Just thought I would add a few more opinions, possibly to inspire more here.
Quote:
'The Notion Club Papers hinted at a concept that could have saved Tolkien his worries over the cosmology: that of two distinct pasts, the historical and the mythical, 'secondary planes and degrees,' merging at the fall of Atlantis/Númenor. Before that, the universe of the Ambarkanta was real. After, our astronomical universe, with its round earth, and solar system (...) is the reality. How the one can be antecedent to the other is simply left as an unfathomable mystery. Were a Wellsian time machine to go into the past, it would not go back to Númenor or Beleriand but to the prehistoric and geological past we are already familiar with. But it might still be possible to visit the mythical past via the more spiritual means suggested by Ramer in The Notion Club Papers.'
Charles E. Noad On the Construction of the Silmarillion Tolkien's Legendarium
|
Compare that to something from John D. Rateliff's 'And All The Days Of Her Life Are Forgotten The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory' (published in The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004 Scholarship in honor of Richard E. Blackwelder), where Rateliff suggests that Tolkien's solution, posited in The Notion Club Papers, was:
'... that a change could come, so drastic that it changed not only the present and of course the future from that point on but even the past as well, so that the present now derived from a different past and the original past had no longer ever happened, being transformed from history -- the things that actually happened -- into myth; the things we remember that exist now only in legend and memory.'
In note 13 Rateliff quotes something from Tolkien in a 1965 BBC interview, that after the Downfall Númenor
'lived then only in memory. It lived in time but not present time... Númenor was drowned, and the Earthly Paradise removed, and so then you could get to Central America!...[The] world became round' and goes on to suggest that the Hobbits
'seem to experience his (Bombadil's) words more as shared memories than as told tales, experiences that predate a human or human-like occupation of the land.'