So I'm working on reconstructing this, and with
Aiwendil's Sequence of Composition to hand it's almost trivially easy. If you've got a copy of NoME, you can replicate my work as follows:
- Based on XVIII, treat Elves as growing to maturity at a 3:1 rate. This agrees with the other late document, XIX (which says they grow "as swiftly as Men", but Tolkien often meant "in their own terms" rather than "in Sun-years").
- Directly copy the timeline in XIII.1. This is the final Timeline Tolkien wrote.
- Add details from XVII.3(7), the final generation scheme. The gap from conception to birth is wrong, but as general dates these generations work fine.
- Dip into XVII.3(1) to pull out the rest of Ingwe's family tree. Adjust his wife's birth-date to be 3 Growth-Years after his, instead of three sun-years.
- Look at XIII.3 and VI.B for Tolkien's latest thoughts on the war around Angband. It was invested (= besieged) while the Ambassadors were in Valinor, and defeated midway between their return and the start of the March.
- Go to VII for Tolkien's final full timeline of the March. The length matches the length given in XIII.3, so simply translate all the dates into the adjusted calendar from XIII.1.
That's what I'm in the middle of. The
justification for the Elves' long pauses on the March vanishes - they were calculated on a 9-year pregnancy and 108-year childhood, while the latest model uses 3 and 72 years - but people aren't computers anyway, so a bit of leeway is acceptable. The sources above have already given me a date for the death of the Trees (VY 888/1), and that it's 600 years from there to the end of the Age, so the only troublesome section ahead is tying Galadriel's youth (XVIII) to her hair as the inspiration for the Silmarils (Shibboleth of Feanor, same approximate date), while staying true to the spirit of the Annals of Aman (which predate most of NoME and serve as the latest timeline of the Valinor years).
hS