Sorry, but you are entirely missing the point I and Elthir have been making – IMO rather clearly – the whole time. Have you even read my article?
I did, but the article focuses mostly in probing that
Tolkien never abandoned the idea or a round world, which I never disagreed with. You can even say that it was Tolkien's last thought on the matter.
What I disagree about is that it won't affect the narrative in
the Silmarillion, again, CT said it would and I agree with him.
The idea of considering everything that happened at the beginning, including the Ainunlindale, the
wars against
Morgoth, the march of the
elves, even the event in
Valinor that led to the exile of the
Noldor were myths, made by the
Numenoreans, with some
elvish lore but many
mannish addictions and inventions IMO means fundamentally altering the Silmarillion.
Why? As I said early, that puts on a position of an historian, or a researcher studying old myths and their origins, not of a reader reading a wonderful fantasy story.
If we think of them as mere myths IMO, and I don't expect you agree, the stories lose substance. Everything written in the Silmarillion might not be true, or at least, might be different than what it's told (what the myths say).
There is a difference between describing something as it is, and describing it as an observer sees it, and passes it down to future generations.
Primitive humans might justly thought that Earth was flat, that's what they could see, that was the palpable reality, but not true.
If some people still live somewhere billions of years in the future, they might think the entire universe is just a bunch of galaxies (what they call the local group) because everything else would be too far to see, yet it would not be reality.
The only part that I find convincing is this:
t is notable that in this interview both the idea of
Aman existing in memory after the Catastrophe and the fact that the world of his legendarium “always had been a vast globe” were confirmed by Tolkien publicly and not in his private writings. As was pointed out to me after the original version of this article was published, the mere mention of the world being “a vast globe” from the beginning does not necessarily contradict
the old cosmology, in which the Flat Earth was encircled by Vaiya, the Enfolding Ocean, both from below and from above, which resulted in the spherical shape of the whole world. However, given the rest of the quoted phrase, it seems obvious that the word “world” is used here to refer to the Earth as such with its navigable surface.
the idea that
Arda was round, but set in a way that was flat to those who lived there. Maybe not exactly flat but with limits that they couldn't pass through.
That still leaves the problem of the sun and moon and the relation with the lamps and the
trees. Again, you can say the lamps and the trees were mere myths, fair enough but that IMO and from my perspective would fundamentally alter the spirit of the story. I don't think I would have found it that enjoyable that way but that's of course a personal preference and wouldn't mean anything in terms of what Tolkien wanted to do.
Yet, even accepting all of that, we do know that Tolkien was revising the cosmology, sure, but do we know if he had thought it in the context of the whole story? You can say the Silmarillion wasn't published at that time and could easily be adapted, but would have Tolkien wanted to do that once he analyzed the whole thing? I don't know the answer to that.
