Is this thread inspired by your in-depth research into Tolkien calendars over on the Password thread?
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Originally Posted by Huinesoron
6th Age: 1AD to present. We know this one.
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Oh, but that is the most interesting endpoint, because we can actually decide that one without significant historical bias! Aside from Ages
ending, rather than beginning, as you rightly note, the endpoint also is determined by the living people of that time. They are not determined post-factum by historians digging through old scrolls in Rivendell's or Gondor's libraries. This is the opposite of the retrospective way we tend to define historical periods in our world. The retrospective method carries bias: we judge events not by their immediate significance, but by their historical impact as it was relayed to us; and with our judgement we bring our modern-world-influenced criteria, which, much as we try, would not match up perfectly with the criteria of a person living thousands of years ago.
Which brings me to two points. Firstly,
we, the people alive now, are in power to determine the boundary between the 6th and 7th Ages. Yes, we might not be the perfect generations for it, but we are probably close enough to still feel the impact of the Age change and to at least judge it with Age-appropriate values. So, do we assume we are in the 7th Age, or has that switch not flipped yet? If we are still in the 6th Age, then the discussion is moot because the critical events have not yet happened. So for the purpose of empty but entertaining speculation, can we assume that we are in the 7th Age now? Then we can go hunting for the endpoint of the 6th. Looking somewhat retrospectively, you could argue for a pattern of increasingly large scale wars in Europe and elsewhere from the 1800s up until WWII, and relative change in the organization of the world afterwards. However, the argument against that is that I am myself speaking with historical bias, and if the end of a horrific massive world-destroying war with promised peace to come was to be marked as the end of an Age by the people living then, it would have already been done after the Great War; the reason I do not agree is because I know that WWII is to follow not even a lifespan later, but you couldn't know that in 1918. What other major recent (well, "recent") world-changing events are there that could mark the change of an Age? ...Surprisingly, it took me
this many mentions of it in one post to think of the current pandemic (*facepalm*). But the beginning of a new lifestyle imposed by an illness does not sound like the end of an Age, because it is not an ending and because it is negative (as William notes, the legendarium Ages end something bad to leave something hopefully more good). You could argue that we have witnessed the end of normal socialization, but I would rather not start an Age on such a pessimistic note and as a participating living individual actively vote against this choice. Nobody starts an Age with the Black Breath.
But the second implication that comes of trying to dissociate from the hindsight perspective is that neither the birth nor the death of Christ can mark the change of an Age, because from the perspective of the 1AD and 33AD people, there was no world-changing event. The significance we give to these events would not be given by the people living even just in Jerusalem itself, forget about the rest of humanity. While the significance is undoubtable to us in the far future (heck, we even count our years from it, humanity at one point really
did decide Nativity was an Age-turning point!), there was nothing world-shakingly remarkable about it from the perspective of Christ's contemporaries. The world did not believe an Age ended, or began.
Having gone through this exercise, I now realize that we traditionally mark
our Ages more by beginnings rather than endings. The start of warm climate; the beginning of European migration; the start of agriculture; the invention of some tool or technique, be it iron forging or the printing press. We put more emphasis on what makes a lasting impact with ripples to our present, we don't naturally judge it by things that ended and thus did not reach us. We still have some endings mixed in there: a fall of an empire, an end of slavery. But to my non-expert eye, it seems that we are missing quite a lot of endings. If our history was like Middle-earth history, our Ages would be punctuated by things like Neanderthals dying out or something. We call the Renaissance that because of what happened over the entirety of the time period and what followed, not because it marked the end of the Middle Ages. But it would be the opposite way around if we were to call the Ages out "in real time", so to speak: an end is more immediately recognizable than a beginning, because beginnings need time to evolve into significant change.
Saying all of that, I would be very happy if someone came up with an argument to reconcile the prospective and retrospective divide, or give some good counter-examples for the retrospect bias. My head would hurt a lot less if I could go back to thinking of Jesus as the start of an Age. But would equally be interested in hearing if you know of any examples when we as a society
did call an Age-change in real time and it wasn't just people screaming about nothing.