Mon 02 Aug 2021, 15:31
Great question. These are exactly the type of things I like to think about as well. I once spent an inordinate amount of time researching exactly what state of decay you would expect corpses/skeletons to be in within a tomb after x years, x decades, and x centuries, etc... because I was trying to think of a realistic way to explain the existence of fully structural skeletons within my "ancient tomb". In other words, I wanted to see how "ancient" I could make it and still reasonably have skeletons. It was a real dilemma in my head because even if I wanted to hit the magical preservation button, that in my mind would have produced zombies, since one would thought that such a thing would occur shortly after death before decay to a skeleton state!
One thing that really strikes me about Tolkien's setting is how incredibly ancient Middle earth history really is. The Third age alone is nearly 4,000 years at the time of our setting ... or in real world equivalent, basically encompanssing most of the entirety of written human history in just one age! In real world timeline equivalent, the end of Numenor and the Second age would precede a lot of the recorded history in the Old Testament of the Bible.That really gives perspective to a place like Gondor... it's basically like saying a country today is a direct surviving remnant of a civilization that predates Classical Greek Civ in the real world by about 1,500 years! I suppose the close real world paradign would be the modern nation state of Israel (atleast as it perceives itself). So when we are talking weapons and armor from the first age of middle earth, that would be equivalent to saying leather armor from Neolithic hunter/gatherers is still preserved today! (As mentioned above, completely possible in an anaerobic environment, but pretty hard to imagine elsewise.
Then again... there is alway punching the easy button and saying magic did it, it is fantasy after all.