Storm Éowyn and how Tolkien predicted a historic gale hitting Ireland

I don’t want to make light of a storm that comes with warnings of danger to life (especially since I now know personally the devastation a storm can cause even if no one is physically harmed). And anyway, I’m sure it’s already occurred to other Lord of the Rings fans that Éowyn is an excellent name for a storm – especially one riding from the west.

But a terrible storm, Ireland, and Tolkien – that’s a suggestive combination.

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I’m inevitably drawn back to the storm in The Notion Club Papers, set in 1987 – the year when a historic storm really did hit the British Isles. It is less a meteorological event than a world-scale echo of the ancient destruction of Númenor, Tolkien’s version of Atlantis. Two of the Oxford academics in the Notion Club (a fictional version of the real Inklings) return from Ireland with an account of the aftermath of the storm:

‘The great storm had left more traces there than anywhere, and not only in visible damage. There was a good deal of that, but much less than you would expect, and it did not interest us so much as the effect on the people and the stories that we found going about. People in Galway – well, for the matter of that, from Brandon Hill to Slieve League – seemed to have been pretty well shaken by it, and were still scared for weeks afterwards. If the wind got up at all, as of course it did from time to time, they huddled indoors; and some would begin to trek inland.

‘We both heard many tales of the huge waves “high as hills” coming in on the Black Night. And curiously enough, many of the tale-tellers agreed that the greatest waves were like phantoms, or only half real: “like shadows of mountains of dark black wicked water”. Some rolled far inland and yet did little damage before, well, disappearing, melting away. We were told of one that had rolled clean over the Aran Isles and passed up Galway Bay, and so on like a cloud, drowning the land in a ghostly flood like rippling mist, almost as far as Clonfert.

‘And we came across one old man, a queer old fellow whose English was hardly intelligible, on the road not far from Loughrea. He was wild and ragged, but tall and rather impressive. He kept pointing westward, and saying, as far as we could gather: “It was out of the Sea they came, as they came in the days before the days”. He said that he had seen a tall black ship high on the crest of the great wave, with its masts down and the rags of black and yellow sails flapping on the deck, and great tall men standing on the high poop and wailing, like the ghosts they were; and they were borne far inland, and came, well, not a soul knows where they came.

‘We could get no more out of him, and he went on westward and vanished into the twilight, and who he was or where he was going we did not discover either.…’

The fictional storm of 1987, then, is instant folklore. And in Tolkien, folklore often points back to the supernatural.

But there’s something ineradicably scientific in all this, too. Tolkien wrote the abortive story at the end of 1945 and into 1946, so one footnote is especially striking:

The centre of its greatest fury seems to have been out in the Atlantic, but its whole course and progress has been something of a puzzle to meteorologists – as far as can be discovered from accounts it seems to have proceeded more like blasts of an explosion, rushing eastward and slowly diminishing in force as it went.

Elsewhere in the story there’s a reference to atomic tests going disastrously wrong. And all this emerged onto paper just months after the atomic bomb was first dropped, when Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher:

The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out fire-arms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace’. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.

So I’d characterise this as not only an Atlantis-haunting (Tolkien’s phrase) but also a Hiroshima-haunting. Such was the enormity of the atomic bombing that, to Tolkien, it it went far beyond the scientific or rational. Ilúvatar could remake the world in order to destroy Númenor. To remake atoms themselves was to trespass on divine territory.

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