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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9437145" data-attributes="member: 6787503">No, that's not my point. First of all, this is fiction. None of it is "supposed to be ... factually correct". Second, I don't believe JRR Tolkien had in mind some other "actual form of the book" departure from which would require any kind of rationalizing. He was just writing a story with a book in it, and what he wrote was how he imagined the book. The concept of "events actually tak[ing] place in universe" is bizarre to me, considering we're talking about fiction. The reason I've asked for quotes is I'd rather discuss the actual text of the novel than contend with bald assertion about it.Maybe it is. I wouldn't know, because I didn't bring it up. My assertion, based on Tolkien's letter, is about the time-period of the novel's setting, not about its conformity to an archaeological model of what material culture may or may not have been present at that time. My general point regarding that is the archaeological record only includes what was there. It doesn't tell us what wasn't there, except by inference. If by "are not compatible with the archaeological record" you mean "couldn't have taken place at that time", then I disagree. While I agree the events of the novel would depend on the existence of writing systems which are posited by the legendarium to have been invented by the Elves in Tirion and Beleriand, places for which there is, of course, no archaeological record, sometime before say 13,600 BC by my reckoning, an absence of recognizable traces of such systems in the archaeological record is not proof that no such systems existed or were in use in Western Europe c. 6600 BC. It's likely there have been at least four independent inventions of writing by humans within the last 6,000 years. It isn't unthinkable to contemplate there may have been earlier inventions sometime in the previous 294,000 years of modern human existence for which we simply lack the evidence.</blockquote>

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