attempt to conquer the immortals. They try—but, in return, their island is destroyed without a trace, except for nine ships that sail back to Middle Earth.
We may think that our tragic flaw involves technology and its abuse, from our obsession with games and technical diversions to our casual attitude toward the nuclear bomb. But I think that beneath that is the spiritual issue that Tolkien lays out so vividly in Akallabeth. We don’t see it, but that lurking fear drives us to do nearly everything we do, and to avoid nearly everything we avoid. The fear of death haunts our technology, which is often used to act out murderous games. It haunts our relationships and our perception of politics and of the future. Many of our political leaders profess to believe in the Rapture.
The fear of death is indeed driving us closer to the brink of collective disaster: In our own minds, we are becoming the next Atlantis. What we may not know is that such a fate is optional. Yet that’s always how it is.
Additional research by Mari Kim and Genevieve Salerno.
