Greek Mythology

The most obvious influence on the story of Númenor and its destruction is Greek mythology. Númenor was inspired by the story of the island kingdom of Atlantis, told by ancient Greek philosopher Plato, about a great civilization that was drowned in a terrible catastrophe. Tolkien mentioned it several times himself in his letters, calling the destruction of Númenor “a special variety of the Atlantis tradition.” He himself had a recurring dream about a great wave towering over and washing away a green land, which he gave to Faramir in The Lord of the Rings as a sort of ancestral memory of the destruction of Númenor.

Gondor also has some things in common with another city from Greek mythology that isn’t actually in Greece – Troy. Although the stories about it are myths, the ancient city of Troy was a real place, called Wilusa, and located in what is now Turkey. Some of Tolkien’s descriptions of Gondor draw parallels between the cities of Gondor and ancient Troy. He suggested in a letter that the port city of Gondor, Pelargir, was located “about the latitude of ancient Troy” (Hobbiton was about the latitude of Oxford, and Minas Tirith about the same as Florence).

He described the walls of Minas Tirith as “so strong and old that it seemed to have been not builded (sic.) but carven by giants out of the bones of the earth,” which sounds similar to the defensive walls around the city of Troy, which famously could not be breached and which kept the invading Greek armies out for 10 years, until Odysseus snuck them inside in the infamous wooden horse. The presence of seven strong defensive walls might have been inspired by an ancient Greek city, Thebes, which in mythology had seven gates in seven walls (though no one has yet found evidence of these in the real world ancient city).

Some of the story of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings is inspired by Greek mythology as well, like the fate of the last Steward of Gondor, Denethor. In Greek mythology, when Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, left to confront the Minotaur in Crete, Aegeus told him to put up white sails when he returned to show that he was returning home safely. However, Theseus forgot to change the sails, and when Aegeus saw his son’s ship returning homewards to Athens with black sails, he committed suicide by throwing himself from a height – in some versions, throwing himself into the sea and giving the Aegean Sea its name.

Similarly, Denethor is driven to despair both by the mistaken belief that his son Faramir is dead and by the ships with black sails that he sees sailing up the Anduin towards Minas Tirith in the palantír, the seeing-stone. Denethor, like Aegeus, does not wait long enough to find out that it is Aragorn who is, in fact, captaining the fleet, and he despairs and commits suicide, trying to take Faramir with him. This might have been why Peter Jackson had Denethor throw himself from the Spire of Ecthelion (rather than burning in his tomb, as in the book) in the film adaptation of The Return of the King.

The Roman and Byzantine Empires

No part of the ancient Western world was left untouched when Tolkien created Gondor, as he put some aspects of the Roman and Byzantine Empires in there as well.

Danofgeek