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Message: <blockquote data-quote="briggart" data-source="post: 9416542" data-attributes="member: 6805135">I don't think anybody here is disputing that Tolkien, at least in the beginning, presented his stories as set in Earth's actual past, and in the passage you quoted he clearly considered the possibility of LotR taking place in the Neolithic time-period.But the point is that, while real world Neolithic spans a somewhat defined range of years (at least in Eurasia and North Africa), that range of years is defined by the typical technological and cultural aspects of the various societies of the time, which does not match those of the people of Middle Earth as shown in the LotR. More so because its "exact" duration varies locally, depending on when and how the various societies adopted/discovered metalworking. The whole stone -> copper -> bronze -> iron age division is not universal, with some cultures transitioning directly from stone tools to iron forging, and others never leaving stone age technological levels until contemporary times. One notable example would be the people of Baliem valley in central New Guinea, which were a Stone Age society of several tens of thousand of individuals who had limited contacts with the outside world until they were spotted during airplane exploration of New Guinea highlands in the 1930's. Given that New Guinea was part of the British Empire in the late 1800s, technically you could have a Victorian D&D campaign with characters living in small villages in the jungle, going around basically naked, no literacy, no metals and so on, but that would not be what people typically refer to with "Victorian setting".You could make a case for LotR being set during the European/North Africa Neolithic, but it is not a Neolithic setting. If those events actually happened in our world, most likely the archeological consensus would be that that part of the world transitioned out of Neolithic several thousand of years earlier than most everywhere else. I mean, the literal casus belli of the whole LotR saga is the forging of several sets of metal rings which by definition makes it not-Neolithic.</blockquote>

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