Great Ships

When the Ent Treebeard thought back to the coming of the Wizards to Middle-earth, he recalled that they had first been seen in Middle-earth after the 'Great Ships' had come over the ocean. Treebeard was immensely old; he would have been alive at that time, and may even have seen these ships for himself, but nonetheless his account is difficult to square with what we know from other sources of Middle-earth's history.

Treebeard's 'Great Ships' must be a reference to the ships of the Númenóreans, either those that travelled to Middle-earth at the height of Númenor's power from II 600, or the much later ships that brought Elendil and his people across the Great Sea after the Downfall of II 3319. Other records of the coming of the Wizards, however, place there arrival about a thousand years into the Third Age, long after the last Númenórean vessel had sailed to Middle-earth.

It is not impossible that Treebeard was simply confused about the timing (he admits himself that he was unsure on at least some of the details), though an error of a thousand years or more seems difficult to credit. Alternatively, perhaps our other dating sources are only speaking of the Wizards known in the Third Age, while Treebeard was thinking of other Wizards from an earlier Age. In fact, in later writings Tolkien did come to consider the possibility of such earlier Wizards¹, though their existence is not hinted at in The Lord of the Rings. To confuse matters, however, Treebeard's account goes on to immediately discuss Saruman, apparently implying that he had been among those associated with the Great Ships, an idea that would be hard to fit into the known timeline on any reading.