The Middle-Earth Campaign Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth The current year for our Middle-Earth campaign is set during the year of 2946 of the Third Age. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien

In the current timeline of J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, Middle-earth as depicted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings has long passed into a mythical antiquity. According to Tolkien's own letters and later writings, the world is now our own modern Earth, some 6,000 to 7,000 years after the events of the Third Age.

The magic and the various non-human races have long faded or become hidden from human sight, leaving behind the world as we know it, where the great tales of Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits are but a distant memory, if remembered at all.

The story for the modern day is not one of new battles against Dark Lords or epic quests, but rather the quiet reality of the "dominion of Men". The Fourth Age saw the rise of human kingdoms, particularly the Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor under King Aragorn II Elessar, bringing an era of peace and reconstruction.

During this time, the other races began their slow, inevitable decline. The Elves, already waning, continued to sail West to the Undying Lands, their presence in Middle-earth diminishing over time until only a very few remained in places like Mirkwood and the Grey Havens.

The Dwarves also started to dwindle. While they had periods of recovery and cooperation with men, their numbers decreased, and they largely retreated into their mountain halls, their great cities like Erebor and the Iron Hills eventually falling silent. Tolkien hinted that they might still exist in the modern world, very good at staying hidden from the "Big Folk".

The Ents, the ancient tree-shepherds, never found the Ent-wives and slowly became more tree-like, fading into the forests until they were no longer a conscious force in the world. The Hobbits, the unlikely heroes of the Third Age, returned to the Shire and lived on in peace for many generations.

They were eventually driven into hiding by the increasing aggression and expansion of Men, and in the modern Seventh Age, they remain elusive, small folk who avoid contact with us because we are too large and boisterous for their quiet ways. Their stories are myths, their existence debated by the very Men who share their world.

Therefore, "what is currently going on" in Middle-earth is simply human history as we know it, with all its complexities and conflicts, but stripped of the overt magic and fantastical creatures of the earlier ages. The geographical shape of the world has even shifted over millennia, a global flood and other geological changes eventually morphing the map of Middle-earth into our current continents.

The events of The Hobbit movie trilogy—culminating in the Battle of Five Armies and the re-establishment of the Kingdom Under the Mountain—were some of the last major conflicts involving a united front of different races. The subsequent War of the Ring was the definitive end of that era, ushering in the Age of Men.

So, as we look around the world today, we are, in a sense, living in Middle-earth's future. The great deeds and dramatic events of the Third Age have passed into legend, and the world is now ours to shape, for better or worse, without the overt intervention of Valar or the constant threat of a Dark Lord's shadow. The current story of Middle-earth is the story of humanity's world, where the remaining magic is found only in stories and the hope that the small, quiet goodness of the Hobbits still exists somewhere, just out of sight.