The Art of Eternal Disaster: Tolkien's Apocalypse and the Road to Healing

In a 1955 letter to his friend W. H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien confessed, "I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. ... I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields" (Letters 163). He was to insist on the significance of this dream again in various correspondences in 1956, 1964, and 1965; over the course of those letters, he refers to his "Atlantis complex" as a dream, vision, myth, legend, and—fascinatingly—dim memory (213, 232, 347, 361). In several of these he also mentions that, though he does not know if either of his parents was subject to the Atlantis haunting, his son Michael "inherited" the dream, and that he (J.R.R.T.) "bequeathed it to Faramir" by some undefined process of ideational inheritance.¹ The Great Wave appeared in multiple other places as it developed into an Atlantean myth concerning the island of Númenor. Gradually, the narrative became entwined with other concerns: a pseudo-fall, the Noachian escape of Elendil and his sons to Middle-earth, an attempt at psychological science-fiction, and of course even deeper issues of trauma, reincarnation, time travel, and communication with other living beings.

The unfinished and abandoned manuscript known as The Lost Road stands as a monument to Tolkien's first foray into the world of science-fiction writing, as unlike the traditional texts of that genre as it at first may seem. The story of its genesis is old and more or less well known: the tale emerged out of a pact with C. S. Lewis that stipulated that Lewis would try his hand at space travel, Tolkien at time travel. Lewis, predictably, produced a first book in a flurry of activity and moved on to other things; he later returned to the idea and churned out two more volumes to complete his Space Trilogy. Tolkien, just as predictably, began a narrative that by the second page was already decidedly philological and that would just as quickly become distinctively mystical in its conceptions. The story was abandoned and returned to in fits and starts throughout the rest of his life, reappearing as The Notion Club Papers (the only other form that came close to a complete story), but was ultimately never finished or even brought to any sort of satisfying conclusion. As it stands, it presents a tantalizing picture of an unforeseen disaster, the Great Wave, that would unite Middle-earth with the primary world through the vehicle of the out-of-body mind roaming in time.

Critical attention to the apocalypse in Tolkien's writing is by no means scarce. Verlyn Flieger has written on it prolifically, primarily in her book A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie. She focuses chiefly on Tolkien's preoccupation with time as a field, as literal space, studying his fascination with J. W. Dunne's eccentric book on dreaming and time travel, An Experiment with Time. Other researchers have taken different approaches. John Rosegrant reads Tolkien's apocalypse as an attempt to deal with the pain of losing his father at a young age. Rosegrant's Freudian/psychoanalytic reading becomes markedly speculative, but given that Tolkien spoke of "exorcising" the dream through writing, it is useful to consider the role that trauma or grief might have played in the Great Wave drama. Amy Amendt-Raduege, on the other hand, in her article "Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," connects the proliferation of dream visions in Tolkien's work not with time travel, as Flieger does, but with the medieval dream vision tradition with which Tolkien was intimately familiar, as the device appears in such texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These studies and others have not addressed, however, the markers of mystic ecstasy that are scattered throughout the apocalypse texts. Attention to this important factor would produce a more complex, colorful reading of these narratives and would acknowledge and...