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Fattybolger
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Post Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 23, 2005 08:39
This question occurred to me when I was contemplating Terry Pratchett's debt to Tolkien. The Discworld is flat, of course. But is Middle Earth - or was it once?

There's a lot of talk in the books about the 'bent seas' which covered Númenor when Ar-Pharazon tried to conquer Valinor. After that, apparently, any ship manned by humans that tried to get to Valinor just came back to where it started from, having presumably circumnavigated the globe.

Aragorn when dying refers to 'the circles of the world', saying that humans aren't bound to them after death. This again seems to imply that the world is considered to be 'round', if not actually a globe. When talking about Lúthien and Beren, however, he uses the word 'confines' rather than 'circles'. This may be by chance, or it may be deliberate, because those two lived long before the 'seas were bent'.

So was Middle Earth originally flat? And if so, what did this signify?
Drauglin
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 23, 2005 09:05
Yes, I believe it was flat until the destruction of Numenore, when they 'bent all roads'. There was a reference to the Numenorians being able to sail on that outer ocean above the world, too.

If you read the book of lost tales 1 , there's some great early maps by Tolkien where the world was shown as flat, and in the shape of a giant ship. I think this is a literal take on 'sailing the outer oceans'. I think it might signify the passage of the old world school of thought to a new one, or something to that effect.
LOTRluver43235
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 23, 2005 04:28
in the Sil, Tolkien refers to the road to the "ancient west" that elves can travel to go to the Blessed Relm, but mortals can't and so they circumnavigate the world and return to where they were. hope that makes sense!
aewon
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 23, 2005 08:47
when the world was created it was flat but when the numenoreans tried to go to valinor the valar took valinor away from the earth and made it a globe. at least this is how I understand it
hope it helps
Fattybolger
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 26, 2005 07:02
Interesting!

And yet at the beginning of Sil, when Iluvatar shows the Valar an image of the World as it has been imagined, but not yet made, it was 'globed amid the Void'. Seems there's a contradiction here!
punk_angel
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 27, 2005 04:42
I have a book, Tolkien, The Illustrated Encyclopaedia by David Day, and it shows globe-type maps of the development of Arda. It says beside the map depicting the Second Age of the Sun, Sauron forged the Ring, the Numenoreans captured him, and he convinced them to make war on the Valar. "This resulted in the sinking of Numenor, and the Change of the World: [i]the flat earth became a globe and the Undying Lands were set behind it's spheres."

I don't have any direct Tolkien references right now, but I hope this helps.
Morwinyoniel
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 28, 2005 11:02
punk_angel, just a word of warning that, Day's books aren't regarded as the most reliable sources of Tolkien info.

In the sketches presented in The Shaping of Middle-earth, the early world really is pictured as flat. A good description why this doesn't actually contradict what is said in the published Silmarillion is written by Karen Wynn Fonstad in her The Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-earth:
From the edge of the disk, however, the reader sees the 'Vista' (inner airs) domed above the land surface, and the solid 'Ambar' (earth) below; wth 'Vaiya' (the encircling 'seas' - but obviously not used in the usual sense of seas) separating the whole from 'Kúma' (the Void). There is no contradiction in the statement "it was globed amind the Void", for the diagrams clearly demonstrate that Middle-earth could be both round and flat!

It also appears from The Shaping of Middle-earth that, after the fall of Númenor, the world became round.

[Edited on 28/12/2005 by Morwinyoniel]
punk_angel
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 28, 2005 04:00
Really? Thanks, Morwinyoniel. I do tend to forget that I can't believe everything I read, especially considering that this is Tolkien, who changed what he wrote more often than he changed his socks.
Fattybolger
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 28, 2005 11:50
Thanks very much for this elucidation.

Wearing my (very) amateur astronomer's hat, I'm always faintly bothered by the more 'primitive' beliefs in Sil, especially concerning the Sun and Moon. It's the only bit of the mythology that is so obviously 'untrue' that I can't swallow it however I try. The flat-earth scenario also bothers me, though not in LoTR, where it is only referred to very indirectly. It's much more insistent in Sil.

