Forum:Movie vs Book Timeline Issues Solved



I was thinking about Thranduil's line at the end of the Battle of the Five Armies about Legolas going to find Aragorn, people online disagreed and said Aragorn was 10 at the time (true in book lore).

I then spent way more time than necessary pulling together dates and making an Excel document.

The most glaring issue is that Movie!FotR clearly doesn't take place when Frodo is 50, (which IS his age in the book) since he looks like he's barely 20, he also is seemingly contemporary with Merry and Pippin, who are supposedly much younger than him in the book. He also does not look nearly as old as Bilbo is in the Hobbit, therefore the 17 year gap between Bilbo's 111th Birthday and FotR didn't happen in the film.

Since Aragorn states his age in RotK as 87, we therefore have to move his date of birth back in the Movie timeline, meaning he was 25 during BoFA, which was five years after he left Rivendell and a couple years before he went to fight for Rohan and Gondor, firmly placing him with the Dunedain Rangers. Meaning that Thranduil is sending Legolas to the right place at the right time.

Anyway, I couldn't find anyone on this site talking about this, and I couldn't find a page referencing it, so I thought I would pose my theory here.