[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Galin

given its wonderful brevity/vagueness regarding who was born when, should I go back to The Annals of Aman and just plug in 144?

As Arvegil says, this was exactly what Tolkien wanted desperately to do. There's whole chapters of NoME where he's struggling to justify to himself the extreme lengths between events that 1 VY = 144 SY would bring. This is where we get "gestation = 900 months = !75!solar!years" from - he just really wanted it to work!

In the end, and the basis for this "Final Timeline", he scrapped the whole system; the latest system of dates Tolkien actually provides are based on VY 850 for the Awakening, and VY 888 for the death of the Trees. Converting between them is largely what I'm overwhelming this thread with.

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

No, I meant - take for example the Awaking of Men (VY 1075 I assume): how did you arrive at 862/50 (FA 1778) figure? As in, can you walk me through the process?

Sure! Using the last three paragraphs VI.A, the Quendi awoke in VY 1000, Men awoke in VY 1075, and Orome found the Quendi in VY 1085. At the time, 1 VY = 144 SY, meaning the gap between the two awakenings is 10800 SY.

That's far too long for the later timeline where the Quendi awake in VY 850 - it would put the Awakening of Men somewhere in the early Third Age. So I have instead used the ratio between the three dates.

In VI.A, there are 85 VY between the Quendi awakening and being found. In XIII.1, there are 14. That means 1 XIII.1 VY = (14/85) = 0.165 VI.A VY. We can multiply the 75 VY between the two Awakenings by that number, to get a XIII.1 gap of 12.353 VY; and 850 + 12 + (0.353 x 144) = 862/50, the date on the Final Timeline. (You can get the same result by converting everything into SY, which has the advantage of not needing to multiply fractions of 144.)

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

EDIT: Maybe you should expand the explanation in your scheme as to why Men awoke in 862/50 (based on the VY 1075 date), and why the 'awakening' and 'arising' of Men are not one and the same.

I agree I should probably clean up some of the explanations; I'll try to do that once we stop fixing them!

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

Because CT says that Tolkien changed 1179 to 1169, not the other way around.

Urgh, that is a complicated note, but I think you've read it right. There's also additional dates in this and note 4: 1170 for Miriel's death, 1172 for the Statute, and 1185 for Finwe's wedding to Indis.

This all makes the sequence of composition very important. The ball-point pen amendments to AAm are earlier than NoME VII, which quotes the 1169; but 1170/1172/1185 doesn't line up with the latest Finwe & Miriel (which has the 12/12/3 gaps I mentioned; see MR pp 258-261). I think from MR p205 that the AAm changes are contemporary with Finwe & Miriel 1, so 12/12/3 is the dating I will be using.

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

And, at the risk of reopening this can of worms, I still think that our best course is to discard the 'very young Galadriel' idea

Galadriel! Galadriel! Clear as mud is all your tale!

Okay: to be 20 at the Exile, Galadriel would be born 13 SY before the AAm date for Feanor breaking the peace. Is 13 years long enough for her to grow tresses, and be verbal enough to refuse Feanor, and old enough for her refusal to offend him, and for him to make the Silmarils, and for Melkor to stir up enough trouble to cause Feanor to make and draw a sword?

It seems unlikely. Instead, let's do the same "mortal equivalent" trick as with Idril, making Galadriel 26.7 life-years at the Exile; that works out to 456 SY, putting her birth in 5018. AAm has the Silmarils only taking 10 years to forge, so Galadriel would have been 23 SY = 7.7 life-years = 5.7 mortal-years when Feanor started the work. As Shibboleth says: "from her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others".

... I need to rework the calculations, don't I? There's several points which give me freedom to move things: like VII fixing Feanor's begetting rather than his birth, which would let me move the whole AAm timeline back a bit; or the FM4 date of Finwe's second marriage being earlier than in the AAm notes, which again could let me close the Feanor:Fingolfin gap. I'll take a look at it and see what works best.

I'll need to look at the Grey Annals separately; I haven't even given them thought until now.

hS