One can get round most mythological cosmogonies by reflecting that the people who concocted them didn't have any 'scientific' kniowledge and were simply trying to explain the cosmos according to their own knowledge and belief. In Tolkien, however, we notionally get it from people (the Noldor) who were actually there at the time the sun and moon were made, and also know people (the Valar) who were actually there at the Creation!

No doubt I'm just reading the Sil. in the wrong way, like a bible-belt creationist. But there it is...
Morwinyoniel
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 29, 2005 04:52
One can get round most mythological cosmogonies by reflecting that the people who concocted them didn't have any 'scientific' kniowledge and were simply trying to explain the cosmos according to their own knowledge and belief. In Tolkien, however, we notionally get it from people (the Noldor) who were actually there at the time the sun and moon were made, and also know people (the Valar) who were actually there at the Creation!

Tolkien later changed his mind about the creation of the Sun and the Moon; the revision is presented at least in Myths Transformed in HoME 10. According to it, the Sun was there from the beginning, and the Moon was made long before the Elves appeared; the myth of their creation from the last fruit and flower of the Trees is just that - a myth, written by humans.
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 29, 2005 06:20
Of necessity I find that making the world round would of necessity involve some sort of second or alternate universe. Simply making the world into a globe would leave it as a ball set in the middle of the space it used to reside in, somehow still surrounded by the remnannts of the circles of the world.

Somehow part of the void would have been made into a new universe, with Middle-earth and its skies moved there while the remnants of the circles of the world stayed where they were. Ships of the elves that could still sail from Middle-earth to the undying lands would have to sail on some interdimensional brdge that only Elves ( and the Vala) could access.
Without a second universe , I kept picturing a globular earth floating like a golf ball levitated at the top of a golf course hole with the rest of the universe represented by the surrounding greens. I didn't like the picture, and decided that our entire universe must have been created when the world was made into a globe.

( of course I have a heavy background in S.F. and that probably influenced my vision)
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 29, 2005 03:22
I am reading The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien and I just read a letter written by Tolkien in Sept. 1954, that has a reference to this topic.

Referring to LotR," Actually, in the imagination of this story, we are now living on a physically round earth. But the whole "legendarium" contains a transition from a flat world( with borders all about it) to a globe....."
Fattybolger
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: December 30, 2005 01:37
Many thanks for further most enlightening contributions, especially as regards the sun and moon!

Of course JRRT was a mythographer (and romancer, and poet), not a cosmologist. And of course there are innumerable mythologies that assume some sort of 'flat' earth. The Norse world-tree is even harder to imagine; I know, I tried to draw it once and got into terrible difficulties, not just because of my lousy drawing but because Snorri Sturlason's account is so contradictory.(Does anybody know where I can get a better drawing, BTW?) But anybody who isn't a fundamentalist, and who has been educated in the post-Copernican, post-Newtonian West, has to be aware that our world is a globe orbiting the sun, etc. JRRT plainly does take account of this, just as C. S. Lewis does in the Narnia books, as well as in his SF. CSL doesn't need to worry too much, of course, because Narnia is not 'our world' and can obey whatever cosmological rules Lewis chooses to impose; but JRRT always insisted that ME was our world, so the difficulty subsists.

Perhaps it's best not to try to envisage ME as a 'planet' at all, either before or after the great change. Whatever you make of it, the idea of the 'bent seas' is marvellously evocative, I think.

