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Old 11-02-2022, 08:01 PM   #3
Victariongreyjoy
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Only 100 years left of the Second Age?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55 View Post
Obviously, the "compressed timeline" would have affected Numenorian history - in the sense that they do not seem to have the established footholds and relationships with the mainland denizens as they do in the books. They don't have a history of fighting Sauron, or building colonies. Miriel seems to be the first to pioneer Middle-earth involvement of any kind. [Which, as a side note, begs the question of how they lived - for an island whose big thing is seafaring, it's a little odd to never sail out of sight of one's own shores]. However, I feel like one of the things the show bungled pretty bad is that they couldn't decide exactly how long the Second Age was at this point in time, and what did or didn't happen. By putting literally every development possible all at the same time, they deprived an Age of a history. So how many mortal generations passed since Morgoth's downfall? Who knows! Because some unnamed amount of time passed without anything to fill it, and it may be 200 years or it may be 20,000 with equal success. It can't have been too short a time, because Numenor has to have forgotten its origins, but it can't be too long a time, because some themes like Galadriel's whole thing and the "watch the southlanders" attitude seem like they should have gotten stale a long time ago, even for an Elf - and because Numenor really should have more ties with ME by now, if even just for trade - and because why has literally nothing managed to happen in all this time. It's just hard to fathom a whole Age devoid of history.

So, my answer is - Numenorian history and all of history has gone to pieces. Someone in the math department divided the timeline by zero and now five is equal to thirteen and seven cubed is negative four and pi is finite and the time-space continuum has been warped irreversibly such that events which make sense in the direct aftermath of the War of Wrath and events that only make sense after an age of collective history are happening at the same time. It's trying to make history happen at the same time as the present. It's like presenting the rising conflict of WW2 before WW1 has had a chance to happen - heck, Napoleon is still riding around in his bicorn, and everyone just went home after the Fall of Rome. It doesn't work. The timey wimey only stretches so far before it stops making sense.

So, my personal take is that it's futile to guess how time passes when we don't have a sense of how much time has actually passed. What's the use of guessing if they removed kings from the genealogy or shortened their lifespans, if said kings have never done the things they were meant to do, never had the interactions and historical impact they were meant to have?
If I remember correctly, the showrunners did mentioned in the Vanity Fair article back in February, the timeline has been compressed down to a average human lifespan. I think it's likely the all the major events will happen during the last years of the Second Age, probably the show's timeline starts at 3341.

Back in episode 7, Brownyn said they were going to Pelagir, a old Numenorean outpost. So it means Numenor has been setting up small colonies already in the past. Not in a massive scale yet though. The show is saving it to Ar-Pharazon's expansionist chapter.
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