[Isilisse]

I've been working on a fic that consists of traveling beyond the world of Middle earth... In the 3rd Age especially..Valinor technically exists right??? But if you look at the map of Middle Earth in the 3rd Age... doesnt Valinor look like North and South America flipped??? So does it mean that Frodo traveled to the "New Lands"?

[Hathor]

Well... Arda doesn't look like Europe/Asia. Not that my geography is very good.

Valinor does exist! In Tolkien's world. It's not really comparable to our Earth, and although it can act like one, it's not a history of our Earth either.

Does that help? I was confused by the question.

[BittenBuggy]

[Andreth]

Let me see if I can break it down to a not too confusing explanation. The land of Aman consists of the island of Eressea and the separate land of Valinor, which was surrounded by the Pelori Mountains. Valmar was the city of the Valar.

Valinor did technically exist - it was an actual physical continent that could be sailed to, although there was a ban on any Mortals coming to Aman. But that was just like a law that everyone respected; there were no physical impediments to them actually going. Then toward the end of the Second Age when Eru destroyed Numenor, the world was reshaped and a great chasm opened between Aman and the rest of the world, which resulted in the world becoming round and Aman being hidden from the physical world of Arda. Eru wanted to make sure that the Deathless Lands of Aman couldn't ever be approached by Mortals again.

It was said that the Straight Road was gone and the only way to reach Valinor was by 'magic', i.e. traveling there in a ship of Elven-make. In the Book of Lost Tales it says that Aman could also be reached by walking the Rainbow, which was called Ilweran or the Bridge of Heaven, but that no living Men could walk the swaying threads of the bridge and that few Eldar had the heart.

So Valinor did exist in the Third Age - it had just been removed from the physical world of Arda. It's still there, it's just hanging around in the ether somewhere.

As for Frodo's journey, it never says that he only went to Eressea. In one of Tolkien's letters he states that *Galadriel's request in her lament* was that Frodo be allowed a sojourn to Eressea, but in his other letters the professor says that Frodo and Bilbo were allowed to journey to Aman, or Elvenhome, which could have included Valinor itself. All depends on how you want to look at it.

I don't know if it's what you were looking for in particular, but I do remember a map of Valinor in the Atlas of Middle-earth and IIRC the shape of it is similar to South America. Tolkien gave some idea of how the coordinates of Middle-earth would correspond to today's maps. The Shire was in England and I believe Gondor was somewhere around Italy. I don't have the URL for it, but there's a page with an excellent grid map with coordinates called Lalaith's Middle-earth Science Pages or something along those lines.


Anna