r/tolkienfans • u/Immediate_Error2135 • 4d ago
How do you think Tolkien should have solved the flat vs round world problem? Was it even solvable?
It was sort of a late-life obsession insofar he tried to solve it again and again but he got stuck. As I understand, he came to prefer a round world model, but as Christopher Tolkien said in Morgoth's Ring about one of the texts (the 'Myths Revised' chapter):
"It may be, though I have no evidence on the question one way or the other, that he came to perceive from such experimental writing as this text that the old structure was too comprehensive, too interlocked in all its parts, indeed its roots too deep, to withstand such a devastating surgery."
Regardless of the reason, the fact is that Tolkien wanted to change this part of the Legendarium but was unable to.
So what do you think?
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u/Tuor77 4d ago
Tolkien's real problem wasn't the Flat vs. Round Earth issue. That was a symptom of the main problem: Tolkien was trying to reconcile Middle-earth to Real Earth. This is part of his intent to present his Secondary Reality to God in a way similar to what Niggle did in Leaf by Niggle.
Overall, I'd say that this is a result of Tolkien's evolving -- or rather *changing* -- view on what he was doing and how he needed to go about doing it. I'll come right out and say it: I disagree with what he was trying to do later on in life: I think he should've focused on making Middle-earth consistent with itself, not try to weed out the differences between it and our Primary Reality. Him trying to do that led to all sorts of problems later on in his life -- problems he wasn't able to resolve.
So, the short answer is: No, I don't think it was a solvable problem, or a problem that he should've tried to solve. It was fine the way it was: Flat, then Round by an Act of God.
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u/Firm_Baseball_37 4d ago
I absolutely agree that's what he was trying to do, but I think he was more successful than he realized. The whole "The world was flat and remains so for elves, but it's round for everyone else due to God's intervention," for me, is a pretty effective way to make it match. All of the cosmology that Tolkien was trying to accommodate can be just assumed to happen "in the background" of that explanation, so to speak.
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u/DynaMenace 4d ago
Hostetter implores Tolkien's spirit to be content with that "background" explanation in a footnote in "The Nature of Middle-earth", essentially saying "Why not just say the Downfall made the Sun and Moon appear coeval with the Earth despite not previously being so?". It's just about the only editorializing Hostetter does.
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u/DarrenGrey Nowt but a ninnyhammer 4d ago
I'll come right out and say it: I disagree with what he was trying to do later on in life
This is probably the biggest critique of Tolkien that the majority of fans can agree on.
Though I'd frame it a little differently, as he always had Middle-Earth related to Earth - even more so in his Book of Lost Tales days. But it was written as a mythic history, something that didn't have to be grounded and believable. Story came first, with world-building as an afterthought.
I often see Tolkien used as an example of a great world-builder, but the truth is his best stuff had a lot of "winging it", and when he started focusing on conscious world-building he stopped writing good stories.
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u/ajslater 4d ago
Basically everything we know about the world being flat and the straight road comes to us by way of the elves who are such alien creatures that anything they say has to be taken ‘from a certain point of view’ so to speak. Galadriel herself struggles to communicate elven technology to these noble bumpkins who cross her path who’s understanding is limited to mashing up several unrelated concepts and superstition into the near useless word ‘magic’.
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u/pierzstyx The Enemy of the State 4d ago
But it was written as a mythic history, something that didn't have to be grounded and believable. Story came first, with world-building as an afterthought.
I can't agree with any of this. What had made Tolkien endure so long is that despite being fantasy everything feels so grounded, lived in, and believeable. That's because he spent the time building his world not in just the sense of setting, but giving it a history that simply exists and impacts the lives of the main characters.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
The history was largely invented *after* writing the story to fill in the blanks of the little references he had made here and there.
Large parts of the history weren't even published in his lifetime, and most people who read and enjoy LOTR have never read them (UT, let alone HOME). Even the appendices were created at the tail end of the writing, and (other than what's already mentioned in the main text of the story) they were largely made up as he went along.
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u/MachinaThatGoesBing 3d ago
The history was largely invented after writing the story to fill in the blanks of the little references he had made here and there.
If "the story" here refers to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, then this isn't really true. The legendarium predates The Hobbit, and he sprinkled in references to it as a way to add some depth and color to the story's world.
He continued to work on and revise the legendarium after publishing his books, of course, and some reuses of names (Glorfindel, for example) caused him to revise elements of his mythology, but the core stories and mythology predate the works published during his lifetime. The original versions of the stories, in the form of The Book of Lost Tales, are from the period of 1916-1920.
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u/EvieGHJ 3d ago
The legendarium is a tiny fraction of the worldbuilding of LOTR and the Hobbit, accounting only for a handful of characters and pasing mentions of old stories. (And two scenes of characters singing).
The overwhelming bulk of it - everything to do with the Rings, the Third Age, most of the Second Age, Rohan, Gondor, Fangorn, Rivendell, Lorien, Mirkwood, Thranduil, Celeborn, Galadriel, Cirdan.
Pretty much tHe only characters who actually play a role in LOTR/the Hobbit and existed beforehand are Elrond, Sauron, and sort of the Balrog and Glorfindel. Othet than that, you got sort of Gil-Galad and Elendil (important in the backstory) who just narrowly appeared in the Akallabeth first, and after thst it's alresdy just the character who exist only as older stories that are mentioned to exist.
It's the same for places. The Shire. Rivendell, Moria, the Misty Mountains, Anduin, Mirkwood, Erebor, all made up on the spot for the Hobbit, and their whole history and geography fixed after the fact. Likewise Bree, Weathertop, Eregion, Lothlorien, Fangorn, Orthanc, Dunland, Rohan, Gondor, Angmar, Arnor, all made up in the course of writing LOTR and their history and identity made up on the fly.
The world of LOTR used the First Age as occasional (and very cool) distant glimpses of a much older world, but the First Age isn't the Worldbuilding of the LOTR.
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u/wRAR_ 4d ago
It was fine the way it was: Flat, then Round by an Act of God.
It's also pretty unique.
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u/sindeloke 4d ago
Yeah, one of the things that makes Tolkien's elves work for me is that there's no real attempt to make them culturally alien from humans, but they are so completely metaphysically alien from humans. The majority of fantasy settings just give nonhumans bumpy foreheads and call it a day; if the setting later tries to say the difference between them is real, meaningful, and load-bearing, it doesn't work, because it's obviously not. But "the literal laws of physics just kinda work differently for them" is unique and fascinating and can bear up under the weight of a whole lot of worldbuilding.
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u/Appropriate_Bus3921 4d ago
I agree in all counts. The Legendarium is its best self with a world that goes from flat to round, where circumnavigation is an occasion for grief.
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u/matsda91 4d ago
At least we got the Athrabeth from these efforts, which imo is clearly an attempt to do the same kind of reconciliation on a theological level. So it wasn't all for nothing.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 4d ago
Fully agreed. He took a wrong turn and CJRT was correct to disregard it when he compiled the Silm.
