Fourth, Fifth, Sixth (and Seventh?) Ages

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

Indeed. I think I took too long editing my previous comment! (see the end of what I said before as I updated) I definitely think it has some resonance as a significant moment.

From a "Legendarium is real" perspective, it all feels a bit on-the-nose; but from a "mindreading Tolkien" angle, I agree that the Great War is probably the answer.

Jumping back into the pseudohistory side, I've just learned of the Varna Necropolis, on the shores of the Black Sea (or Sea of Nurn, if you prefer; the right-angle bend of the southern Carpathians makes that undeniable). It dates to 4600-4200 BC, right on the button for the end of the Third Age (my date was 4241 BC), and includes the oldest known gold treasure in the world.

It also includes this chap:



He's the highest-status burial in the necropolis, and may be the earliest known elite male burial in the world. He carries a war adze/mace, and is positively covered in gold.

I really want to go go full Schliemann and claim this is the body of King Elessar himself, but that's obviously ridiculous. Elessar fought with a sword, and would have been buried with his crown, not a huge gold necklace. Also, this body was buried in Mordor.

Obviously, it's the skeleton of Sauron Himself.

hS

[William Cloud Hicklin]

the day between the crucifixion and resurrection was the Harrowing of Hell. I had to check, but the Catholic version is indeed that Christ released all the righteous souls who had died before him from their torment, and let them into heaven. As a "dark angel is overthrown" moment, they don't get much more significant.

Although it's not something the Church says much about these days, it would have been known to any medievalist, and especially to a Middle English scholar like Tolkien since it features prominently (and dramatically) in Piers Ploughman.

Which then turns to the theory of Aragorn as Christ-figure, specifically as Christ-the-King*: What does Aragorn do but descend into the abode of the accursed Dead, bring them out with him, and by releasing them restore to them the Gift of Men?

_________________
* Frodo (who "dies" on Mt Doom and returns to life**) is Christ-the-sacrificial-lamb or Suffering Servant; Gandalf (who literally dies and returns) is Christ-the-Priest

** In the first draft, Frodo's coma lasted for - wait for it - three days.

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

I really want to go go full Schliemann and claim this is the body of King Elessar himself, but that's obviously ridiculous. Elessar fought with a sword, and would have been buried with his crown, not a huge gold necklace. Also, this body was buried in Mordor.

Very, very minor side-quibble: Elessar most certainly would not have been buried in his crown because: a.) he wasn't buried and b.) Eldarion would worn the crown.

Regarding the first point, it is entirely possible he could have been buried at a later date to avoid tomb-robbers (the orkish work of <i>The New Shadow</i> perhaps?).

But, regarding the second, the crown had been made in the reign of Atanatar Alcarin, replacing one that had been used since Isildur's day. As epochal a king as Elessar was, it would not have been "buried" with him, but would have been used for his heir. The reason, I presume, that it was brought to him at the time of his own coronation from Rath Dínen is because Eärnur left no heir, so the crown was left with the last king till the arrival of the new.

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Although it's not something the Church says much about these days, it would have been known to any medievalist, and especially to a Middle English scholar like Tolkien since it features prominently (and dramatically) in Piers Ploughman.

Thanks! It's always hard to know what was known, what was obscure, and what postdates the professor anyway.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Which then turns to the theory of Aragorn as Christ-figure, specifically as Christ-the-King*: What does Aragorn do but descend into the abode of the accursed Dead, bring them out with him, and by releasing them restore to them the Gift of Men?

_________________
* Frodo (who "dies" on Mt Doom and returns to life**) is Christ-the-sacrificial-lamb or Suffering Servant; Gandalf (who literally dies and returns) is Christ-the-Priest

** In the first draft, Frodo's coma lasted for - wait for it - three days.

According to the unassailable source We Three Kings, I think this means Aragorn gets gold, Gandalf gets frankincense, and Frodo is stuck with myrrh.

Originally Posted by Formendacil

Very, very minor side-quibble: Elessar most certainly would not have been buried in his crown because: a.) he wasn't buried and b.) Eldarion would worn the crown.

I... should have known that. -_- Thank you!

