We are listening to Lord of the Rings for my son (I refuse to read it aloud again), and there is a strong “degeneration” theme in it. The men of Westernesse were so much cooler, smarter, stronger, better skilled, and longer living than the plain vanilla men of the current time. The elves used to be so much stronger and more numerous. Anything powerful or amazing must have been crafted a long time ago because everyone has lost the skills to make such a thing. It seems to span across almost all civilizations and races across the map. It even seems to apply to roads and trade which is less common than it use to be.
It seems to be something of a “universal degeneration” because it seems more broad than just “there used to be more heroes and kids respected their parents.”
Has there ever been a time in human history when this was true, i.e. when there was a much better time in the past? Not counting short term fluctuations, but a real better age of humans?
I think that’s a little easy and facile. The rule of Rome, outside of the home counties so to speak, was not especially pleasant, and there were prices for the general population to pay for the long straight roads and some local peace. I’m no expert, but I don’t think there are many historians who would call the Roman Empire a golden age.
Right. I don’t get the whole “we shouldn’t call them the Dark Ages” thing. It seems clear to me that things did in fact regress during that time period in comparison to the days of the Hellenistic period, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire. That should be obvious just by looking at the literature available from those time periods. There’s way more stuff that was written and that is still around from the times of the Greek and Roman heydays than there was during the Dark Ages.
That’s why I said, localized, for an inhabitant of Rome the Empire and the Republic were far better times, outside of the City proper… probably not so much-
The period after the Bronze Age Collapse, which is likely the original source of the trope. They suffered major regression in everything from population to technology.
For example, the origin of the term “cyclopean masonry” is the fact that the post-Collapse Greeks looking at the ruins of their predecessors attributed them to the myth of the Cyclops because they couldn’t imagine humans building such things.
As I recall, Tolkien studied Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature of the Early Middle Ages.
While this wouldn’t have been literature from the regions that had been most directly under Roman control, most of it was written by Christians who had relatively recently been practicing shamanism under the Odin pantheon.
As such, they would have been looking back at the end of Rome, through their Christian faith, and the end of their own legends as great warriors.
I don’t know, but until the 19th Century at the earliest there wasn’t a time in human history when people didn’t think it was true. Belief in a “golden age” has always been the guiding principle of the vast majority of humanity.
Tolkien also studied Irish myth and literature. Early 20th Century Irish writers tended to heavily romanticize the good old days before the English conquest.
I don’t doubt that there might’ve been some individuals who believed that, I find it very hard to accept that the notion was wide spread.
Shamanism under Odin? I can’t really makes those two things work together.
Can we please drop the whole Dark Ages myth. It’s extremely Eurocentric. And even if we confine ourselves to Western Europe (since Eastern was Byzantium and certainly not dark), the Dark Ages introduced the University to the world.
But the early Medieval period, 500-800 or so?
The problem is that there are not as many written records from that era, and historians are loath to leave their offices, hence history being the study of documents (as compared to archeology).
The myth of the Dark Ages got traction during the Enlightenment, because they needed to contrast their own Golden Age with a barbarian past.
Probably the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Ruin’ which starts:
These wall-stones are wondrous — calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.
It goes on, and its betting that the buildings were once grand, but also that everyone in them looked like a Hollywood star, and there were gold and jewels aplenty, and they farted perfume (not in the text but was probably in the damaged bit).
Directly to the OP’s question, there will always be past times where people built stuff that has lasted and made it look like they were technically accomplished. What really sets apart the ‘Golden Age’ is that it has the people themselves somehow being better / more heroic / nobler than regular humans of the present age, rather than just being jerks in togas or mithril.