The Lord of the Rings and Unknown Armies
Well, Babylon 5 lost the toss, so this week it’s another crossover for the Lord of the Rings. (Don’t worry about B5 – I’m sure we’ll be back there one of these days.) This time around, Lord of the Rings meet Unknown Armies. High fantasy meets postmodern horror.
Next week, the Lord of the Rings moves off, and we follow the crossover chain through Unknown Armies. But for now, let’s get to it:
It’s only a small thing – you might miss it if you weren’t paying attention – but it’s there. The description of Bibliomancy in the Unknown Armies rulebook explicitly mentions the Red Book of Westmarch as a real book. Which presumably means that Middle Earth exists somewhere in the background of Unknown Armies, unknown millenia ago in some ancient time that our histories do not record.
This wouldn’t mean that much, since the two worlds only touch at that point, were it not for the cliomancers. If the Atlantis story of cliomancy’s origin is true – and who knows, perhaps the rulebook’s claim that it is false is a double-bluff – then it wasn’t really Atlantis as Plato thought of it. It was Atalante, the downfallen.
Or Numenor, as it is most commonly known.
If cliomancy really does have such a long pedigree, what about other magicks? Thanatomancy is fairly obviously a creation of either Sauron or Morgoth, while mechanomancy is the kind of thing that would have appealed to Middle Earth’s dwarves. Other magicks are obviously more recent – pornomancy, narco-alchemy and many others have clear modern origins.
But the way to really tie these two settings together is not through the magicks, but through the archetypes. It’s likely, in this setting, that the Valar and Ainur that Tolkien describes were actually archetypes – most of them are described in such a way as to make that a fairly obvious matter of relating them. (Tulkas, for example, is an early version of the MVP.) But what if these archetypes are no longer the ones we know. What if the end of the Third Age of Middle Earth marked an end (and re-beginning) of the universe, such as it was? The world rolls on, but slowly falls into disarray – the other races fade away, leaving humanity alone on the planet, eventually to rebuild civilisation and magick… and to start repopulating the Invisible Clergy.
Interestingly, the whole idea of the Istari – Ainur (or Arcehtypes) who descended from spirit into matter strongly suggests that these were once ascended Archetypes who voluntarily forewent much of their power to return to the world as GodWalkers to unoccupied Archetypes. It may even be that the replacement of Saruman by another holder of his archetype is the reason – or at least, a reason – for his corruption.
If that is the case, then the identity of the First and Last Man, the mysterious figure called the Comte de Saint Germain, is the same as that of the last Ainu to ascend to the Statosphere – or the West, as they called it in those days. That’s right: the Comte is none other than Gandalf.
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| The Lord of the Rings | Unknown Armies | ||||