So this means it's definitely Sauron, right? ^_^ ^_^ ^_^

All this got me curious about what Europe was like 6000 years ago - whichever specific date we pick, the Third Age ending ca. 4000 BC is pure Tolkien. As is traditional, I scribbled together a map:



The prehistoric coastlines - back when Doggerland joined Britain to the mainland, ice filled the North Sea, and Corsica and Sardinia were one island - actually match up pretty well with Middle-earth, provided you ignore western France and Iberia (perhaps Aragorn had his dwarf buddies dig out the eastern Med and build them?). The similarity of the Italian-French coast with the Middle-earth map surprised me, as did the fact that the Irish coast and mountains fit Lindon perfectly. Of course, the Misty Mountains wound up on the course of the Rhine, but we can't have everything.

Anyway, some of the cultural locations of the era:

-Sauron's dominions match up nicely with the Chalcolithic - Copper Age - cultures. Makes sense, as he was the one pushing technological advancement.

-Rhun was inhabited by the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, which is noted for periodically burning down all its settlements. Sounds like a Sauron thing!

-Khand is where the Varna Necropolis lies; it seems to have been built by horse-riding peoples migrating from the east. Sauron's Easterlings on the move.

-Everything west of the Sauronian era was busy building menhirs and megaliths. This really took off around 4000BC itself, so possibly it's a post-Third Age phenomenon. Or maybe the ones in Britain and Brittany were actually the lintels of Hobbit-holes?

-Sardinia, somewhere around Umbar, was under the Bonu Ighinu culture. They buried their dead in natural cavities, so this may be the Gondorian culture after the end of the Age.

-Rohan was under the Lengyel culture, which built defensive ditches around its settlements. Look, prehistory isn't all that detailed...

-Going back a couple of thousand years, the Neolithic appears to have hit Europe in two waves: one coming from the sea in the West, and one coming up the Danube in the East. Arnor and Gondor, anyone?

-Around a thousand years before the fall of Barad-Dur, the mosaic of cultures in Italy - ie, Gondor south of the White Mountains - are quite suddenly unified. Sounds to me like the Stewards needed to impose some unity on their new kingdom.

Obviously Tolkien didn't know any of this - much of it wasn't known at all in his day - but it's nice to see that things sort of line up.

hS

[William Cloud Hicklin]

It also makes it apparent that Napoleon was a Black Numenorean from Umbar, which explains a lot.

[Huinesoron]

Had to come back to this, because I happened to glance at The Lost Road, which lists Tolkien's notes on stories he could include while 'working backwards' to Numenor:

Originally Posted by HoME 5: The Lost Road - The Unwritten Chapters

[after the 20th century story would come] Lombard story?; a Norse story of ship-burial (Vinland); an English story - of the man who got onto the Straight Road?; a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Og; a story concerning painted caves; the Ice Age - great figures in ice; Before the Ice Age: the Galdor story; post-Beleriand and the Elendil and Gil-Galad story of the assault on Thu; the Numenor story

The key point is up in the middle there: at the only time we know Tolkien thought about linking the Elder Days to a specific time, they were before the Ice Age.

What exactly consitutes the latest Ice Age is a bit of a tricky one. To avoid adding 100,000 years to the timeline, we could just look at the Younger Dryas - a brief (1000 year) glacial period that followed a ca. 2000 year period of warming, which itself followed tens of thousands of years of ice.

I don't know the history of when the Ice Age was presumed to be, but I know geological timelines have tended to get longer, so I think it's plausible Tolkien had the Younger Dryas in his head as "six thousand years ago". The Lost Road predated LotR and the Third Age: the 'assault on Thu' marked the end of the Elder Days (Galdor is apparently a seer who lived in the latter days of Numenor, or possibly was a survivor of it). If we assume the length of the Second Age wasn't fixed, then the timeline matches up quite well! Ages of ice before the Sun was made, then a warm spell during which Men awoke and Beleriand and Numenor flourished, then a cold snap which regressed the Numenoreans to neolithic barbarism and left space for the rise of Egypt.