One point - presumably, wherever Elvenhome now is, it's part of the 'physical' universe as JRRT conceives it. Hence his insistence that the life of the Elves, though enormously long, is finite: when the physical universe is wound up, that's the end for them. Men, on the other hand, leave the physical universe altogether when they die, but are not annihilated, because they are part of God's ultimate plan. Therefore, human mortality is a better bet, in the long run, than Elvish quasi-immortality, though that isn't much comfort to ageing Numenoreans, obviously. (Sorry if this intrudes on another thread.)
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Post RE: Was Middle Earth flat?
on: April 23, 2010 04:58
(...) One point - presumably, wherever Elvenhome now is, it's part of the 'physical' universe as JRRT conceives it. Hence his insistence that the life of the Elves, though enormously long, is finite: when the physical universe is wound up, that's the end for them. Men, on the other hand, leave the physical universe altogether when they die, but are not annihilated, because they are part of God's ultimate plan. Therefore, human mortality is a better bet, in the long run, than Elvish quasi-immortality, though that isn't much comfort to ageing Numenoreans, obviously.


Hmm, where did Tolkien insist that Elves will cease to exist (as this seems to imply)?
wolfbladequeen
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on: June 16, 2013 06:06
If the Numenoreans (hope I spelt that correctly) sailed round and arrived back where they started, does that mean that there was mostly just the one big expanse of land and a few islands? Or is Tolkien's Earth smaller than ours?
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on: June 16, 2013 03:16
In The Shaping of Middle Earth (volume 4 of HoME) is an early representation of the world after the cataclysmic destruction of Númenor. Whether Tolkien kept to this visualisation is a moot point. It shows a cross section of a round earth surrounded by the Ilmen and Vista which were also bent. It seems that it is a globe rather than a cylinder. New lands had been created in this upheaval and although not specifically the continents as we know them they were not just a few islands. It's not said whether those mariners stopped off anywhere on their 'bent' journey so it's possible that they came across these new lands on their way round, just as Magellan's ship did. So I don't see why it shouldn't be about the same as our world.

The main problem is that all the stars are going round as well as the sun and moon, which is slightly more difficult to explain. It's also difficult to explain why Middle Earth was left untouched during all this activity, and that at the end of the First Age.
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Elthir
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on: June 18, 2013 10:18
Well I must disagree a bit with... actually almost every post in this thread so far

Disagree might be too strong a word actually, but I believe that Tolkien later revised his flat earth vision -- or at the very least, was working on a multiple representation of the matter [due to opinion and point of view], just as he was with respect to the Sun and Moon (noted in the thread above). I think the 'final' conception was...

Western Elves, especially from Aman: these knew the world had always been round. I don't recall Tolkien ever going into detail about what certain Elves believed who had never been in contact with the Valar or the Elves from Aman, but it seems reasonable that they would be less informed.

Men, even some Numenoreans: some [not all] believe the world was only made round at the destruction of Numenor, and thus was once flat.

A mixed account (Mannish and Elvish), as seems expected, was a somewhat confusing version of mixed notions.

I think that The Drowning of Anadûnê -- a relatively unknown work by JRRT and a Mannish account of the Fall of Numenor -- is most important here, but without going in depth into this work, in this account the Elves of the West taught the Numenoreans that the world was always round [or simply round, as Numenor had not fallen yet].

And in the larger context of being but one text among others -- or at least two with respect to Numenor's fall -- the Akallabêth is not an Elvish account but seemingly a mixed account [see Sauron Defeated] -- and if so those passages that might imply that the world was made round are put into a very different context -- when one reads what the Mannish account has to say on the matter.

In the Mannish account an originally flat world is portrayed, from an Elvish standpoint, as a false belief, and one that clung on in some Men's minds even when they learned the world was truly round after Numenor fell beneath the seas.

And as Tarcolan and others have noted, even when Tolkien did imagine [from an external standpoint] that the world had actually been changed from flat to round, the phrase globed amid the void was not a contradiction, as globe seems to refer to the larger shape of the 'airs' surrounding the world.

If I am correct, Tolkien would have to deal with certain statements already published in The Lord of the Rings [incidentally he did alter a statement in a later edition of The Hobbit concerning the Sun], but I'm not sure Bombadil's description of the 'bent seas' is all that specific in any case [especially without mentally plugging in other descriptions I mean], for example.

[Edited on 06/18/2013 by Elthir]
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