(Silly) Time-travel in Middle-earth

[Lail]

I was thinking about the non-linear aspects of RP time-lines and then I thought to myself: if anyone in Middle-earth could time travel, who would it be? Surely a Maia of Vaire, Weaver of Time, or even Vaire herself, might have been able to travel through time or weave such a magic cloak or device to allow you to time-travel?

What are your thoughts? Perhaps you even have a theory that a character familiar to us could travel through time...and what did (or would) they do if so?

[Boromir88]

Ooh, silly lore topic. I'll try not to make it too serious, so this will just be a bunch of random thoughts somewhat associated to time travel.

I'll start with Eru who seems beyond time, and time seems to be even something the Valar are bound to. As Gandalf reports when he comes back:

'Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.'

'Naked I was sent back - for a brief time, until my task is done.' (The Two Towers: The White Rider)

Maybe that isn't quite time travel, it's sort of even beyond time travel, Gandalf wondering in places out of 'thought and time.' But he does use the words 'sent back.' and 'for a brief time'. Clearly that means sent back in time, right!?

Then there's Elves and they seem rather obsessed with trying to halt/delay the 'slow decay of time.' Time appears to move differently in Lothlorien than elsewhere in Middle-earth. With how obsessed they are with the past, it does appear they would be interested in time travel. I don't think it's too ridiculous to suggest if they ever figured it out, at least one of them would want to go back and alter events surrounding the whole 'oath of Feanor' mess.

My final thought is, I believe I'd even argue Merry time traveled. It may have been in a dream, but it was such a convincing and life-like dream he believed he was an ancient warrior who got stabbed in the chest by a spear:

'What in the name of wonder?' began Merry, feeling the golden circlet that had slipped over on the eye. Then he stopped, and a shadow came over his face, and he closed his eyes. 'Of course, I remember!' he said. 'The men of Carn Dum came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! the spear in my heart!' He clutched at his breast... (The Fellowship of the Ring: Fog on the Barrow-downs)

Definitely a case of time travel.

[Androthelm]

To jump in as well (and hope I'm not taking this too seriously), I think time-travel poses some really interesting thematic questions to Middle-Earth. After all, the passing of time -- and the destruction it brings -- is such a common sight in the world of Arda-Marred. And (pardon me since I can't find the quote, but) didn't the Professor himself remark that the true "theme" of the Lord of the Rings was Immortality, and the struggle between "Mortal" Men who have theoretically some place to go beyond this world and "Immortal" Elves, for whom time will not bring the end but who are far more bound, as it turns out, to the earth?

Plus, I think it's fair to say that Valinor is to some degree "out of time" if not literally, at least in narrative. It is, after all, the perfect bubble that the elves are trying to replicate in Rivendell and Lothlorien -- a land of feasting and festival, even in the days when darkness grows across the earth. In some way, then, sailing west is time traveling -- back to the days of the beauty, when Morgoth had not yet twisted the world.

In response to @Boromir88's mention of Merry's time travelling in the Barrow-Downs, I'd like to (tangent, maybe) ask if anyone has read the H.P. Lovecraft story Polaris? It's... Not always great, as it does carry on Lovecraft's bigotry (as his stories tend to) but also deals with a similar time travel / memory of an ancient war / dream-transport-death and I found it quite interesting.

[KingODuckingham]

Technically everyone in Middle-earth is a time traveler, they just happen to be moving in the same direction and at the same rate, which can give the impression of static. It's all relative though, you know?

Joking aside, the slowing of that traveling through time is played upon in two ways, through the Elven perspective and then the twisted corruption of the Ring and all the other lesser rings it influences. The previous posters have already noted this, and I think it really is a serious part of the story of LotR.

It's a big topic, so I'll just ask: why do you think it's "preservation" for the Elves to slow time but "corruption" for the Ring to do it?

[Androthelm]

Oh that's a splendid question Duck. If I can throw my two cents, I think... Honestly, the Elves aren't doing Middle-Earth too many favors in their preservation.

