Past Lives = Future Fiction: Tolkien Edition
Soul memories can be a prime source for unique, compelling novels
So where do authors get their ideas for their novels?
J.R.R. Tolkien famously stated that he didn’t invent or create Middle-earth. It wasn’t his idea. The world already existed and he was merely writing down the languages and tales.
I believe him. His experience is eerily similar to mine in chronicling the annihilation of a mighty island nation called Azgard in my Stoneslayer high fantasy series. Maybe that’s why of all the peoples and legends that abound in Middle-earth, the rise and fall of Numenor moved me the most.
Numenor’s fate felt personal to me when I was a teen reading Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time. It took me three decades of searching down many strange pathways and, finally, my own soul memories to understand why it felt that way.
Perusing the newly released The Fall of Numenor, I literally stopped reading and did a double-take in the first few pages. In a 1964 letter to an editor, Tolkien stated: “This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me.
“In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green islands. It still occurs occasionally, although now exorcized by writing about it.”
Ka-pow! Past-life alert!
Dreams are often the way our souls try to reach our waking awareness. We usually just brush them off, but dreams are both messages and messengers, trying to let us know we have something major unresolved.
It seems to me that Tolkien experienced (and most likely died in) one of the multiple global wipeouts scattered along earth’s ancient and mythologized history. The floods mentioned in almost every culture’s ancient texts and oral traditions.
More about Tolkien’s physical life and death involving that dreaded wave, however, is impossible to determine. Unless Tolkien himself explores his akashic record (soul memories) in whatever dimension his spirit now dwells.
(Reminder: Only the physical body ceases. Soul-consciousness-unconditional love are eternal.)
Past-life daydreams
Instead of one dread-filled persistent dream, my past-life musings were turbo-charged by the few mentions of Numenor that Tolkien made in The Lord of the Rings and its appendices. Then the stories of what quickly expanded into four generations of women niggled at me for decades in my day-dreams. Haunted me, really.
I became consciously aware of some of my past lives starting in 1986, when I met my late wife and began Sunan storyhealing for emotional-spiritual resolution. Knowing my desire to write a novel, my spirit guides more than once suggested that past-life memories would be great sources of stories for fiction.
OK. Got it. Message received.
Fast forward nearly twenty years. I was at an SFF conference and struck up a chat with another attendee whose novel was being considered by a major fantasy publisher. She remarked that it was hard to move onto another book with this Thracian woman running around in her head.
Kapow! Past-life alert!
As we talked, I became more and more certain that she had lived in ancient Greece as that Thracian woman. Looking back, my only regret is that I kept my suspicion to myself and did not share it with her.
Whatever became of that book I have no idea because I did not keep in touch with her. I hope it was accepted and did very well. It’s the least I can offer another story-teller.
The beauty of past lives as a source for fiction is a blend of uniqueness and universality. Each soul’s sojourn on earth or any other physical reality is singular. But we all share common experiences. The hopes, fears, joys, triumphs, traumas, and tragedies that fill our waking lives.
For me, the question of where I get my ideas for my novels was answered in my long ago past.