The ship-burials of the seafaring Numenoreans in The Lost Road and Other Writings, ch. 2 "The Fall of Numenor" have been compared to those of the Viking age as described in the Prose Edda and in the Old English poem Beowulf; Boromir is similarly given a boat-funeral. As with Scyld Scefing's funeral ship in Beowulf, no-one knows where the boat goes to in the end, but for Tolkien the suggestion that it goes to a mysterious land in the uttermost West was fascinating, and he developed it at length in The Lost Road.
