Round World version of the Silmarillion

The Round World version is one of the variants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium, published in the final volumes of The History of Middle-earth. In this version, the setting of his Legendarium is more realistic and less mythological: the Earth was always round, and Arda was the name for the whole solar system instead of just the Earth.

In the Round World version the Sun and the Moon were not the fruit of the Two Trees, but actually preceded their creation, and the Two Lamps which preceded them all in the Flat World cosmology had never truly existed and were instead a subject of Númenórean legend. The significance of the Trees and the Silmarils was that they preserved the light of the Sun before it was tainted by Melkor when he ravished Arien. The Moon in this tale was instead a remnant of the First War from a time when Melkor sought to destroy all the earth but could not succeed in his attempts, and the Moon is what broke away from Arda in the destruction. However, another tale from this cosmology tells that the Valar wrought the Moon out of the earth to counteract the night when Melkor was most active.

Similarly, the stars were not created with the Awakening of the Elves, but the occluding clouds were removed to reveal them, and it wasn't Varda who kindled them, since her power was limited to Arda while the stars were set in Eä.

This version emerged in writings from 1958-1960, but it was never developed beyond the stage of drafting and Tolkien didn't continue the revisions. Thus the Flat World version was chosen by Christopher Tolkien for the published The Silmarillion. Tolkien previously experimented writing a round world version of the Ainulindalë and The Fall of Númenor, but in both cases he returned to the flat-earth model. Beside this, references to the seas being first "bent" after the Fall of Númenor, to the "Sunless Years", and to the trolls of the Twilight, survived in The Lord of the Rings. These may, however, be seen as allusions made by the characters and writers of the Red Book to the mythology those at the time of its writing would have been familiar with rather than dogmatic truths of the history of Arda.

The Round World version can be deemed by Tolkienists as the definite 'actual' story behind the text; the text of the Quenta Silmarillion then, can be seen as just the legends based on the 'reality', written by the Númenóreans and the ancient people of Middle-earth. In his last years, Tolkien didn't view his Legendarium as having an Elvish origin, but a Mannish one, and thus the legends contained in it could be inaccurate. This can be seen as a commitment to retain the older legends in the context of Mannish transmission, without need to rewrite the tales, as Tolkien had attempted at first.