With the advent of the Third Age, this becomes somewhat unfeasible: you have to push back at least 40,000 years to find an interglacial period long enough to run from Feanor to Frodo. But that's okay! Because the advance in science gave us an extra 6000 years to get back to the Younger Dryas, and leads to the very nice 'Morgoth caused a mini ice age' concept from my second post in the thread. ^_^

hS

[Huinesoron]

As William Cloud Hicklin has noted, the new NoME (Nature of Middle-earth) features an explicit timeline connecting the Elder Days to ours. In 1.VI, "The Awakening of the Quendi":

The Atani entered Beleriand in 310 Bel. That is in the 22nd Sun-year of VY 1498. Men had then existed for 448 VYs + 22 SYs: i.e., 64,534 Sun Years, which, though doubtless insufficient scientifically (since that is only - we being in 1960 of the 7th Age - 16,000 years ago: total about 80,000), is adequate for purposes of the Silmarillion, etc.

A related essay (NoME 1.X "Difficulties in Chronology") confirms that the "Beleriandic Reckoning" (= the traditional "First Age of the Sun") lasted 590 years under the Sun in Tolkien's conception at this point, which lets us construct the full timeline of the Elder Days:

- 14,350 BC: first year of the Beleriandic Reckoning, ie the usual F.A. 1.
- 13,760 BC: Fall of Morgoth / S.A. 1
- 10,441 BC: Downfall of Numenor and the Change of the World
- 10,319 BC: Fall of Sauron / T.A. 1
- 7298 BC: Fall of Sauron Redux / 4.A. 1
- ca. 4865 BC: 5.A. 1
- ca. 2432 BC: 6.A. 1
- 1 AD: 7.A. 1

I said at the top of the thread that Tolkien wasn't deeply invested in the 6000 years idea - well, here's the proof, because now it's over 9000 years since the War of the Ring! The NoME text postdates Letter 211 by a couple of years (1960 versus 1958), so it seems Tolkien had given it a bit more thought and tweaked his ideas a bit. He wanted the Seventh Age to explicitly be the Christian era; and it seems as though he actually calculated (off-page) the lengths of the 4th-6th. Evenly spacing the Age lengths from 3021 (3rd) to 1960 (4th) gets a total of 7471 years for the 4th-6th, within 200 years of the length implied by "only 16,000 years ago".

So! Where do our Ages fall in (pre-)history now?

The Wars of the Jewels - 14,300 - 13,700 BC. The end of the European Paleolothic. The archaeological record shows a spate of new (stone) technology around the end of this period, coinciding with the influx of refugees from drowned Beleriand.

The Numenorean Catastrophe - 10,450 BC. The Younger Dryas, a thousand year cold snap beginning around 10,950 BC, is clearly the result of the drowning of Numenor and the change of the world. Arnor especially was a cold place, quite likely leading to its breakup.

The War of the Ring - 7300 BC. Actually a relatively quiet time for major milestones. The first walled city (Jericho) was ~1000 years old by this point; barley and wheat had been cultivated about as long. The Sahara Desert became a fertile region about this time, and stayed that way until ca. 3500 BC; possibly the effect of the Gondorian renaissance under the house of Telcontar. Over the next thousand years, Britain would be cut off from the continent by rising sea levels, isolating the hobbits from the Big Folk.

The End of the Fourth Age - ca. 4800 BC. Riiiight about the dawn of known civilisation - Sumer emerged in 4500 BC, along with the earliest stirrings of the Bronze Age. The next few hundred years are also when the likes of chickens and horses were domesticated; it looks like the Fourth Age was a long decline, with the Fifth being a restoration of 'lost' technologies like metalwork and horse-riding.

The End of the Fifth Age - ca. 2200 BC. The dawn of History. Writing. And, exactly spot-on for the end of an Age, the 4.2 kiloyear event brings down the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Akkadian Empire, the Indus Valley civilisation, and the Liangzhu culture in China. This is the event which seems to have led the Proto-Indo-European peoples to migrate west and consume Europe - a fitting end to the last of the ancient Ages.

(Also: 2200 BC is about when Stonehenge was built. I'm guessing that makes it an evil temple of Melkor. ^_^)

We know from the "Lost Road" quote in my last post, that Tolkien was thinking about Numenor in relation to the Ice Age, and placing it immediately before it; I think it's very, very likely that "16,000 years" was calculated to align the Numenorean Catastrophe directly with the onset of the Younger Dryas.

