: I've thrown together a little graphic to illustrate this
: new theory:
Someone just linked me to this old post again, and it reminded me that some time between then and now I came across the metaphorical pizza box lid upon which the original Myth story plans were written, including a transcription of the LITERAL pizza box lid's "stuff that rocks" and "stuff that sucks" columns, and the first thing after that is a bit on the Four Ages. It lists them as:
Age of Light
Age of Silver
Age of Reason
Age of Gold
Then has a bit describing the current calendar as the "gold age" (Acit El) calendar, and it proceeds to discuss four other ages we are more familiar with, dating them in the Acit El system, from one comet to the next, over a span of exactly 500 years:
219-422: Axe Age
422-539: Sword Age
539-661: Wind Age
661-719: Wolf Age
All of these four ages are full of dark events, including most of the lead-up to TFL that we know about (Balor's appearance, the sack of Stoneheim and Muirthemne, the fir'Bolg alliance, the betrayal of the Myrmidons, etc). Notably, Mazzarin falls during the Wind Age here, but that's only less than 200 years before TFL.
I can see two ways to interpret these two sets of ages. One is that all four of these dark ages in the past 500 years are within the Age of Gold, given that they are dated in the Acit El calendar. Or, that that's just the calendar people are still using, it having been created at the end of the last light period; and those four nice-sounding ages are divisions of the previous light period, just like these four nasty-sounding ages are divisions of the current dark period.
Either way, we know this can't be perfectly reconciled with released canon events:
In the first case, if the Ages of Light-Gold are the past four 500-year periods between comets, then Connacht, who ushered in the "Age of Light" in canon, was the hero of four comets ago, not just the last comet; yet Connacht is also canonically the "great hero of the Wind Age", while he was already Balor in this scheme's Wind Age.
Likewise, in the second case, if the Ages of Light-Gold are just the 500 years of light between the last two comets, then Tireces who returned as Moagim to end the Age of Reason (in released canon) makes no sense.
Besides which, even some recent dates are off, e.g. Muirthemne falls over 180 years before TFL, not just 50 as in the released canon.
Nevertheless, I think we can take something from this. In my previous theory, I had the four (500-year) inter-comet eras named by the four Volupsa-named ages (Axe-Wolf), with two named light periods in the first half of each. With these four names for light ages now, and knowing that the Age of Light is the latest one and not the first, I think we can put together a map of Myth time like this now:
