The image of Beowulf as a tower derives from a novel of time-travel that J.R.R. Tolkien commenced early in 1936 and abandoned the next year. Through shared dreams of their ancestors a father and son pair travel into the past, ascending a spiral genealogical staircase. The novel was founded on ‘The Fall of Númenor’, an Elvish remix of Plato’s myths of Atlantis and the making of the World. Some escape the destruction and arrive by ship on the shores of our Middle-earth, where they build high towers from the top of which they are able to look beyond the horizon and perceive the Straight Road of memory.