How ska Arda precis vara en gammal jord?

Först och främst försökte Tolkien skapa en saknad angelsaxisk (eller, som vissa argumenterade , Celtic), mythos. Mer information finns i Q1 och Q2

Om du minns din nordiska mytologi, som starkt påverkar Tolkien (Midgard == Middle Earth), har den norra mytos världens geografi väldigt liten likhet med jorden (det gäller även många gamla mytestrukturer):

FördetandraärArdaverkligenheltintemeningsfullturengeologsperspektiv(åtminstoneensombehandlarbiologi,ekologiochpaleontologi).

Dettakommerfrånenverkliggeologochpaleontolog(seniorforskarevidPaleontologicalInstituteofAcademyofSciencesofRussianFederation),KirillYeskov,somvarsåmissnöjdmedArdasplanetäraproblematthanskrevenhelbok- The Last Ring-Bearer "- som var helt baserat på två lokaler: (1)" Arda borde ha varit geologiskt för att göra LOTR vetenskapligt trovärdigt "och (2)" Historia är skrivet av vinnarna, inte de som är intresserade av sanning ".

Naturligtvis, som LOTR som härrör från en språkdesign av en språkvetenskaplig Tolkien, blev Arda som uppstod av paleontologen Yeskov en underbar fantasi och en bra bok att läsa.

Men nu, för att lista de faktiska geografiska museerna i Yeskov, citeras från en artikel av honom som förklarar ursprunget till hans boken.

Minimera, och om du föredrar att inte läsa igenom hela uppsatsen (översatt från ryska, så är stilen lite tung), den allra sista punkten är den mest kritiska.

Tolkien was a practicing scientist, too, but a linguist rather than a natural scientist like Yefremov1, so the foundation of professional knowledge he had used to erect Middle Earth was different. It is fairly obvious to me that the Game the Oxford professor decided to play with nature began, in essence, with the creation of imaginary languages, with their own alphabets and grammar. Then he created the epic tales to match those languages, then the peoples who wrote those tales, and only then the steppes, mountains, and forests for those people to pasture their herds, build citadels, and battle the “Dark from the East.” This, precisely, was the sequence: “In the beginning was the Word” – Ainur’s music, pure and simple. Truly an excellent model of the Act of Creation!

However, Tolkien the philologist had obviously had a very weak interest in this last, non-living component of Middle Earth – its physical geography – and created it only because he had to, with predictable results. It is a well-known fact that the Professor had painstakingly verified, to the day, the lunar phases during his heroes’ long quest. I believe that, but the problem is that he had overlooked some much more significant elements of the local natural history background.

The Middle Earth has several built-in physical defects, and there’s no getting away from that. In his well-known essay Must Fantasy Be Stupid? Pereslegin provides a detailed classification of errors commonly committed by fantasy authors. He uses Tolkien’s work as an example of one of them, an “irreversible professional error”: “It occurs in a geologically unstable world. Tolkien, being a professor of English Literature, knew nothing of plate tectonics, while the topography of Beleriand and Eriador are highly important to the story; therefore, it seems impossible to fix the author’s mistake.”

(To explain: if a planet has a single continent – Middle Earth – it means that the convection currents in the planet’s mantle form a single cell, meaning that the entire “light” part of the continental crust has gathered over the point where the mantle material sinks toward the core, like foam gathers over the bathtub drain. (This had happened on Earth at least twice, in mid-Proterozoic and late Paleozoic, which is when two super-continents of Megagea and Pangea formed.) When subcontinents collide, they bunch up into folds (e.g., the Himalayas that arose at the collision of the Indian subcontinent with the Eurasian plate). This means that there ought to be a huge mountain plateau like Tibet smack in the center of Middle Earth; where is it?

Pay attention, now – strictly speaking, such errors are trifles. In Pereslegin’s litany of sins an “irreversible professional error” is classified under tolerable errors, being one of the minor ones. It’s obvious that one person can’t be equally proficient in linguistics and geology (I suspect that Yefremov had committed no fewer errors creating Tormansian languages than Tolkien had in Middle Earth tectonics). So we can pardon the Professor – the infraction he had committed was not particularly dangerous to society; The Lord of the Rings can go free. This will acknowledge it to be a regular fantasy text – I mean, a real good one, easily in the top five…

Do you like this option? Me neither. Because The Lord of the Rings is not a good, or even the best, fantasy text. It is sui generis, the only one of its kind; therefore, we will not settle for anything less than a full exoneration.

We will assume that Middle Earth is as real as our world, so if some of the details do not fit our concepts, it’s our problem. On the other hand, we will adhere scrupulously to the laws of nature. As Tolkien himself wrote, it’s easy to imagine a green sun, but “To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.” Well, the sun has its usual color in Middle Earth (and probably belongs to G-2 spectral class), its surface gravity and geochemistry do not seem different from ours, and even the lunar month is 28 days. Therefore we have to approach the task wielding Occam’s Razor (as is customary to the European intellectual tradition): we will appeal to magic and suchlike only when out of all other options.

