Is Averorn a version of Atlantis? It is a sunken city in the Atlantic. Poul Anderson's main version of Atlantis is in The Dancer From Atlantis and is in the Mediterranean. Anderson also has two versions of Ys. Skafloc sees the sunken tower of Ys in The Broken Sword but all Ysan buildings are leveled in The King Of Ys.
Neil Gaiman rightly tells us that there is more than one Atlantis. He describes it both as sunken and as the fair land in the West. In CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, Numinor, borrowed from as yet unpublished manuscripts of JRR Tolkien, is the True West and Atlantis sank. In Tolkien's Middle Earth History, Numenor sinks and there is land to the West for ships that occasionally follow the straight path instead of the curve of the Earth.
In the Bible, wise men come from the East but, for Chinese Buddhists, wisdom came from the West so there is a mythical Western Paradise.
Imagination and meaning meet.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I recall reading of how, after Tolkien retired from Oxford University in 1957, he thought he would finally have time to finish his unfinished stories, esp. those set in the First Age of Middle Earth. One problem that worried him was how he came to think the "legends" about the Elvees and Numenoreans shows them as having a more primitive conception of the universe than such advanced peoples should have. Grappling with that issue took up way too much of Tolkien's time and left him unable to finish much, alas. His son Christopher Tolkien wrote with regret how his father overlooked a much simpler solution: these stories could have been thought of as myths inherited from times before the Elves had worked out a heliocentric astronomy and arrived at a Newtonian level of physics.
Ad astra! Sean
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