Those familiar with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth will recall that Elves are longeval; not immortal, since they can be slain in battle, but nevertheless resistant to illness and extremely long-lived. “Ageless” – unlike mortal Men, with their sicknesses and senescence. Galadriel, who is several thousands of years old at the time during which The Fellowship of the Ring takes place, is described thus:
“… and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold, and the hair of Lord Celeborn was of silver long and bright; but no sign of age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes …”
“She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.”
In his Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, Sir Charles Bell documents the changes associated with the aging process, in particular for the “lower jaw bone”, or mandible. Below is Bell’s drawing of the mandible of an infant, a young adult, and an elderly person, showing the associated differences in the length, depth, and angle. Note especially how the angle between the body and the ramus changes, and how the alveolar process, which forms the tooth sockets, disappears after the teeth do:
When we look for the mental nerve, which exits the foramen of the same name (visible in the young adult mandible sketch, below the two premolar teeth), in gross anatomy, we often find that there is no foramen remaining, if the person had been edentulous (toothless) for many years before death. Here is another of Bell’s sketches, showing the skull and mandible of an aged person; again, the alveolar process has been resorbed:
It seems in Bell’s time, which was not so very long ago, it was just accepted that if you survived to old age, you would have lost all your teeth, and consequently the alveolar process of your mandible. Subjected to the age-related deterioration characteristic of mortal Men, Galadriel might have looked something like this:
I will diminish, and my teeth will go into the West….
Actually the loss of teeth is probably a recent phenomenon.
Caries wasn’t introduced to humanity after we started to rely on starch containing food, and was accelerated with the introduction with food rich in sugar.
This is all very recent. Until then we kept our teeth, but they just wore down till basically the root surface or a bit above it.
I suspect that therefore the age related deterioration of the jaw is therefore a modern phenomenon.
Bell’s essays, and the accompanying drawings that I photographed, were published in 1806; that’s “modern” or “recent” by some definitions, I guess.
Caries is not the only cause of tooth loss, however- calcium deficiency and vitamin C deficiency are two other culprits. Apparently pregnant women are more likely to develop gingivitis, which can lead to periodontal disease and tooth loss.
By the time we see Galadriel at the end of the Third Age, she is 8,440 years old. Just thought you’d like to know that.
Thanks, Henry. I was too lazy to check the Appendices or the Histories to calculate Galadriel’s age precisely, but I knew it was in the thousands of years.
Apparently pregnant women are more likely to develop gingivitis, which can lead to periodontal disease and tooth loss.
yes, apparently depending on your socio-economic conditions you lose one or two teeth per child.
At what age were people losing teeth in Bell’s time? I am hoping you won’t say that the aged woman in the sketch is 31, basically. What was the life expectancy back then? Did people live long without teeth?
Bell’s time overlapped the Georgian, Regency, and early Victorian periods, and my (uneducated) guess is that life expectancy would vary greatly with socioeconomic class and exposure to infectious diseases. Tooth loss might follow a different pattern, though, because as Mark pointed out, dental caries became a significant problem for those who consumed starchy and sugary foods. People with less refined diets, and whose diets were not deficient in calcium or vitamin C, probably retained their teeth throughout life.
I read an abstract for a paper in a dental history journal in which the claim was made that the teeth are rarely displayed in European portraits from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth. It was considered indecent and threatening by the Victorians, and possibly indicative of class, if the teeth were missing or rotten. I can’t access the paper easily, and my knowledge of art history is insufficient to confirm or deny the claim.