Later Centuries
Tolkien's writing does not provide information on more than the first few centuries of this age, so it is not known when it ended. It is stated that the Fourth Age was when Men became dominant and powerful in Middle-earth, and the Fading of the Elves began. As such, the Fourth Age marks the bridge from the fantastic fictional prehistory of earth to the real history. He notes elsewhere in The Silmarillion, however, that the Elves count their own dwindling from the time of the first rise of the Sun, and some epithets for the Sun by the Elves refer to it in that context.
Read more about this topic: Fourth Age
Famous quotes containing the word centuries:
“As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The Cad is the entire epitome, the complete blossom and fruit in one, of what we are told is an age of culture. Behold him in the vélodrome as he yells insanely after his kind as they tear along on their tandem machines in a match, and then ask yourself candidly, O my reader, if any age before this in all the centuries of earth ever produced any creature so utterly low and loathsome, so physically, mentally, individually, and collectively hideous?”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)