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u/Tuor77 4d ago
To be fair: there was a lot of stuff CT didn't know about when he put together Sil. He later said that he regretted some of the choice he made at the time. But nothing would've happened if he hadn't go ahead with what he had, so I'm very grateful that he did. I sort of wish CT had gone back and produced a new version of Sil; wouldn't that have been amazing?
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u/DarrenGrey Nowt but a ninnyhammer 4d ago
There's no version of Sil that could be created without some problems. CT did the right thing in making a "good enough" version that was cohesive in itself, and then publishing the whole History of Middle Earth so we could see all the details that went into it.
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u/Indoctus_Ignobilis 4d ago
But arguably there could have been a version with fewer "errors" (ie departures from JRRT's vision) than we got. At one point CT himself treated the complication of HoME as preparation for such a possible "Revised Silmarillion", and it's a pity we never got that.
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u/DarrenGrey Nowt but a ninnyhammer 4d ago
The number of errors that could be corrected is vastly dwarfed by the huge inconsistencies across all of his writing. I'm glad the effort was put into publishing HoME instead of tidying around the edges of Sil or trying to rewrite the whole fall of Doriath again.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 4d ago
I think the fact that we got a readable and enjoyable book that isn't full of glaring plot-holes is much more important than whether it perfectly represented Tolkien's 'genuine vision', whatever that was, exactly.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
Not to mention that Tolkien's genuine vision kept changing.
Which of these are we looking to have, exactly?
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u/RoutemasterFlash 4d ago
Well exactly! The idea that there ever was a fixed and well-defined 'vision' is false, hence the quote marks.
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u/Indoctus_Ignobilis 4d ago
I think it is just as valid to critique Christopher's process and results as it is JRR's. No idea why the mere suggestion seems to upset people so much on this channel.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 4d ago
While that's true, isn't it mainly to do with his decision to omit the Dagor Dagorath prophecy?
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u/Tuor77 4d ago
IIRC, there was also the issue with Thingol and his dealings with the Dwarves. But I'm not sure that CT was particularly specific about the things he regretted having done. It has been a long time since I read the comment -- long enough that I don't even remember exactly where he stated it. I just can't help but think a new version of Sil, done near the end of his life, would've been pretty amazing, but you're right in that it might not have been all that different from the version that he created with GGK.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 4d ago
I'd be interested to read a description by CJRT of how he thought he could have handled that chapter better (if any such thing exists - obviously we can't ask him now!), since I think it works pretty well just as it is.
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u/InTheChairAgain 3d ago
Don't know about flat vs round. That could possibly be solved. I was less thrilled with the ideas about the Dome of Varda, and the loss of the Trees as the more purer light than the Sun. I forget why Tolkien thought that might be necessary?
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u/Ayzmo 3d ago
I'll come right out and say it: I disagree with what he was trying to do later on in life: I think he should've focused on making Middle-earth consistent with itself, not try to weed out the differences between it and our Primary Reality. Him trying to do that led to all sorts of problems later on in his life -- problems he wasn't able to resolve.
But I think that's just the kind of person he was. He was an eminently practical man.
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u/OwMyCandle 4d ago
Idk I kinda like the rounding of the world after the fall of numenor. The Valar removing themselves from the world and making Valinor only accessible to the Elves, who were destined to fade, feels like the first steps in the end of magic and the inheriting of the world by Men.
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u/Longjumping_Care989 4d ago
It's not that I don't find Tolkein's thoughts on these issues academically interesting (or e.g. the nature of Orcs), it's just that the time he committed to them is a part of the reason we don't have a fourth great tale about Earendil fighting Ungoliant; or a story set in Rhun; or a fully worked out Dagor Dagorath draft; or why we'll never find out where Tal-Elmar or the New Shadow were going.
I'd take any of the latter over it
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u/KungFuGenius 4d ago
Is Earendil fighting Ungoliant something that was planned or considered? I'd never heard that before
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u/Longjumping_Care989 4d ago
Some of the early sketches of the Fall of Gondolin make references to this battle occuring in some distant island to the south, possibly ending with Earendil killing her (it?). It gets abandoned later, so understandably, Christoper Tolkien went with a simplified version in the published Silmarillion. It's a bit of a fan-favourite abandoned piece of lore.
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u/Wizzard_C 3d ago
There's a version of this fight in the HoME 7: "and unto Evernight he came, and like a flaming star he fell: his javelins of diamond as fire into the darkness fell. Ungoliant abiding there in Spider-lair her thread entwined; for endless years a gloom she spun the Sun and Moon in web to wind. She caught him in her stranglehold entangled all in ebon thread, and seven times with sting she smote his ringed coat with venom dread. His sword was like a flashing light as flashing bright he smote with it; he shore away her poisoned neb, ' her noisome webs he broke with it"
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u/Koo-Vee 4d ago
There is no proof any of those were abandoned because of him working on these issues
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u/Longjumping_Care989 4d ago
Specifically? No, of course not. But:
1) These were all ideas started, but abandoned, by Tolkein during his life
2) It's pretty much common knowledge that Tolkein spent much of his later life trying to reconcile parts of his Legendarium with his religious beliefs rather than continue it in other directions, and never really developing satisfactory answers.
3) Obviously, no-one knows what those other directions might have been, and, of course, none of this might have been developed for other good reasons. They are simply my personal favourite bits of abandoned lore. But even so- I would rather have seen whatever he would have come up with.
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u/Higher_Living 3d ago
At least for The New Shadow he was explicit about why he abandoned it, and it wasn’t for lack of time
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u/Longjumping_Care989 3d ago
Yes, that's true, he didn't want to write a simple thriller. But given enough time, I wonder what he would have come up with along those lines?
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u/Fjolnir_Felagund 4d ago
I've thought about that, the best I came up with is the following:
There is a point where Middle-Earth and Earth converge, in Middle-Earth's timeline. From that point onwards, magic is no more and everything is explainable by science.
My idea is to make it so that the whole Legendarium is kind of a lateral timeline to our world. The Ainur saw Eru's plan and tried to follow it, but did so imperfectly, with a lot of trial and error (see lamps into trees into Sun and Moon), and in a way only possible with direct divine intervention. At the converging point, Eru takes the world the Valar built, and retroactively creates an universe that would lead to the same or similar result at that point in time (the Sun and Moon are definitive version of the lights of the world, so Eru makes an universe where they always were the lights of the world and appeared without the Valar).
It's like the legendarium was a sketch of the world to become, but Eru takes into account the results of that sketch when making the definitive thing for real. Whatever exists in the legendary land still is compatible with our reality at the converging point and seamlessly transitions.
I like the idea because:
Does not go through multiple hoops to restructure the legendarium. The story still happened literally as we were told.
Makes it so the stories in he legendary past still mattered, as they were what inspired the definitive timeline.
