Arda Kompendium

Ambarkanta

the Shape of the World; the cosmology of the early legendarium

textambarkantacosmologyworld shape

Nature

The Ambarkanta — “the Shape of the World” — is Tolkien’s picture-essay of the world-cosmos as conceived in the earlier mythology: “the form and dimension of the world” — the treatise (with his diagrams) setting out Arda in the flat-world model — the great lands (Middle-earth, Aman, the dark east) amid the seas, the “Encircling Sea” at the rim, the “Walls of the World” and the “Void” without, and the courses of the Sun and Moon about the flat earth.

Contents

The great seas and lands: Middle-earth, Aman (the “extreme west”), the “Uttermost East” without name, the “Dark Land” (a southern continent); The geography of Beleriand’s relation to the West; the mountains of the world’s edges; The cosmology of the light (where the Sun goes in the dark, the Moon’s wandering) in the flat-earth reckoning — the earlier view that the later Akallabêth replaced with the rounded world.

Composition

Composed in the 1930s (contemporary with the

Quenta and the Lhammas), the Ambarkanta (text + his diagrams) was published in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HoME 4), where Christopher Tolkien explains the maps and the “rounding” problem. It is the key to the mythological astronomy and to the later reshaping of the cosmology.

Verknüpfte Seiten

EäArdaThe Undying LandsThe Walls of the WorldThe Shaping of Middle-earthMiddle-earthConcordance — A to Z
Werke: die Quellen sind seitenübergreifend die Bücher von J.R.R. und Christopher Tolkien (Silmarillion, Hobbit, Herr der Ringe, Unfinished Tales, History of Middle-earth, Nature of Middle-earth u. a.) — eigene Zusammenfassung. Siehe die Concordance und den README der Quelle für die Einzelbelege.
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