Quote:
Originally Posted by Pitchwife
If I remember my astronomy correctly, seasons are caused by the tilt of the Earth's axis, which makes the two hemispheres receive more or less sunlight in longer or shorter periods at different points of our orbit around the Sun. I guess you can explain seasons in a geocentric Flat World model by having the Sun move around the Earth at varying distances - but no Sun, no seasons.
How did plants in Middle-Earth grow without sunlight? Intriguing question... To be sure, Nogrod did well to remind me early in this thread that Tolkien was creating a mythology (not writing science fiction), and any attempt to make it agree with modern science is bound to run into problems sooner or later (as the Professor found out himself). Hence, Legate, your idea of things being 'just the way they look' (no cells, no microbes, no photosynthesis) does have a certain charm. On the other hand, Arda is supposed to be our world, and I can't help thinking that the plants and animals must have been more or less of the same kind as ours.
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You see, the problem is - Arda is supposed to be our world, yet at the same moment, it is not really our world. Just because there are some things that work differently - some quite obvious ones. One really cannot take it for granted that Arda is our world, because there are conflicts. But I agree that it is also not good, especially when Tolkien emphasises that so strongly, that Arda is
not our world. I think what may help us is some middle road: just taking it that Arda is this world in some other Age, but an Age when - note! - many things were different. Of course: continents had different shapes etc., but also,
when trees could grow without light. I leave that to the biologists among us, simply put, if one of them wanted to deal with that, he could say that the trees eventually adapted to the sunlight and the chorophyle and whatever stuff inside them accepted the function of permitting photosynthesis, whereas before that, it did not have as much meaning, and the trees grew just based on something else, now one may start speculating about catching some rare vapors from the air with the leaves etc., just it proved later far more energetically advantageous to gain the benefit from the Sun. Or whatever you like.