TimeMaps

We thought we'd do something completely different today, and have a bit of fun!

With the film "The Hobbit" coming out, the goings-on in Middle-earth are on some people's minds again.

JRR Tolkien set The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in a fascinating world, with its own highly elaborate, and extremely well-worked out, history. He clearly possessed a very good historical understanding: the history of the Third Age of Middle-earth is a wonderful story of the decline and fall of a great civilization (my guess is that he was influenced by Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; there are many parallels).

Anyhow, we have spent a little time creating what is basically a quick, rough overview of the history of Middle-earth in the Third Age. It contains only a tiny selection of vast amount of detailed information which Tolkien put into his work: there are literally hundreds and hundreds of people, places, genealogies, races and so on. We have selected a tiny, tiny fragment of this, to give you a broad overview (otherwise we would have been on with it for months, rather than the few hours we set aside for this little project!).

A Brief History of Middle-earth in the Third Age

Have fun!

By Peter Britton