An internal problem: impossible to the Númenóreans According to the lawyer and author on Tolkien Douglas Kane, the fundamental problem Tolkien had with the Flat World Version was that the Númenóreans, the ancestors of Men, were the means by which the legends of the earliest days were transmitted to later generations. Tolkien believed that the Númenóreans would understand that a flat Earth was impossible.
An external problem: incredible to the ordinary reader The Tolkien scholar
John D. Rateliff takes a different view of the problem, writing that Tolkien had changed his mind about what an ordinary reader would be able to believe, or the extent to which that reader might be able to
suspend their disbelief, in the face of a medieval cosmology. Rateliff wrote that Christopher Tolkien wrote in ''
Morgoth's Ring'' that his father had decided to reconstruct his mythology to a Round World model because he had
A change in attitude The
Inklings scholar
David Bratman identifies a third possible reason for moving to a Round World model: that "Tolkien's attitude to his creation" had shifted. He suggests that Tolkien had grown "more analytical with details in general", giving as example the work he did late in his life, documented in
The Nature of Middle-earth, in which he laboriously compares the Elvish and human
life cycles. Bratman describes as an "absolutely crushing moment" the time when Tolkien made up his mind that In Bratman's view, the cause of this change was that he had gradually and perhaps unwittingly turned the mythological legendarium into an annalistic history "modeled on the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles". The further back the exact historical dates went, the more acute the crisis became; and the dates could go very far back into what had been vague mythological time, because
Elves like
Elrond could remember events thousands of years before the events of the War of the Ring. And Tolkien had written
The Lord of the Rings in a far more modern style than the Silmarillion,
supported by extensive "historical" Appendices including exact chronologies.
The horns of the dilemma The Flat World Version, Tolkien had come to feel, was thus essentially unacceptable, whether internally or externally, requiring replacement. But the story of the submerging of Númenor relies intrinsically on this cosmology. Many other dramatic moments would be lost or need serious revision to make a Round World Version consistent across all of the works in the Middle-earth legendarium. Among the tales that would need revising is the story of the
Two Trees.
Matthew Dickerson calls these "the most important mythic symbols in all of the legendarium". The Round World Version thus represents a major, concrete part of Tolkien's attempt to entirely rewrite the mythology of Middle-earth. Rateliff comments that Tolkien had an "extremely good" grasp of the "cascading effects" of making such a change in his legendarium; and that this change was uniquely awkward, as it stood at the junction of the myths from Valinor and the legends of
Beleriand. Tolkien saw that he would have to rewrite the early tales that set out his cosmology, and stop work on the legends until the cosmology had been made fully consistent. In Rateliff's view, Tolkien "became convinced that he had to make changes he simply couldn't bring himself to make" and became stuck; this problem was compounded by his publisher's rejection of
The Silmarillion in 1951. Even if Tolkien could have resolved one of these issues, Rateliff writes, the two together "probably" ensured that no version of
The Silmarillion would be published in his lifetime. Tolkien gave the Round World Version of the
Akallabêth the name
The Drowning of Anadûnê; this was eventually published in
Sauron Defeated in 1992. He described this as the "Man's version", possibly to distinguish it from the Elvish version in the
Akallabêth, and to reconcile why there are two versions in the legendarium. Despite his desire to abandon or heavily revise the Flat World Version, he found himself unable to do so, as it was already too deeply embedded in the universe he had created. Tolkien was attempting, but failing, to reinforce the sense of believability in his mythology by bringing it more into line with scientific knowledge of the history of the Earth.
Patrick Curry argued in 2013 that the Round World Version generated as many problems as it solved, such as where the earthly paradise of
Valinor might now be placed – though Tolkien's own solution to this problem was only published in 2014.
Carl Hostetter added that Tolkien's solution appears to contradict
The Lord of the Rings, in which Frodo journeys to what appears to be a "very physical" Tol Eressëa. The Tolkien scholar
Verlyn Flieger described the attempt as "a 180% turn", citing Christopher Tolkien's description of it, a fearful weapon' against his own creation". In Christopher Tolkien's view, his father's manuscripts reveal a tension or "stress" between the need for the new model, and the difficulty of such a fundamental reconstruction of the mythology: Kristine Larsen likens Tolkien's struggles to reconcile cosmology with his mythology to the
Renaissance astronomer
Tycho Brahe's attempts to reconcile his observations with his model of the
Solar System. She quotes Christopher Tolkien's description of his father's struggles as "a prolonged interior debate", and his judgement that: In Larsen's view, Tolkien was neither able to "ignore the simple logic of a
heliocentric cosmology", nor to switch over to it "as it would break much of what was so poetic in his fictional cosmology." However, Christopher Tolkien also pointed out in ''Morgoth's Ring'' that the Round World version was referred to in his father's commentary to the
Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, as well as incorporated into his last work on Chapter 6 of the
Silmarillion. the c. 1963 text
Of the Ents and the Eagles, the c. 1968
The Shibboleth of Fëanor and
The Problem of Ros, and the c. 1972–73
Glorfindel II. Carl Hostetter, in his editorial comments to the late 1960s text
Dark and Light presented in
The Nature of Middle-earth (discussing Elvish conceptions of astronomy before they met the Valar), also noted that the Round World changes were "obviously long-lived". Douglas Kane also considered the
Of the Ents and the Eagles reference as being "of particular interest", even though he agreed with Christopher Tolkien's decision to use a Flat World for the published Silmarillion. In 2024 Vyacheslav Stepanov, writing in
Palantir, the journal of the St. Petersburg Tolkien Society, pointed to such examples and added that the Round World was incorporated into the narratives as late as the c. 1972–73 text
Círdan. Considering the extended period over which these revisions were made, right up to the year of Tolkien's death, Stepanov argued that Tolkien had in fact solved the problem to his satisfaction and decided in favour of the Round World. == Choice for
The Silmarillion ==