In the Shadow of the Past

 

A neolithic long barrow in England

One of the more unfamiliar things in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is that it is in most senses taking place in an era which is less glorious, less populated, and less sophisticated than the same region had been hundreds and indeed thousands of years before.

This is not a way that we as modern people are used to thinking about the past.  And to make it odder, some of the features that Tolkien uses are ones which we are familiar with but think of as belonging to more primitive people in the distant past.

In the "Fog on the Barrow Downs" chapter of Fellowship of the Ring (and to a great extent again in the Paths of the Dead in Return of the King) characters encounter ancient features which seem similar to the megalithic monuments (including barrows) in England, with which Tolkien himself would have been familiar.  (There are also barrows, mounds, and other megalithic structures on the continent.)

In our world, the barrows were built in two waves.  The long barrows (like the one above) were build by Neolithic farmers in the centuries around 3500 BC.  These peoples has no written language, did not work metal, did not have the wheel, and buried their dead with artifacts such as tools made from antlers and polished stone axes.  

Then, more than thousand years later, the Bronze Age peoples who had almost completely replaced Britain's Neolithic inhabitants built round barrows in which they buried their elite dead with offerings that included gold jewelry, bronze daggers, etc.

Somewhat similar, though not exactly barrows, the Anglo Saxons who lived in Britain in the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire sometimes buried their dead under mounds or in whole buried ships.

So several different cultures had burials which resembled the barrows in Tolkien, but what they all had in common was that they were much more primitive in their culture and technology than the medieval to early modern material culture which seems to predominate in Tolkien's Middle Earth at the time of Lord of the Ring.

The grave goods which the Hobbits find in the barrow are from the Numenorean kingdom of Cardolan, a subset of the older and larger realm of Arnor where Isildur had ruled.  It was from that kingdom, which has fought against the forces of the Witch King of Angmar, that the dagger which Merry takes into battle came.  And, in the end, it achieves the purpose it was made for 1500+ years before when Merry stabs the Witch King with it in the Battle of Pelennor Fields.

Unlike the Anglo Saxons in England, much less the Bronze Age or Neolithic peoples thousands of years before, the kingdom of Cardolan seems to have been more populated and more sophisticated than the inhabitants of Middle Earth we see in Lord of the Rings.  And they, in turn, were fewer in number and less in power than the men of Gondor and Arnor in the time of the Last Alliance between Elves and Men another 1400 years before, when Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anarion fought against Sauron in alliance with Gil-galad.

So in Middle Earth, the contents of the barrows are remnants of a more glorious, more populated, more powerful time, as are monuments we see such as the giant Argonath statues or other relics of the past such as the Palantir "seeing stones".

Now, two things are worth noting, before I go further, just in the interest of showing all the complications.  

First, it's dubious to talk about the different eras of Middle Earth as being more or less "advanced" in the sense of technology, in that Tolkien is fundamentally not dealing with a technological era.  Some elements of this can be a bit odd.  In some ways the Hobbits seem quite advanced, with their mill and vaguely 17th or 18th century vibe.  But really Middle Earth is not a place of technology.  The only person who seems bent on technology as an advancement is Saruman, and his fixation on this is not a good sign when it comes to his moral character.

Second, although the grave goods in the barrows and the most recently buried people there are Numenoreans from the kingdom of Cardolan, in the appendices it is briefly mentioned that many of the barrows were originally built long before in the First Age by the Edain, the first peoples who would become the ancestors of the Numenoreans, before they even crossed the Blue Mountains into the west and met the Elves to become involved in the great war against Morgoth. But although the Edain are clearly a long time ago, I don't think that Tolkien would necessarily think of them as primitive in the way that Neolithic peoples were or perhaps even Bronze Age peoples.

But leaving aside these details, I think it is fair to say as an overall point that in Tolkien the characters in Lord of the Rings are living in a period which is lesser in almost every way than 1600 years ago and indeed than 3000 years ago.  They are truly living in the shadow of the past.

This is very much not how we think of ourselves today.  We reflexively think of the past as being more primitive, poorer, less populated, and that is because for us, it is.  And not only for us.  For 500 years or more the path of progress has seemed self evident and it is a path which seem to slope inexorably upward.

However, this is not how all places and times have seen things, and it has not aways been an accurate way to see things.

