Subject: The Age of the Elf.
Author:
Posted on: 2019-01-17 09:46:00 UTC
(It's like the Age of the Dinosaurs: "Never before... has life on Earth... been this pretty.")
What you've got there is a pretty good estimate of Agent Dafydd's age: he lived through all of that stuff as Maglor. His age is actually going to be crucial to figuring out Agent Huinesoron's, so let's go over this piece by piece.
1/ How old were the Feanorian boys when the Trees died? Tolkien Gateway handily has a timeline of the Ages of the Trees, which tells us that Feanor was born in the adjusted Year of the Sun 11,201, and made the Silmarils in 13,894. Somewhere in that ~2600 years, his kids were born - but when?
There's several approaches to take here, but I'm going to take the simplest: Maedhros and Fingon were friends, which suggests they're about the same age. The timeline has Fingon's siblings born in 12,457 and 13,051, which suggests Fingon might have been born around 12,000.
That actually seems a bit early: Finarfin hadn't even gotten married at that point, and Finrod acts like a contemporary of at least the middle Feanorions. So perhaps we should assume Aredhel was a late birth, and take the spacing of Finarfin's children, who were all born in that same period. Dividing that up gives us ~150 years between children, placing Fingon and Maedhros in 12,300 (just after Finarfin's wedding), and Maglor in 12,450.
The Sun and Moon rose in 14,373, so your estimate of 2000 years in Valinor is spot on for Maglor.
2/ How long is there between the end of the Third Age and the present day? Tolkien estimated 6000 years (I wonder which Archbishop of Armagh he got that from... ^_~) so let's just accept that. That puts Dafydd's age at 15,000 years, but a different Third-Age-to-Now number would change that.
3/ Why do I keep going on about Dafydd? Because of the interesting fact that Agent Huinesoron had a friend who was friends with Maglor. That means they're about the same age; hS is probably a little younger, let's call it 1800 years before the Sun rose.
4/ What happened next? For 455 years, hS lived in the cities of Finrod Felagund. And then... he died. Yes, there's a story to that; it's in an upcoming mission.
(Running age: 1800+455 = 2255 years.)
How long did he stay dead? We know that Finrod was released from Mandos before the end of the First Age, and Glorfindel by the middle of the Second, but they were very special cases. There's no indication that anyone else got out by the end of the Third Age - which is when the last of the renegade Noldor returned, which would be a good time to reconsider things. So let's guess at ~100 of the Fourth Age for hS's release.
We don't count time while dead in his age (... obviously?), so he picks up at 2255. He pokes around in Valinor for a bit, indulging his interest in geology and archaeology - but those disciplines are kind of pointless when you can just ask the people who lived there - and the Power who made the rocks in the first place. How long could you handle that - 200 years maybe?
And then he steals a boat and leaves.
(That's not quite as bad as it sounds - hS is half-Teleri, so he had a hand in building said boat. In fact, let's add 50 years for that 'interest' to get him far enough for his plan to work.)
At age 2500, Huinesoron returns to Middle-earth. If we take Tolkien's figures, it's now ~3600 BC. Stonehenge has not yet been built, horses are on the verge of domestication in Russia, and what was once Middle-earth is about to enter the Bronze Age. It's about 400 years to the time of the Pharoahs.
Alternately, it's less than 130 years since the death of Eldarion of the Reunited Kingdom. Unless the New Shadow affair ended with the complete destruction of Numenorean civilisation, Minas Tirith should still be thriving. A quick speculation: maybe Gondor gets hit by a cataclysm around 350 years from now, wiping it from the map, and the survivors flee to northern Harad to become the First Dynasty of Egypt?
Anyway, that doesn't matter, for one simple reason: Huinesoron still uses Quenya as his preferred language. That's the act of someone whose most recent long residence was in Valinor, not someone who spent thousands of years watching mortal civilisation grow. I don't know how he wound up in HQ, but I estimate he did so within 100 years of landing on the Hither Shore.
Agent Huinesoron joined the PPC about 20 years ago (give or take 5). Adding everything together, his age comes to 2620. That makes him probably older than our Time Lords, but I wouldn't be surprised to find an older active agent among the non-human population of HQ.
hS