Pretty unrelated, but I do wonder what the mathematics are behind the elves taking the “straight road” from Middle Earth to Aman. I think it would start to ruin the mystique and magic of the Tolkien Legendarium, but it’s still fun to think about.
The idea is that after Sauron convinced Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, to attack the Valar, Ilúvatar drowned their ships, killed their soldiers, and then reshaped Arda to be a sphere rather than flat. The elves who remained Middle Earth still had the right to return to Aman once they became weary of the world, and so Cirdan would build ships able to sail the old straight road directly from the grey havens to Aman. I’m wondering what that mechanism would be that would allow the ships to go through “space” rather than simply wrap around the sphere of Arda. Maybe a portal? Or just like straight up they lift off the ocean and float through space with minimal thrust before reaching Aman? Given that the Arda is supposed to be Earth far far in the past, how would the Valar hide themselves from a space travel capable humanity?
I’m assuming it’s all magical space warping. I’m not a master lore buff but could maybe be interpreted that the world is still not “round” in the traditional sense but was just made to behave that way, like an old school JRPG map where you go off one edge of the map and appear on the opposite side.
So I guess in a technical sense, it’d be a giant hemisphere-spanning portal that causes the world to become round for any who try to sail through it.
The elves returning to Valinor would just have the blessing of the Valar to circumvent this restriction and travel as if the world were still flat. Instead of looping around to the other side, they just carry onwards.
Either that, or it’s like the lowercase Greek letter sigma (σ), where the tail part at the top is where Aman is located. The elves can access it by just going along the route, but everyone else just phases through it and continues along the curvature if they tried.
I like both of these ideas, but I think the lowercase sigma idea is probably closest to what Tolkien envisioned. Although it would be pretty funny seeing Tolkien get confused about video game logic when presented with the concept of flat world screen wrap. Try explaining integer over/underflow to a man who fought in WW1 and almost definitely never used a computer in his entire life
Pretty unrelated, but I do wonder what the mathematics are behind the elves taking the “straight road” from Middle Earth to Aman. I think it would start to ruin the mystique and magic of the Tolkien Legendarium, but it’s still fun to think about.
The idea is that after Sauron convinced Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, to attack the Valar, Ilúvatar drowned their ships, killed their soldiers, and then reshaped Arda to be a sphere rather than flat. The elves who remained Middle Earth still had the right to return to Aman once they became weary of the world, and so Cirdan would build ships able to sail the old straight road directly from the grey havens to Aman. I’m wondering what that mechanism would be that would allow the ships to go through “space” rather than simply wrap around the sphere of Arda. Maybe a portal? Or just like straight up they lift off the ocean and float through space with minimal thrust before reaching Aman? Given that the Arda is supposed to be Earth far far in the past, how would the Valar hide themselves from a space travel capable humanity?
I’m assuming it’s all magical space warping. I’m not a master lore buff but could maybe be interpreted that the world is still not “round” in the traditional sense but was just made to behave that way, like an old school JRPG map where you go off one edge of the map and appear on the opposite side.
So I guess in a technical sense, it’d be a giant hemisphere-spanning portal that causes the world to become round for any who try to sail through it.
The elves returning to Valinor would just have the blessing of the Valar to circumvent this restriction and travel as if the world were still flat. Instead of looping around to the other side, they just carry onwards.
Either that, or it’s like the lowercase Greek letter sigma (σ), where the tail part at the top is where Aman is located. The elves can access it by just going along the route, but everyone else just phases through it and continues along the curvature if they tried.
I like both of these ideas, but I think the lowercase sigma idea is probably closest to what Tolkien envisioned. Although it would be pretty funny seeing Tolkien get confused about video game logic when presented with the concept of flat world screen wrap. Try explaining integer over/underflow to a man who fought in WW1 and almost definitely never used a computer in his entire life