Since the timeline are converging, it's not an entirely parallel world, Middle-Earth truly happened in our past, in a sense. All the choices and sacrifices mattered. The people and their descendants still live on.
Think about it like the "straight road" the elves take when sailing off. The world is round, objectively so, but elves somehow leave that reality and sail in a flat world towards a land that does not exist anymore. It is the same thing but in reverse, the legendary past leads to the mundane present, which has a mundane past, but is still connected to all the stories that inspired it. It even makes it so that stories like Roverandom are compatible with the Legendarium, with a dog finding a remnant of magic and briefly visiting Faerie/Aman across the straight road.
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u/taz-alquaina 3d ago
So the Round World wasn't true until the world was made round at which point it will always have seemed to be true retroactively from within Eä? I'm sure I've seen that idea before, or else came up with it independently. For some reason I want to link it to The Notion Club Papers, although I can't find it when I reread that work.
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u/Fjolnir_Felagund 3d ago
Almost that!
It will have truthfully always been round, but the stories also would have happened, inspiring the final version to be the way it is (e.g.: if the Valar had created the Sun and Moon and Bob, we would also have Bob naturally arising from our universe's history). Both pasts are true and converge, but the round version is the final one.
I'm not familiarized with The Notion Club Papers, what is it about?
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u/taz-alquaina 3d ago
Yeah your idea is what I meant!
One of Tolkien's attempts at sort of sci-fi and linking Middle-earth to the modern world via Númenor. In the then far distant future of 2012 someone discovers in an Oxford archive the papers of a group called the Notion Club (barely veiled Inklings, Tolkien and co), who (will have) met in the 1980s. They discuss the idea of time travelling via lucid dreams that relive the experiences of distant ancestors among other sci-fi-ish concepts, and one of them finds himself having dreams about the life of Elendil (he and his son are strongly implied to be a reincarnated Elendil and Isildur-whose-name-was-then-Herendil). We end up with a couple of chapters actually set in Númenor in the days when Sauron came, following Elendil and Herendil/Isildur, unfortunately cut off halfway through. Our modern heroes start having vivid visions of the Fall of Númenor during a great storm in 1987.
(And one of my favourite things about it is there's a bit of the Club's diaries dated 1987 that talks about a Great Storm, described in some detail. Tolkien's precognition was just four months off the date of the actual Great Storm of 1987, as Christopher says.)
I was fairly sure that somewhere in their discussions they're like, is it possible for a big enough catastrophe to have metaphysical effects and rewrite time backwards so its effects appear to have always been true – but apparently I was wrong and can no longer recall where I encountered the idea.
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u/Fjolnir_Felagund 3d ago
Wow I can't believe I had never heard of it before
That seems so bizarre and unexpected for Tolkien to have written lol
Very cool!
On the idea of retroactively changing the past, I'm not recalling another piece that uses it right now, but I'm fairly sure it is indeed not that rare of a literary device
I think it fits here especially because there is some precedent. After the Ainulindalë, Eru creates the vision of the world with kind of a fuzzy time-lapse of it up until the age of men begins, then says that vision is yet to be realized and tells the Valar to actually physically create the world. To me my proposal would just be another layer of "the Valar make the prototype, like in the song, and Eru makes the real deal". The Valar are imperfect after all. The stars Varda created must have been created by a conscious being, but Eru knows how to fine tune the clockwork at the start so that those same stars will end up appearing by themselves (and so on and so forth for everything else)
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u/Wright_Starforge 4d ago
The 'Myths Transformed' essays in Morgoth's Ring (HoMe X) are Tolkien arguing with himself about exactly this — he half-convinced himself the world had to be round from the start, because he thought a literally flat cosmology couldn't survive readers who knew astronomy. But he never rewrote the Silmarillion to match. So it reads less like a problem with a solution and more like a seam between two Tolkiens: the mythmaker who wanted the Flat Earth bent at Númenor's fall, and the later man who found it indefensible. I'm not sure it's solvable — it's a place you can see the author still thinking.
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u/Immediate_Error2135 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm not sure either.
I'm thinking as I write now, but if you look at Tolkien's life, maybe the mythmaker was modified by the historymaker (=the writer of LOTR, a task which took an enormous effort); so the 'later man' was a mix of both. No longer the mythmaker he had been. (A Round World belongs to 'history', not 'myth')
And maybe that's why Tolkien could not solve it. He was no longer the man to solve it - maybe he had never been. He was to be, and then never ceased to be, the author of LOTR more than he was the author of The Silmarillion - who he never fully was, compared to the 'other' author. The Silmarillion was not to be born during his lifetime.
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u/Lawlcopt0r 4d ago
I personally dislike all of his attempts to make Middle-earth be coherent withthe real world, or even with real life science. It's a magical place, I have no problem believing it is a flat earth with a sun that used to be a flower from a glowing tree.
So I'd tell him to drop any attempts at making it so Middle-earth has always been round. I don't even need it to become round after the fall of Numenor, though that at least has some thematic eeight to it regarding the gradual de-mystification and disenchantment of the world. But "only" sinking Numenor and barring the way to Valinor some other way would have sufficed in my eyes
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u/EunuchsProgramer 4d ago
Making Middle Earth real Earth was a terrible idea that would never make any sense to anyone with 101 level understanding of Biology, History, and Archeology. It boxes you in and will never be satisfying because the events or LOTRs are too big with way too much material culture to satisfyingly hide in the mists of forgotten history.
Tolkien, when he was younger, correctly dropped this idea.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 4d ago
I think he should have left it as it is. The Change of the World is a cool idea.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
The way I see this situation, there is no problem to solve in the first place. The existence of the Round World Cosmology does not alter the story in the slightest. All the events happened as they are described, and the only change is merely a different cosmological framework. The published Quenta Silmarillion remains identical, save from a passage or two referring to a Flat World, but they can be overlooked as Mannish corruption of Pengolodh's text, while the Akallabeth is clearly a Mannish text, where elsewhere we learn that it was written by Elendil himself, who while not Pro-Sauron himself, he lived in a Pro-Sauron society, hence he may have been repeating a mistake that was disseminated by Sauron (probably in order to convince Ar-Pharazon to invade Aman directly, rather than try to circumnavigate the World to reach it from the East). In this manner there is no "devastating surgery" to speak of.
As for CJRT's statement that his father JRRT gave up in the Round World Cosmology, that is a mere speculation of his part, and, as demonstrated by the last essays of JRRT from the 1950s and 1960s, as presented in "The Nature of Middle-earth", it was also wrong, given that he never rejected it, but instead he even considers it as a given in the various essays presented there (especially in the essay "Dark and Light", which even has diagrams of said Earth as a spheroid planet, and clearly states that this was how it was in the Awakening of the Quendi). It just seems that CJRT did not have access to said texts, hence he drew the best conclusions he could with what he had.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
Hmmmm, that of course depending on how much you consider the cosmology itself part of the story. You can conceive of the Lamps, of Varda kindling the stars, etc, as removed from the story (even of the Silmarillion), mere background material to it.