They are doomed, after all, to fade--and I think if even one of the Elven Ringbearers really tried to stop that, it would quickly go the way of the Númenórians. That, I think, is the real Gift of Man--death and time passing are natural parts of the world, and not necessarily bad things. Men live within that cycle (and perhaps beyond?) whereas elves are a bit... stuck. They may not notice it in the way Bilbo does, at least not immediately--but surely there's a sign in the fact that they all keep getting sad and departing for the west.
So Elves, in their preservation, may be corrupting the natural order to some degree as well.

[Lail]

Hey, make it as serious or as silly as you want! I'd love to see serious discussion come out of this.

I think you are onto something with Gandalf, @Boromir88! He basically said it himself that he time-traveled!

Your mention of Merry time-traveling, by the way, reminds me of a most joking theory I swear used to exist that Pippin was psychic. I can't remember the details, but there was a bunch of examples that he said things that would then later happen.

It is interesting, isn't it, that time seems to slow or characters lose track of time both in Lothlorien and in Tom Bombadil's house? Maybe Tom B's house is really a portal to another time/place...

@Androthelm - please feel free to discuss time as a theme more seriously if you want to! I think this is a really interesting point! Its not something I thought of before, but there is an element of time and immortality involved, isn't there? The whole Gift of Men and everything.

It's a big topic, so I'll just ask: why do you think it's "preservation" for the Elves to slow time but "corruption" for the Ring to do it?

This is a really excellent question. The only thing that comes to my mind is that the Ring was created with bad intentions of suborning others whereas Elves obviously were not. I'm interested in what others think in addition to @Androthelm's very interesting thoughts.

[Androthelm]

On another note, I did find some interesting potential time travel thanks to the elven magic in Lothlorien. If I can quote the longish passage...

Sam sat tapping the hilt of his sword as if he were counting on his fingers, and looking up at the sky. `It's very strange,' he murmured. `The Moon's the same in the Shire and in Wilderland, or it ought to be. But either it's out of its running, or I'm all wrong in my reckoning. You'll remember, Mr. Frodo, the Moon was waning as we lay on the flet up in that tree: a week from the full, I reckon. And we'd been a week on the way last night, when up pops a New Moon as thin as a nail-paring, as if we had never stayed no time in the Elvish country.
`Well, I can remember three nights there for certain, and I seem to remember several more, but I would take my oath it was never a whole month. Anyone would think that time did not count in there! '
`And perhaps that was the way of it,' said Frodo. `In that land, maybe, we were in a time that has elsewhere long gone by. It was not, I think, until Silverlode bore us back to Anduin that we returned to the time that flows through mortal lands to the Great Sea. And I don't remember any moon, either new or old, in Caras Galadhon: only stars by night and sun by day.'
Legolas stirred in his boat. `Nay, time does not tarry ever,' he said; `but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.'
`But the wearing is slow in Lórien,' said Frodo. `The power of the Lady is on it. Rich are the hours, though short they seem, in Caras Galadhon, where Galadriel wields the Elven-ring.'
'That should not have been said outside Lórien, not even to me,' said Aragorn. `Speak no more of it! But so it is, Sam: in that land you lost your count. There time flowed swiftly by us, as for the Elves. The old moon passed, and a new moon waxed and waned in the world outside, while we tarried there. And yestereve a new moon came again. Winter is nearly gone. Time flows on to a spring of little hope.'

So, time funkiness is certainly within the power of Galadriel, if perhaps not straight backwards travel

[Mojo]

So I know this is marked as Silly, but there are some interesting questions to be posed here.

Outside of the dreams the characters have recalling real events (Merry in the Barrow-Downs, Faramir's dream of Numenor, etc) there are some other instances of characters being "frozen in time" or at least, acknowledging the passing of time differently. Two instances that come to mind are when Thingol met Melian and when Beren met Luthien.

Elwë, lord of the Teleri, went often through the great woods to seek out Finwë his friend in the dwellings of the Noldor; and it chanced on a time that he came alone to the starlit wood of Nan Elmoth, and there suddenly he heard the song of nightingales. Then an enchantment fell on him, and he stood still; and afar off beyond the voices of the lómelindi he heard the voice of Melian, and it filled all his heart with wonder and desire. He forgot then utterly all his people and all the purposes of his mind, and following the birds under the shadow of the trees he passed deep into Nan Elmoth and was lost. But he came at last to a glade open to the stars, and there Melian stood; and out of the darkness he looked at her, and the light of Aman was in her face.

