“‘And Númenor went down into the Sea’: Tolkien, Beowulf, and the Masochistic Jouissance of Westernesse”

In Tolkien, Enchantment and Loss, John Rosegrant avers that Tolkien wrote of the downfall and destruction of Númenor in order to release a personal emotional complex (John Rosegrant, Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss, 118-20). In this essay, I examine in greater detail the emotional power of this story and relate it to the psychological notion of primary masochism (Freud, Deleuze, Bersani) and the pleasures connected to the dissolution of the self. The Beowulf poem renders conspicuous the dependency of heroic Anglo-Saxon male subjectivity on experiences of masochistic desire and the Death Drive, the desire to be unburdened of great expectation and responsibility. The attraction to psychic annihilation is both heroic and Christian. I will make the case that Tolkien’s close relationship to the Beowulf poem primed the pump of his literary artistry when it came to stories of erotico-spiritual submission such as the Fall of Númenor, allowing for the author and readers alike to experience the erotic thrill of the All-Father’s punishments. The destruction of Numenor is described in The Lord of the Rings by Faramir; however, Tolkien first wrote of it in the 1936 “Fall of Numenor, in The Lost Road (1937), the “Notion Club Papers” (1945), in the “Drowning of Andûnë” (1946), and in the “Akallabeth” (1948). Tolkien addresses his reoccurring personal dream in his 1955 letter to W.H. Auden, among others, where he describes the Great Wave and his surrender to it. The event is spiritual and highly emotional. Iluvatar himself is brought to wrath and in his anger he rends apart the world, condemning the Numenoreans and submerging the land and people under the sea. Of course, the biblical echoes are here to discuss as well. Readers think of Noah and the Flood (the post-deluvian world) or perhaps Sodom and Gomorrah. I argue here that -as with Beowulf- the diegesis around the downfall of Numenor evinces not only a sorrow and a fear of God pace Kierkegaard, but also a trembling and a queer pleasure one could accurately label masochistic.