(As an incidental: the "80,000 years total" figure for the awakening of Men aligns very nicely with the Recent African Origin dates. But given how in flux the timeline of early human history is - not to mention how often Tolkien changes his own mind - that can't be more than coincidence.)

hS

[James the Just]

Like you, I've been working on a 'real life' chronology for Middle-earth and would like to share some thoughts and ideas on this fascinating subject. Most of what follows can be checked using the free Stellarium software (danger:addictive).

As for any theories that try to date events in the Third Age to a time before or in-between ice ages, they must be dismissed due to a lack of workability with the calendars described in the Appendix. Tolkien seemed to assume that the length of the year changed very little over time:

The year no doubt was of the same length now,1 for long ago as those times are now reckoned in years and lives of men, they were not very remote according to the memory of the Earth.

1 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds.

The Return of the King, Appendix D.

Unfortunately this is not correct. If you went as far back as the Eemian interglacial around 130,000 years ago the length of the year, in terms of mean solar days, was about 365 days, 6 hours, and 5 minutes. This would result in a more than a 10 week difference in the days on the calendar for when seasons began between the start of the Second Age until the end of the Third. For instance, if the winter solstice was on Second Yule in the first year of the S.A. it would occur around mid-March by the time Bilbo and Frodo.
However around 10,000 years ago the year was only about 365 days, 5 hours, and 50 minutes. Using a more traditional chronolgy allows for less than a week's difference. So, for example, we could say that the solstice was originally on December 25 but gradually moved up to the Yules.

Another thing to keep in mind is the precession of the equinoxes. This will alter the visibility of many stars and constellations as it goes through its cycles. This puts even stricter limits on how deep into the past we can be. In Fellowship of the Ring there is a description of what I would presume to be Betelgeuse in Orion:

Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil, and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt.

The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Ch. 3, p. 120.

If we wish for Betelgeuse to even be seen above the horizon from the latitude of London then 9000 BC is as far back as we can go. 7000 BC to see the belt and about 5200 BC for Rigel. This pretty much kills some of the alternative chronologies in presented in NoME.

I think Tolkien got it right the first time.

“I imagine the gap [since the fall of Barad-dûr, TA3019] 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 2nd Age and 3rd Age. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the 6th Age, or in the 7th”

(The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, letter #211, 14th October 1958, Michaelmas term)

This is usually interpreted to mean that the end of the Third age occurred around 4,000 B.C. But another way to read it is that it happened as long ago from the present as the length of the Second and Third Ages combined (about 6000 years). More precisely, if we consider the end of the Third Age to be on the fall of Barad-dûr, 6,459¼ years. Subtracting that from 1958 would date that epoch making event at 4502 B.C. But only if you took it very literally instead of for the approximation that it obviously is. So 4241 BC ought to be close enough.

But, alas, astromony yet again intervenes. Not many specific years will work. First of all the moon phases need to be in alignment with the seasons. If there is a full moon on the night of January 8 then the winter solstice should be around a week earlier.

The Moon, now at the full, rose over the mountains, and cast a pale light in which the shadows of stones were black.

The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I

I, Ch. 3, p. 374.

Even Venus must be taken into account.

The evening star had risen and was shining with white fire above the western woods.

She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground.

The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Ch. 7, p. 472.

This doesn't leave us with a lot of options for choosing dates for the events in the stories. On the bright side, however, we can be more sure that we may have gotten it right if we did. Only about one in a hundred years can fit the bill astronomically.

Let's check some dates. 4241 BC? Nope. The full moon comes too soon and Venus is a morning star. The closest we can get is 4307±8 BC. The ± means that 4299 or 4315 BC may also work because both the Moon and Venus have similar 8 year cycles.

How about the aforementioned 4502 BC? Why yes! The winter solstice falls on 2 Yule, a full moon on January 8, and Venus is very high and bright in the evening sky on February 15. This is just plain dumb luck. We can take Tolkien's words literally and still have everything just right.

This still leaves us with determining the start of the other ages. Nothing seems to me more climatic in modern times than World War II. If it can be taken as a given that the Sixth Age began in 1 AD and that it ended in 1945 then its duration was 1944 years. Interestingly this is exactly 13½ yén. Since the Elvish calendar goes through a 3 yén cycle we could say that it's exactly 4½ cycles. If we wish to smoothly increase the length of the Ages as we go back in time we'd need a Fifth Age of 5 cycles and a Fourth of about 5½. This would give us a start date for the Fifth of 2160 BC.