Quote:
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Originally Posted by The Might
'(...) One thing I don't understand though - why were these machines built after the Downfall? That doesn't make that much sense...'
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Because they desired to sail on the imagined seas
after the world was made round, as, upon the Straight Road (as I'm sure you and others know, but just for the thread in general):
'... only the gods could walk, and only the ships of the Elves could journey; for being straight that road passed through the air of breath and flight and rose above it, and traversed Ilmen in which no mortal flesh can endure; whereas the surface of the earth was bent, and bent were the seas that lay upon it, and bent also were the heavy airs that were above them.' Fall of Númenor III
I tend to think the flying ships were abandoned. They don't appear in any of the later texts (if I recall correctly), including the Mannish tradition
The Drowning of Anadûnê, and the mixed tradition
Akallabêth.
Granted
The Fall of Númenor could be seen as a variant tradition, but
in my opinion if it was supposed to be thought of as Elvish tradition then it awaited a general revision in any case, because it was explicitly a flat world version -- that is, a once flat world
made round -- whereas the Elves taught that the world was
always round according to
The Drowning of Anadûnê (Mannish) tradition.
Even if I'm right about that much, that doesn't necessarily mean JRRT would have abandoned the flying ships, and this becomes another case of an existing idea from an 'early-ish' text (Fall of Númenor) that is not specifically denied -- or mentioned -- in later versions of essentially the same tale (although again, the later tales are arguably meant to represent variant traditions in any event).
Does the idea still necessarily exist in an internal sense? hard to know. This text being relatively private and 'unknown' (from Tolkien's perspective) would not
necessarily call for some sort of written direction from the author himself, even though at times JRRT would writes notes to himself, or slash through something later rejected, for instance.