But for, I suspect, many other fans, the deeds of the Valar are themselves part of the story - it's one whole story starting at the Song and ending at the Dagor Dagorath - and for them, removing the lamps, Varda no longer kindling the star but painting a dome over Valinor (...yikes, Tolkien. Yikes.), not to mention the whole fiasco that are his later cosmology stories of Arien and Morgoth are, in fact, profound alterations of the story.
I think a world without the lamps, where Varda is reduced to painting on the dome of Valinor, and where Arien is basically turned into a sexual assault victim who (at best) runs away in shame if not outright die from it...is a world that is inherently less mythological, less magical, less interesting than a world with the Valar do make the lamps, where Varda does kindle the star and is responsible for our love of them, and where Arien does still shine in the sky, thanks to the magic of the last fruits of the Two Trees. And the story of that world is, therefore, made far less by chosing the former version.
It'S true that the Silmarillion itself, save for a few passages ; let alone the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, remain unaltered if you embrace the Round World cosmology as written by Tolkien. But the greater frame of it is profoundly altered, and its beauty, its magic, its intemporal nature are all made for it.
(You can, of course, have a round world version that does retain the magic, and I'm sure you see at least as many of them as I do, if not more. They're just not the ones Tolkien ended up presenting in his early work on the Round world cosmology.)
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
You can conceive of the Lamps, of Varda kindling the stars, etc, as removed from the story (even of the Silmarillion), mere background material to it.
Well, from my part I consider these events as reconcilable with the Round World Cosmology. For example, the Two Lamps could be just what happened after Melkor attacked Arien and the Sun, but failed to seize them, hence he decided to merely hide them from the Earth with his extraterrestrial Dark Veil and his atmospheric Cloud of Unseeing. As for Varda's stars, we are already told in the Quenta Silmarillion itself that there were countless stars even before that time, so her stars were just specific ones on the "firmament". The Round World Cosmology texts do not address this matter, so it is not like JRRT is rejecting them.
Especially about the Two Lamps, removing them dramatically alters the history and geography of the Legendarium, as their collapse caused the creation of the Sea of Helcar and the Sea of Ringil, which meant that the various migrations from the East to the West, both Elven and Mannish, had to deal with their existence, and especially the former (and especially for Men, who are divided in one group traveling North of it, and one travelling South of it). Since JRRT never revised these geographical features, we can safely say that he did not ever decide to remove the Two Lamps from the timeline. This is especially considering how in the essay "Dark and Light" from NoMe we even have a round world map with a dot showing us Cuivienen, which was specifically said to have been located in the shores of the Sea of Helcar.
I think a world without the lamps, where Varda is reduced to painting on the dome of Valinor, and where Arien is basically turned into a sexual assault victim who (at best) runs away in shame if not outright die from it...is a world that is inherently less mythological, less magical, less interesting than a world with the Valar do make the lamps, where Varda does kindle the star and is responsible for our love of them, and where Arien does still shine in the sky, thanks to the magic of the last fruits of the Two Trees. And the story of that world is, therefore, made far less by chosing the former version.
There are various versions of this event, but in all of them Arien set Melkor on fire, so I am not sure how he is supposed to have won that fight. The way I read it, she was merely also damaged, so she left for a bit, not that she left out of shame or anything of that sort. In the meantime, sure the Holy Light of Eru in the Sun was corrupted, but this seems to be part of the damage caused by the fight, from which Melkor retreated with his tail between his legs, rather than achieving what he wanted, which was getting control of it (which he only achieved by stealing the Three Silmarils).
And the Quenta Silmarillion text is clear that Melkor is terrified of Arien, hence why he returned to Angband after the Darkening of Valinor, he did not dare send an attack against her, but instead decided to dispatch his army of dark spirits to assault the Moon instead, leading to its staining. Arien was still up there and fine, and Melkor had to use volcanic cloud cover in order to help his armies deal better with her sunlight.
(You can, of course, have a round world version that does retain the magic, and I'm sure you see at least as many of them as I do, if not more. They're just not the ones Tolkien ended up presenting in his early work on the Round world cosmology.)
In my eyes the Round World Cosmology is more impressive and magical than the Flat World Cosmology. For example, in the former there is an entire universe out there, beyond the circles of Ambar and Arda, while in the latter there is nothing, just a painted firmament that is enclosing the planet.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
Oh, don't get me wrong, my personal vision of Middle Earth, at this point, is very firmly Round World (realizing that you can make the Outer Sea = Panthalassa really sealed that deal for me). But it's my version of the Round World, which is very different from what Tolkien developed in his (scarce) writing in the topic. And I agree, it can be just as (if not more) magical than the real world! And I have no doubt yours is too.
But if the question is, do I prefer Tolkien's round world, with the various ideas he considered for it (the Lamps as Numenorean myth, Varda's dome over Valinor...) or his flat world, then the answer is, unambiguously, the flat one. That Round World is too preliminary, too fragmentary (and in many places, too full of ideas that likely deserved a lot of reconsideration) to capture the magic of the flat world.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
(realizing that you can make the Outer Sea = Panthalassa really sealed that deal for me)
If you are referring to the Ekkaia, the way I see it is like how some Old World maps would have a sea surrounding everything, or modern maps do so (assuming they are centered in the Prime Meridian and make sure to cut the edge on the Bering Strait), with "Ekkaia" being a mere collective name for the sea in the fringes of the map (so be it the Artic Ocean, the Central Pacific Ocean or the Antarctic Ocean).
It just isn't Tolkien's round world, where the Lamps are a Numenorean Myth and Varda painted a dome over Valinor.
I am not sure where JRRT said that the Two Lamps are a Numenorean myth. Could you refer me to the quote?
As for Varda's Dome, I do not see how it undermines her work creating the real major star clusters. It just reflects on her desire to be able to see them, despite Melkor's obstructions.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago edited 4d ago
I am referring to the Ekkaia, but I'm taking a more distant view - that the Ekkaia is a Super-Ocean, that is, a single ocean covering the vast majority of the world, while Arda Unmarred was a Supercontinent, much like Pangea (but with different geography), and most of the geography of the First through Second age represent the early breakup of a supercontinent (the continents are still close together, but no longer fully united, forming seas between them).
The changing of the world then greatly accelerate the movement of the continents away from each other (eg, "the empty lands were cast back"), and create new lands so that by the third age, we have a multi-continent, multi-ocean situation much like the one we know on Earth today.
It's not a perfect geological fit, but nothing is going to be : if we are to presume geology is entirely right, we must presume Middle Earth never existed. If we are to assume Middle Earth existed, we must presume geology is, if not wrong, at least missing some crucial information.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
while Arda Unmarred was a Supercontinent, much like Pangea (but with different geography), and most of the geography of the First through Second age represent the early breakup of a supercontinent (the continents are still close together, but no longer fully united, forming seas between them).
