This is the cover of the 2022 edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories about the sunken island kingdom Numenor, with an illustration by Alan Lee. In Tolkien’s oeuvre Numenor is geographically situated west of Middle-Earth and shows strong similarities to Plato’s Atlantis.
Its major cities are located along the coast and the inhabitants are a sea-faring, maritime society, refered to by the people of Middle-Earth as “Sea-Kings”.
I am no expert on the oeuvre of J.R.R. Tolkien. My knowledge is from vague memories of reading some books as a teenage so I rely here solely on source from the internet that are manifold and sometimes contracitory. As I understand, Numenor is not the only flooded land in the Tolkien Universe.
Among the texts I have read, the most astonishing invention by Tolkien to me is the idea of the bending of the earth which leads to the destruction of the island. Here is a quote from Wikipedia: “Eru Ilúvatar, the One God, caused the Changing of the World: the hitherto flat Earth was transformed into a globe, Númenor sank beneath the ocean. The whole population on the island was drowned.” (quote from wikipedia) This flood story is told in a short story entitled “Akallabêth“. The full text can be found here.
Tolkien was apparently influences by the story of “Lyonesse“, a faraway land that sank into the sea in the Middle English romance King Horn.
In a comic book from the Belgian comic series Marsupilami the artists Batem and Yann create a satire on megalomania pipe dreams of the super rich and the fascination of the flood myth.
Set in the South-American Amazon basin, the plot is based on the true stoy of Henry Ford’s „Fordlandia“ project, a business venture the us-American automobile entrepreneur conducted in the 1920‘s in the region to secure rubber supply for the booming car industry. In the comic book a fictitious billionaire follows Ford’s footsteps into the jungle to pick up the ruinous business. But he is obsessed with the idea of a second deluge and devotes all his time – and money – into catching animals to cage on his arch. Like a true business man he does not build the arch himself but buys a mega-flying boat off another billionaire, Howard Hughes. Like Fordlandia, the legendary „H-4 Hercules“ was a massive fail too; the only one of these planes ever produced had one flight only in 1947.
The images are from my german edition of the book:
The story was published in 1991 but one can’t help think of today’s grant rescue schemes of the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It’s a common feature of today’s climate debate, that billionaires seek and successfully generate public attention to techno-utopian elitist projects. (See this article by Douglas Ruschkoff on his encounter with prepper billionaires which caused quite a buzz upon it’s publication last year) The nice twist in Batem and Yann’s story is that this rescue project is completely built on the past failures of similar minded men.
In addition to these megalomania schemes and failures, the story also references environmental destruction and authoritarian development projects in developing countries: When the deluge does eventually come, it is not a universal one but just the massive tidal wave from a bust reservoir dam, that was finished just before by the authoritarian regime of Palumbia, the fictitious state the adventures of the Marsupilami are set in.
A common theme in Northern European flood myths are the church bells of submerged cities. This motive can be found all along the ccoasts of Brittany, Wales, England, Germany and Poland. The popular folk song “Bells of Aberdovey” relates to the legend of the sunken kingdom Gwydneu (more commonly known as Cantr’er Gwaelod) off the coast of Wales. The song is most likely not an original folksong at all but a composition from 1785 for an English Opera with lyrics in English not Welsh. The today popular Welsh version was first printed in 1905.
About the motif of submerged bells see also the art installation by Marcus Vergette in this post.
In a theme park near Tampa, FL, you can see mermaids perform for you live since 1947.
The producers write on their website: “What do you get when you combine underwater fantasy with SCUBA technology? Why, you get mermaids, gliding and twirling to the soundtrack of children’s fairy tales or popular music. […] In the shows the mermaids (and mermen — called princes) discreetly take mouthfuls of air from the slender breathing tubes while they perform. Even with the air tubes, though, it’s clear that part of being a mermaid is being able to hold your breath for quite a while.”
Interestingly, the audience is seated in a giant glass tank, turning the concept of aquarium inside-out: “The mermaids are swimming in a natural spring; the 500-seat theater is embedded in the side of the spring 16 feet below the surface.”
The park is a business venture by the famous performer and sports swimmer Newt Perry, a former Navy soldier who became a celebrity by appearing in over 100 of filmmaker Grantland Rice‘s “Sportlight” short films over a period of three decades. Newt Perry, once dubbed “The Human Fish”, went on to became a much sought-after film advisor for Hollywood.
Newt Perry and mermaid Nancy Tribble in Tampa, FL. Click on the pic for the online source and additional info!
Australian Geographer Patrick Nunn opens a book of his with the following story told by a Chief of the Haida people of Haida Gwaii (formerly Queen Charlotte Islands).
“Young recalled, his people lived in northwest Haida Gwaii in a large village across from Frederick Island. One day, a group of children playing on the beach noticed a stranger some distance away, wearing a fur cape of a kind never before seen in Haida lands. Running up to her, one cheeky boy lifted the cape to expose the stranger’s back, the sight of which made the children laugh and jeer.
After the adults called their children away, the woman went to sit alone on the sand near the ocean’s edge. The water rose to her feet, so she got up and moved a little distance up the beach. The water again reached her feet and so it went on until the ocean had climbed higher than ever before. It became clear to the Haida that their homes would shortly be flooded, so in panic they tied logs together to make rafts and, taking to the ocean, were able to save themselves.
Young explained that because these crude rafts could not be steered, each drifted to a different place, a story that could be a distant memory of the time — thousands of years ago — when the first Haida peoples are known to have been dispersed by the rising of the ocean level here.”
