[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by gondowe

I believe that the fact that he counted generations was due more to his eagerness to make the Tale of Years very reliable and realistic according to the nature of the Quendi and in the context of a world with sun and moon from the beginning.

He certainly was very preoccupied with "realism", hence his boosting of the number of generations from 6 to 25 almost off the cuff. Whether even immortal elves could create a language from scratch in 2000 years doesn't seem to have bothered him, though.

Originally Posted by gondowe

I was not doing accounts, but I am trying to adapt the "old" Tale of Years to the new duodecimal system and I find it very difficult to adjust it without a "new narrative". I think that a lot (not all) of the new information can be inserted but keeping the old decimal system. I can be wrong and it would be necessary to give it more lapses but ...

It is difficult, which is why I basically gave up and just kept the precise spacing. If Tolkien had written it, he would probably have kept 'blocks' of events spaced the same as before - eg the gap between the Noldor and Teleri arriving in Valinor - and shuffled those blocks relative to each other. He would certainly have pinned precise birth and marriage dates on the House of Finwe, given his preoccupation with the same in the generation schemes.

But... all we can do is all we can do. There are several approaches to take, one of which is to literally keep the Annals timeline and just change the numbering scheme to duodecimal, taking the "3100 years is probably an elvish underestimate" as the latest authority (heck, at one point 14,000 years was too short for him!) My timeline would maybe better be described as pseudo-Christopher Tolkien: it's how I imagine Christopher would have reconstructed a consistent timeline for a hypothetical New Silmarillion, not what Tolkien would have produced with his own hands.

Originally Posted by gondowe

On the other hand I think Tolkien always thought and wanted the three ambassadors to be First Born hence the "option" for Imin Tata and Enel to go to Valinor and join them Ingwë Finwë and Elwë, their "young descendants", and that also contributed to the calculations to make it more credible.

Now that was a weird little interlude. His whole reason for introducing the generation schemes was to make Finwe et al young enough that Finwe could reasonably not be married before Valinor, and he wrote all his generational schemes and two(?) accounts of the Debate with just the Three Ambassadors. But then he seems to have decided - or realised - that the Three Fathers ought to have been there too, and so Tolkien's final position is that there were six Ambassadors.

It gives some lovely interactions, but it's really hard to know what to do with it. That's why my timeline just says "Ambassadors" - it's a problem for someone else to sort out!

hS