Oxonmoot 2024

2022 has brought new depictions of an area of Middle-earth that had not been the focus of adaptations so far—Númenor. Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power took its spectators to a reimagined Second Age much indebted visually to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movie trilogies, while Alan Lee continued his exploration of Arda with accompanying illustrations to The Fall of Númenor edited by Brian Sibley. The two entirely different and unrelated projects brought this pseudo-Atlantis to the foreground, and steeped its iconography in Antiquity, with surprisingly similar sources of inspiration for surprisingly dissimilar results. In this paper I offer to compare and contrast those depictions, shedding light on the way artists read the Akallabêth and how they interpret it.