Could the Fourth Age have Ended with the Noachian Flood?

Q: Could the Fourth Age have Ended with the Noachian Flood?

ANSWER: J.R.R. Tolkien did not, so far as I know, devise a chronology for the Fourth Age, beyond noting in a draft for the appendices to The Lord of the Rings that it lasted “for 100 generations of Men”. Tolkien described these stories as “imaginary history” in our own world’s real past, meaning that the settings for the stories are intended to be equated (approximately) with the past Earth. But because these are legends the stories are not meant to be taken literally.

For example, The Lord of the Rings is not The Red Book of West-march nor even a portion of the Red Book. Rather, the Red Book is Tolkien’s imaginary source and books like The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, etc. are supposed to be Tolkien’s own imaginative fiction based on what he found in the Red Book. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings contain passages that are presented as if they are translated verbatim from Tolkien’s copy of the Red Book.

Hence, one is free to argue that the author may have done as story-tellers do by suggesting that he may have taken some liberties with the source material and attempted to fill in some gaps. This kind of extrapolation is useful in evaluating what might have happened next.

For example, the reader who submitted this question seems to me to be disappointed in Tolkien’s decision not to write a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien did begin a new story he called The New Shadow but he abandoned it because he felt that it could have been no better than a thriller and not some great mythic epic. Why? Because in Tolkien’s mind Sauron was the last physical incarnation of evil in the world; evil had to interact with the world of men indirectly after that time.

Readers, of course, are quick to point out that Tolkien could have written tales about dragons, maybe another balrog, and perhaps some of those “nameless things” dwelling under Khazad-dum. In other words, Middle-earth doesn’t have to be completely devoid of monsters. But the myth Tolkien created was neither a myth about monsters nor a myth about England (The Book of Lost Tales was the “mythology for England”, not The Lord of the Rings). Tolkien’s great myth of Middle-earth was really about the struggle for control over the world of men. Morgoth made the first bid to seize that control and he was thwarted by the Valar. Sauron made the second bid to seize control and he was thwarted by the Fellowship of the Ring (and the nations of Free Peoples who supported them).

But from that point forward Tolkien’s imaginary history (and his great myth) begins to overlap with the stories of the Bible, and in the Bible Adam (the first spiritually living man) cedes control of the world to Satan (whom Tolkien identified with Morgoth, but Satan was acting through the serpent). We know that by the time Jesus was ministering in Judea that Satan had control over the world, and so Protestant Christian teachings interpret the Fall of Adam story as a tale about how Man lost his heritage (I believe this is also the Catholic view but I am not well-versed in Catholic teachings).

For Tolkien to devise a third incarnated evil would, I think, bring his imagination into conflict with his Christian teachings. The mythology for England was simply a neo-pagan story. It wasn’t a Christian work at all, but rather a secular reimagining of the presumed but lost myths of the Old English peoples. The Middle-earth mythology, on the other hand, is Tolkien’s Catholic myth, meant to be read as inspired by the Bibical stories of God and his angels and how they have struggled over the fate of mankind.

I don’t think it is possible to fully reconcile Tolkien’s suggestion that there were multiple successive ages with the Biblical chronology any more than we can reconcile that concept with archaeological interpretation of prehistory. We simply have to accept that somehow the world moved from the end of the Third Age to the body of stories contained in the Bible.

While it might seem like an interesting philosophical or intellectual exercise I think it misses the point. Tolkien saw hints of struggles prior to the Adamic fall in the Bible and he drew inspiration from those hints to create his fictional world. He wanted to imagine what those struggles might have been like.

But if you look too closely into these matters you will find there are contradictions between Tolkien’s world and the world of the Bible, just as there are contradictions between the world presented by the Bible and the world we have discovered through archaeology. The Bible itself merely begins with a collection of traditional stories, handed down through the centuries before they were finally put into the written forms we know. Such history recorded in the Bible that has been verified by science occurs long after the Noachian event and is separated from that event by a gulf of time and the rise and fall of many intervening cultures.

Although science suggests there may be a real source for the Garden of Eden and Noachian stories, the Bibical accounts provide few if any testable details that can be matched up with archaeological research. Hence, I think it is best to imagine Tolkien’s story as leaving off about where the Bible begins, and you can’t really expect to devise a reliable set of connection points between the two stories.

See also:

• When did the Third Age End in Our Calendar?
• How Much of the Fourth Age of Middle-earth did Tolkien Write about?
• Exploring Tolkien’s Fourth Age

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