crosspost: Gondor analogues [April 2014]

[anghraine]

• Thank you very much for your letter. … It came while I was away, in Gondor (sc. Venice), as a change from the North Kingdom ...
• In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.
• Venice seemed incredibly, elvishly lovely – to me like a dream of Old Gondor, or Pelargir of the Númenórean Ships, before the return of the Shadow.
• The Númenóreans of Gondor were proud, peculiar, and archaic, and I think are best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms. In many ways they resembled ‘Egyptians’ - the love of, and power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And in their great interest in ancestry and in tombs.
  
• […] I think the crown of Gondor (the S. Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle. The N. Kingdom had only a diadem (III 323). Cf. the difference between the N. and S. kingdoms of Egypt.
  
• But this is not a purely 'Nordic’ area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.
  
• The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a 'Nordic.’
  
• Nonetheless one’s mind is, of course, stored with a 'leaf-mould’ of memories (submerged) of names, and these rise up to the surface at times, and may provide with modification the bases of 'invented’ names. Owing to the prominence of Ethiopia in the Italian war Gondar may have been one such element.
  
• we come to the half-ruinous Byzantine City of Minas Tirith