Primeiro, Tolkien estava tentando criar um anglo-saxão ausente (ou, como alguns argumentaram , Celta), mythos. Para obter detalhes, consulte Q1 e Q2
Se você recordar sua mitologia nórdica, que influenciou strongmente Tolkien (Midgard == Terra Média), a geografia do mundo dos mitos nórdicos tem muito pouca semelhança com a Terra (o mesmo se aplica a muitos sistemas de mitos antigos):
Em segundo lugar, Arda realmente completamente não faz sentido do ponto de vista de um geólogo (pelo menos, um lidando com biologia, ecologia e paleontologia).
Isso vem de um geólogo e paleontólogo (pesquisador sênior do Instituto Paleontológico da Academia de Ciências da Federação Russa), Kirill Yeskov, que estava tão insatisfeito com as questões planetárias de Arda, que escreveu um livro inteiro - " O Último Portador do Anel "- que foi baseado inteiramente em duas premissas: (1)" A maneira como Arda deveria ter sido geologicamente para tornar o SDAT plausível cientificamente "e (2)" A história é escrita pelos vencedores, não pelos interessados na verdade ".
É claro que, assim como o LOTR surgiu de um design de linguagem de um lingüista Tolkien, o Arda que surgiu do paleontólogo Yeskov se transformou em um maravilhoso lugar de fantasia e um ótimo livro para ler.
Mas agora, listar as reflexões geográficas reais de Yeskov, citadas de um artigo explicando as origens de livro.
Ênfase minha, e se você preferir não ler todo o ensaio (traduzido do russo, então o estilo é um pouco pesado), o último parágrafo é o mais crítico.
Tolkien was a practicing scientist, too, but a linguist rather than a natural scientist like Yefremov1, so the foundation of professional knowledge he had used to erect Middle Earth was different. It is fairly obvious to me that the Game the Oxford professor decided to play with nature began, in essence, with the creation of imaginary languages, with their own alphabets and grammar. Then he created the epic tales to match those languages, then the peoples who wrote those tales, and only then the steppes, mountains, and forests for those people to pasture their herds, build citadels, and battle the “Dark from the East.” This, precisely, was the sequence: “In the beginning was the Word” – Ainur’s music, pure and simple. Truly an excellent model of the Act of Creation!
However, Tolkien the philologist had obviously had a very weak interest in this last, non-living component of Middle Earth – its physical geography – and created it only because he had to, with predictable results. It is a well-known fact that the Professor had painstakingly verified, to the day, the lunar phases during his heroes’ long quest. I believe that, but the problem is that he had overlooked some much more significant elements of the local natural history background.
The Middle Earth has several built-in physical defects, and there’s no getting away from that. In his well-known essay Must Fantasy Be Stupid? Pereslegin provides a detailed classification of errors commonly committed by fantasy authors. He uses Tolkien’s work as an example of one of them, an “irreversible professional error”: “It occurs in a geologically unstable world. Tolkien, being a professor of English Literature, knew nothing of plate tectonics, while the topography of Beleriand and Eriador are highly important to the story; therefore, it seems impossible to fix the author’s mistake.”
(To explain: if a planet has a single continent – Middle Earth – it means that the convection currents in the planet’s mantle form a single cell, meaning that the entire “light” part of the continental crust has gathered over the point where the mantle material sinks toward the core, like foam gathers over the bathtub drain. (This had happened on Earth at least twice, in mid-Proterozoic and late Paleozoic, which is when two super-continents of Megagea and Pangea formed.) When subcontinents collide, they bunch up into folds (e.g., the Himalayas that arose at the collision of the Indian subcontinent with the Eurasian plate). This means that there ought to be a huge mountain plateau like Tibet smack in the center of Middle Earth; where is it?
Pay attention, now – strictly speaking, such errors are trifles. In Pereslegin’s litany of sins an “irreversible professional error” is classified under tolerable errors, being one of the minor ones. It’s obvious that one person can’t be equally proficient in linguistics and geology (I suspect that Yefremov had committed no fewer errors creating Tormansian languages than Tolkien had in Middle Earth tectonics). So we can pardon the Professor – the infraction he had committed was not particularly dangerous to society; The Lord of the Rings can go free. This will acknowledge it to be a regular fantasy text – I mean, a real good one, easily in the top five…
Do you like this option? Me neither. Because The Lord of the Rings is not a good, or even the best, fantasy text. It is sui generis, the only one of its kind; therefore, we will not settle for anything less than a full exoneration.
We will assume that Middle Earth is as real as our world, so if some of the details do not fit our concepts, it’s our problem. On the other hand, we will adhere scrupulously to the laws of nature. As Tolkien himself wrote, it’s easy to imagine a green sun, but “To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.” Well, the sun has its usual color in Middle Earth (and probably belongs to G-2 spectral class), its surface gravity and geochemistry do not seem different from ours, and even the lunar month is 28 days. Therefore we have to approach the task wielding Occam’s Razor (as is customary to the European intellectual tradition): we will appeal to magic and suchlike only when out of all other options.
It turns out that all the seeming contradictions of Middle Earth’s natural history can be resolved with a single assumption: that Tolkien is describing only the northwestern part of the local landmass, rather than the whole thing. Actually, it’s not even an assumption: Tolkien’s map is obviously intentionally cut off in the south and the east; why should we assume that his world ends there? There’s enough room there for the hypothetical central plateau or even other continents and archipelagos.
[1] Ivan Yefremov foi um dos clássicos da ficção científica soviética, que por acaso era um paleontologista por profissão
