Tolkien's final First Age timeline

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

Does your project treat works published during Tolkien's lifetime as taking precedence over those that are later but unpublished?

It does not, which is one reason it isn't anywhere near the New Silmarillion forum. The reason I've excluded Galadriel is that "Galadriel is older than the Silmarils" and "Galadriel is a teenager at the Death of the Trees" are both later statements than "this is how many years there were between the making of the Silmarils and the death of the Trees". I have a horrible feeling that last statement is actually sourced to the Annals of Aman, so yes, using the AAm date would be by far the easiest option. I can't, though, because the point is "latest" - but I couldn't bring myself to hypercompress the Silmarils-to-Exile timeline as the sources would indicate.

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

I'm curious about how you would handle this (even though you said you wouldn't, but, indulge me?).

Okay, so. NoME 1.VI(B) gives a timeline of:

• VY1000: Awakening of Eldar
• VY1090: Finding of Eldar
• VY1100: Arising and Fall of Men, during the Captivity of Melkor.

The simplest solution would be to simply scale the Finding:Arising gap to the final Awakening:Finding gap. There are 14 VY from the Awakening to the Finding; so there should be 1.56 VY between the Finding of the Quendi and the Arising of Men. That would place the Arising in VY 866/80, which... actually works really well? It's 9 years after the March begins, when the Eldar are camped out at Rhun. There is no clear date for the fall of Utumno, but if we read "The Valar delay moving against Utumno for fear that war would affect the Quendi" to mean "the Valar did not attack Utumno until the Eldar had moved away", then Utumno probably falls sometime in those 9 years (why would they wait longer?). In fact, the Arising of Men might have occured because of the fall of Utumno, mystically speaking. Sauron is free to move around at this point - he's not attested harassing the Eldar for at least another solar century.

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

EDIT: I was thinking that, perhaps, it is possible to Sherlock our way to a rough date of the Awaking of Men by constraining the dates via the clues given to us about the Awaking of the Dwarves. There are two major sets of evidence I'd like to present.

Oops, I forgot about the Dwarves entirely! Taking your sources, Tolkien's latest written ideas on them are:

1. They "'awoke' far back in the First Age (it is supposed, soon after the awakening of Men)" - PoME p.383, ca. 1972-3
2. They (specifically the Petty Dwarves) "settled in Beleriand before the Elves came there" - WotJ p.389, ca. 1959-60

So I think I have to take the reverse of your position: the Dwarves awoke not long after Men, somewhere in the later years of VY866. If we call this VY866/144, it gives them 2VY + 54SY (ie 342SY total) to invent racism and drive the petty-dwarves into Beleriand proper. I have no problem with that timeline, and when I get a chance I will integrate both this and Men above into the document.

Originally Posted by Arvegil145

P.S. What do you think about this timeline (based on yours) that I found on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans...ted_first_age/

+ the image (https://i.imgur.com/VZ3LnUK.png)

Oh, neat! I didn't realise I was Reddit-famous. It looks like they have a more reliable VY > SY conversion (I freely admit I didn't check for off-by-one errors, or typos in Tolkien's calculations), so I should probably adopt those. That probably means going back and checking that the dates are originally VY, and that I haven't misplaced something by wrongly converting a SY date.

I disagree on their methodology for the Valinorean years; I still agree with what I said on the timeline, that "It seems likely that Tolkien would have retained the relative spacing within each of these sets of dates". But that's a judgement call! It's entirely legitimate to do it their way - I just didn't.

One interesting point is that they said it was "too at variance with the established chronology for comfort". They're right, and that means that if someone was trying to use this timeline, they should probably use the Reddit variant. But I'm trying specifically to work out what Tolkien's "final version" would have been - and he was in no way bound by his own earlier dating schemes.

And one thing that worries me is that they say "We know that the Valar delayed moving against Utumno until after the Elves... came to Valinor." That would mess up my tidy logic on the Arising of Men, so I have to go and hunt down that source and see if it actually says that... and when it was written.

hS