Travessias (Sep 2019)
The Fall of Númenor: The Flood in Tolkien’s Mythology
Abstract
The present article aims to analyze the occurrence of the Universal Flood mytheme in J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythological narratives. The analysis is based on the definition of mytheme from Claude Lévi-Strauss structuralist perspective, as well as the aspects that assemble the Universal Flood mytheme. Flood narratives found in the Epic of Atrahasis, in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, are also used in this study, as examples of how this mytheme arises in literature. Our object of studies is the fourth section of The Silmarillion ([1977] 2011), Akallabêth, which narrates the events that led the Supreme Being from the Tolkien’s mythology, Eru Ilúvatar, to invoke the power of the water to cause the destruction of the island of Númenor and its inhabitants. The methodology used is a bibliographic review of works about myths, mythemes, flood narratives, Tolkien’s mythology and biographies about him. Following the analysis made, we concluded that the way in which the author uses the Universal Flood mytheme in his mythology differs from what the authors of the texts taken as examples do in both structure and content.