The Ancient Greeks, especially the early authors such as Homer and Hesiod, seem to have thought of themselves as living in a diminished age, a lesser one than the ages of the gods and of heroes, which had come before.  

Homer says:

"Few are the sons and heirs who can measure up to their fathers;

Most are the worse by far, and few are those who can best them."

Odyssey, Book II, 276-277 (Daniel Mendelsohn translation)

And Hesiod draws out a whole schema of decline in Works & Days (starting at line 110): 

First in the time when Cronos ruled, there was the Golden race of mortal men, and they "liked like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them...  They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods." (Evelyn-White translation)

Then after this first race of mortal men died out, the gods made "a second generation which was silver and less noble by far."  They were foolish as children, and lived only a little time in their prime "and that in sorrow because of their foolishness, for they could not keep from sinning and from wrongong one another."

Zeus becomes angry and gets rid of that generation because they do not honor the gods, and so after them came a third race: "a brazen race, sprung from ash trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age but was terrible and strong. They loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence."

After these men of the bronze era died out, another race was made by the gods, "which was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own."  These, Hesiod says, are the men who fought over Thebes with Oedipus, who fought the Trojan War over Helen, and inhabited other stories.  

But this race of men died out as well, leaving behind the fifth age of men, among which Hesiod unhappily numbers himself, "would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards.  For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day and from perishing by night."

So Hesiod, sees himself as living in the lowest and worst age of men.

I don't think Tolkien exactly sees the end of the Third Age of Middle Earth in this light, but you could see certain similarities.  The early days of Gondor and Arnor under Elendil were far greater than the later days of the divided kingdoms, and those days were greater than the time in which Frodo, Sam, and Aragorn live.  But even Elendil's time was a diminished time compared to the high age of Numenor, before it fell.

But I don't think Tolkien simply sees it as decline (and in general he didn't draw much of Greek mythology.)  I think in Tolkien's world, there's also an element of the Christian idea of the Fall.

There's not precisely an Adam and Eve story in Middle Earth that we know of, but there is the fall of Melkor which brings evil into the world, and both the Elves and Men are clearly fallen beings who can be turned to evil and are frequently subject to temptations to pride, greed, wrath, etc.

The high Numenorians were higher in part because they were closer to the angelic Valar.  They lived within sight of the blessed lands. And their descendants have diminished in part because since the fall of Numenor, which was a Fall in the Christian sense because it was effectively a rebellion against God's order, the later generations are living further and further from the memory of seeing and living near the Blessed Lands.

So in some sense, the age of Lord of the Rings is the most fallen period -- at least, the longest since anyone could remember the time before the Fall.  (It's more complicated than this, even, because clearly the men before the war against Melkor were even then fallen, but there's some sense in which the era of Numenor was less fallen that the times before and after, even though it was not an Edenic time.)

But this is not a one-way diminishment.  While there's no real talk of it in LotR, I think in Tolkien's mind there was still the clear expectation that at some point the world would be redeemed, and so it would at some point become less fallen through being in closer contact with the Redeemer.  

In some sense, we're seeing a diminished world in LotR because we're seeing that low point between when humans were still in touch with the angelic world of the Valar, and the point when Iluvitar's plan comes to its full fruition in a way which even the Valar to not understand and cannot predict.

In the particular time of LotR, however, there is a similarity of the view of Hesiod:  People are less virtuous (further from the Blessed Realm).  They are shorter lived, less heroic, suffer more just to get by, and do not do the great deeds of before.  They are more in the power of the world, rather than having power over it.

It's key to note: none of this really has to do with technological progress one way or the other.  The age in which Frodo lives is not higher technology than the era 3000 years before when Elendil and Gil-galad fought Sauron (or the ages long before that when Elves and Men fought Melkor.)  Nor was that past age higher in technology.  The ages of Middle Earth, like the ages of Hesiod, are not really defined by technological progress (an alien concept to him) but rather by heroism and by the degree to which people were in connection with the divine powers and the degree to which people were in tune with the world rather than subject to its ravages.

This is why the pre-history of LotR is so little like how we ourselves think about pre-history.  (Side note: I'd love to have some idea how Tolkien thought about pre-history in our own world.)  When the Hobbits encounter the barrows in which warriors and rulers were buried 1600 years before, they are not seeing the relics of "less advanced" civilization. Indeed, they are in some ways seeing the relics of a more advanced civilization, but a civilization more advanced on a different axis than technology.