Another, more literary parallel between the Timaeus and the Ainulindalë: Like Plato’s Timaeus, which was to be followed by the Critias’s much fuller account (left unfinished at Plato’s death) of ancient Athens’s defeat of imperial Atlantis and the subsequent destruction of both nations through earthquake and flood—theAinulindalë forms with the rest of The Silmarillion an equally ambitious, all-encompassing mythology (also incomplete at Tolkien’s death) beginning with the creation of the world and climaxing in Tolkien’s own retelling of the fate of ancient Atlantis in the tragic history of Númenor.
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