Fourth, Fifth, Sixth (and Seventh?) Ages

[Huinesoron]

Had to come back to this, because I happened to glance at The Lost Road, which lists Tolkien's notes on stories he could include while 'working backwards' to Numenor:

Originally Posted by HoME 5: The Lost Road - The Unwritten Chapters

[after the 20th century story would come] Lombard story?; a Norse story of ship-burial (Vinland); an English story - of the man who got onto the Straight Road?; a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Og; a story concerning painted caves; the Ice Age - great figures in ice; Before the Ice Age: the Galdor story; post-Beleriand and the Elendil and Gil-Galad story of the assault on Thu; the Numenor story

The key point is up in the middle there: at the only time we know Tolkien thought about linking the Elder Days to a specific time, they were before the Ice Age.

What exactly consitutes the latest Ice Age is a bit of a tricky one. To avoid adding 100,000 years to the timeline, we could just look at the Younger Dryas - a brief (1000 year) glacial period that followed a ca. 2000 year period of warming, which itself followed tens of thousands of years of ice.

I don't know the history of when the Ice Age was presumed to be, but I know geological timelines have tended to get longer, so I think it's plausible Tolkien had the Younger Dryas in his head as "six thousand years ago". The Lost Road predated LotR and the Third Age: the 'assault on Thu' marked the end of the Elder Days (Galdor is apparently a seer who lived in the latter days of Numenor, or possibly was a survivor of it). If we assume the length of the Second Age wasn't fixed, then the timeline matches up quite well! Ages of ice before the Sun was made, then a warm spell during which Men awoke and Beleriand and Numenor flourished, then a cold snap which regressed the Numenoreans to neolithic barbarism and left space for the rise of Egypt.

With the advent of the Third Age, this becomes somewhat unfeasible: you have to push back at least 40,000 years to find an interglacial period long enough to run from Feanor to Frodo. But that's okay! Because the advance in science gave us an extra 6000 years to get back to the Younger Dryas, and leads to the very nice 'Morgoth caused a mini ice age' concept from my second post in the thread. ^_^

hS