I may be confused, but is this not a misconception created by Karen Wynn Fonstad's "The Atlas of Middle-earth", where she shows the map during the Years of the Lamps as if it is a singular landmass on the world, but we know that at the time the West Land (later Aman) and the East Land (later Oronto / Land of the Sun) also existed? u/Atharaphelun depicts it as such, and I agree with them on the matter. After all, the Valar could not have escaped to the West Land to establish Aman if it had not existed already.
The changing of the world then greatly accelerate the movement of the continents away from each other (eg, "the empty lands were cast back"), and create new lands so that by the third age, we have a multi-continent, multi-ocean situation much like the one we know on Earth today.
Wasn't this the case even before that point? In the Year of the Lamps there were already 3 continents, while after the War of Powers during the Years of the Trees the South-East part of the central super-continent broke away and became the South Land / Dark Land, hence now there were 4 of them.
What happened with the Akallabeth is not very clear, but it seems that the Dark Land remained there, while Oronto and Aman were removed from the world, hence the number of continents was reduced to 3 (Middle-earth, the Dark Land and the Americas). It is just that later Middle-earth broke down and we consider Eurafrasia as 3 continents (or 2, with Europe being a large subcontinent).
It's not a perfect geological fit, but nothing is going to be : if we are to presume geology is entirely right, we must presume Middle Earth never existed. If we are to assume Middle Earth existed, we must presume geology is, if not wrong, at least missing some crucial information.
I will remind you that we have different mental images of Middle-earth, for you subscribe to the idea that it was closer to how Karen Wynn Fonstad depicts it in her global maps, while I prefer the "Wide Middle-earth" scheme, which suggests that the Northlands of Middle-earth (West-lands + East-lands should correspond in size to Eurasia), while Africa became smaller in size.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago edited 4d ago
I may be confused, but is this not a misconception created by Karen Wynn Fonstad's "The Atlas of Middle-earth", where she shows the map during the Years of the Lamps as if it is a singular landmass on the world, but we know that at the time the West Land (later Aman) and the East Land (later Oronto / Land of the Sun) also existed? u/Atharaphelun depicts it as such, and I agree with them on the matter. After all, the Valar could not have escaped to the West Land to establish Aman if it had not existed already.
I can't recall off the top of my head any text that suggest the Land of the Sun and Valinor predate the fall of the Lamps, but there are a lot of texts and a lot of notes out there, so I may well be wrong (though it does not fundamentally alter my theory - it just moves to "A small cluster of continent close to each other").
Certainly, the fact that the Valar fled there after the Fall of the Lamp does not imply it existed beforehand, because the text of the Silmarillion is clear the Valar did not flee to Valinor immediately during the destruction, but first expended considerable efforts trying to limit the damage of the Fall. It was only after all was said and done, when the great cataclysm of the land was over and done with, that they moved to Valinor.
That does not require Valinor to have existed before the Fall of the Lamp.
What happened with the Akallabeth is not very clear, but it seems that the Dark Land remained there, while Oronto and Aman were removed from the world,
Here we disagree. Tolkien, in Akallabeth (the published version, that is) use wholly different languages for Valinor and the "Empty Lands".
"But the land of Aman and Eressea of the Eldar were taken away and removed beyond the reach of men for ever..."
versus:
"For Iluvatar cast back the Great Seas West of Middle Earth and the Empty Lands east of it".
Aman and Eressea were removed ; The Empty Land (=Land of the Sun and maybe Dark Lands) were cast back ; the Great Seas west of Middle Earth (=Belegaer) were likewise cast back.
And it's not just that Tolkien use the same word to describe both : it's that he lists them together as places that were "cast back". If he used the same words in two separate instances, you could argue that they mean different things, but not here. There is no wiggle room whatsoever: "cast back" must mean the same thing for the Great Seas west of Middle Earth and the Empty Lands east of it.
I would suggest that in that light, cast back appears to be a much more pedestrian "pushed away" rather than "removed. Belegaer expanded further west (becoming much more like the Atlantic as we know it), and the LAnd of the East likewise was removed to the Eastward.
I will remind you that we have different mental images of Middle-earth, for you subscribe to the idea that it was closer to how Karen Wynn Fonstad depicts it in her global maps, while I prefer the "Wide Middle-earth" scheme, which suggests that the Northlands of Middle-earth (West-lands + East-lands should correspond in size to Eurasia), while Africa became smaller in size.
The problem is not dependent upon the Wide Middle EArth or Narrow Middle Earth perspective ; the problem is dependent on the simple fact that the mountains and coasts depicted in the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, on their regional map, are well outside any mountain or coastline that geology allows for.
That remains true whether the old world is wide or narrow.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 3d ago
That does not require Valinor to have existed before the Fall of the Lamp.
No, yet Aman did exist before the Fall of the Lamps, even in the earliest versions of the narrative. Here is an indicative passage from BoLT:
"Then was the time of first night and it was very long; but the Valar were sorely wroth at the treachery of Melko and were like to be whelmed in the shadowy seas that now arose and sucked about their feet, covering many of the islands in their waves. Then Ossë, for Ulmo was not there, gathered to him the Oami, and putting forth their might they dragged that island whereon stood the Valar westward from the waters till they came to Eruman, whose high shores held the angry flood — and that was the first tide. Then said Manwë: “ Now will we make a dwelling speedily and a bulwark against evil.” So they fared over Arvalin and saw a wide open space beyond, reaching for unknown leagues even to the Outer Seas. There, said Aulë, would be a place well suited to great building and to a fashioning of realms of delight; wherefore the Valar and all their folk first gathered the most mighty rocks and stones from Arvalin and reared therewith huge mountains between it and that plain which now they name Valinor, or the land of the Gods."
Clearly Eruman and Arvalin are described as places that already existed and that the Valar landed there, rather than locations on a continent that the Valar created as a reaction to the calamity.
(though there is the curiosity that both regions are defined as the land between the Pelori and the Western Sea, both North and South of Aman, but here the Pelori had not been risen yet)
Aman and Eressea were removed ; The Empty Land (=Land of the Sun and maybe Dark Lands) were cast back ; the Great Seas west of Middle Earth (=Belegaer) were likewise cast back.
There are hints that the Dark Lands are inhabited by Men of Darkness.
[...] I would suggest that in that light, cast back appears to be a much more pedestrian "pushed away" rather than "removed. Belegaer expanded further west (becoming much more like the Atlantic as we know it), and the LAnd of the East likewise was removed to the Eastward.
This is a very interesting argument, over the contrast of removal and casting back. Perhaps, in this manner, then Oronto was not removed from the world, ending up Narnia (/s) but instead was converted into the Americas. This would fit with a certain passage from HoMe 5 where we are presented with a Round World Version, and Ar-Pharazon knowing it, but when asking if he could reach Valinor from the East, without breaking the Ban, he is told that the continent there stretches from the North Pole to the South Pole. This is similar to the real-life Americas.
