Numenor and America

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

The Akallabêth existed long before the 1960s, I'm afraid. Tolkien was working on it before he started to write The Lord of the Rings.

As has already been mentioned on this thread, the new lands to the West (the Americas - in his fiction literally the New World) came into existence when Númenor was destroyed and the Undying Lands were separated from the rest of the world. Tolkien made explicit comparisons with the ancient Egyptians and with Atlantis, but nowhere in his writings is there any hint that he intended to refer to America. To be quite honest, I doubt that America mattered enough to Tolkien for it to feature largely in his thinking.

However, Tolkien's story of Númenor is certainly applicable to most advanced cultures. It applies to the Egyptian Old Kingdom, to ancient Greece, to Rome, to the British empire and to modern America: people do have a tendency to abandon their spiritual principles, to seek to dominate other people, to become obsessed with longevity, luxury and the accumulation of wealth. Tolkien demonstrates with his Atlantis legend that even the best of Men are still vulnerable to failure and the fall into evil, and that those who are given the greatest gifts are often those who fall the furthest. To apply this to any one society is to deny its universal significance and to reduce its power. It is also, in my opinion, to misinterpret both the author's intentions and his mode of thinking to a quite astounding degree.