She spoke no word; but being filled with love Elwë came to her and took her hand, and straightway a spell was laid on him, so that they stood thus while long years were measured by the wheeling stars above them; and the trees of Nan Elmoth grew tall and dark before they spoke any word.

And similarly (most likely on purpose because Tolkien does everything with intent):

But she vanished from his sight; and he became dumb, as one that is bound under a spell, and he strayed long in the woods, wild and wary as a beast, seeking for her. In his heart he called her Tinúviel, that signifies Nightingale, daughter of twilight, in the Grey-elven tongue, for he knew no other name for her. And he saw her afar as leaves in the winds of autumn, and in winter as a star upon a hill, but a chain was upon his limbs.

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed.

Then the spell of silence fell from Beren, and he called to her, crying Tinúviel; and the woods echoed the name. Then she halted in wonder, and fled no more, and Beren came to her. But as she looked on him, doom fell upon her, and she loved him; yet she slipped from his arms and vanished from his sight even as the day was breaking. Then Beren lay upon the ground in a swoon, as one slain at once by bliss and grief; and he fell into a sleep as it were into an abyss of shadow, and waking he was cold as stone, and his heart barren and forsaken. And wandering in mind he groped as one that is stricken with sudden blindness, and seeks with hands to grasp the vanished light. Thus he began the payment of anguish for the fate that was laid on him; and in his fate Lúthien was caught, and being immortal she shared in his mortality, and being free received his chain; and her anguish was greater than any other of the Eldalië has known.

Beyond his hope she returned to him where he sat in darkness, and long ago in the Hidden Kingdom she laid her hand in his. Thereafter often she came to him, and they went in secret through the woods together from spring to summer; and no others of the Children of Ilúvatar have had joy so great, though the time was brief.

[Androthelm]

I think @Mojo that those "frozen in time" sequences are especially interesting because they reveal the degree to which Tolkien was inspired by Fairy-Stories. There is, for all the awe and majesty of Thingol and the sweet romance of Beren and Luthien, still a touch of Rip Van Winkle about this idea of being swept off to Faerie and lost for many years.

Which, as it happens, since Valinor is Faerie and Lothlorien is crafted in memory of the Gardens of Lorien in Valinor... Is sort of just what happens to the Fellowship, when they lose track of time in Caras Galadhon.

[Lail]

A question about Lothlorien springs to my mind based on @Androthelm's passage. Is time so different in Lorien because it is an Elven domain, because Galadriel wields Nenya, because it is inspired by the Gardens of Lorien, or do you think its a combination of those things?

Those passages are beautiful. Nice to read them again. Since Beren/Luthien mirrors Aragorn/Arwen, now I'm wondering if they had a similar "time-freeze" when meeting or not. I will have to check the passage later unless someone beats me to it.

To summarize so far, we have...(not all are entirely serious)

Our time travelers (or possible time-travelers):
Vaire
Everyone (according to Ducky)
Gandalf
Merry
Elves in general (?) - they have a different relationship with time at least
Melian and Elwe/Thingol
Beren and Luthien

Places where time seems to move at a different pace:
Tom Bombadil's house
Lothlorien
Valinor
Rivendell

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I was thinking about the non-linear aspects of RP time-lines and then I thought to myself: if anyone in Middle-earth could time travel, who would it be? Surely a Maia of Vaire, Weaver of Time, or even Vaire herself, might have been able to travel through time or weave such a magic cloak or device to allow you to time-travel?

What are your thoughts? Perhaps you even have a theory that a character familiar to us could travel through time...and what did (or would) they do if so?

The Lord of the Rings is a story of time travel! The story is about the Rings of Power, which the Elves made to hold back the tides of Time.

As soon as he set foot upon the far bank of Silverlode a strange feeling had come upon him, and it deepened as he walked on into the Naith: it seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more.

