page_title: Númenor
section_title: Fall
hierarchical_section_title: Númenor / Influences / Fall
caption_attribution_description: Galego: Relevos no pórtico da Virxe, Notre-Dame, París. English: Reliefs, portal of the Virgin, Notre-Dame, Paris. Français&#160;: Portail de la Vierge, Notre-Dame, Paris.
context_page_description: Númenor, also called Elenna-nórë or Westernesse, is a fictional place in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings. It was the kingdom occupying a large island to the west of Middle-earth, the main setting of Tolkien's writings, and was the greatest civilization of Men. However, after centuries of prosperity many of the inhabitants ceased to worship the One God, Eru Ilúvatar, and rebelled against the Valar, resulting in the destruction of the island and the death of most of its people. Tolkien intended Númenor to allude to the legendary Atlantis. Commentators have noted that the destruction of Númenor echoes the Biblical fall of man.
context_section_description: The names connected by his philological studies formed for Tolkien the possibility of a kind of downward progression, from his long-lost mythical world of Númenor in the Second Age, to his fantasy world of Middle-earth in the Third Age, also now lost, to the real ancient Germanic and Anglo-Saxon thousands of years later, and finally down to the modern world, where names like Edwin still survive, all (in the fiction) that is left of Middle-earth, carrying for the knowledgeable philologist a hint of a rich living English mythology. Shippey notes that in Númenor, the myth would have been still stronger, as being an Elf-friend, one of the hated Elendili, marked a person out to the King's Men faction as a target for human sacrifice to Morgoth. Tolkien's "continuous playing with names" led to characters and situations, and sometimes to stories.
  Delattre notes that the position of Númenor in Tolkien's Middle-earth is curious, being "at once marginal and central", not least because in The Lord of the Rings, the glory of Númenor is already ancient history, evoking a sense of loss and nostalgia. This, he writes, is just one of many losses and downfalls in Tolkien's legendarium, leading finally to the last remnants of Númenor in the North, the Dúnedain, and the last Númenorean kingdom, Gondor, which "keeps alive the illusion that Númenor still exists in the South".
  Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, stated that The Downfall of Númenor (Akallabêth) was effectively a second fall of man, with "its central theme .. (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition". Bradley J. Birzer, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, notes that Tolkien thought that every story was essentially about a fall, and accordingly his legendarium contains many "falls": that of Morgoth, of Feanor and his relatives, and that of Númenor among them. Eric Schweicher, writing in Mythlore, notes that the ban was "soon defied", as in the Biblical fall. The temptation for the Númenoreans was the desire for immortality, and the ban that they broke was not to sail towards the Undying Lands of Aman.
caption: The downfall of Númenor has been compared to the Biblical fall of man.[12] The serpent tempts Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, Notre Dame de Paris
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