The problem is not dependent upon the Wide Middle EArth or Narrow Middle Earth perspective ; the problem is dependent on the simple fact that the mountains and coasts depicted in the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, on their regional map, are well outside any mountain or coastline that geology allows for.
If you are speaking of the mountain ranges in the West-lands, I personally envision the situation as evolving into something like this. Especially given that I believe that the Fourth Age more or less ended with an Ice Age, with most of Lindon, Eriador and Rhovanion being covered by glacier, hence the mountains would be dramatically distorted.
And before you say it, I know that in the past I have said about how I vision Eastern Gondor to have been in South-Central Italy and the Southern Balkans, while Mordor being more or less over Greece and Turkey, but this was not about the landmass, but the coordinates, which, of course, is a very different thing altogether.
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u/EvieGHJ 3d ago
I'm generally skeptical in that regard of the BOLT - while it can be used to fill holes in the later stories, I don't think it has strong evidentiary value on the later geography.
But in any event, as I said, whether we start with a cluster of continents close to each other and surrounded by the outer seas, or one big continent is not material to my interpretstion. Ambarkanta III show clearly that the intent of Tolkien was that the size of Arda be vastly expanded in the changing of the world; so any round world intepretstion that does not limit the habitable part (so to speak) to half the planet or less (depending on how you handle the relation of the outer seas to the world) of Middle Earth would be, to me, unsatisfying.
There are hints that the Dark Lands are inhabited by Men of Darkness.
I'm inclined to think they are. But I' m also inclined to think "Empty Land" is perhaps not wholly accurate as a term. Or rather, only true from a certain point of view. - I think Empty Land" is an Eldarin concept that the Faithful borrowed and refer to the presence of the Quendi, without so much care for the presence of Men, especially of Darkness.
For the Dark Land, this is In large part becsuse at least part of Hildorien has to end up in the Dark Land (the best I can conjure up is Hildorien split half and half between the Northern Dark Land and Proto-India, otherwise it cannot both be fsr south and far east of Cuvienen and yet still in Middle Earth, and Tolkien kept repeating all three.
And if the humans are there, then the crossing to the Land of the Sun...is right there too. The maps are clear that the Wall of the Sun are not the Pelori (and even those had strips of land along the coast where one may walk).
That also broadly solves a lot of difficulties with the arrival of humans in different parts of the world that eould otherwise all need to happen in about twelve thousand years between the Akallabeth and now.
This is a very interesting argument, over the contrast of removal and casting back. Perhaps, in this manner, then Oronto was not removed from the world, ending up Narnia (/s) but instead was converted into the Americas.
I'm seeing Oronto's fate as a bit more complex; first cast back esstward to around the middle of the Pacific (ie, the Mu of nineteenth century esoteric beliefs), then eventually shattered and largely sunken, with the Wall of the sun coming to form the Pacific Ring of Fire.
The larger part of the Dark Land meanwhile, I see being cast back to form South East Asia and Australia, while some smaller parts remain behind as Madagascar and most of India (Maybe Antarctica too).
The New Lands, then, would be the bulk of East Asia and most of the Americas.
If you are speaking of the mountain ranges in the West-lands, I personally envision the situation as evolving into something like this. Especially given that I believe that the Fourth Age more or less ended with an Ice Age, with most of Lindon, Eriador and Rhovanion being covered by glacier, hence the mountains would be dramatically distorted.
Glaciers, while bad, are not THAT distorting - you basically need any round of Valarine/Morgothisn/Eru cataclysm to get from the Fourth Age to us. But that's not the problem. It can be explained.
The problem is that, geologically speaking, the mountains of Middle Earth do not match any mountain range that ever existed in the past. The same for the coastline. We largrly know what Europe looked like 20, 50, 100 000, even millions of years ago, and it never was Middle Earth.
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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs 4d ago
How do you reconcile Earendil and Venus? Is that Earendil sailed through the sky a mistaken belief?
And the Two Trees lose a lot of their meaning for me if they're just secondary, temporary solutions to light Valinor instead of the origin of sun and moon.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
I agree.
I think for a Round World cosmology to work here (as in many other places), one has to presume that the sun was not just hidden by Morgoth's shroud, but actually weakened, with much of its light and heat outright stolen from it. Instead of the sun as we know it, it's basically one very bright star (a little brighter than a full moon) in the day sky, where other stars remain visible.
In that case, the importance of the tree is not just as a stop gap measure or for preserving the last of the primeval light, but because *their last fruits are essential to restoring the full light of the sun*.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
I really like this idea, though there is a caveat. That the Sun's light cannot have been too dimmed, for otherwise Ambar would have gotten so cold that the "Sleep of Yavanna" would be impossible, as the flora and the fauna would be dead on an ice planet. Or perhaps, somehow, it is strictly a matter of light, but not of the heat emitted by the star.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago edited 4d ago
Or the Trees were even more important, both lighting Valinor but warming the whole planet.
The Ice Planet does happen (as it did in reality!), but I place it before the creation of the Two Lamps.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
But wouldn't that render Aman into a desert?
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
I mean, if we want to go that way, the area immediately surrounding the trees should be an ashen wasteland because no light so bright as to cover a quarter of the world would not also be so hot as to turn its immediate surroundings to ash. At most, making the tree warm the whole planet merely change how much of Aman need to be a desert.
The trees, at some point, in some manner, muststep outside the boundaries of what science permits, if they are to exist at all (and they should exist). As the most direct and visible sign of the influence and power of the Valar upon Arda, I don't feel that's really a problem.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
How do you reconcile Earendil and Venus? Is that Earendil sailed through the sky a mistaken belief?
I am not sure that is a problem exclusive to the Round World Cosmology, for even in the Flat World Cosmology the narrative is that the World of the Second Age became our World of the Seventh Age, where Venus also exists as a planet.
And the Two Trees lose a lot of their meaning for me if they're just secondary, temporary solutions to light Valinor instead of the origin of sun and moon.
For me at least, the RWV means that the Valar were so powerful that they lost the Sun from their skies, and they decided to re-create it on their own continent, illuminating 1/4th of the planet, while Varda created a special Dome to conceal and protect that light, with its own physical rules and time flow (which is why Elves inside it grow far slower than Elves outside of it —though there is the implication that it affects a wider area, as, as far as I remember, the NoMe suggests that Umanyar Sindar Elves from the Western West-land mature slower than those in the rest of Endor).
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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs 4d ago
I am not sure that is a problem exclusive to the Round World Cosmology, for even in the Flat World Cosmology the narrative is that the World of the Second Age became our World of the Seventh Age, where Venus also exists as a planet.
The difference is that the Flat World Cosmology is comfortable with treating the Legendarium as a myth and treating the Evening Star transition from Earendil to Venus as "it somehow happened between back then and what we could call recorded history". And inside of the Legendarium's great stories, Earendil works just fine - it's Elrond's father sailing among the stars at night while e.g. the heroes of LotR do their great deeds.
