I was thinking about this today for some strange reason (maybe to avoid doing homework??) and now it's got me really intrigued.
Has anyone come up with a timeline for the series? I looked through and haven't been able to find anything that really gets there.
I'm more concerned with the time between the Great White and the events in the books. I haven't got my copy of Obernewtyn close to hand but I remember there that it gave some details about what happened in the Age of Chaos etc, but not how long it went for or how long from the AoC to the start of the series.
Just a thought that occured to me after reading the scene in The Sending with the Rhenlings - a completely new or so badly mutated species would have taken hundreds of generations to evolve the way they have - obviously without knowing more of their life cycle it's hard to tell how long a "generation" is though and also the many comments about how the mountain range Elspeth etc were wandering over had been glowing green in her youth and that some places were now able to support life again.
Anyway, the point was, do we know (and did I just miss it?) how long it's been since the Great White? I was under the impression it was several hundred years at least, but then some of the comments in The Sending and The Stone Key made me think that maybe it was only 3-4 generations....
With the many changes that happen throughout the books, I believe that the "Beforetime" is about 1000 years in the future from now and that another 1000 years has passed after the GW. It would take that long for any radiation to start to go away and for several generations of radiation deformity of the Rhenlings plus a little evolution. Plus you have to look at all that has happened to all the cities like Sutrium; it takes a while to rebuild things like that.
11 years ago
Tue Jan 08 2013, 11:43am
From the books, I would guess that the Great White is suppossed to occur about 50-100 years in the future from now (because, frankly most of the changes from our world to the 'beforetimers'' could be the result of a single world war which could occur over 3-5 years). I think Elspeth would have been born maybe 300-500 years after the great white, because this seems long enough for many generations of smaller creatures and about 10-15 generations of humans (by my family's standards anyway) which seems about right as there are only small mutations due to radiation poisoning in babies but no huge changes in human life.
You will be happy to know that I am almost done with a visual timeline of Elspeth's age. While it never mentions exact ages or birthdays in The Obernewtyn Chronicles, I have been able to get down exactly how many years have passed and I will very shortly be posting it in the art section.
11 years ago
Sat Feb 09 2013, 02:06pm
I was just re-reading the series, and I noticed that in the Farseekers when Pavo and Elspeth (and others) are looking through the beforetime library for the first time, Pavo says 'We are the first in hundreds of years to come here. The first since the Old-timers.' I hope this is useful. :)
EDIT: Also, I have been thinking about this as I have been re-reading the Obernewtyn series and I realised that Elspeth says many times that "Louis Larkin had once told me that he remembered, as a boy, hearing Marissa Seraphim purchase the great doors." (Ashling p.240) As Elspeth later guesses that Cassy made the doors herself, this means that Louis, who I would guess to be around 80 years old, had been born when there were still people alive from the beforetime-era. Of course, Cassy could have been a very old woman when this happened (lets say also 80) and the Great White would have occurred when she was about 20, so this would mean that Elspeth is living (in Ashling) maybe about 135 years after the Great White. This is if my calculations of the characters ages are correct. Really it would be a maximum of 135 years ago if these characters were younger than I thought.
