Kingdom of the Crossovers: The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars

The Lord of the Rings and Unknown Armies

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, then it wasn't really Atlantis as Plato thought of it. It was Atalante, the downfallen. Numenor, to be precise.

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 presumably more recent - pornomancy, narco-alchemy and many others have clear modern origins.

The way to really tie this in 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. 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 of the universe, such as it was? The world rolls on, but slowly falls into disarray - the other races disappear, leaving humanity alone on the planet, eventually to rebuild civilisation and magick... and to start repopulating the Invisible Clergy.

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. And the reason why he's seen it all before might be a little clearer with that in mind.