Fourth, Fifth, Sixth (and Seventh?) Ages

[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.

[James the Just]

As is traditional I've drawn a map.

"If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy." (L294)

The contours drawn in the ocean are for when the sea level was 100 meters lower, as it was thousands of years ago.

The Misty mountains start in the South with the Jura mountains. If you look at an atlas you can actually see the line going north right where they are on the map. And the Redhorn Pass is obvious.
The mountains in Italy line up pretty well, too.
Lake Garda, the largest lake in that country is Nen Hithoel. It, too, is surrounded by mountains except at its southern end which leads to a plain, just like on the map of Middle-earth.
Fangorn is right where the Black Forest is.

[James the Just]

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.

Since islands have a tendency to sink somewhat during warm periods when the sea level is higher I wonder if he meant that the Edain reached Númenor just before the beginning of the next (and last) Ice Age. Perhaps they were escaping the advancing glaciers. The Dwarves seemed to want to move south at that time as well.

It would seem difficult to explain all the activity that occurred during the 590 years before the Second Age if the North was covered in ice. However, not much at all happened there during the first 1200 years of the Second Age before the Númenoreans began to make permanent havens.

Delving further into the past is it possible the Noldor arrived at Helcaraxë during the Older Dryas? Was Melkor was freed from his sentence when the Ålesund interstadial ended 28,000 years ago?

[Arvegil145]

This might be a good place to post this quote:

Of Eldarion son of Elessar it was foretold that he should rule a great realm, and that it should endure for a hundred generations of Men after him, that is until a new age brought in again new things; and from him should come the kings of many realms in long days after. But if this foretelling spoke truly, none now can say, for Gondor and Arnor are no more; and even the chronicles of the House of Elessar and all their deeds and glory are lost.

- The Peoples of Middle-earth, 'The Tale of Years of the Third Age', pp. 244-5

So, if we take a normal human 'generation' to mean something like, say, 25 years - that would equate to c. 2,500 years.

And if we take Eldarion's death to be c. FO 200, that means that the Fourth Age lasted for about 2,700 years - which checks out with Tolkien's hastening Ages.

[Huinesoron]

I decided to pull all the competing timelines into a table:



And by "all" I mean "both. Letter 211 aligns with the astronomy argument given by James the Just; perfectly so if you accept their point that "about 6000 years ago" should be read as "the length of the 2nd and 3rd Ages combined" (ie, about 6500 years). Meanwhile, the NoME timeline aligns with the date of the last thing that can reasonably be called an Ice Age (the Younger Dryas). I've tweaked the 4th-6th ages to be "gradually quickening" (the original NoME timeline had 3 2433-year ages), which makes it align pretty closely with the PoME "100 generations".

In terms of real history, the Astronomy Timeline has the 4th Age end with the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and the 5th with the birth of Christ. The NoME Timeline shifts those markers to the ends of the 5th and 6th Ages. All other Ages are solidly prehistoric.

It's pretty funny that we've ended up with a Long and Short timeline, one supported by astronomical evidence, the other by geological (the Ice Age). Actual archaeology of the ancient Near East has exactly the same problem, with the Sack of Babylon wandering by over 200 years depending on how you count it. Makes it feel more real, somehow.

EDIT: Given that it's Tolkien, it's also interesting to note that Bible chronology suffers from the same problem: dates for the Genesis creation have historically clustered around either 4000 BC or 5500 BC. Neither of these dates really fit anything other than the simple Letter 211 chronology - a literal 6000 years since Gollum tripped into a volcano. (This means that the Genesis flood is not connected with the fall of Numenor; it falls sometime in the 4th (Astronomy timeline) or 5th (NoME timeline) Age.)

hS

[Arvegil145]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

I decided to pull all the competing timelines into a table:



And by "all" I mean "both. Letter 211 aligns with the astronomy argument given by James the Just; perfectly so if you accept their point that "about 6000 years ago" should be read as "the length of the 2nd and 3rd Ages combined" (ie, about 6500 years). Meanwhile, the NoME timeline aligns with the date of the last thing that can reasonably be called an Ice Age (the Younger Dryas). I've tweaked the 4th-6th ages to be "gradually quickening" (the original NoME timeline had 3 2433-year ages), which makes it align pretty closely with the PoME "100 generations".

In terms of real history, the Astronomy Timeline has the 4th Age end with the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, and the 5th with the birth of Christ. The NoME Timeline shifts those markers to the ends of the 5th and 6th Ages. All other Ages are solidly prehistoric.

It's pretty funny that we've ended up with a Long and Short timeline, one supported by astronomical evidence, the other by geological (the Ice Age). Actual archaeology of the ancient Near East has exactly the same problem, with the Sack of Babylon wandering by over 200 years depending on how you count it. Makes it feel more real, somehow.

hS

I'd only change the 'Awakening of Men' part in your table - since I think that Tolkien ultimately decided against such an enormous 'First Age', given that in the same NoME text in which this figure appears, the problem of the founding of Angband is still present, while in the other texts from the same period (such as the 'VY 850' Awakening of the Elves), Angband is already established as an ancient western fortress of Morgoth.

If I remember correctly, that is.

[Arvegil145]

As an aside, did Tolkien use the 'F.O.' abbreviation to refer to the dates of the Fourth Age, or 'FoA'?

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

I'd only change the 'Awakening of Men' part in your table - since I think that Tolkien ultimately decided against such an enormous 'First Age', given that in the same NoME text in which this figure appears, the problem of the founding of Angband is still present, while in the other texts from the same period (such as the 'VY 850' Awakening of the Elves), Angband is already established as an ancient western fortress of Morgoth.

You're right, though I'm not sure Angband is relevant.

First off, NoME 1.VI A was revised into 1.VI B. Tolkien repeats the statement of how many years Men had existed before they entered Beleriand, but amends it from 64,534 years to 57,190 years. He still keeps the "not scientifically long enough" statement, too! So the Awakening of Men date should certainly be revised to match that.

But then he did reconsider. 1.XIII.2, for example, places the death of the Trees 96 VY after the Awakening of the Elves, explicitly 13,824 years. Men would obviously have to be younger than that!

But I think it's valid to record what he was thinking at the time. Ultimately there is no One True Answer to this question, so showing all the options is my preferred aproach.

~

Though of course, we can put them in chronological order.

• The Lost Road - pre 1937. Submitted to Allen and Unwin that year.
• Astronomy - 1937-1949. During writing of LotR.
• PoME TV - 1949-50. Dated by CT.
• Letter 211 - October 1958. Dated.
• NoME 1.VI - 1960. Tolkien dated text A to this year.

So "16,000 years" is the final comment Tolkien made on how long ago the Elder Days were, for whatever that's worth.

hS