July 19, 2002

The Characters and Their Ages
David H.

Hi all. This is my first post here, but I've been following all these good debates for some time. I find them all very fascinating.

You can find the birthdates of almost all of the main characters if you look in the appendix to ROTK. The War of the Ring occured mostly in TA3019 so you can easily determine all their ages. I did that and came up with the following. I've converted all Shire Reckoning years to Third Age years for ease of comparison.

Bilbo: born in 2890 age in 3019 = 129*
Frodo: b.2968 = 51*
Merry: b.2982 = 37
Pippen: b.2990 = 29
Sam: b.2980 = 39**

Aragorn: b.2931 = 88*
Boromir: b.2978 = 41
Gimli: b.2879 = 140
Legolas: no birthdate given

*Aragorn's birthday is listed as March first. Which means he turned 88 on the day he met Gandalf the White in Fangorn forest. Frodo and Bilbo's birthday is on Sept. 22, so these ages are from after the war is over.

**There is a discrepancy over Sam's birthdate. The geneology tables list it as 2980, but the chronology has it as 2983. I've chosen the first date because I believe he's older than Merry.

Other characters:

Denethor II: b.2930 = 89
Faramir: b.2983 = 36
Theoden: b.2948 = 71
Eomer: b.2991 = 28
Eowyn: b.2995 = 24
Arwen: b.241 = 2778

Gollum: no birthdate given, but he found the Ring sometime around 2463, making him around 575 years old, give or take.

Gandalf of course is immortal, and first came to Middle Earth around TA1000. Legolas' age is unknown, but probably hundreds of years, if not thousands.

Remember also that many of these characters have lifespans much longer than normal humans. The hobbits probably look a little younger than their ages suggest (Remember Bergil mistook Pippen for a youth). Aragorn is a Numenorean with a very pure bloodline, and therefore much younger in body than his real age. Denethor, Boromir, and Faramir also have Numenorean blood, but not to the purity of Aragorn's lineage. Dwarves live for hundreds of years, so Gimli is probably in the prime of life. And of course Bilbo and Frodo both had possesion of the Ring, which halted their aging process at the time they took possession (Bilbo at 51, Frodo at 33), though Bilbo started aging again rapidly after he gave the Ring up. So Theoden, Eomer, and Eowyn may be the only characters here that look like their real ages!

I hope this helps out. :-)