help me understand

[Olorin_TLA]

Yeah, but it wasn't meant to be physcially in the same place as England. ;) Along the same latitude though, to account for the same climate.

The Third Age of Middle-earth is meant to end at some (imho, an almost-touchable-yet-just-unreachable) point before the dawn of recorded history, so says Tolkien. He gave an exmaple of around 6,000 years ago, as back then that was when "recorded history" "began" in depth...however, that was just an example, bascially, LotR is set before, but not hugely before, our earliest history, so whenever a new archaelogical find is found, just shift the date of LotR back a bit. ;)


EDIT: Yikes! I accidnetally said that Men arose 150,000 years ago. This was a MISTAKE. It's roughly 57,000 according to HoMe X (which puts each "Year" in the SIlmarillion before the rising of the Sun as being 144 sun-years long...and also places the birth of Man all the way back to slightly before the Great March)...somehow I'd got "c.50,000" mixed up with 150,000...hmm.


Also, Tolkien later wrote that perhaps he could have made the geography of LotR fit better with Europe's, had he had that specifically in mind at the time of writing. (Note how the land around the icy Cape of Forochel has a similar shape to Scandanavia). Frnakl,y though, letting the sotry and geography design themselves allowed for greater freedom, and a better LotR...for a start, there would have been no Mordor as we know it! :eek: