The Lord of the Rings as [Greenlandian] Fantasy in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien [edited title]

[briggart]

You're quibbling with me about the meaning of the word neolithic. That's semantics.

I feel that, broadly speaking, there are two main meanings of 'semantics' (pardon the pun). Properly speaking, semantics is the field of study dealing with meaning of words, by themselves or in a larger context. However, in popular use 'semantics' often has a negative connotation and refers to focusing on meaningless differences in the form of the message, e.g. if you say "there are twelve eggs", and I say "there is a dozen eggs", we are literally saying different things, but there is no ambiguity over how many eggs there are.

Your choice of words, "quibbling" or contrasting "semantics" with "issue of substance" (as in your reply to @Paul Farquhar ), made me think you were using "semantics" in this second way, while IMO we did not agree on the content of the message, rather than its form. That's why I said I didn't think what we were discussing was just semantics.

Then it should be quite easy for you to provide actual examples of these descriptions of material culture showing the events of the story couldn't have occurred before 4,000 BC.

The book is about a dangerous trek across a continent to destroy a magical gold ring by throwing it into a volcano because, it being magical, it can't be melted in regular forges:

Your small fire, of course, would not melt even ordinary gold. This Ring has already passed through it unscathed, and even unheated. But there is no smith’s forge in this Shire that could change it all. Not even the anvil and the furnaces of the Dwarves could do that.

Given this, to me it really feels weird you insisting on proofs that the story couldn't have taken places before 4000 BC. But again, just from the first few pages of the prologue:

• Writing: the framing device is that both the Hobbit and LotR are just excerpts and adaptations of Bilbo's and Frodo's diary, The Red Book of Westmarch
• Books in a form they didn't assume until thousand of years after invention of writing (the Red Book is a red-leather bounded volume)
• Hobbits do not like any technology more advanced than forge-bellows or water-wheels
• Horse riding
• Carts

Bilbo's birthday gifts to his relatives include: an umbrella, a set of silver spoons, a gold pen. Bag's End has mechanical clocks.

And given that a picture is worth a thousand words, here is Tolkien's drawing of Bag's End:

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The object to the left of the door is a barometer, invented 1844.

 

[Hriston]

Numenor is explicitly inspired by Atlantis legends (Letters, I forget which book),

I don't think anyone can dispute this and would go as far as to state an equivalency between Númenor and Atlantis in Tolkien's legendarium.

and it wouldn't surprise me that the Sinking of Beleriand is tied to the sinking of Doggerland. That was known or hypothesized in the 1940s-50s.

I think of Doggerland as the northern part of Eriador surrounding the Icebay of Forochel, which I'd equate with the Norwegian trench.

Beleriand I would place in the North Atlantic, in the vicinity of the Rockall Plateau, part of the "lost continent" of Icelandia proposed by an international team of geologists in 2021. I actually ran across a book in the Berkeley stacks as an undergraduate that proposed a similar theory based on the distribution of fauna on both sides of the Atlantic in North America and Europe and had a beautiful map depicting a land mass stretching between the two continents. It looked to have been published in the 1930's or maybe as early as the turn of the century, but I've since been unable to remember the name of the author or title, and the internet seems to have never heard of it.

Given the rusting of iron, the great number of bronze artifacts found versus iron from late Bronze to early Iron Ages, and the relative modern lack of Wonders of the Ancient World, it is easy to think of an "advanced" civilization that once existed that has vanished with little trace. 9k - 12k ya is a pretty good time for that to happen.

I think these are great reasons to imagine such a possiblity. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Hriston]

I don't know what you're getting this sort of nonsense from, but it's not from archaeology.

From this wikipedia article:

Many varying scientific and alternative hypotheses attempt to explain the exact construction techniques, but, as is the case for other such structures, there is no definite consensus.​

But if you think that's wrong, I'm sure you can tell me on which hypothesis all the archaeologists agree.

We've found entire cities which were swamped, and sea levels haven't even risen that much (rising a lot faster in the last 30 years admittedly lol), so they'd have to be in shallow water.

I'm not sure what you'd call shallow, but, since the time I'm proposing for the end of the Third Age (c. 6,800 BC) sea level has risen about 25 m or 82 ft. That coupled with the destructive power of tidal activity and the difficulty of doing archaeology underwater, and I think it would be difficult to find very much.

