We know our world is roundish because we have been lucky enough to observe it from space. Before modern times, Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, among others, had much difficulty in convincing geocentric authorities that the Sun is the centre of the Solar System, and not the Earth. One Australian astronomer and physicist, Dr Nicholas Lomb, showed us a presentation of Saturn with a backlit Earth in the foreground, to give us a greater idea of the relative sizes of both planets. Earth, with all its history, is barely a small disc in comparison with a huge beautiful, beringed, Saturnian mass which could float on water if there was a bathtub big enough to hold so much water.
In effect, the Earth is slightly more elliptical than round. And hard to map accurately by picturing it on a flat surface. A mercator projection is distorted into a grid and makes India and Australia look barely bigger than Sweden or Greenland, and we know for a fact that is not the case. Even if our world is round, out there in space, there are some odd-looking lumps of rock and debris, comets, asteroids and meteors that aren't round.
Though the Ancient Greeks knew the world was round much of what they knew was lost when earthquakes demolished great libraries from Pergamon to Ephesus and when the Great Library of Alexandria was burned down and destroyed by invading Arabic forces after 632 AD, not for the first time. I was taught that by the 1450's AD the Portuguese Prince, Henry the Navigator, had been researching how to get to China going south and east around Africa, an ocean-going venture that was previously regarded with horror by sailors of the time, who were just as vague about the rest of their world as the superstitious Telmarines and sailors of VDT's Lone Islands. Even the great traveller, Marco Polo, whose travels to China were recorded in the 1200's, was regarded with suspicion.
So the flat world perception might well be because those in Narnia only perceived the parts of their world they actually saw and touched, whatever shape it was. The talking animals of Narnia were immensely practical, and left astronomy to what we regard as mythical creatures, called centaurs, whose eating habits seem so laborious that Jill and Eustace might wonder where they found the time to chart the heavens. The Calormenes were more interested in power and trade, the Lone Islands were more interested in their links with a large landmass to the West plus neighbouring islands and archepelagos such as are found in the Mediterranean Sea to this day. And the Telmarines, whatever their origins, were more interested in finding fertile, well-watered land to settle on and claim as their own.
The Mediterranean Sea is named as such because it was regarded as the centre of the Ancient Greco-Romanic world. The Chinese called their country the Middle Kingdom because they, too, regarded their civilization as the centre of their world. And yes, they turned inwards, curtailing exploration of the oceans to the West after 1412 AD, after a new Emperor came to the throne.
As a child, cleaning a veranda, I used to watch the dawn come up. The sky was a big blue inverted bowl of a day, which only the Sun and the waning moon might penetrate. At night the stars came out in this firmament to light a circular flat area bounded by the sea to the east and mountains on the western edge. It wasn't hard to imagine that my corner of the world was like a huge goldfish bowl, all layered, with England somewhere on the bottom part of the goldfish bowl. Or maybe it was part of the lid
. You know down here, everything is upside down.
Or maybe out in space it is you lot up in the Northern Hemisphere.
I really will have to get my cat to tell me what he thinks of the world. If he cares, any more than his alleged relatives in their rather Narnia-centred world, which we never saw the whole of.