Maybe Tolkien in his youth ran across a retelling of Plato’s account, and ended up being quite traumatised by it? A retelling is more likely than the original, since the Timaeus and Critias are not light reading, and by the time Tolkien was reading the original, I think he’d have been old enough to remember what was causing this dream. Leaving aside the possibility that something much stranger is going on here, I think one could make a more mundane hypothesis. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don’t think I have had it since I wrote the ‘Downfall of Númenor’ as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. I say this about the ‘heart’, for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Tolkien himself famously ascribed his Atlantis Complex to a haunting dream: Lewis from 1926 onwards – and Lewis was both a Plato aficionado, and an early dabbler in mystic authors (Lewis liked himself some Yeats). Yeats), and Tolkien would almost certainly have known Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, the ancient source of the Atlantis myth. On the other hand, Tolkien’s earlier reading material included Lord Dunsany, who did actually have occultist acquaintances (W.B. It’s actually a quite interesting question, given that the source material for the craze tends towards the esoteric… how did Tolkien venture into such occultist waters? Second-hand, via other fiction, or did he go a bit further in his reading? Note that Charles Williams (Occultist and Inkling) is a red-herring, since Tolkien already had Númenor in place before meeting Williams. Tolkien handles this in his Númenor story. I have also been thinking about how J.R.R. Lewis’ Narnia (specifically The Magician’s Nephew). Howard and Clark Ashton Smith both owe their settings to these long-forgotten weirdos, while Atlantis even shows up in C.S.

It was certainly all grist to the creative mill for the pre-1950 fantasy genre. This may be the domain of fringe eccentrics today, but a hundred years ago Atlantis and other such ideas had some social currency, at least in terms of how they fed into more mainstream works. One of the topics in question is the long-ago Atlantis craze, the notion of a fabled Lost Continent beneath the waves. I have been working my way through the works of literary weirdos recently, both ancient and nineteenth/twentieth century.