The missing link between middle earth and known history

I felt like that after my first breakup.

 

I felt like that before my first breakup.

 

At least it's not "All Around The Watchtower".

 

Smoking too much weed will do that.

 

My take is that is was more like 8,000-13,000 years ago. It could have been Europe, but it also could have been North America before the local species of horses died out. My take is that there was another massive natural disaster prior to 6.000 years ago (Mount Doom exploded in super volcano fashion...like it was Yellowstone or something) and doomed much of Gondor and parts of Rohan. The remaining species likely died off as a result of the migration of people that would become the native Americans, if in North America. Otherwise something happened in Europe by 6,000 BC or so and by the time of Sumaria and the birth of civilizations as we know them today, the cultures of Middle Earth suffered technological regression so that by the time they became relevant again in history, they were "barbarians" to the Romans in northern Europe.

 

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if Middle Earth is supposed to be flat, whereas our Earth is obviously not, then...how'd they fix that?

 

Arda was flat until the Third Age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arda_(Tolkien)

 

One of the Ainur ran folding@home on his computer at some point.

 

I've been rewatching the extended cuts of the films over the last few days along with some of the extras and I've been watching these on You Tube which I guess pre-date the Peter Jackson trilogy -though the quality is very bad:

I'm no Tolkien aficionado, but based on what I've watched I think now that the Hobbit & the Lord of the Rings are set quite far back in geological terms, maybe even before homo sapien sapiens walked the Earth.

 

^Then, what? The "men" in the books were dinosaurs or something?

 

I mean that the period the books are set in May pre-date the advent of modern humans in the real world.

 

Earlier species of hominid is the likely outcome. There use to be several, but we are all that remain, more or less.

 

Best not to put too much thought into it, it is meant to be fantasy after all and so far as I can recall, the intent wasn't to propose an alternate history of the real world so much as to propose an alternate folklore history.

I think I read somewhere that Tolkien often lamented the loss of the old southern Britonic and Celtic cultural folklore and tribal traditions that were almost entirely erased over the course of the various conquests & waves of colonisation from the continent, starting with the Romans and ending with the Germanic Angles & Saxons. So the stories of Middle Earth were meant to fill that gap, which is why it's so British and Euro-centric by design.

 

Melkor was cast out into the Void, where he can no longer enter or affect Middle Earth.

 

EDIT: misclicked. nothing to see here, move along.

 

Indeed.

I think that its was more the loss of Anglo-Saxon folklore that he was trying to address, which he blamed on the subjugation of the native English population by the Normans after 1066, although it's likely much was never written down anyway and was only passed on by oral tradition. The Welsh, Scots and Irish have a very rich folklore comparatively -- for example, the Mabinogion and the Mythological and Fenian Cycles. The Normans didn't seem to destroy their culture (as much) when they got round to subjugating them. All that remains of Anglo-Saxon literature is not much more than the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Beowulf plus a few fragments of other important poems such as The Battle of Maldon and The Battle of Brunanburh, which don't feature pagan mythology.

 

Could the geografical changes between the beginning of the fourth age and our times be explained by Eru changing the Lands again like he did when he drowned Numenor? What could have happened that would have make this necessary, as he didn't get involved during the ring war?

I don't believe Melkor was freed then, as he was only supposed to reemerge during the Endtimes.

 

Noah's flood, perhaps.

 

That would have been bananas! I can only imagine the masses of audience members who have no idea Middle-earth is theoretically our own world just writhing in their seats in discomfort! As mind-blowing as it would have been, though, I'm glad it wasn't. After all, why would Arwen imagine our present technology? That'd make her one hell of an oracle.

Yup. Geoffrey of Monmouth, an influential 12th Century British historian, outright stated in his Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) that Britain was founded by a grandson of the Trojan refugee Aeneas. To nitpick Tolkien's saga with regards to what we know of human early/pre-history is to miss the point.

 

Until I read your reply I always thought the scene (which was in The Two Towers NOT Return of the King as I erroneously said, my bad sorry about that), was for our benefit, but when you explained it, of course it was for hers and we just saw it to .

I was born and raised not twenty miles from Geoffrey's old 'stomping grounds' and we frequently visited the area when I was growing up on Sunday afternoons in the spring & summer in our car. It has beautiful countryside there and the surrounding area. If you've never been/can't go look it up on Google Street View . Funnily enough when reading 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy edition many moons ago, I imagined the countryside around a nearby market town named Abergavenny as the Shire.