We’re not sure we’re mentally prepared enough to come to terms with discovering when The Lord of the Rings takes place.

This Middle-earth saga has always seemed like a medieval adventure so far away from our own world.

Yet, shockingly, this might not be the case at all.

Finding out that there was a hidden tenth member in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was a big enough surprise for us.

That was until this happened.

Redditor SuperCalculon started their discussion with quite the opener: “TIL that Lord of the Rings takes place in the real world, and that we are now in the Seventh Age.”

We’re sorry, what?

It turns out they are indeed correct, as demonstrated by the pieces of evidence other fans brought to the discussion.

Fellow Reddit user kremliner shared an excerpt describing a night sky Frodo looks upon as he leaves the Shire.

“’Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars and… red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire….and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt’.

“Given that this passage happens after midnight in autumn, the timing and description perfectly matches Orion, a rising Mars, and the Pleiades cluster in the Taurus constellation.”

Watching the night sky this autumn is going to hit differently, we can tell you.

It isn’t just The Lord of the Rings that reaffirms this connection to our own world, but the writing from The Hobbit, too.

“Having just re-read the Hobbit, I noticed that it’s written as if there is a narrator, and sometimes the narrator will speak directly to the reader.

“At some points, it says things like ‘what we now know as’ and other references that seem to show the narrator is one of us, from our own time,” adds a since deleted user.

While Middle-earth isn’t a “literal rendition of earth history”, the similarities between its history and our own are striking.

It’s certainly food for thought.