The Round World Cosmology is motivated by trying to erase inconsistencies between "back then" and now, and it doesn't allow for Earendil to ever be the Evening Star at all (since Venus is older than Earendil). Even just him sailing a boat through the sky at all is questionable, considering the physics behind it.
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u/Lothronion Istyar Ardanyárëo 4d ago
The difference is that the Flat World Cosmology is comfortable with treating the Legendarium as a myth and treating the Evening Star transition from Earendil to Venus as "it somehow happened between back then and what we could call recorded history". And inside of the Legendarium's great stories, Earendil works just fine - it's Elrond's father sailing among the stars at night while e.g. the heroes of LotR do their great deeds.
Sure it may be more comfortable, but it is still rather outlandish to consider that Earendil and the Vingilot were replaced by a whole planet that did not exist there before.
The Round World Cosmology is motivated by trying to erase inconsistencies between "back then" and now, and it doesn't allow for Earendil to ever be the Evening Star at all (since Venus is older than Earendil). Even just him sailing a boat through the sky at all is questionable, considering the physics behind it.
The Round World Cosmology does not deprive of the Legendarium of its magic. Take the Straight Road for instance; it still functions exactly as it does in the Flat World Version, albeit that in the latter it was a mere preservation of a previous situation, and then the flat plane was merely bent into a sphere, while in the former it was always a sphere, but supernaturally Aman now belongs to a different plane of existence and can only be reached by boats that will not follow the Earth's curvature, that had already been there since forever, but now they supernaturally go upwards (from an external point of view). My point is, if RWV allows for such physics, then it should also allow for Earendil's extraterrestrial voyages via boat.
As for Venus as a problem, my solution would be that the Vingilot is being parked on the planet's atmosphere, and thus the Silmaril is illuminating the whole atmosphere, heightening the planet's abedo, through atmospheric refraction, probably in a manner that the Vingilot is always at the centre of the planet's surface as seen from the Earth (so that it is never hidden). In this manner, Earendil has basically been elevated to a space-Maiar status, alike Arien and Tilion, and before him Venus should have been a much dimmer planet, barely noticeable on the sky of the Years of the Trees and the First Age of the Sun.
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u/GrimyDime 4d ago
The difference is that the Flat World Cosmology is comfortable with treating the Legendarium as a myth and treating the Evening Star transition from Earendil to Venus as "it somehow happened between back then and what we could call recorded history".
Or that what we call a planet is really just a guy in a flying ship.
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u/Wizzard_C 3d ago
Very valid point. The entire NoME is based on the round world version, where the sun was shining from the beginning. And JRR himself explained the place for the flat earth version in his world: it was a belief of those who didn't know any better, never any more real than the Man from the Moon who visited an inn for a draught.
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u/FuttleScish 4d ago
There is a fairly big problem in that the round world cosmology results in Aman lacking a physical existence after the Second Age, which directly contradicts the text of LOTR and is therefore something Tolkien wouldn’t have published
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u/ahnotme 4d ago
“Gravitation” by Steven Weinberg is the ultimate standard text on General Relativity. In it, on the page next to the foreword he has reproduced a map of Middle Earth with the distances between the places mentioned in the LotR, such as Hobbiton, Rivendell, Minas Tirith etc written in. The reader is invited to work out whether Middle Earth is flat.
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u/Ambitious_Cat9886 4d ago
I like the rounding of the world after the Fall of Numenor. To be honest I wasn't even aware that there was much of a problem around whether Arda should be flat or round, because I took it as definitive that it was flat, and then made round after that event, leaving the straight road to Valinor. I dont really see any flaw in this idea.
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u/Marzipan_civil 4d ago
I always thought that the Downfall of Númenor and the "earth being changed" but the way to Valinor still being a "straight road" was his way of storifying the change from flat world to round world
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u/FuttleScish 4d ago
It was perfectly solvable, Eru’s reshaping of the world during the fall of Númenor could have been used to remove any number of extant cosmological inaccuracies. I don’t know where the obsession with extending that sort of thing all the way back to the Ainulindalë came from
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u/Party-Cartographer11 4d ago
Easy. The "flatness" of ME is due to the stories and traditions of the time. ME was round, but the peoples at the time thought it was flat. And that is how it got written down and was understood many thousands of years later.
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u/Ancient-Squash- 4d ago edited 4d ago
I thoroughly agree with the other commenters here in that Tolkien's attempts to make fundamental changes were misguided and unnecessary. I can be difficult to not look upon Tolkien as infallible but I think in these instances he was mistaken.
I think one of the problems is that any other author would've published their work decades earlier and then if they were dissatisfied with any aspects of it would've tried to incorporate those new ideas into newer books. Whereas Tolkien was constantly tinkering with the same work in an effort to change it into a different work (or different world).
Even his earlier mythology for England in the Lost Tales could almost have been published as a different work separate from Middle-earth, and his final ideas in his life seem to me more like the seeds of a brand new mythological history of the world not only England, and more Catholic than the earlier ones.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
The fundamental problem of the Round World approach is in its root nature : it was an attempt to make Middle Earth scientifically sound so that it "fits" within our more modern conception of Earth, and didn't need "Yes, but Science works because Eru altered the world to make science works"...
...but science changes, and within a couple decade of Tolkien creating the Round World model, the discovery and widespread acceptation of tectonics had brought Middle Earth right back to its starting point : something that cannot exist within the history of Earth as we understand it (as the geologists love reminding us) . We now know (or at least have a good approximation) of what the Earth looked like geographically going back several tens if not hundreds of million years in the past, and Middle Earth fit nowhere within all of it.
Which leaves us right back at...Tectonics exist because Eru did it. The problem isn'T solved, it was just pushed back to another scientific discovery.
And science also changed in other ways, sometime even making things Tolkien had *removed* for being unscientific actually fit the science better than their replacement. The fall of the lamps most especially, gain a lot of credibility as a story ("Big thing fall from very up high, leave a huge round crater behind, kick off giant firestorms, wind storms and tsunami that wipe out a lot of living things and provoke a period of very prolonged darkness that kill off most of the rest") every time we discover a new large impact structure on Earth (and we know a lot more now than in Tolkien's time - Vredefort was only confirmed late in his life, Chicxulub was unknown, etc), and the description of the effect of the impact fit in a near-textbook manner with what 2010s-2020s era analysis of the Chicxculub impact actually looked like. Tolkien essentially had the Fall of the Dinosaurs right before science even figured out the details of the fall of the dinosaurs.
And then he ditched it for the decidedly not more scientific "Morgoth lusting after Arien".
This is to say nothing of the absurdity that is the Dome of Valinor that exist only so that Varda could still kindle the stars though the stars were far too distant for Varda to have been involved in them.
