The missing link between middle earth and known history

[Unimatrix Q]

Now with the obligatory christmas viewing and reading of LOTR, the old questions raise their head again:
What happened to Middle Earth, what was left and how did the reunited kingdom turn into the ancient civilizations of sumer, egypt, mycenian greece and the megalith culture?

How did the cultures change to an earlier level of society and lose so much knowledge and history?

What happened to the shire and the hobbits?

 

[Jedman67]

Check out this Stack Exchange: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/26808/how-exactly-is-arda-supposed-to-be-an-ancient-earth
Tolkien left the "missing time" purposefully vague, he imagined that the middle earth he described was "about" 6,000 years before the modern age.

 

[dahj]

A wizard did it?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

More to the point, how did the hobbits get hold of tobacco and potatoes to grow? Did the elves bring them from Valinor? Presumably, those plants died out when Middle Earth became Europe. Perhaps Tolkien should have envisioned Arda as being a parallel Earth and have had the Red Book of Westmarch fall through a rip in space-time or a wardrobe or something.

 

[Mr Soak]

More to the point, how did the hobbits get hold of tobacco and potatoes to grow? Did the elves bring them from Valinor? Presumably, those plants died out when Middle Earth became Europe. Perhaps Tolkien should have envisioned Arda as being a parallel Earth and have had the Red Book of Westmarch fall through a rip in space-time or a wardrobe or something.

Aslan? JRRT and CSL were friends, after all.

 

[TommyR01D]

I thought it was supposed to be an entirely different planet.

 

[Tenacity]

The Lord of the Rings isn't the past ... it's the distant future.

 

[Phoenix219]

As a kid watching Thundercats, I always wondered how Middle Earth became Third Earth, and wondered why there were Egyptian ruins, and assumed it must be post world war 3. Not really on topic, but it came to mind and felt *almost* relevant.... although no human ruins (although that could be to not rip off that barbarian in the future cartoon).

 

[Relayer1]

No, JRR set it in the past of our Earth.

LOTR ended about 6,000 years ago.

 

[Phoenix219]

The Lord of the Rings isn't the past ... it's the distant future.

Never heard that before.... I thought the whole point of having some familiar poetry and rhymes and songs was to show how they were devolved thru repetition on the way to the modern age.

 

[Kemaiku]

I thought it was supposed to be an entirely different planet.

Originally, it was written as Earth 6000 years ago and that we were living in a much later Age than the first 3.

It was later altered so that Arda was now a separate planet that was brought into being by a process described in The Silmarillion.

So there is no gap to try and fill in now, as of the completion of LOTR it was it's own world as far as the story was concerned.

 

[Phoenix219]

Originally, it was written as Earth 6000 years ago and that we were living in a much later Age than the first 3.

It was later altered so that Arda was now a separate planet that was brought into being by a process described in The Silmarillion.

So there is no gap to try and fill in now, as of the completion of LOTR it was it's own world as far as the story was concerned.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of process was it? I've never read The Silmarillion.

I've always seen it as the original interpretation, and that was part of what made it intriguing.

 

[Kemaiku]

Something akin to the deities of their universe bringing it into existance in a chorus of magical song, each of them embodying a note that shaped a property of the cosmos. Of course, Morgoth sowed a discordant note that allowed evil and chaos to exist, and tempted the lesser beings like Sauron into his way of thinking.

 

[Kahless the Unforgettable]

You just have to look at any of MIddle Earth's maps to know it's not Earth of the past. At least not as recently as 6,000 (or even 600,000) years ago.

 

[sojourner]

The Hyborian age of Conan the Barbarian leads from the fourth age of Middle Earth into our known pre-history, of course.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Maybe it's one of the 12 Colonies!

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I'm still confused by Mark Addy's accent in Viva Rock Vegas. Shouldn't it be native American?

 

[Mudd]

Tolkien's Earth was flat at one point. That takes more explaining than potatoes.

Pipeweed isn'the tobacco - it's weed. Good weed.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Aslan? JRRT and CSL were friends, after all.

I know -- I've supped in The Eagle and Child, where the Inklings met, many a time.

Reportedly, during a meeting of the Inklings, the Oxford dons' book club whose members included Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Tolkien read passages from his manuscript for The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was a terrible public speaker and reader, mumbling and droning, and his fellow English teacher, Hugo Dyson, promptly fell asleep. When he woke up and heard what was still going on, Dyson exclaimed, "Oh no, not another fucking elf." Thereafter, Tolkien limited his readings to those meetings of the Inklings when Dyson wasn't present.

http://www.artsjournal.com/bookdaddy/2007/03/oh_lord_more_elves.html

When Lewis and friends could bear old Tolkien's mumblings no longer, they enlisted Christopher Tolkien, the professor's youngest son, to read from the great book. Christopher is a man of extraordinary eloquence. His lectures at Oxford on Norse mythology were always packed out. I wish I had heard him read from The Lord of the Rings. I have heard him read from the Edda, from the Sagas, and from the Anglo-Saxon poems which were the chief inspiratons for his father's work.

The "fucking elf" story came from Christopher himself and I put it in my biography of Lewis. It was not CS Lewis who made this unmannerly interruption, but Hugo Dyson, a noisy veteran of the First World War, who taught English at Merton college.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4726760/Tolkien-was-not-a-writer.html

 

[N-121973]

If this was supposed to be our past, what happened to hobbits, immortal elves and the fantasy creatures such as goblins, orcs, dragons etc? What might have been interesting if Middle-Earth is our Earth in the distant past is that during the time lapse scene from I want to say 'Return of the King' where Arwen is imagining what life will be like with Aragorn and it shows her by his tomb at various periods, if the last scene had been her standing in a street in our time, supposedly on the site of his tomb, surrounded by cars and other modern things.