Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I imagine that turning of the ages as a process by which the poetically imagined history of Middle Earth in the Fourth Age merges with the known history of our world, and also with the scientifically imagined prehistory.
If I hopped in a time machine and set it for X number of millennia in the past, I’d never find Gondor or Mordor under what’s now the Mediterranean. But if my machine let me travel though the collective unconscious, into stories, I could find those realms in that part of the world.

Yeah, but that's not what JRRT had in mind. For the purposes of his story, ME is the actual, physical past of the real world, in that world your time machine would take you back to Mordor and Gondor. Yes, it's fiction, but it's not fiction set in any sort of imaginary plane. It's as 'real' on its own terms as the starship Enterprise or the Morlocks/Eloi.