Tolkien's Physical Universe

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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

I split the osgiliation about who wrote the Silmarillion into a separate thread:

http://www.thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=322
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Post by Parmamaite »

I don't really have much to add, my thoughts (and more) have already been said in a much more profound way than I could ever hope for, especially by Scirocco and Voronwë.

For me, Middle-earth is our Earth, but in an imagined past. That poses no problem for me.

I love the stories of the Two Trees, the Earth made Round and Eärendil as a star. These stories would have to go if the Earth was created as a globe, thus removing the most powerful and original parts of Tolkiens mythology.

But it would be very interesting to see the end result if Tolkien had had time to finish rewriting......
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Post by MithLuin »

Yes...I think you can write powerful myths within the context of a round world - so who knows what Tolkien would have come up with had he tried?

Part of the reason the round world from the beginning concept is so dissatisfying is because we know what we would lose, but not what we would gain.

I am not willing to accept that Middle Earth is not our world, or is some parallel dimension, or whatever. For me, it has to be our world. We have to have some ownership, some connection...that is part of the poignancy, if it is (in some remote way) home. Like Prim, I don't want to give that up. I don't just want to suspend disbelief and enter the story temporarily...I want to believe the story; I want it to be true.


I have always been moved by Sam's star. But when I first learned of it, I had no idea who Eärendil was. Yes, there was Bilbo's long poem, but I never figured out what it was about, or why he was showing 'cheek' to recite it in Elrond's house. And I certainly got the connection - Silmaril to star to phial, Beren to Frodo. But the tale of Beren and Lúthien wresting a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown was just a remote tale to dream about - I didn't know the story yet.

So while part of me knew that jewels didn't glow (and didn't become stars), I didn't know that Sam was claiming that a person had become a star when he called the star Eärendil (and I also didn't know that Venus was the morning star yet, either, but cut me some slack - I was 12-16!). By the time I learned who Eärendil really was.... I had already read the entire Silmarillion, and learned to accept its mythic tone. But LotR didn't have that. It isn't embued with myth...it is embued with a sense of history. Sure, the history borders on myth, and has glimpses of myth, and mythic overtones....but it isn't itself myth.

I really don't think that there is anything in LotR that makes me say "this couldn't be our world." It's too real. And yes, I know I won't meet an ent... and yet... well, it just works.

But even believing that God created our world, and accepting the book of Genesis, I cannot accept the story of how the Valar constructed Middle Earth as 'how our world really formed.' The Silmarillion delves way past history, and into pure myth. I love it....but it does make me uneasy at times. A part of me says "No!" even though I easily accept dragons, immortal elves and giant spiders. These are equally as impossible, perhaps....but not equally as unsettlingly unbelievable, I guess.

I guess the fact that I can accept Genesis says something - Genesis doesn't try to tell me how it happened - it just says that it happened. It adds the meaning to the story of Creation...not the mechanics. The Ainulindalë is like that for me....but the construction of the Lamps is not.
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Post by Alatar »

Parmamaite wrote: I love the stories of the Two Trees, the Earth made Round and Eärendil as a star. These stories would have to go if the Earth was created as a globe, thus removing the most powerful and original parts of Tolkiens mythology.
Hi Parma!

I really don't see how any of those stories would have to be altered significantly to work in a Round World mythology. The sun and moon could chase each other across the sky in exactly the same fashion, with the moon drawn to the suns splendour. You simply lose the Gates of Night. Eärendil as a star can circle a globe as easily as he rides the heavens in a flat Earth. The Two Trees never lit anything but Valinor anyway, so that works. Even Illuin and Ormal can work with the globed earth. They just don't work with a full Universe/Solar System concept.

I suppose it's just a matter of how far I'm willing to suspend disbelief. I'll accept the Discworld in Pratchett, but not in Tolkien.

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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

Ah, but as Christopher Tolkien points out (as I said in the Sil discussion):
One loses, of course, the dramatic impact of such things as the first ‘incarnates’ waking in a starlit world – or the coming of the High Elves to Middle-earth and unfurling their banners at the first rising of the Moon.
More importantly, one loses the the whole concept of the loss of the straight path, one of the most critical philosophical/spiritual concepts in all of Tolkien's writing.