[Silky Gooseness]

I’m no physicist, but I believe time is related to space; so the world made round is probably further indication that Elves and Men don’t see time the same way. The Elves have the flat world, one thing that goes on for a long distance but has an end; the Men have a world you can completely traverse and return to the beginning. circular, like a ring

[Chrysophylax Dives]

To jump in as well (and hope I'm not taking this too seriously), I think time-travel poses some really interesting thematic questions to Middle-Earth. After all, the passing of time -- and the destruction it brings -- is such a common sight in the world of Arda-Marred. And (pardon me since I can't find the quote, but) didn't the Professor himself remark that the true "theme" of the Lord of the Rings was Immortality, and the struggle between "Mortal" Men who have theoretically some place to go beyond this world and "Immortal" Elves, for whom time will not bring the end but who are far more bound, as it turns out, to the earth?

Plus, I think it's fair to say that Valinor is to some degree "out of time" if not literally, at least in narrative. It is, after all, the perfect bubble that the elves are trying to replicate in Rivendell and Lothlorien -- a land of feasting and festival, even in the days when darkness grows across the earth. In some way, then, sailing west is time traveling -- back to the days of the beauty, when Morgoth had not yet twisted the world.

In response to @Boromir88's mention of Merry's time travelling in the Barrow-Downs, I'd like to (tangent, maybe) ask if anyone has read the H.P. Lovecraft story Polaris? It's... Not always great, as it does carry on Lovecraft's bigotry (as his stories tend to) but also deals with a similar time travel / memory of an ancient war / dream-transport-death and I found it quite interesting.

Yes. This. Androthelm, I do miss your posts. But you spot at once that a 'silly' Lore thought actually touches on the core ground of the stories.

I plan to read carefully all the replies above over the course of the day (breaks from my editing work). I think this may well be the best Lore thread on the nuplazza.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

A question about Lothlorien springs to my mind based on @Androthelm's passage. Is time so different in Lorien because it is an Elven domain, because Galadriel wields Nenya, because it is inspired by the Gardens of Lorien, or do you think its a combination of those things?

Those passages are beautiful. Nice to read them again. Since Beren/Luthien mirrors Aragorn/Arwen, now I'm wondering if they had a similar "time-freeze" when meeting or not. I will have to check the passage later unless someone beats me to it.

To summarize so far, we have...(not all are entirely serious)

Our time travelers (or possible time-travelers):
Vaire
Everyone (according to Ducky)
Gandalf
Merry
Elves in general (?) - they have a different relationship with time at least
Melian and Elwe/Thingol
Beren and Luthien

Places where time seems to move at a different pace:
Tom Bombadil's house
Lothlorien
Valinor
Rivendell

I started from the bottom and will work backwards in time. So around the time this conversation was going on I was around but failed to notice due to: intense editing of 'Peeling the Onion' and work on the halfir archive, a savage personal attack on me from a member of the community, defensive action, discovering the joys of plaza discord for the first time as a long line of admin-folk with sticks up their bottoms lined up to lecture me on the meaning of community. Bitter? Hell, yeah! Well, I had just come to terms with it when I started reading this thread again. Had the new community of the nuplaza not rose up in revolt against a member who was (I quote) 'not one of us', I might have shaved four years off of my research.*

Development of this summary leads precisely into my (novel) reading of LotR, as I have begun to set it out in my series 'Seeing Stones'. I am not addressing the matter of time travel so directly because Tolkien goes out of his way to disguise this underlying theme.

Essentially, the story situates us as Hobbits of the Shire and takes us up the enchanted staircase of Elostirion, the tallest of the Elf-towers of Emyn Beraid to the west of the Shire. Elostirion is conceived as a time-machine, such that climbing its stairs is a journey on ever more ancient vistas on the past. This is the hidden metaphor at the design of the story - in literal reality no Hobbit sets foot in Elostirion.

An obvious case of time travel to add to the list above is Meriadoc in Rohan. This is the (Victorian) modern English stepping into the world of the ancient English, reminscent of the world of Beowulf, only more ancient and so a little less hopeless, desperate, and desolate.

The thread from the Barrow-downs and the blade forged in the long ago by the Man of the West who was an enemy of the Witch-king of Angmar, and the great deed of Meriadoc of the Shire at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields might be worth considering.

But that is the thing. Once you have your head round what is going on the time themes spring up everywhere and run through everything. This is what LotR is. I'm not at all sure if that is the case for the Silmarillion stories of the First Age, though.

