Q: What are the Ages of the Sun?
ANSWER: This question is bound up with several similar questions, such as “Who coined the expression ‘Ages of the Sun’?” and “Did J.R.R. Tolkien have a name for the various ages of Middle-earth?” There are numerous misunderstandings about the expression “ages of the Sun”, some of which are propagated by sham scholarship that has been referenced as an authoritative source of information.
J.R.R. Tolkien used “ages of …” to describe various lengths of time within the history he devised for Middle-earth without intending any of them to be used as an external measurement for all divisions of time. For example, The Silmarillion says that the “ages of the stars” ended with the first rising of the Sun.
To confuse matters further, Tolkien provides chronologies measured in terms of “Valian Years”, “Years of the Trees”, and “Years of the Sun”. He changed his computational methods for cross-referencing Valian Years with years of the Sun and abandoned texts that used one system only to resurrect them with another system in later versions. And there were specific periods — such as the “three ages of the Chaining of Melkor” (which only occurs obliquely, as in “the first age of the Chaining of Melkor” and “second age of the captivity of Melkor”) — which were grouped as “ages” within the main chronologies.
Against these chronologies Tolkien also applied the semi-formal name Elder Days, of which in The Lord of the Rings he wrote: “In the Fourth Age the earlier ages were often called the Elder Days; but that name was properly given only to the days before the casting out of Morgoth. The histories of that time are not recorded here.” In the story’s primary narrative the reader finds numerous occurrences of Elder Days, including one reference coupled with Middle Days (apparently referring to the Second And Third Ages).
The Elder Days ended with the casting out of Morgoth, but when did they begin? In The War of the Jewels Christopher Tolkien devotes an entire chapter to “The Tale of Years”, which he dates to the period starting around 1951. In this evolving work the Elder Days are said to have begun with the Awakening of the Elves, but at one point they are said to have ended when Fingolfin and Inglor (later named Finrod Felagund in The Silmarillion) lead the majority of the rebellious Noldor across the Helcaraxe. A revision of this chronology adds that the Lore-masters of Valinor held that the Elder Days ended with the crossing of the Helcaraxe but that the Exiles held they ended only with the overthrow of Morgoth.
The transition from “years of the Trees” to “years of the Sun” occurs immediately within the various texts. The feast of Mereth Aderthad, for example, is held “when twenty years of the Sun had passed”. “The Tale of Years” only takes up the transition and enlarges upon it without deciding the issue of exact chronological references. The original conclusion was written: “Here ends the First Age of the Children of Iluvatar” (which cannot be equated with the “the First Age of the Elves”). However, J.R.R. Tolkien revised the conclusion to say, “Here end the Elder Days with the passing of Melkor, according to the reckoning of most lore-masters; here ends also the First Age ….”
Unfortunately, Christopher Tolkien does not confirm that this language remained exactly in that form through subsequent revisions — nor does he provide any information about what may have followed “also the First Age” as suggested by the ellipsis. The Children of Iluvatar were rightly both Elves and Men (but Dwarves were adopted by Iluvatar and so included among the Children). However, would a First Age of the Children have to include all of the Children or need it include only some of the Children at its beginning? Perhaps wishing to avoid providing a “correct” answer to this question Tolkien left the wording intentionally ambiguous.
But where in all this does the expression “ages of the Sun” come from — an expression which I have used liberally for many years and which I was falsely accused of coining? To the best of my knowledge, the earliest occurrence of the expression is found in a David Day book, Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. I have occasionally said that David Day coined the expression but to be honest I don’t know.
On the other hand, it is completely appropriate to refer to the four+ ages into which Tolkien divides the “years of the Sun” in his “tales of years” documents (Appendix B in The Lord of the Rings uses this name while only providing dates for the Second Age and the Third Age) as “ages of the Sun” because that is what they are — ages denoted in historical narratives as measured in terms of years of the Sun. In this context, and according to Tolkien’s own numbering system, the First Age of the Sun began with the year in which the Sun first rose — but this “age of the Sun” was itself considered to be part of the Elder Days by the Noldor of Middle-earth (although not by the lore-masters of Valinor, with whom the Numenoreans supposedly had contact for over two thousand years (of the Sun)).
The faux distinctions that some writers draw between “the First Age of the Children of Iluvatar” and the “First Age of the Sun” are based on faulty logic, that J.R.R. Tolkien somehow had produced a final document which asserted exactly and precisely what a “First Age of the Children of Iluvatar” might be — when in fact he abandoned that expression. Some Websites, such as Tolkien Gateway, perpetuate this error by citing inappropriate “authorities” that have published nothing credible.
The Elder Days are not properly defined or denoted or characterized by any set of “ages” within a single timeline or measured according to a single standard. Tolkien’s intentions are not entirely clear and apparently were never fully realized; about all we can be sure of is that he made a good faith effort to represent several historical annotative voices in his chronologies, both to include the evolution of the political and ethnic groups recording the histories and to account for logical inconsistencies that might have arisen due to changes in style and method. That is probably why at one stage in the evolution of these chronologies he decided that Rumil of Valinor wrote the earlier chronologies and Pengolod of Middle-earth wrote the later chronologies — and yet only Rumil was mentioned in The Lord of the Rings.
Most likely we’ll always have debate and division over the collective arrangement of Tolkien’s chronologies; the most ancient chronologies were left incomplete and without a defining narrative authority. Nonetheless, if one wishes to be precise in making reference to events that occurred in Middle-earth, then one can do no better than to refer to the “Ages of the Sun” (as opposed to the “Ages of the Trees”) when referring to the events and civilizations from the rising of the Sun onwards, even though the chronological computations don’t always agree when converting from Years of the Trees to Years of the Sun.
See also:
# # #
Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