It is worth mentioning here, I think, that the concept of switching to a round world theory was not something that JRRT first came up with at the end of his life, only to not get to it. As I mentioned in the thread about creating the published Silmarillion, he actually wrote a "round world version" of the Ainulindulë some time before 1948, before LOTR was even finished, and he then superceded that with a new, "flat world version."
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Post by Alatar »

Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:Ah, but as Christopher Tolkien points out (as I said in the Sil discussion):
One loses, of course, the dramatic impact of such things as the first ‘incarnates’ waking in a starlit world – or the coming of the High Elves to Middle-earth and unfurling their banners at the first rising of the Moon.
I fail to see why the two are incompatible, unless of course, one assumes a solar system. One can have both a globed world and an "orbiting" sun and moon which are created after the earth and stars. As a Mythic concept its far easier to accept than the flat earth concept.
Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote: More importantly, one loses the the whole concept of the loss of the straight path, one of the most critical philosophical/spiritual concepts in all of Tolkien's writing.
Again, not necessarily. The concept is merely shifted in perspective. Rather than leave Valinor in situ and shape the world away from it, you remove it from the world and place it outside, so that it can be reached by the straight path. It's a trivial adjustment.
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Post by Parmamaite »

Oh yes Mithluin, I quite agree: Middle-earth is our own world, it's Home, and that makes the legends much more important.
MithLuin wrote:But even believing that God created our world, and accepting the book of Genesis, I cannot accept the story of how the Valar constructed Middle Earth as 'how our world really formed.' The Silmarillion delves way past history, and into pure myth. I love it....but it does make me uneasy at times. A part of me says "No!" even though I easily accept dragons, immortal elves and giant spiders. These are equally as impossible, perhaps....but not equally as unsettlingly unbelievable, I guess.
I have the opposite problem, the astronomical discrepancies doesn't worry me, but dragons, giant spiders and Beorn does. I'll just have to not ponder too much about how they came to be.


You're right Alatar I meant that they don't fit with a Solar System mythology.
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Post by Athrabeth »

Alatar wrote: I'll accept the Discworld in Pratchett, but not in Tolkien.
But it’s not a “discworld”. As a matter of fact, I think referring to it as a “flat world” is really not indicative of its form at all. Looking at the diagram in my first post, with the great “veins of the world” reaching down towards the regions of Ilmen, I'm unsure how one can relate it to anything resembling this:

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Alatar wrote:
Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote: More importantly, one loses the the whole concept of the loss of the straight path, one of the most critical philosophical/spiritual concepts in all of Tolkien's writing.
Again, not necessarily. The concept is merely shifted in perspective. Rather than leave Valinor in situ and shape the world away from it, you remove it from the world and place it outside, so that it can be reached by the straight path. It's a trivial adjustment.
To my mind this would certainly not be a trivial adjustment. This would mean a tale fundamentally different in both narrative and theme. For starters, how would the Quendi’s great journey to Aman take place in (or rather out of) a round world, and more importantly, how could the Noldor’s return to Middle-earth even occur within such a cosmological construct?

Since I started this discussion, the idea of the axis mundi has been lurking about in the back of my mind, and now I think I know why. Tolkien, it would seem, envisioned the Valar descending into the physical, globed realm of Eä at its very center, which also happened to be the very center of Middle-earth. This “sacred center” fits the concept of the axis mundi almost perfectly……a place where the “earthly” meets and blends with the divine. Before the attack of Melkor on the great lamps, ALL the land and water of Eä was Middle-earth, with the light of Ormal and Illuin flooding over it in a “changeless day”, but with the hallowed regions of the Valar’s first habitation, the “center of the world”, bathed in the light where it met and blended and was perfectly balanced. This, to me, has incredibly powerful symbolic resonance.

I think it’s extremely important to remember when looking at the diagram in my first post that the surface of Middle-earth is located at the exact center of the entire cosmos itself from whatever angle it is viewed; that “Vista and Ilmen” above and “Ambar and Ilmen” below are almost exactly symmetrical, and that these regions actually blend together, even into the great encircling substance of Vaiya, to form the living and dynamic and perfectly spherical globe of Eä itself. A “round world”, within this globe from the beginning. could not contain the symbolically important symmetry of the Valar’s first labours, or a perfect center to that symmetry that could be taken “literally” as both the physical and spiritual axis mundi of the entire cosmos (not merely of a “planet-like” earth surrounded by concentric layers of airs and other substances).

