First Men/Andals versus Numenor

[lakin1013]

I am wondering if anyone has compared and contrasted the first men against Tolkien's Numenor?  I have tried two of the search engines here but I got nothing.  If anybody knows where this might have been discussed, send me where to look.  I do not quite have my thoughts together about this and wanted to see what was already said.

ty

[Nathan Stark]

There isn't really much to talk about here. The First Men are not Numenorean parallels. The Numenoreans are highly regal, very sophisticated, dealing regularly with the elves and some of the Valar, before their pride and arrogance causes them to fall. The First Men were basically Stone Age/Bronze Age people migrating to Westeros and building a society from that. The two fictional groups are complete opposites. The much better comparison would be Numenoreans versus the Valyrians. The Valyrians actually do parallel Numenor in most ways.

[Ring3r]

On 9/1/2022 at 10:19 AM, lakin1013 said:

I am wondering if anyone has compared and contrasted the first men against Tolkien's Numenor?  I have tried two of the search engines here but I got nothing.  If anybody knows where this might have been discussed, send me where to look.  I do not quite have my thoughts together about this and wanted to see what was already said.

ty

Both Numenor and the Great Empire of the Dawn explicitly parallel Atlantis (this has been confirmed by both authors) so I'd start there.  History of Westeros and In Deep Geek both have excellent 2+ hour long-form discussions on Youtube and they're both great listens.

[Ser Lepus]

Numenor crushes both the First Men and the Andals. The First Men are modeled after Bronze Age European cultures (bronze weaponry, tribal, build ringforts), and the Andals are inspired by Iron Age and Medieval European cultures. And in many aspects they are inferior to our world's Ancient and Medieval cultures from an economic, military and technological point of view (the exception being the Maesters' knowledge of medicine and a few other disciplines...).

Numenor, on the other hand, is supposed to represent the absolute peak of pre-industrial Humanity minus gunpowder but plus magic.

Pick the best sailing ship ever: XIX century clippers, Napoleonic Era ships of the line, XVI century galeasses, Zheng He's gigantic Treasure Ships...? The Numenoreans had better and then some.

Are we speaking castles? The Numenoreans built Isengard, whose walls were laced with magic and indestructible...

Cavalry? Numenorean horses were descended from elven horses imported from Valinor, the land of the gods themselves.

Armor and weapons? Numenoreans smiths learned from the Noldor, who were trained by Aulë, the God of Smithing himself...

Armies? Military tactics? Numenorean armies were so mighty that Sauron, the evil demigod who commanded armies of millions of orcs, trolls and humans yielded to Numenor without putting a fight.

Arts? Culture? Nothing humans have ever created comes close to what the Eldar did, but the Numenoreans were the ones who came closest...

Medicine? Agriculture? Animal husbandry? They knew how to heal every existing disease, and they had received knowledge on botany, zoology and biology from elves trained by the goddess who created all plants and animals...

And Tolkien hinted that Numenoreans may have discovered gunpoweder weaponry and steam engines...

First Men and Andals are dumbed down real humans. Numeroneans are the peak of what Humanity can aspire to be, minus modern industrial tech (because Tolkien thought modern tech was icky), but with lots of divinely-granted knowledge...

 

 

[gatlin]

I don't think Andals are the appropriate, or intended, parallel to Númenoreans; I argue that would be the Valyrians.

This topic opens the door a larger comparison of the two fantasy universes, however, especially in light of the personal views of the men who write them.

Both JRRT and GRRM have both chosen to tell stories set in the wake of the destruction of a wealthy, powerful, and influential society whose art, language, culture, and technology continues to be the dominant influence for centuries after their collapse. Both empires lasted for centuries and were destroyed nearly instantaneously, both sinking into the ocean.

I don't think for one second that it's an accident that Quenya term for Elves is "speakers," and the CotF's self-applied demonym is "singers." Tolkien fused his devout Catholicism with his interest (certainly knowledge) of Indo-European culture and created a nice generic IE pantheon still subservient to a monotheistic Creator; the Elves, without meaning to launch a controversial discussion, almost seem to be an argument for mortality by contradiction: all they see is the world degrade and descend. In a nutshell, Tolkien's world is arguably an expression of his spirituality and his attempts to reconcile his own worldview with the reality he saw in WW1 and which I don't need to describe.

Martin however is an atheist and a secular humanist. He is a science enthusiast. He is intrigued by human corruption, the moral gray of reality, etc. He created a fantasy setting where magic being real doesn't change the fact that humanity is violent and selfish and short-sighted. The Valyrians  society in many respects represents the reality of how something that grand and impressive could exist: on the backs of slaves and conquered vassal states. There is even evidence that the ruling class of all these has some non-human blood. They called themselves a "freehold" but this was of course a lampshade hung on the truth.

And just as the Númenoreans inherited much of their knowledge and culture from others who came before the Valyrians likely built their society on top of some previous power.

Tolkien engages in a little race science and suggests that much of the really cool and/or foundational stuff humans have was first developed by Elves; they're our benevolent older siblings (the first children of Ilúvatar, in fact).

First children. Children of the forest. Hm.

And where Tolkien riffs on the alarmingly standardized Indo-European pantheon to kickstart the world he's creating, Martin seems to riff on that by, in many ways, holding up the Norse story of Ragnarok in comparison to more esoteric alt history theories about cycles of cataclysm (what would be the result of mixing ice and fire in great amounts if not a flood?).

I won't pretend to be a Tolkien or Martin scholar but as someone who keeps finding out his esoteric interests seem to be shared by the two, I can't help but wonder if Martin is intentionally creating a subverted Eä.