* Edit. I wish to underline two things. None of the present admins of the plaza lined up to lecture me in that discord box. The strike that I received in a subsequent incident in this saga did indeed open a bitter feud with me and past admins. But though I still bear the strike on my record, I consider this feud closed and ended. We have my late and lamented friend Tree to thank for that.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

It's a big topic, so I'll just ask: why do you think it's "preservation" for the Elves to slow time but "corruption" for the Ring to do it?

Oh that's a splendid question Duck. If I can throw my two cents, I think... Honestly, the Elves aren't doing Middle-Earth too many favors in their preservation.

They are doomed, after all, to fade--and I think if even one of the Elven Ringbearers really tried to stop that, it would quickly go the way of the Númenórians. That, I think, is the real Gift of Man--death and time passing are natural parts of the world, and not necessarily bad things. Men live within that cycle (and perhaps beyond?) whereas elves are a bit... stuck. They may not notice it in the way Bilbo does, at least not immediately--but surely there's a sign in the fact that they all keep getting sad and departing for the west.
So Elves, in their preservation, may be corrupting the natural order to some degree as well.

Yes. Again. And the Goose points in the right direction a few posts above with the world flat and round contrasted. The Three and the One meet and touch. They are the magic that defies the cosmic change, the bending of the world when Atlantis fell and the days of Myth ended and History began. These Rings of Power are mythological magic, descending out of Myth - they were all forged before the world changed. But they come into their own after Numenor falls and History begins in a newly Round World.

These Rings of Power keep, enhance, preserve, the Straight-Road in the days of the Round World. They are all magic as it were out of the days of the Straight-World and they all work to draw half-visible the Straight-Road in the days of the Round World.

This is the fundamental time-travel enacted in the story - we are in History but come to see vanished Myth with an ever keener eye.

The premise of the story is that we should not be able to see the Straight-Road at all; the Hobbits of the Shire live in a Round World in History, much like our own. But in those ancient days the Mythical Straight-Road was still present in the Round World because of the Rings of Power.

Once the One is destroyed the mythical center is fully hidden, as it should have been after Numenor fell into the sea. Necromantic Elvish magic from the days of Myth work to preserve Myth in History, which is lucky for Sam, who gets to meet Elves and see Elvish magic with his own eyes. But this Elvish magic opens a backdoor to the designs of Sauron the Necromancer. Only natural, when you reflect on it, because time travel into the past is all about talking with the dead, and so the real question is how Tolkien managed to find a way to engage in time travel that he considered free and safe from necromancy.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

My final thought is, I believe I'd even argue Merry time traveled. It may have been in a dream, but it was such a convincing and life-like dream he believed he was an ancient warrior who got stabbed in the chest by a spear:

'What in the name of wonder?' began Merry, feeling the golden circlet that had slipped over on the eye. Then he stopped, and a shadow came over his face, and he closed his eyes. 'Of course, I remember!' he said. 'The men of Carn Dum came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! the spear in my heart!' He clutched at his breast... (The Fellowship of the Ring: Fog on the Barrow-downs)

Definitely a case of time travel.

Yeah. I find this one of the most interesting because it feels primordial. So many other details in this story prove, on inspection, to be bound up in other details many pages away, and that happens here too: this story is woven into the ancient history of Angmar and so the blade with which Merry stabs the witch-king - a very neat instance of natural time travel, by artefact not person. Angmar was actually only imagined in 1948, as Tolkien was writing the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the identity of the chief Ringwraith was suddenly decided, quite out of the blue. Once the name Angmar appeared we see Tolkien in the drafts returning to the Barrow-downs and embellishing this incident, weaving it into the later narrative.

But I am pretty sure (should check!) that this dream of death as a memory of another's death is at it were primordial - it just appears in the story as Tolkien first wrote it. I guess it captures some intense picture that came to his mind at some point as he thought about battles long ago.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Outside of the dreams the characters have recalling real events (Merry in the Barrow-Downs, Faramir's dream of Numenor, etc) there are some other instances of characters being "frozen in time" or at least, acknowledging the passing of time differently. Two instances that come to mind are when Thingol met Melian and when Beren met Luthien.