The breaking and upheavals of the land and seas of Middle-earth, and the removing of the Valar “into the West” symbolizes, I believe, the loss of an “actual” axis mundi for Eä. It is the diminishment of blessedness on Middle-earth; the first “disconnect” between the earthly and divine. But the "blessed" center, is still accessible and still within the interconnected regions of Eä. The “pivot” of the cosmos now, I believe, becomes the great mound of Ezellohar and the Two Trees (hills and trees, interestingly, are the most common representations of the axis mundi in many religions and myths throughout history). Much has been discussed here and elsewhere of the divine nature of the Trees and their Light, and I don’t think these ideas need be revisited in this post, but the symbolic importance of the Trees as dynamically connecting the earthly and the “heavenly” strongly resonates throughout the Silmarillion, and on into LOTR. Their Light, held in the Silmarils, will help remake Arda, and will go “out over all the world”; a world which I’m inclined to believe would be in the form of its original “unmarred” design. ;)

When the great cataclysm occurs at the end of the Second Age, another, far more extreme “disconnect” of the earthly and the divine has Valinor remain at the same point within the cosmos, while the lands and seas of the west bend under it to meet those of the east. In a round world, I wonder how Ulmo can blend Ilmen and Vaiya, sending them upwards through the veins of Ambar to refresh the waters of the earth? In a round world, Vista and Ilmen and Vaiya still surround Ambar, but with the exception of the airs of clouds and winds (Vista) they do not blend with its earthly substance. Ilmen, the air breathed by the immortals in Aman, and traversed by the stars and the Sun and Moon, has no “meeting place” with the earth as it did in the original design. Nor does Vaiya, the “Outer Sea”, which once shared a dynamic relationship with all the other regions of Eä. The integrated, interconnected system cannot work as it once did. The world, quite simply, is not what it once was. I think various representations of axis mundi appear in LOTR as fragments of this system, of this “lost cosmology” that once allowed Middle-earth to tangibly share in the blessedness of the Valar’s realm within Eä. Lórien, with Cerin Amroth as its “heart” is, I believe, the most powerfully symbolic in its structure, but I very much wonder if perhaps the House of Bombadil is another “cosmic center” that still offers those within the more confining and limited world of the Third Age some kind of “portal” that touches the essence of the divine. But the Straight Path is the “grand portal”, the unbroken connection between the Blessed Realm and Middle-earth – two separate realities within Eä that used to be one and whole. :(

The poignancy in the finality of that hidden path, and the depth of the gulf between what was and what is would be absolutely lost if Valinor had always been separate from the earth.
scirocco wrote:
Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:For me, at least, reading and thinking about Tolkien's work makes me feel like Elendil, standing at the top of the tower at Annúminas peering in vain longing for some vision of the undying lands. Though the effort is doomed to fail, sometimes I feel that a glimpse of that holy realm is just outside my reach, and my spirit is uplifted from making the effort, even though I fail.
Beautiful, Voronwë. That glimpse I'm sure we all feel, and I think captures something of what Tolkien meant by Faery, that sort of distant, only just glimpsed, Perilous Realm, a kind of cold shiver of joy, a half-remembered dream, a sense of loss and sadness now it is unattainable, and a yearning to reach it.
:love: Yes. That pretty much says it all.
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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

I split the posts about whether the LOTR is "Round World from the Beginning" into a separate thread:

http://www.thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=360
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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

I wanted to mention that in Tolkien's final revision of the Quenta Silmarillion he changed the name for the Outer Sea from Vaiya to Ekkaia and that term (and the concept that it represents) does appear in the published Silmarillion, in Chapter One, Of the Beginning of Days:
Thus ended the Spring of Arda. The dwelling of the Valar upon Almaren was utterly destroyed, and they had no abiding place upon the face of the Earth. Therefore they departed from Middle-earth and went to the Land of Aman, the westernmost of all lands upon the borders of the world; for its west shores looked upon the Outer Sea, that is called by the Elves Ekkaia, encircling the Kingdom of Arda. How wide is that sea none know but the Valar; and beyond it are the Walls of the Night.
I also wanted to address the following comment of Alatar's, or more properly to point out that Christopher Tolkien himself has addressed this very issue:
Alatar wrote:See even when I read the Silmarillion, the initial concept was of a round world.
But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatar said to them: 'Behold your Music!' And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; arid they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it.
In discussing the Annals of Aman (where most of that text that I cited above from the published Silmarillion comes from, combined with a small portion form the final draft of the Quenta Silmarillion itself, where the term Ekkaia actually occurs) CT discusses the contradiction with the very portion of the Ainulindalë that Alatar cites:
Amid all the ambiguities (most especially, in the use of the word 'World'), the testimony seems to be that in these texts the Ambarkanta world image survived at least in the conception of the Outer Sea extending to the Wall of the World, now called the Walls of the Night -- thought the Walls have come to be differently conceived (see also p. 135, § 168). Now in the revision of 'The Silmarillion' made in 1951 the phrase in QS § 12 (V.209) 'the Walls of the Wolrd fence out the Void and the Eldest Dark' -- a phrase in perfect agreement of course with the Ambarkanta was retained (p. 154) [but it does not appear in the published text -VtF]. This is a central difficulty in relation to the Ainulindalë, where it is made as plain as could be wished that Ëa came into being in the Void, it was globed amid the Void (§§11, 20, and see pp. 37-38); how then can the Walls of Arda 'fence out the Void and the Eldest Darkness?

