I have a question about historical memory in Tolkien, and I'm wondering a bit whether @BretDevereaux can answer it.
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And it's the gaps that are odd to me. Faramir and Boromir know a great deal about Isildur and Anarion. Boromir knows that Isildur lurked about Minas Tirith for a while educating his nephew!
So, that's actually exactly the kind of patchy knowledge I'd expect! Take a look at the sources we have, for instance, for the Middle/Late Roman Republic. For some years, we have Livy *and* Polybius, and we're really well informed! But in other years, the relevant sections...
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...of Livy and Polybius are lost, and all we have are later summaries of their work. Often that means literally knowing, "An important battle at <place> happened in this year and <side> won." Sometimes we're left trying to sketch out the events of a decade from...
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...really disjointed biographies (esp. Plutarch) because while there *were* narrative sources for these important battles, they don't survive. And that's with a fairly complete reckoning of all of the material that made it out of the classical past.
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