Cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium
When this is marred by the evil Vala Melkor, the world is reshaped, losing its perfect symmetry, and the Valar move to Valinor, but the Elves can still sail there from Middle-earth.
Eru is introduced in The Silmarillion as the supreme being of the universe, creator of all existence, including the world, Arda, and its central continent, Middle-earth.
[T 1] Eru first created a group of godlike or angelic beings, the Ainur, consisting of the powerful Valar and their assistants, the Maiar.
Tolkien stated that the "Flame Imperishable" or "Secret Fire" represents the Holy Spirit in Christian theology,[1] the creative activity of Eru, inseparable both from him and from his creation.
[T 4] Arda ends in the apocalyptic battle of Dagor Dagorath, which Tolkien stated owed something to the Norse myth of Ragnarök.
[T 6] In the Second Age, Eru buried King Ar-Pharazôn of Númenor and his army when they invaded Aman, trying to reach the Undying Lands, which they wrongly supposed would give them immortality.
[T 13][T 14] Men live only in the world (Arda), are able to die from it, have souls, and may ultimately go to a kind of Heaven, though this is left vague in the legendarium.
In Shippey's view, the Silmarillion resolves the puzzle, letting Elves go not to Heaven but to the halfway house of the Halls of Mandos on Valinor.
Evil is defined by its original actor, Melkor, a Luciferian figure who falls from grace in active rebellion against Eru, out of a desire to create and control things of his own.
[13] Tolkien's personal war experience was Manichean: evil seemed at least as powerful as good, and could easily have been victorious, a strand which Shippey notes can also be seen in Middle-earth.
[14] Brian Rosebury, a humanities scholar, interprets Elrond's statement as implying an Augustinian universe, created good.
To support the lamps, Aulë forged two enormous pillars of rock: Helcar in the north of the continent Middle-earth, and Ringil in the south.
[T 16] The Valar left Middle-earth, and went to the newly formed continent of Aman in the west, where they created their home called Valinor.
[3] The only remaining way to reach Aman was the so called Old Straight Road, a hidden route leaving Middle-earth's curvature through sky and space which was exclusively known and open to the Elves, who were able to navigate it with their ships.
Tolkien's unfinished The Lost Road suggests a sketch of the idea of historical continuity connecting the Elvish mythology of the First Age with the classical Atlantis myth, the Germanic migrations, Anglo-Saxon England and the modern period, presenting the Atlantis legend in Plato and other deluge myths as a "confused" account of the story of Númenor.
[T 22][3] The Akallabêth says that the Númenóreans who survived the catastrophe sailed as far west as they could in search of their ancient home, but their travels only brought them around the world back to their starting points.
Christopher Tolkien included extracts from this in an appendix to The Book of Lost Tales, with mentions of specific stars, planets, and constellations.
The names were Silindo for Jupiter, Carnil for Mars, Elemmire for Mercury, Luinil for Uranus, Lumbar for Saturn, and Nenar for Neptune.
Tolkien indicates in "Three is Company" in The Fellowship of the Ring that Borgil is a red star which appears between Remmirath (the Pleiades) and before Menelvagor (Orion).
[T 26] Menelvagor (also Daimord, Menelmacar, Mordo, Swordsman of the Sky, Taimavar, Taimondo, Telimbektar, Telimektar, Telumehtar) is Orion the hunter[20] and was meant to represent Túrin Turambar.
[20] Valacirca, "the Sickle of the Valar",[T 31] is Ursa Major (the Plough or Big Dipper)[20] which Varda set in the Northern sky as a warning to Melkor.
[20] In his 2020 book Tolkien's Cosmology, the scholar of English literature Sam McBride suggests a new category, "monotheistic polytheism", for the theological basis of Tolkien's cosmology, insofar as it combines a polytheistic pantheon with the Valar, Maiar, and beings such as Tom Bombadil, alongside an evidently monotheistic cosmos created by one god, Eru Ilúvatar.
[25] McBride shows how Eru's actions can be seen in the creation of the world (Eä) and the Valar through which he acts, and more ambiguously in the Third Age where the divine will is at most hinted at.
[26] The theologian Catherine Madsen writes that Tolkien found it impossible to make his many drafts and revisions of The Silmarillion consistent with The Lord of the Rings, leaving it unpublished at his death.
[27] Scholars have noted that Tolkien seems in later life to have hesitated and drawn back from the flat earth cosmology of Arda in favour of a round world version, but that it was so deeply embedded in the entire Legendarium that recasting it in what Deirdre Dawson, writing in Tolkien Studies, calls "a more rational, scientifically plausible, global shape", proved unworkable.
Readers may, she writes, consider interpreting the Ainulindalë metaphorically, so that Melkor's attempts to destroy Arda, "raising the valleys, throwing down the mountains, spilling the seas—could be read as a symbolic representation of geological forces", but there is no suggestion of this in the text.
