Recently, listening to THE SILMARILLION, I noticed a reference in the section on Númenor that bothered me. As all Tolkein geeks know, Arda was flat before the downfall of that island, the Earth only becoming round at the behest of Eru to keep those uppity Men out of the Valar’s soup. In that case, it seems to me that during the First & Second Ages, there should not have been much advantage in ascending to a great height when it came to extending the range of one’s vision over the sea. Unless I am thinking of this wrong, distant objects in such an environment would grow indistinct and smaller at the same rate no matter what one’s altitude, but that does not seem to have been the case for the kings of Westernesse trying to gaze upon Aman.
Am I thinking of this incorrectly, or was this simply a failure (minor, I am sure we can all agree) of imagination on the Greater Professor’s part?
Thinking about it, I believe you’re right. In fact being at a height would be a disadvantage in a truly flat world, because you’d be looking at them down the hypotenuse of the triangle, which is the longest side.
I think height would still matter, even on the ocean, since waves or other obstructions (even grass or rocks on a flat plain) will add up to restrict one’s view the lower one is.
When Tolkien talks about being able to see Tol Eressëa on a clear day, he’s talking about seeing it from the summit of Meneltarma – the sacred mountain. I don’t think the visibility is a characteristic of the curvature of Middle-Earth; it’s a characteristic of the sacred mountain the Númenorean watchers were standing on. Tolkien didn’t pay much attention to the physics of his world, but he paid a lot of attention to the metaphysics.
If the air of Arda acts like that of real Earth, then there is a density/humidity gradient to the atmosphere, with colder, drier, clearer air as you rise in elevation. So from a very high vantage point, your sightline to a distant object may be longer than from ground level, but most of that sightline will be passing through clearer air.
There’s also a statistics or probability question here. Your eyes are a certain height above the ground, and any object in the world that is at that height or higher will block your view of everything in the world (at that visual angle or less) behind it. So, from an eye at two meters above the ground, an oak tree ten meters away will block your view of a huge mountain far away, or some big hills nearer by, or an identical tree just behind the first one. If you can make yourself taller than almost any possible blocking object, then you will have the longest possible unimpeded view. Most ‘surface objects’ in the world of Arda are probably less than 100 meters tall, so getting up even that high would markedly improve your view of distant things. The terrain itself varies by more than 100 meters over long distances, of course. Going up to a mountain top would lift you above a very large percentage of the blocking terrain (mountains are tall, but there are a lot fewer mountains than there are big trees or tall hills) and would help even more.
Remember, those are Elfish eyes we’re talking about. They could, in theory, take a gander at any particular distance. What might become fuzzy and indistinct to a man could still be made out with clarity by an elf.
It might depend on what you’re looking at, and how far away what you’re looking at is. Some things you might prefer to be able to look at from above, and at least if they were not too far away then you might be able to get that by climbing something.
But I’m in the camp of “Tolkien was probably ignoring that, in the same way that he ignored the problem of characters’ languages being mutually intelligible or not”. (There may or may not have been an official post-hoc rationalization for the language thing; the plain fact is he ignored it.)
I’ve often wondered about the horizon on a flat earth. Wouldn’t it be higher? On a round earth, the horizon is ever so slightly below eye level, and it would be exactly eye level on a flat earth. And in an open plain, or the ocean, everything would be visible, if small and distant. It seems to me that someone used to a round earth would be disoriented in a situation like that, feeling as if they were living inside a bowl or something.
Would it though? I feel like atmospheric distortion from humidity and heat would start making things hairy at some point, regardless of your terrain - unless it’s a short enough distance before the edge I suppose.
Yeah, maybe “visible” wasn’t the right word. What I mean is, it’s all there, everything is in your line of sight, scrunched up near the horizon, whether you can distinguish it or not. Like the boundary of this interesting shape. Unlike a globe, where your line of sight cleanly ends at a certain point, beyond which the earth itself hides everything else.
I feel like, if we were all suddenly teleported to an otherwise identical flat world, we would notice immediately (people in open spaces who could see the horizon, at least) and we wouldn’t have to wait for NASA to take pictures or for the news to report on the disappearance of time zones or for sailors to observe receding ships fail to go “hull down”. It would be more geometrically obvious, rather than a scientific discovery.
Earth’s ocean surface has its own topography, caused not only by waves, tides, and currents, but also by the presence of features on the seafloor. Thus, the ocean surface is higher over submerged mountain ranges and lower over trenches. So if you’re looking with Elf eyes across a couple thousand leagues of open ocean on Arda, you’ll notice that the sea isn’t really ‘flat’ (presuming that the seafloor isn’t flat). If Arda has magic tides, that would add a secondary effect too, piling water up in shallow places even more. So going higher will help you see over these features.
Also, even if you can make out land, you would’t be able to distinguish any interesting features of it, looking edge-on. And if there’s a limit to the acuity of your eyes (which there is, even for Elves), then sufficiently-distant land might not have any features at all large enough to distinguish.
You must have grown up in a pretty flat and empty place. I’m used to the horizon being full of mountains. Well, buildings too, but beyond the buildings there was always a mountain or three.
The first time I found myself driving through the flat landscape of Palencia I almost got agoraphobic. There were no mountains in sight! Anywhere! Not even a hill! The horizon was broken!
