Tea at Trianon: Navigating Middle-earth Before the Bending of the Seas

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Navigating Middle-earth Before the Bending of the Seas

From TOR.com:

“Above all arts,” says the Akallabêth, the Men of Númenor “nourished ship-building and sea-craft, and they became mariners whose like shall never be again since the world was diminished; and voyaging upon the wide seas was the chief feat and adventure of their hardy men in the gallant days of their youth.” With the exception of the Undying Lands, travel to which was banned, the Dúnedain traversed the Sundering Sea and beyond: “from the darkness of the North to the heats of the South, and beyond the South to the Nether Darkness; and they came even into the inner seas, and sailed about Middle-earth and glimpsed from their high prows the Gates of Morning in the East.” In other words: they got around.

To travel the world like that doesn’t just require hardy seafarers and ships, it requires skilled navigation. And that’s where the problem is. Before the Changing of the World that destroyed Númenor bent the seas and made the world round, the world—Arda—was flat. And if you know enough about maps, navigation, or mucking about with boats, you know that will have serious implications for navigation.

Think about how a sailing crew would navigate on our world. During the later years of the Age of Sail, a navigator might make use of a compass, a sextant and a marine chronometer to figure out their precise location on a map—the compass to determine bearing; the sextant to determine the latitude from the height of the Sun at noon or Polaris at night; the chronometer to determine longitude. (Longitude can be determined by measuring the difference in time between noon in two locations: if local noon is an hour earlier in one position than it is in another, it’s 15 degrees west of that other position.) Earlier in maritime history an astrolabe or a Jacob’s staff would have been used instead of a sextant.

All of these tools are predicated on a spherical (okay, oblate spheroid) world. On a flat earth they wouldn’t work the same way, or even at all. On a flat earth, noon takes place at the same time around the world—Arda has no time zones—so longitude can’t be determined that way. And while the angle of the Sun or the celestial north pole might change the further north or south you go, it would not (as we will see) be a reliable way of determining latitude.

So how could the Númenóreans have navigated? That’s a surprisingly tricky question—one I didn’t think would have a good answer when I started working on this article. But it turns out that there are methods they could have used to cross the wide seas of Arda without getting completely and hopelessly lost. In this thought experiment, I explore how they might have done it. (Read more.)