The proto-geography of the Third Age

[Aiwendil]

A very interesting hypothesis! I was quite fascinated to discover the apparent identification of elements of TH’s geography with Beleriand when I read Rateliff’s book. And I think there is a reasonable (though circumstantial) argument for an intermediate stage in which the Misty Mountains became the Blue Mountains. However, I think perhaps the situation is a little less clear than your post makes it sound. In particular, I have reservations on this point:

Despite what T said in a letter many years later, TH *always* took place in the world of the Elvish legendarium; even the earliest drafts contain numerous references to things like the Three Kindreds, Gondolin, and even Beren and Luthien However the time-frame, while vague, seems to be not long after the events of what would later be called the First Age).

Now I agree that, as Rateliff shows, the world of The Hobbit was in a sense equated with the Elvish legendarium from the outset. In a sense. For it is not really as simple as that. For all the correspondences between the two there are also significant discrepancies that are hard to explain away. For one thing, the geography is not an exact fit. Amon Ereb was always away in the south of Beleriand, whereas the journey toward the Lonely Mountain was always primarily an eastward journey. Rivendell on this view would be on the western side of the Ered Wethrin, but there is no corresponding place or Elvish dwelling in the Silmarillion. But more importantly, Bilbo’s world doesn’t seem to fit nicely anywhere in the timeline of the Legendarium. Both the 1930 Quenta Noldorinwa and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion ended with the sinking of Beleriand; therefore if the events of The Hobbit are actually to have occurred, they would need to have happened before the Great Battle. If, further, the Necromancer is Sauron and he dwells in Mirkwood/Taur-nu-Fuin, then The Hobbit must take place after the defeat of Sauron by Huan and Luthien. But the world of The Hobbit clearly cannot fit in that timeframe for many obvious reasons. The alternative – that The Hobbit assumes Beleriand survived the Great Battle and is set after it – is not really tenable either, since all the contemporary Silmarillion accounts have Beleriand destroyed.

I think, rather, that it was only in a very vague sense that Tolkien in his mind equated Mirkwood with Taur-nu-Fuin or the Great River with the Sirion. All indications are that when he began to write The Hobbit he did not really think of it as a ‘serious’ work and that he had no compunction about using elements from the Legendarium haphazardly, without striving for any firm consistency.

This may actually make your hypothesis more attractive rather than less, though. At some point, he obviously did decide that The Hobbit was in fact set in the same Middle-earth as his Elvish material – usually this decision is placed around the beginning of his work on The Lord of the Rings, but it’s quite plausible that it could have come earlier, even if we don’t accept that it came at the outset of The Hobbit. So pushing things east, out of the lands that were, as was well established, destroyed in the War of Wrath, became necessary.

Nonetheless, I am not at all persuaded that the Misty Mountains were equated with the Blue Mountains in the early stages of The Lord of the Rings, even if they were so earlier. The argument from the identification of Nogrod with Moria is a strong one – but it must be noted that Moria was not associated with the Misty Mountains until LotR, that is, after the references to Nogrod as the ancient home of Durin’s folk. So it seems quite plausible that by the time Moria was encountered in LotR, it was no longer identified with Nogrod (unless perhaps I’m forgetting some further Nogrod-Moria identification in the post-LotR writings?)

And though it’s completely irrelevant to the topic:

how on earth did it take Aragorn the Ranger many days to cover ground Thorin & Co. managed in a couple of hours?

I may be mis-remembering, but I thought the problem was the opposite – the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell took Bilbo and the Dwarves quite a long time while Frodo and company made it quite quickly (and without ponies).