It turns out that all the seeming contradictions of Middle Earth’s natural history can be resolved with a single assumption: that Tolkien is describing only the northwestern part of the local landmass, rather than the whole thing. Actually, it’s not even an assumption: Tolkien’s map is obviously intentionally cut off in the south and the east; why should we assume that his world ends there? There’s enough room there for the hypothetical central plateau or even other continents and archipelagos.

[1] Ivan Yefremov var en av klassikerna av sovjetisk science fiction, som råkade vara en paleontologist av yrke

Som de flesta Tolkiens fans vet, är Arda (Tolkiens värld) tänkt att vara jorden i sitt förflutna, och alla dess historier ska ha hänt för länge sen på samma planet. Självklart är detta fiktion, så det här är inte tänkt att vara faktiskt sant.

Eftersom denna fråga ofta kopplas till från andra frågor om huruvida Arda är bokstavligen vår Earth eller inte, låt oss bara bekräfta att detta är korrekt med några citat. Tolkien ansåg hans skrifter vara en "mytisk historia" i vår värld.

‘Middle-earth’, by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison).4 It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men ‘between the seas'. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.

(Letters)

May I say that all this is ‘mythical’, and not any kind of new religion or vision. As far as I know it is merely an imaginative invention, to express, in the only way I can, some of my (dim) apprehensions of the world. All I can say is that, if it were ‘history’, it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or ‘cultures') into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe; though the Shire, for instance, is expressly stated to have been in this region (I p. 12).6 I could have fitted things in with greater versimilitude, if the story had not become too far developed, before the question ever occurred to me. I doubt if there would have been much gain; and I hope the, evidently long but undefined, gap* in time between the Fall of Barad-dûr and our Days is sufficient for ‘literary credibility’, even for readers acquainted with what is known or surmised of 'pre-history'.

(Letters)

I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth tor place. I prefer that to the contemporary mode of seeking remote globes in ‘space’. However curious, they are alien, and not lovable with the love of blood-kin. Middle-earth is (by the way & if such a note is necessary) not my own invention. It is a modernization or alteration (N[ew] E[nglish] D[ictionary] ‘a perversion’) of an old word for the inhabited world of Men, the oikoumenē: middle because thought of vaguely as set amidst the encircling Seas and (in the northern-imagination) between ice of the North and the fire of the South. O.English middan-geard, mediæval E. midden-erd, middle-erd. Many reviewers seem to assume that Middle-earth is another planet!

(Letters)

Så nu när vi har fastställt att det är bokstavligen vår jord kommer vi till det problem du nämner:

But, if one wanted to roll with it... how could it possibly make sense from a geographical standpoint? All maps of Middle Earth (before or after the destruction of Beleriand and Numenor) just don't match anything on Earth, even when considering continental drift.

Du kan inte. Tolkien bekräftade detta:

As for the shape of the world of the Third Age, I am afraid that was devised ‘dramatically’ rather than geologically, or paleontologically. I do sometimes wish that I had made some sort of agreement between the imaginations or theories of the geologists and my map a little more possible.

(Letters)

Så Middle Earth är bokstavligen vår jord, på en "mytisk" tid som så småningom blev vår egen "historiska" tid. Shire "blev" England, på något sätt eller annat. Tolkien upplevde tyvärr inte denna idé förrän mycket av det geografiska arbetet redan var gjort, och teorierna om kontinental drift var nya för honom, så tyvärr fick han inte mycket arbete till att göra delen av Middle-Earth vi känner till faktiskt motsvara med Europa geografiskt, även om det är Europa. Faktum är att vi lever i senare historia:

I imagine the gap [between TA and now] to be about 6000 years: that is we are now at the end of the Fifth Age, if the Ages were of about the same length as S.A. and T.A. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh.

(Letters)

Naturligtvis kan man helt enkelt säga "Valaren omformade det (igen)", men inte bara det här är lite otillfredsställande, det har inte heller stor betydelse i sammanhanget, eftersom Valar är kända för att inte vill ha störd med Arda om inte absolut behövs, och till och med då, så lite som möjligt.

Men det finns indikationer, i några av hans tidigare skrifter, att detta är exakt vad som hände. Till exempel:

In (5) we meet the conception of the dragging of Tol Eressëa back eastwards across the Ocean to the geographical position of England - it becomes England (see I.26); that the part which was torn off by Ossë, the Isle of Íverin, is Ireland is explicitly stated in the Qenya dictionary. The promontory of Rôs is perhaps Brittany.

(Historien om Eriol eller Aelfwine)

Förmodligen är det säkrast att geografin var i stor utsträckning modern efter Numenor sänkt, och då korrigerade en händelse i den fjärde eller femte åldern den återstående geografin.