dark mythology Scholars including Flieger have noted that if Tolkien intended to create a mythology for England, in the history of Arda as told in The Silmarillion he had made it very dark. John Garth has identified his experiences in the First World War as formative; he began his Middle-earth writings at that time. Flieger suggests that Middle-earth arose not only from Tolkien's own wartime experience, but out of that of his dead schoolfriends Geoffrey Bache Smith and Rob Gilson. Janet Brennan Croft writes that Tolkien's first prose work after returning from the war was The Fall of Gondolin, and that it is "full of extended and terrifying scenes of battle"; she notes that the streetfighting is described over 16 pages. Greek mythology Among the many influences that scholars have proposed as possibly important on the history of Arda is Greek mythology. The disappearance of the island of Númenor recalls Atlantis. The Valar borrow many attributes from the Olympian gods. Like the Olympians, the Valar live in the world, but on a high mountain, separated from mortals; Ulmo, Lord of the Waters, owes much to Poseidon, and Manwë, the Lord of the Air and King of the Valar, to Zeus. Tolkien compared Beren and Lúthien with Orpheus and Eurydice, but with the gender roles reversed. He mentioned Oedipus, too, in connection with Túrin in the Children of Húrin. Flieger has compared Fëanor with Prometheus: they are associated with fire, and are punished for rebelling against the gods' decrees. "Imagined prehistory" Arda is summed up by the Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher as "our own green and solid Earth at some quite remote epoch in the past." Kocher notes Tolkien's statement in the Prologue, equating Middle-earth with the actual Earth, separated by a long period of time: In a letter written in 1958, Tolkien states that while the time is invented, the place, planet Earth, is not (italics in original): In the same letter, he places the beginning of the Fourth Age some 6,000 years in the past: The Tolkien scholar Richard C. West writes that one of the "very final passages" of the internal chronology of Lord of the Rings, The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, ends not just with Arwen's death, but the statement that her grave will remain on the hill of Cerin Amroth in what was Lothlorien "until the world is changed, and all the days of