Tolkien's final First Age timeline

[Arvegil145]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

Okay, let's do a quick rundown, converting "Final Timeline" dates into "AAm YT" dates:

YT 1050: Awakening of the Quendi.
YT 1110: Melkor discovers the Quendi and builds Angband.
YT 1260 (AAm 1085): Orome discovers the Quendi.
YT 1265 (AAm 1090): Valar decide to attack Melkor.
YT 1280 (AAm 1102): Ambassadors travel to Valinor.
YT 1281 (AAm 1104): Great Debate.
YT 1282 (AAm 1105): Great March begins.
YT 1303: March reaches Greenwood.
YT 1304 (AAm 1115): March reaches Anduin.
YT 1333 (AAm 1125): March reaches Beleriand.
YT 1334 (AAm 1128): Teleri reach Beleriand.
YT 1349 (AAm 1130): Elwe lost.
YT 1350 (AAm 1133): Noldor and Vanyar land in Aman.

Most of the events in Aman are dated in my timeline from the Annals anyway, so I'll just end with:

YT 1615 (AAm 1495): Death of the Two Trees.

The biggest difference is that the later timelines add almost 200 "YT" between the Awakening and the Finding. That was, ultimately, the reason Tolkien made all these changes: to give the Quendi time to grow a big enough population for all the trials he needed to put them through. The later timeline also extends the stay by Anduin, and the stay in Beleriand; but then chops the years in Aman down by about 100 YT.

Put another way: if Imin went with the March and reached Valinor, then by the time the Trees died he would have spent 5/6 of his life living under them by the Annals - but only 1/2 of it under the "Final Timeline".

hS

Interesting!

But the motive behind my original question (other than curiosity) was that I'm trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak:

1) The 'square peg' being Tolkien's various 144:1 SY to VY conversions, the messing around with the dates in general, and the plethora of other things incompatible with:

2) The 'round hole' - being Tolkien Gateway's policy of adopting the 'Annals of Aman' timeline + the 9.582:1 SY to VY conversion.


So now I'm left trying to include as much information as possible from Tolkien's 'latest' writings on these subjects (such as the birth-years for certain characters such as Ingwe, Finwe, Elwe, etc.), while also following the YT 1050-1500 timeline!

And as if that was not enough, there is the question of whether I should use Tolkien's later '24/25 generations scheme at the time of the Great Debate', or the previous (and much more manageable for TG purposes) '5/6 generations scheme'.



All in all, since Tolkien Gateway uses the flat-world, published Silmarillion, 'Annals of Aman' scheme, I think the best approach would be to convince the recalcitrant folks there to simply tweak the year of the Awaking of the Quendi from YT 1050 to YT 1000 or something along those lines...but I'm getting ahead of myself.