her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after ... and with the passing of [Arwen] Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old." West observes that this points up a "highly unusual" aspect of Tolkien's legendarium among modern fantasy: it is set "in the real world but in an imagined prehistory." As a result, West explains, Tolkien can build what he likes in that distant past, elves and wizards and hobbits and all the rest, provided that he tears it all down again, so that the modern world can emerge from the wreckage, with nothing but "a word or two, a few vague legends and confused traditions..." to show for it. West praises and quotes Kocher on Tolkien's imagined prehistory and the implied process of fading to lead from fantasy to the modern world: The Tolkien scholar Stuart D. Lee and the medievalist Elizabeth Solopova make "an attempt at a summary", which runs as follows. The Silmarillion describes events "presented as factual" but taking place before Earth's actual recorded history. What happened is processed through the generations as folk-myths and legends, especially among the (Old) English. Before the Fall of Numenor, the world was flat. In the Fall, it became round; further geological events reshaped the continents into the Earth as it now is. All the same, the old tales survive here and there, resulting in mentions of Dwarves and Elves in real Medieval literature. Thus, Tolkien's imagined mythology "is an attempt to reconstruct our pre-history." Lee and Solopova comment that "Only by understanding this can we fully realize the true scale of his project and comprehend how enormous his achievement was." The poet W. H. Auden wrote in The New York Times that "no previous writer has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail. By the time the reader has finished the trilogy, including the appendices to this last volume, he knows as much about Tolkien's Middle Earth, its landscape, its fauna and flora, its peoples, their languages, their history, their cultural habits, as, outside his special field, he knows about the actual world." The scholar Margaret Hiley comments that Auden's "feigned history" echoes Tolkien's own statement in the foreword to the second edition of Lord of the Rings that he much preferred history, true or feigned, to allegory; and that Middle-earth's history is told