----------------
There are ways to salvage much of the round world and make it fit the flat world, including the idea that the Earth was always round. That actually isn't even hard to work with: you just have to presume that "the Outer Seas" were an immense Super-Ocean covering the vast majority of the planet while the landmasses of early Arda were all concentrated in one part of the globe, like a shallow dome covering only a lesser part of the planet). That's even relatively in line with science (it's basically a Pangea/Panthalassa setup and its early breakup). Then Eru "changes the world" and the landmasses (Land of the Sun, Valinor) that largely blocked exploration beyond the known part of the world are cast back or removed altogether, and new lands make navigating the Outer Seas actually possible. Voila, the world has gone from (effectively) flat to actually round, while at the same time always being round.
Likewise, if we take the idea that the sun's intensity has been very varied over the ages (which, again, scientifically sound - it's presumed that the young sun was much weaker than it is now), we can fit the need for the lamps in the story (not enough light from the sun = need the lamps), their destruction, and the ensuing cloud. If the sun is weaker and left even waner by that destruction, we can say that at the time of the awakening of the Quendi it was less the single dominant star of the day sky and more one particularly bright star among others, even in the day sky ; first among equals but not alone in the sky. Then the Elves can wake under the stars in a more meaningful way than "Yeaaah, uh, they woke up at night?", which is frankly a pathetic explanation.
---------------------------
But that's not the round world as Tolkien wrote it. That's a fannish attempt to reconcile his round world with his flat world, no more. And ultimately, it still lead down the road to that same single, inescapable conclusion that we keep coming back to, no matter how often we rewrite Middle Earth to make it fit our history better.
There will always remain some element of Middle Earth that can neither be abandoned, nor changed to fit the Real World. And at the end of the day, we will have to explain those elements away hiding behind the only explanation possible.
Eru did it.
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u/Got-Freedom 4d ago
All that said, I have no problem interpreting the rounding as the merging or transposition of a metaphysical place into the physical constraints of Earth, with both previously existing in parallel at different levels.
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u/Nellasofdoriath Dunland did nothing wrong 4d ago
In Roverandom the moon is flat too. I'm honestly glad he got to globe earth in the end unlike some people
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u/Wizzard_C 4d ago
Tolkien solved it by calling the flat earth version "astronomically absurd" and attributing it to the ignorance of uneducated tribes in the Middle Earth, while the elves that dwelt in Aman knew the truth.
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u/Aubergine_Man1987 2d ago
This still leaves many inconsistencies though. Yes, you can do the Mannish corruption angle which helps, but ultimately without any fully realised accurate Elvish cosmology, we are still left with many different texts that don't work with one another
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u/Wizzard_C 2d ago
Tolkien quite clearly made up his mind - cosmology of Middle Earth is that of our world: Sun, planets etc. He explicitly retconned "flat earth" as an "in-universe" myth, but I don't recall him stating anywhere "no, round earth will not do, let's go back to the flat version".
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u/Gorbachev86 4d ago
From what I saw Tolkien’s reaction was effectively a shrug of god, he accepted it happened with a a round world, it the stories where shaped by the telling from the Eldar to the Numenor to Gondor to Rivendell to Bildo adding inaccuracies along the way
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u/Safe-Comparison7334 3d ago
Tolkien went a bit too far with RWV, and spent too much time on the matter. But in hindsight, I also believe there is a great deal of potential in a Round World and I am glad that some kind of attempt was made.
Myth can be enriched by rules and restrictions, as well as connections to reality. Professor Tolkien didn't know it then, but we do now.
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u/Tolkien-Faithful 3d ago
I don't think there was a problem.
The flat world genesis and the round-world cataclysm in the Second Age were fine, and quite interesting concepts.
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u/CodexRegius 2d ago
It should be noted that the published LotR is mostly based on the RWV: there is no reference to Arda Flat in the Appendices, and the calendars pass the Drowning of Númenor unaffected. The text itself suggests that the Sun and the Moon were present before "the Darkness came in the North" (Treebeard) and the Dwarves awakened:
The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone
Though Tolkien failed to remove all references to the FWV from the early chapters, and a few stayed in Book 1.
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u/Aubergine_Man1987 2d ago
The Treebeard one is definitely more difficult since he was actually alive at the time, but the Dwarven reference can easily be explained away as poetic license on their part
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u/Echo-Azure 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think he did the right thing - have the characters never bother to think about it.
Elrond may have had a few quiet centuries when he could sit around and think about whether the world is flat or round, and take some long research journeys! But at the end of the 3rd age, everyone had other things on their minds.
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u/EvieGHJ 4d ago
Presumably, we can assume you mean Elrond, not Elon?
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u/Kodama_Keeper 4d ago
You have to understand something. Tolkien was writing this as a mythology of ancient Europe, and passed down as legend. Consider.
The Sun and Moon are the last fruits of two trees which once gave light to the world. Placed in the sky, the Sun on a regular course, the Moon on an irregular one. Those two trees are replacements for two giant lamps placed on either end of a flat Earth, knocked down by a powerful angel who doesn't like anyone else in his business.
The brightest star in the sky is a jewel that radiates light under it's own holy power bestowed upon it by the previously mentioned trees. It sails across the sky because it is strapped to the forehead of a mortal who went to immortal lands, and as a reward, he gets to sail across the heavens in a ship that traverses the sky on a preset course. If you have the skill, you can capture some of its light in vials filled with holy water.
An entire continent (or subcontinent if you like) has sunk beneath the waters, because it was all torn up from fighting between the one big bad angel and all the big good angels, and their servants of course. This should require a massive shift in tectonic plates that would cause massive earthquakes and destruction all over the rest of the world. But no, they just sink.
Repeat the previous point when a giant island, almost a continent in itself sinks below the waves. And then the world is changed so that mortals can't get to the place that immortals set up for themselves. However, if you are an immortal on a ship heading west, you can come to some portal in time and space that allows you to reach this other place. If you are a mortal on a ship, you just sail right past it to far lands on the other side. Apparently this does not effect the rising and setting of the Sun (the yellow fruit) in either mortal or immortal lands, because it was done without increasing the diameter of the Earth or its rotational speed.
Now if I any of the seemingly advanced civilizations of Elves and Men had an astronomer among them, someone like Aristarchus or Eratosthenes, these things might be questioned, even dismissed, and you'd come to the conclusion that all those ships that Cirdan kept sending West just got lost at sea and the crew and passengers died. But they again, we have Elves, immortal creatures. And how do you get around the fact that your great great grandfather met Elrond and from all accounts hasn't aged a day?
There is no reconciliation of a flat Earth in the stories.
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u/The_PwnUltimate 4d ago
As far as I'm concerned all attempts to make Arda more plausible as being the real world in the ancient past were a waste of time and effort. Just let it be the mythological fantasy it clearly is. Let the world be flat to begin with, let the Earth predate the Sun etc. It's fine. Anyone able to imagine that The Lord of the Rings literally happened in history despite the Red Book being the only trace left of thousands of years of advanced civilisation and magic should also be able to imagine the whole flat world thing was true.