Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by quarkstomper

Keep in mind that Tolkien never finished the Silmarillion, and part of the reason for that was he had trouble working out the inconsistancies himself. After his death his son Christopher took the unfinished bits and pieces he wrote about the First Age and tried to work them into something which more or less hangs together, sometimes writing material himself based on his father's notes.

But you are right that Tolkien was trying to create something like the sagas of old. His original intention was to create a "National Epic" for England, the way Virgil's Aeneid is the National Epic of the Founding of Rome, or Kalevala is the National Epic of Finland; but along the way the story became less about England and more about elves.

That's partly because the nature of the Silmarillion changed over the years, too. If the Silmarillion is conceived of as a collection of legends from early England, or the equivalent of such, then things like the Ages of the Stars and the flat earth cosmology are fine, poetically powerful and not out-of-character for such stories.

The problem arose when the story mutated into the LOTR, that is, a 'realistic' prose novel set in the real world, albeit in an imaginary time. JRRT emphasized this point several times in his correspondence, the setting of the LOTR is the actual physical Earth, specifically the northwestern region of the Old World (i.e. Europe and the edges of Asia/Africa) in the distant past (as Men think of 'distant past'.)

The problem is that this makes the LOTR almost an example of science fiction, or something akin to it. Where most SF is set in an imaginary future of our real world, the LOTR is set in an imagary past of that same real world. This constrains things in several ways, some subtle, some blatant.

For ex, if the Silmariilion is seen as actual history of that same world set further in the past, then suddenly the Ages of the Stars become effectively impossible. Though it is poetically powerful, a world without the Sun where Elves lived and ate and breathed for millennia in the dark lit only by the stars...well, the air itself would be frozen solid. Elves may be immortal, but they still have to eat and drink and breathe, and then there's the issue of plants and animals. Even Morgoth's monsters need sustenance (other than the pure-spirit things).

So what is the Silmarillion? The 'flat-earth' version can't be the real history of the real world, obviously. Further, since the Silmarillion is supposedly of Elvish origin, the theory that it's old, distorted legends doesn't work either. The Elves can remember those days, and the Valar/Maiar can remember all the way back to the Beginning, so the High Elven histories and the like ought to be pretty accurate.

JRRT tried to rework the Silmarillion to create versions that fit reality better, but never entirely succeeded (though I think given more time, and if his strength had not been failing with age, he might eventually have pulled it off). Eventually I think he concluded that the Silmarillion ought to be seen as Elvish in origin but having been handed down through generations of Men and distorted, changed, added to and subtracted from, etc in the years since the Elves left.

Within the tale, I always took it that the three books of Elvish legends that Bilbo translated and compiled and gave to Frodo was supposed to be the means by which the Silmarillion pasted into mortal hands.