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

[Reynard]

Great! Let's get into the details:

1. Where? Can you provide references/page numbers/quotations of what is actually said in the book?
2. What are they smelting? This is important if you're trying to establish a particular level of human technology has been attained.
3. Who is doing the smelting? Are they supernatural/magical beings (or people working for them) or people from "fairy-land" or a "lost" superior culture, or are they normal people like hobbits or Men of Bree, Laketown/Dale, Dunland, or Rohan? I think this is important for determining whether one might expect the activities of such people to conform to what has been established as "typical" by reference to the archaeological record.
4. What actual physical processes are being described, keeping in mind that what we have is a "translation" and that the terminology for a given process in Westron might be untranslatable into English? Also, that the translation appears to have been originally written in English (because it actually was) so is unlikely to be all that faithful to the original Westron.

What are you actually even doing here? What are you trying to accomplish?

 

[Hriston]

We learn a huge amount about hobbit standard of living.

Apologies, I had shifted to using the phrase standard of living with the intention of imparting the same meaning as living conditions had been used to mean in my exchange with @briggart just up-thread, rather than in the socio-economic sense. I.e. relative "level" of material culture with reference to the discussion about Neolithic cultures. I acknowledge this is different from its widely accepted meaning.

 

[Hriston]

No, they aren't.

Well, since there's no definite consensus about how the pyramids of the Giza complex were exactly built, I think it's difficult for anyone to say with any authority whether or not their construction was beyond the abilities of the High Medieval Period or Renaissance. You certainly didn't see anyone in those periods building anything like those pyramids. Sometimes, knowledge is lost.

I think what you're trying to express is that the Numenoreans were in the late Iron Age, in terms of their culture and technology. But you seem to think that Neolithic is simply a fixed time period or something.

Something like that. I'm not really evaluating the cultural development of the Númenóreans or any of the other "cultures" described in the LotR, therefore my use of the term neolithic to describe the time-period of the setting was incorrect. I've edited the OP and thread title to substitute the term Greenlandian from the geologic timescale which is a fixed time-period.

Further still, we'd find ruins of all these structures if they'd existed as recently as the Neolithic. You simply couldn't erase that from the archaeological record.

You mostly could if they were swallowed up by rising sea level.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Thoughts?

It doesn't surprise me that the Professor devoted some thought to placing his legendarium in real world pre-history. It's a fun exercise. Numenor is explicitly inspired by Atlantis legends (Letters, I forget which book), 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.

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.

 

[Hriston]

It’s only semantics when there is uncertainty as to the definition. In this case Neolithic is defined by the technology in use, not the date. That’s why the dates are different in different places. There is no uncertainty in the definition that is open to debate (semantics), you are simply wrong.

Not to open a semantic debate, but I think you're wrong about the meaning of the word semantics which doesn't imply the meaning of something is uncertain, just that the meaning is the focus of the conversation, rather than any issue of substance.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well, since there's no definite consensus about how the pyramids of the Giza complex were exactly built

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

You certainly didn't see anyone in those periods building anything like those pyramids. Sometimes, knowledge is lost.

Are you joking or just don't know much? It's much, much, much, much harder to build high medieval Cathedrals than the Great Pyramids. It's not even close. The reason people didn't build things like that was that no-one would actually be that impressed because they'd know how they built it and it's basically just an impressive pile of rocks, rather than having any real complexity to it.

You mostly could if they were swallowed up by rising sea level.

Absolutely bloody not. I don't know why you keep making these ignorant claims. 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. 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.

 

[Hriston]

I find it very weird that you went back and dug up that post from almost a week.ago even after going through the process of explaining that you weren't literally saying the Lord of the Rings was set in the neolithic.

How long after you post a reply to me am I allowed to reply to you? It sounds like you don't plan on providing any examples of these descriptions of material culture you say are so prevalent.

I don't actually care what the letters and unfinished tales and all that say. The only text that matters is the finished, published books. And they occur pretty inarguably on a secondary world called Arda.

A secondary world can be a fictional Earth as it is in the case of the setting of the LotR. This is from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings (Vol. 1, The Fellowship of the Ring):

Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea.​

JRR Tolkien called this an express statement that the Shire had been in Europe, but if you don't believe him, why do you think he used the term Old World with its obvious connotation of the Afro-Eurasian land mass?

 

[Hriston]

What are you actually even doing here? What are you trying to accomplish?

I'm asking @Paul Farquhar to substantiate the claim he seems to be making that the "great many times" "Smelting is mentioned" are somehow a refutation of the dates I set out in my OP for the time-period of the LotR.

 

[gban007]

I don't actually care what the letters and unfinished tales and all that say. The only text that matters is the finished, published books. And they occur pretty inarguably on a secondary world called Arda.

I don't know, possibly impacted by having read some of the Unfinished Tales / History of Middle Earth stuff - one of which opens with a traveller from 'current day' as such meeting Elves from memory - but always felt it from published works that it was a view of a mythical past of our world, but embellished much like legends of Arthur are embellished, with him wearing Plate armour and the like.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't know, possibly impacted by having read some of the Unfinished Tales / History of Middle Earth stuff - one of which opens with a traveller from 'current day' as such meeting Elves from memory - but always felt it from published works that it was a view of a mythical past of our world, but embellished much like legends of Arthur are embellished, with him wearing Plate armour and the like.

I think the final Hobbit and Lord of the Rijgs definitely still have that "Primeval Earth Past" angle, even in the Simirllion...bit it is subtle.