These two are for me the most interesting cases to consider. I never got into these Silmarillion stories. I feel their power when I read these quotes, and I also recognize that they touch intimately on the theme of time travel. But they appear to do so obliquely and what sense I can make of this very delicate issue is that what we encounter in these quotes is a notion of enchantment that contains several elements, of which time travel is here latent but subsequently singled out and worked out in LotR.

I do wonder if any of the posters above will ever post again on this thread. I do very much hope so. @Androthelm, much of where you go with your threads above recalls in my mind explorations by Verlyn Flieger in her A Question of Time (1997). A lot of her book is looking at the unfinished 1936 novel of time-travel, 'The Lost Road' but then she goes into LotR. What she draws out - and it is a thread that you seem to have picked up on your own, but requires more careful untangling than even Flieger achieved, is the subtle and varying ways that Tolkien blends his themes of enchantment, dream, and time travel. What she shows, and what your posts seem on the point of noting, is that one cannot pick one of these themes in the LotR without picking up with it also the other two.

So widening perspective by standing back and surveying also these two Silmarillion quotes, my initial stab in the dark is that as a whole we see Tolkien's life-long fascination with and exploration of enchantment, and in LotR we see one dimension of an idea of enchantment - time travel - placed at the heart of the design of the story.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I’m no physicist, but I believe time is related to space; so the world made round is probably further indication that Elves and Men don’t see time the same way. The Elves have the flat world, one thing that goes on for a long distance but has an end; the Men have a world you can completely traverse and return to the beginning. circular, like a ring

Yes. And of course we have mortals in the First Age and Elves in the Third Age, so that within a flat world we have those who by nature belong to a road world, and then after Númenor we have Elves in a round world.

Ephtariat on some thread went on about The Silmarillion being written from an Elf-centered perspective, which is true. But The Lord of the Rings gives the full picture - written from a Hobbit (mortal) perspective, but containing within it a half-visible Elvish perspective.

The essence of the time-travel as it is conceived in the design of The Lord of the Rings is a very careful imagination of the step in Time from one cosmos to another (flat to round) and then a placing of that temporal relationship within the narrative of the new Hobbit story, but with the temporal relationship now pictured in spatial terms. (E.g. Scene with Frodo and Sam and Galadriel, by her Mirror.)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Those passages are beautiful. Nice to read them again. Since Beren/Luthien mirrors Aragorn/Arwen, now I'm wondering if they had a similar "time-freeze" when meeting or not. I will have to check the passage later unless someone beats me to it.

How about this?

At the hill’s foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they once had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vaninialda, namdrie! he said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

‘Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,’ he said, ‘and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!’ And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I’m no physicist, but I believe time is related to space; so the world made round is probably further indication that Elves and Men don’t see time the same way. The Elves have the flat world, one thing that goes on for a long distance but has an end; the Men have a world you can completely traverse and return to the beginning. circular, like a ring

This suggestion of different psychologies of Elves and mortals with respect to time and the shape of the world is really interesting. But I think it requires some primary text to work with. What I find of particular interest is 'the cutting off of Men from their just portion of the straight path'. I call in also @Rivvy Elf.

But not all the hearts of the Númenóreans were crooked; and the lore of the old days descending from the Fathers of Men, and the Elf-friends, and those instructed by Fionwë, was preserved among some. And they knew that the fate of Men was not bounded by the round path of the world, nor destined for the straight path. For the round is crooked and has no end but no escape; and the straight is true, but has an end within the world, and that is the fate of the Elves. But the fate of Men, they said, is neither round nor ended, and is not within the world. And they remembered from whence the ruin came, and the cutting off of Men from their just portion of the straight path; and they avoided the shadow of Morgoth according to their power, and hated Thû.

'Fall of Númenor' (1936), Lost Road, p. 19

[Rivvy Elf]

@Chrysophylax Dives if we connect it to the Athrabeth and the Tale of Adanel, this means that humans were supposed to live longer in middle-earth. But the fall of man occurred, and the ending of their time in middle-earth became shortened.

The straight path means their life in middle earth. The round path was the belief of Andreth that humans lost their original gift and would face eternal inescapable darkness at the end of their lives.