Search results

I'm not sure where this question is coming from. You're asking if I believe he believed what now? Here's a quote from the beginning of the same paragraph I quote in the OP from Letter #211 which may include an answer to your question (bold text added): May I say that all this is...

I guess I'm failing to express that I'm looking for more than mere assertion, like, do you have a particular passage in mind? I'm not doubting that there could be such a passage, but I'm interested in what language is being used and keeping in mind that meteoric iron is a thing.

I think JRR Tolkien probably had the Genesis flood narrative in mind for the end of the Fourth Age. For the end of the Fifth, I personally imagine the Late Bronze Age collapse. So I'm mostly in agreement, except I don't see a need to reconfigure the continents if Christopher Tolkien's map is not...

You're quibbling with me about the meaning of the word neolithic. That's semantics. You are, of course, correct, and I considered not (mis)using it in my OP (which was copy/pasted from the other thread which used the term) and in my thread title but had difficulty finding another convenient...

Eddie Canales, a tireless advocate for immigrants’ rights and founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, died in Texas this week at 76 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Ismail Haniyeh, senior Hamas political leader, was assassinated near Tehran by an alleged Israeli strike.

See @Reynard, JRR Tolkien would not agree about the Celtic vibe. :)

That's a matter of opinion. My opinion is he was more concerned with story elements like plot and character than describing people's standard of living.

What does this have to do with what I posted, and what's your evidence for what he believed or didn't believe?

This shows a lack of familiarity with archaeology. There was indeed working of gold, silver, copper, meteoric iron, and perhaps other native metals in the Stone Age. What marks the end of the Stone Age is the smelting of copper ore, but metals had been worked and beaten into beautiful and useful...

My question is what is he actually describing that makes the story incompatible with being set on planet Earth (specifically in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and Northwest Africa) sometime between 6,500 and 4,000 BC? How does he describe the things you mentioned in a way that conflicts with...

Ah, yes, I was misremembering this passage from Letter #19 (p. 26): Your reader's comment affords me delight. I am sorry the names split his eyes -- personally I believe (and here believe I am a good judge) they are good, and a large part of the effect. They are coherent and consistent and made...

This is all a semantic distinction. I think it's clear in my OP I'm using Neolithic to refer to the time-period of the Neolithic period, not any particular stratum of material culture. I even used scare quotes around the word Neolithic.

So are the Great Pyramids, so is a lot of megalithic architecture. And they're built by literal Atlanteans who've been gifted by the gods with superiority of mind, body, and longevity. That's the fantastical element. The Neolithic lasted for thousands of years, so it's quite possible for it to...

JRR Tolkien for the most part didn't describe much in the way of material culture, so I don't think there's a lot of evidence either way, but I have to disagree with you when it comes to megalithic architecture. I think there was a deliberate effort on the author's part to tie the Númenóreans...

I'm not sure what "cultural, societal, and technological levels" you're talking about. Tolkien, as an author, describes very little about these things, so I'd appreciate more specificity about what you think is being represented. This is complicated by the fact that Tolkien's fantasy depicts...

Well, the dating he gives in his letter, as I've pointed out, means the Third Age is imagined to transpire during the Neolithic. I think that counts for something! The Third Age also has some features I'd associate with the Neolithic, namely a sparse "points of light" pattern of isolated...

Okay, to avoid derailing your thread any further, I've started a new thread here. Any further replies to the ideas I've posted in this thread can be posted there.

[Edit. The term Neolithic in this post has been replaced with terms relating to the geologic time scale to clarify its emphasis on time-period rather than measures of cultural development.] This came up in another thread, and I've branched it off here to avoid further derailing that discussion...

JRR Tolkien wasn't writing about Mars or Alpha Centauri. He wasn't writing about other worlds. He was writing about our world, and the LotR is full of megalithic structures like Göbekli Tepe, places like the Barrow Downs, Isengard, and the Argonath, built by the Númenóreans or their descendants...