Patrick Nunn goes on to conclude: “Young’s story can be read as myth, especially the detail about the stranger and the unfamiliar fur cape she wore. […] But ist is also science, a distant echo of ancient people’s explanations of what happenend to them […] 12.700 years ago.”
Patrick Nunn stresses the point that stories llike these must have been passed on orally for around 500 generations, an astonishing cultural achievement that defys the notion of oral culture as short-lived or deficiant. See also this article by Nunn for aeon.co magazine here.
The Belgian animation movie and comic book from 1972 and 1973 is set around an artificial lake in a fictious mountain state in the Balkans. We do not learn much about the history of the lake but Tintin explains during the landing flight that a whole town had to be evacuated in order to create the lake. We also learn that the locals think of the lake as a bad place or as cursed, implying that the flooding was not at all desirable, possibly it was experienced as an act of cruelty and arrogance towards the local population.
As Tintin finds out eventually the buildings of this submerged town now serve as hideaway for the story’s villain.
Later in the story, there is a submarine chase in the town’s streets. The movie makes much humorous use of the strange intactness of the architecture of the submerged city, for example when Capt. Haddock in his submarine ponders over a “Do not enter”-street sign whether to ignore it or not. In the comic book, Haddock cusses at the other submarine just like a typical driver in any city traffic:
This illustrates quite well the peculiar condition and uncanny of submerged cities.
At the climax of the plot, the submerged town is once again destroyed, this time by explosives set within the villain’s hideaway. In an interesting revearsal of the function of a flood meter above water, the explosives are triggered by a flood meter, measuring the rise of the water entering into the building that is below the lake’s surface. When the room become fully flooded, the buildings of the submerged town explode, sending a massive tsunami-like wave across the lake’s surface.
This probably mirrors and repeats the situation the town got submerged in originally. And it signals the second and presumably final destruction of the town.
This classic Tintin comic story around an underwater city in a lake appeared first as a movie and a year later as a comic book. While the movie poster displayed various images from the movie in a rather playful manner, the first French language book edition had a much more dramatic cover, clearly shifting the focus of the story towards disaster narrative.
The movie poster from 1972:
The cover of the Belgian comic book from 1973:
At least two other covers appeared for different editions of the story:
In the Belgian classic comic series Blake and Mortimer there appeared in 1955 an adventure set in the mythical city Atlantis. It’s the seventh story in the series which started in 1950.
What I find noteworthy is that the city Atlantis here undergoes several metamorphosis: It was once a city (and state) on land. It then got submerged due to seismic events. The citizens however survived and formed a new community in a subterranean system of caves. In the story this “new” Atlantis gets flooded and destroyed once again and the citizens evacuate once more, this time into space.
Since the plot is quite complicated, I mostly quote here from the respective wikipedia entry.
Professor Philip Mortimer takes his vacation to São Miguel, an island of the Azores. In a cave in the extinct volcanoe Sete Cidades he finds a radioactive rock and cannot help making a rapprochement with the orichalcum mentioned by Plato, the mysterious metal of Atlantis.
The comic then tells the following version of the myth:
12,000 years ago, Atlantis ruled the world from an island in the middle of the Atlantic (an island of the Azores) . But the collision between Earth and a huge celestial body caused the submergence of the continental coasts and island. The few survivors of the Atlantean civilization then decided to build a new and secret Atlantis in the bowels of the Earth. The Atlanteans are watching the surface of the Earth thanks to what earthlings call flying saucers.
Blake and Mortimer climb down into a labyrinth of caves and eventually arrive in Poseidopolis, the capital of subterranean Atlantis. Here they get caught in a political uprising to overthrow the royal reign of the state. The uprising results in disaster: Atlantis is flooded a second time, when the flood gates that hold back the ocean are accidentlay opened. The monarchy then orders the evacuation that had been planned for a long time: the departure of the Atlanteans to another planet with an armada of spaceships. While the Atlanteans prepare to join other skies, the other ethnos of this subterranean world, the so called barbarians, are facing extinction in the rising waters. Blake and Mortimer are released and evacuated by a submarine. Back on land, on the shores of the caldera of Sete Cidades, they attend the majestic departure of Atlantean ships into the sky.
The connection between the ocean and outerspace was not an uncommon one in the 1950s as Helen M. Rozwadowski explains in her essay on submarine utopias in the 20. Century. Both – the deep sea and outerspace – held promises of alternate existences for an otherwise doomed human civilization. This also becomes evident in the oeuvre of one of sci-fi’s most important authors, Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote three volumes of non fiction books about the Great Barrier Reef. See my post on Rozwadowski’s essay here.
Original version of the comic book in french language here.
Waves are a popular element in Japanese arts and crafts, particularly in the many wood carvings from the 19. century, like the famous “Great Wave” (around 1830) by Hokusai. Here is an example, a small saucer from a random Asian food store in Germany:
In an insttruction book from 1903 Japanese artist Mori Yuzan displayed and explained hundreds of wave designs. the book can be viewed for free at archive.org:
Already in 1986 the well known German news-magazine Der Spiegel published this image on it’s front page. It depicts the Dome of Cologne, one of the most important cultural heritage sites of Germany, partially flooded. The visual strategies of the media have not changed much in the last 35 years!
This is the same German magazine 10 years later.
I can’t say whether the change in motiv is due to a hightened awareness of the global interconnectedness of the issue or because Germany hosted the 1. UN Climate Change Conference that year.
