Maybe it's just nonsense but...

[littlemanpoet]

Maybe it's just nonsense but Durelin's recent thread on capital punishment in Middle Earth and how the First Age Elves readily practiced capital punishment, Eol being but one example, and it got me thinking whether there are generally loose comparisons that could be made between the Four Ages recorded of Middle Earth and certain eras in the breadth of real world history.

(My apologies to any who understand that Middle Earth really and truly happened.)

The First Age, thusly, with its readiness to punish with death, its ready correlation of word to deed, its oaths, its remoteness, and other aspects, have much in common with pre-historic real world. By pre-historic I refer to those periods of our past for which most of our trustworthy information comes from archaeology and our less trustworthy comes from mythologies or mythic tomes such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh, etc.

The Second Age then, perhaps, corresponds to written recorded history that we deem religious and perhaps more trustworthy but not completely so. Such as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, the Pelopponesian Wars, even into the readily accepted historical periods of Greek and Roman Empires.

The Third Age would then correspond to the so-called Dark Ages and Medieval period, an era of degradation and decay with the seeds of culture readily available to be mined in old libraries and extant cultures, and young cultures such as the Eorling, galloping into known history and aspiring to acculturation and literacy as did the Germanics and other "barbaric" peoples.

The Fourth Age would then correspond to post-Renaissance (?) or post-Viking (?) era.

Now, I am not in the least trying to draw one-to-one correlations. No allegory here. (seems I said that somewhere else recently but it deserves being said) I'm sure there are many things that argue against what I'm presenting here, and that's fine, please do mention them. But I hope that some of you might be willing to bring to this thread other correspondences that come to mind, or perhaps you might help refine the above mentioned general correspondences.