Template talk:History of Arda

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[edit] A few changes

I made a few changes to this template:

(1) Split it into rows to make clear it is not a purely chronological progression being shown here, but rather a series of articles giving an overview of the History of Arda. My reasoning for the rows was that we have: (a) Ainulindale and Valian Years for the creation and beginning of Arda, and that (I think) Valian Years could be seen to apply to the whole History of Arda from its creation to its end; (b) The "Years of..." bit are three discrete periods used to count years within Arda, which stand alongside the Valian Years system (which continued to be used in Aman); (c) The "Ages of the Children of Iluvatar" bit includes both "Years of the Trees" and "Years of the Sun", hence the separate row; (d) The Dagor Dagorath bit is a natural "end" section.

(2) I also added an entry for "Later Ages" to make clear that the intention was for there to be more than four ages. I linked this to a section I created in Fourth Age (more discussion of that article on its talk page), but this messes up the navigation use of this template to travel around these articles. When you are in the "Fourth Age" article after clicking on "Later Ages", the "Fourth Age" link in the series box (this template) goes dead, but the "Later Ages" one remains active. I fear there is no other way to "correct" this other than changing the link from the template to "Later Ages" and creating a redirect from "Later Ages" to "Fourth Age". Is there a more elegant way to solve this little problem?

I've since changed this, and am now happy with the way it looks. I think the only way to get to "Fourth Age" when expecting "Later Ages" is by searching for "Later Ages" or clicking this piped link in this template. Either way, the hatnote at "Fourth Age" tells the reader why they have ended up there.

(3) Problem with wiki-mark-up: I added border="1" to the table instructions, but the border doesn't seem to go all around the box. Is there a way to fix this?

Hope this is all clear. Carcharoth 08:04, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Organizing the different time periods is difficult due to overlaps and changes. That's one reason I'd just left it as is. For instance, Ainulindale was actually intended to cover events 'before time and the creation of Ea'... in The published Silmarillion the end of it describes the entry of the Ainur into Ea, but that was an editorial alteration by Christopher Tolkien. Also, as you note, 'Years of the Lamps' and 'Years of the Trees' were of the same length and really just different periods of the 'Valian Years'... which then continued to be counted even after the loss of the Trees (the elvish 'yen' was the same figure). I think that the current sections are reasonable except that I'd separate out Ainulindale and possibly combine Valian Years with the three below it (possibly indenting the three to show that they are 'subsets' of the span of Valian Years). --CBDunkerson 12:16, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I decided to go ahead and make these changes. Let me know what you think. I also did what I think you were asking for with the border - the reason it appeared not to go all the way around was that the full box border and section border were different colors and conflicting with each other. --CBDunkerson 12:30, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

The table looks fine now - thanks! About the Years of the Sun being a subset of Valian Years, I'm now confused. From reading the Valian Years article, I get the impression that Valian Years are of different lengths to Years of the Sun, so it seems to me that it might be best to just remove the indentation and leave the four types of "Years" in their own section, possibly putting "Valian Years" in its own section as well. This was part of the reason I lumped "Valian Years" in with "Ainulindale". Maybe for the actual article on the Timeline of Arda, a table layout could show this overlapping structure visually? Have Valian Years in one column, and "Years of" in the second column, and "Ages" in a third column. Then you can tweak the number of rows and merge across rows (if you can do that in Wikimark-up) to show the overlaps. Maybe even get the scale roughly right? Carcharoth 19:48, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the lengths are different. I was talking about the two classifications as 'portions of Middle-earth history'... the time period covered by the Years of the Sun is also covered by the Valian Years. Thus, 'Years of the Sun' are (like 'Years of the Lamps' and 'Years of the Trees') a subset of the total time covered by 'Valian Years'. A chart to show the relationships could certainly be done... though it would probably be easier to create an image file showing the details. Making the 'scale' line up could be tricky as there is considerable debate over what the 'correct' scale of Valian Year to Sun Year should be (Tolkien used different factors at various times). --CBDunkerson 21:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, I used another type of line to show that Valian Years are different from other years, but that they are all types of years. Hope that looks OK. The reason I didn't like the indentation way of showing this, was that it kind of implied, to me, that Years of the Sun are a type of Valian Year, in the same way that the Ages are examples of Ages of Children of Iluvatar. I hope the way I've put it is a slight improvement. Of course, this should all be explained clearly in the articles, and some sort of charts would definitely be helpful there. Carcharoth 09:23, 16 April 2006 (UTC)