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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9413902" data-attributes="member: 6787503">I'm not sure what part of the legendarium you're referring to here as "Tolkien" considering the relatively detailed portion alone covers a period of about 6,500 years from the first sunrise to the final downfall of Sauron, a longer period of time than the historical Iron Age itself, but more to the point, what about the stories requires them to be set in the Iron Age in your opinion? What about the Downfall of Númenor suggests the Copper Age to you? Personally, I'd associate the Copper and Iron Ages with the Fifth and Sixth Ages in the legendarium.Eta: If one accepts the premise that Professor Tolkien's stories are about our own world -- Midgard as it's called in Germanic cosmology -- as he is on record stating, it doesn't make much sense to say his stories are meant to depict events happening in the Iron Age the way a fantasy novel like House of the Wolfings definitely is because we as modern readers have a fairly coherent idea about the type of historical events that have taken place in the Iron Age and can be fairly certain that nothing like the War of the Ring, for example, was taking place in Southern Europe and Northern Africa at any time after 1200 BC. The closest thing is probably the Punic Wars. Such a tale set in the Iron Age beggars belief while the same tale, set in a more remote period the historical details of which we know next  to nothing about, is far more palatable as having occurred in a "time of legend", at least to me. To sum up, the Meso- and Neolithic periods were a blank canvas for Tolkien on which he authored a "medievalistic" fantasy.</blockquote>

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