The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

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- - Beyond The Ages (http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=730)

What we know of the Forth Age is very slim. Did Tolkien set out to say that the declining of the "sppeaking peoples" (save Men) was how we came about. In other words are we the men from Middle-earth?

That’s debatable. He often stated this, but I think he may have decided it was more of a parallel universe type thing. As always what I am saying is just what I assume feel free to challenge.

I dont know about the parallel universe thing because of the similarities between it and our world. The Man in the moon song. Only some of it is now recited and its just a nursery rhyme. But its still evolved literature from their time to ours. ME is now our world. Also, when describing Hobbits, he said they can disappear when big stupid folk like US come blundering along. I think Tolkien's world is our world long ago

I hope your not talking literally [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] When he wrote the hobbit it was not set in Middle Earth, or not intentionally, just set in a mythical world/time/area/thing. The Middle Earthiness just crept in because he was an obsessive person, and there was a lot of ME just floating around in his head.

Often quoted, but apparently not nearly often enough:

"I doubt if there would have been much gain; and I hope the, evidently long but undefined, gap* in time between the Fall of Barad-dûr and our Days is sufficient for 'literary credibility', even for readers acquainted with what is known or surmised of 'pre-history'.

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* I imagine the gap to be about 6000 years : that is we are now at the end of the Fifth Age, if the Ages were of about the same length as S.A. and T.A. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh." (Letter 211)

It is my understanding that Tolkien's original intent was to invent a mythology for England. I would assume that his myth extended to an unstated presumption that England's inhabitants descendants of those men of Middle Earth.

For your further consideration:

Quote:

Letter 165

'Middle-earth', by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison).4 It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men 'between the seas'. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this 'history' is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.

and

Quote:

Letter 183 (notes to W.H.Auden upon his critique of LoTR)

I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. The name is the modern form (appearing in the 13th century and still in use) of midden-erd > middel-erd, an ancient name for the oikoumenē, the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in use specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen worlds (as Heaven or Hell). The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.

If...any of you are saying or Tolkien was stating that our world is middle-earth in it's later days and such, what about the End of Times? What about Aman?

Just wondering!

Aylwen

Aman was removed from this world and put beyond our reach and our perception. So as far as we are concerned it is gone.

As for The End, the mythology has its own version of it.