A possible explanation, of a sort, may be hinted at in the words cited above from AAm § 17; Melkor gathered spirits out of the voids of Ëa. [changed in the published Silmarillion to "halls of Ëa" - VtF] It may be that, although AAm is not far distant in time from the last version (D) of the Ainulindalë, my father's conception did not in fact now accord entirely with what he had written there; that (as I suggested, p. 39) he was now thinking of Arda as being 'set within an indefinite vastness in which all "creation" is comprehended', rather than of a bounded Ëa itself set 'amid the Void'. Then, beyond the Walls of the Night, the bounds of Arda, stretch 'the voids of Ëa'.
[Morgoth's Ring, pp. 63-64]
I like this conception very much.
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Post by Alatar »

Athrabeth wrote:
Alatar wrote: I'll accept the Discworld in Pratchett, but not in Tolkien.
But it’s not a “discworld”. As a matter of fact, I think referring to it as a “flat world” is really not indicative of its form at all. Looking at the diagram in my first post, with the great “veins of the world” reaching down towards the regions of Ilmen, I'm unsure how one can relate it to anything resembling this:

Image
Alatar wrote:
Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote: More importantly, one loses the the whole concept of the loss of the straight path, one of the most critical philosophical/spiritual concepts in all of Tolkien's writing.
Again, not necessarily. The concept is merely shifted in perspective. Rather than leave Valinor in situ and shape the world away from it, you remove it from the world and place it outside, so that it can be reached by the straight path. It's a trivial adjustment.
To my mind this would certainly not be a trivial adjustment. This would mean a tale fundamentally different in both narrative and theme. For starters, how would the Quendi’s great journey to Aman take place in (or rather out of) a round world, and more importantly, how could the Noldor’s return to Middle-earth even occur within such a cosmological construct?
Should I respond here or in the Round World thread?


What's with all the threadsplitting going on? Somebody needs their scissors rights revoked!!!! I'm talking to you Voronwë!!!!
:rage: :rage: :rage:
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Post by MithLuin »

Alatar wrote:What's with all the threadsplitting going on? Somebody needs their scissors rights revoked!!!! I'm talking to you Voronwë!!!!
:rage: :rage: :rage:
I second that! I get thoroughly confused when a thread breaks off and is reborn elsewhere. Especially if I didn't take part in the initial discussion, I feel like I am missing something in the new one.

I realize that you have the perogative to determine how things will work here, but I will merely voice my opinion that suggesting we start a new thread to deal with Osgiliations is better than splitting off osgiliations into their own threads. That way, the conversation can have a 'beginning point' and everyone can join in on those terms. It also allows the conversation to progress more organicly on the original thread.

My two cents, even though you didn't ask for them ;).
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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

Thanks for your comments, Alatar and MithLuin. You will notice, however, that in the initial post in the LOTR Round World thread, scirocco indicated that he thought that that subject would be worth a separate thread. I agreed, and split off that post and two responses, before the two subjects became too interspersed to separate. The fact that that thread has garnered quite a bit of interest is a fair indication that it was the right thing to do.
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Re: Tolkien's Physical Universe

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

To my great surprise, I am reminded that this is the thread in which the germ of Arda Reconstructed was originally born. I was actually looking for another thread (The Moral Universe of Middle-earth) but came across this one and started reading through it. It's quite an interesting thread, beyond it's "historical significance.
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