Plus some of this stuff was inarguably in mountains, like the Dwarfholds, which would be completely impossible to hide, even if they intentionally collapsed them.

From The Hobbit:

"How could such a large door be kept secret from everybody outside, apart from the dragon?" he asked. He was only a little hobbit you must remember.​

"In lots of ways," said Gandalf. "But in what way this one has been hidden we don't know without going to see. From what it says on the map I should guess there is a closed door which has been made to look exactly like the side of the Mountain. That is the usual dwarves' method -- I think that is right, isn't it?"​

"Quite right," said Thorin.​

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm not sure what you'd call shallow, but, since the time I'm proposing for the end of the Third Age (c. 6,800 BC) sea level has risen about 25 m or 82 ft. That coupled with the destructive power of tidal activity and the difficulty of doing archaeology underwater, and I think it would be difficult to find very much.

Yes I know you think that, because you don't know what you're talking about. We've found towns and cities which went underwater in that era. Incredibly massive structures like the one in LotR would be trivial to detect at this point.

And yes, 82ft is extremely shallow water in this context. It's so shallow that cheapo off-the-shelf boat radars etc. have been able to scan that deep for many decades.

From The Hobbit:
"How could such a large door be kept secret from everybody outside, apart from the dragon?" he asked. He was only a little hobbit you must remember."In lots of ways," said Gandalf. "But in what way this one has been hidden we don't know without going to see. From what it says on the map I should guess there is a closed door which has been made to look exactly like the side of the Mountain. That is the usual dwarves' method -- I think that is right, isn't it?""Quite right," said Thorin.

None of which would stop us detecting it. Seismology, ground-penetrating radar, satellite mapping, aerial mapping, etc. would all reveal this stuff trivially. They reveal the much lesser constructions from that period frequently, where they exist.

But if you think that's wrong, I'm sure you can tell me on which hypothesis all the archaeologists agree.

It's literally in the article. Go to the section entitled "Construction".

Great Pyramid of Giza - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The disagreements you mention are over relatively small things like "How exactly did they plan the whole thing?" (but the type of structure simply doesn't require incredible planning, as much as mathematical precision), or "how exactly did they cut the blocks? Was it method A, method B, or method C?". Or "did they just use an external ramp system, or also work on it from the inside?". Not like "WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW THEY DID IT!". I think the latter is important to point out, because well into the 1990s, many junk science/pseudo-science books and TV shows were being made about the pyramids (they still happen - Netflix did some with the crooked fake-archaeologist Graham Hanc*ck - who just so happens to be the father (or uncle, I forget) of the top Netflix documentary commissioner (!!!)), and they relied on spurious claims that we just had "no idea" how it was built, rather than that there was a debate about the exact and precise methods.

 

[Nikosandros]

And yes, 82ft is extremely shallow water in this context. It's so shallow that cheapo off-the-shelf boat radars etc. have been able to scan that deep for many decades.

I basically agree with all your points, but I have to nitpick at this one. I suppose you mean SONARs? Radio frequency EM waves have extremely shallow penetration in water.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I basically agree with all your points, but I have to nitpick at this one. I suppose you mean SONARs? Radio frequency EM waves have extremely shallow penetration in water.

Yes, sorry, RADAR is used heavily on boats but mostly on the surface to detect weather etc. - there is underwater ground-penetrating RADAR which I was half thinking of, but this kind of general detection would primarily be SONAR.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

@Hriston

The characters and events of Tolkien's legendarium represent a "mythic prehistory" - complete with a cosmogony - which doesn't map remotely well onto what we know about established prehistory, any more than the Enuma Elish does; nor did it in Tolkien's own time.

Certain events are purposefully evocative of/consonant with other myths (eg Atlantis/Numenor; or a "drowned land" in the West).

While I concede that Tolkien might have whimsically mused about placing events 7000 or 8000 years ago, I am forced to ask exactly what is the purpose of trying to harmonize Tolkien's creation with what we know about our own world's past?

That might give a clearer understanding of where you're going with this.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The only way to be sure is to break into the secret sublevel of the Bodleian Library and steal the original Red Book of Westmarch.

 

[Nikosandros]

The only way to be sure is to break into the secret sublevel of the Bodleian Library and steal the original Red Book of Westmarch.

It's a good idea. Tolkien did a good job back then, but it is high time for a new, more accurate translation from Westron.