... a book entitled "Facing the Ocean- the Atlantic and its Peoples". It has
some interesting facts about islands laying to the West of the continent and
Britain and Ireland. Legends of sunken lands are two a penny, from the legend
of Ker Is (an island town sunk by the evil daughter of the King), the
submerging of Cantre'r Gwaelod in Welsh folklore and the Cornish legend of the
sinking of Lyonesse. These legends were recorded as early as the 16th century.
Also of note are the many early maps, from 1400 up until as recently as the
19th century, which show not only real Atlantic islands, but imaginary ones as
well (one shows over 400 false islands off the shores of Africa and Europe).
Monks and pilgrims from Europe, England and Ireland would often travel out into
the Atlantic, returning later with tales of islands with towers and buildings
on, glimpsed from afar: the 'Voyage of Mael Duin's Boat' or the 'Navigatio
Brendani' being examples of this.
It is probable that Tolkien, being both a philologist and a catholic, would
have been aware of some of these early sailors writings, and perhaps even
linked them to influencing the Atlantis myth. In creating a mythology and
cosmology for Britain, it may also have occured to him that this quite major
thread in existing European mythology and cosmology would fit well. Added to
this is, of course, the symbolism of the west to Euopean and Christian culture
strongly effects the placing of Aman. The place of the Elves birth is in the
East, from where the sun will rise, the place of their final resting is in the
West, where the sun sets. West represnts death and ending, but in many
cosmologies the ideal of an extreme and unreachable east and west carries with
it myths of 'paradise on earth' in those places, where the sun is born and
where the sun dies. This can be seen especially in the travels of Gil-Galad and
in Eqyptian mythology.
I think therefore that Tolkien probably was not thinking of Ireland when he
placed and wrote of Valinor and the Blessed Realm. Rather he was placing his
'earthly paradise' in a cosmologically logical place that would have made sense
both to the dwellers of his 'Europeanised' world and to us modern readers, who
mainly exist in a European or North/South cosmoligcal framework. It just so
happens that the Ireland that exists in many of our minds resembles the closest
that we can think of to Aman, and, being an island to the west of Britain, we
can easily create a link.
As a footnote, for those who are interested, I noticed someone saying about
Egyptians burying their dead to the West, which can further illustrate my point
about cosmological orientation. The ancient Egyptian were actually
australicised... that is their 'North' is in fact our south, since the major
cardinal point for ancient Egypt was the source of the Nile. West in ancient
eqypt would have been on your right, not your left. This also tied in nicely
with the fact that there was a huge desert to the west of Egypt (their east!).
The sun set into a region that was associated with death and chaos, and so it
seemed a logical place to bury the
dead.
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"The Truth is not in the History, the History is in the Truth"...... "...For a given value of true"
qhiparu nayaru uñtas sartañani
