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
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