Arda
the world itself, changing shape across five ages
The Story
Arda is the world Eru Ilúvatar gave the Valar to shape, sung into being out of the Music of the Ainur. Its history is its body. The Lamps fell. The Trees withered. Beleriand drowned. Númenor sank. Aman was removed beyond the Circles of the World. The flat world was bent round so that no road would lead back.
To walk Arda is to walk a story that reshapes itself as it goes, the only world in great fiction whose physical body is a chronicle of what it has lost. What you draw on a map of Arda depends entirely on the age. Watch the body of the world change, and you watch the long song of its making and its marring.
The Land
In the early ages, Arda is a great flat disk ringed by the Encircling Sea. After the Akallabêth, the world is bent round into a sphere, but Middle-earth's own peoples drew their world flat, in the manner of antique maps. That is how it appears here.
- Years of the Lamps, one undivided disk, two pillars at the poles, the green isle of Almaren at the centre.
- Years of the Trees, Aman a vertical wall on the west, Middle-earth in the central body, the Two Trees the only light.
- First Age, Sun and Moon risen; Beleriand intact in the upper west of Middle-earth.
- Second Age, Beleriand drowned; Númenor risen as a star at the centre of the sea, until it too sinks.
- Third Age, the round world drawn flat. Aman a faint outline; the Sundering Sea between.