dark age

plural dark ages · alternative darke age

1. A time period characterized by ignorance, decline, stagnation, and/or conflict and turmoil.

   How would the "dark age" of plutocratic dominance come to an end if reformers remained withing the walls of the monasteries.

   1998, Richard J. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, page 64

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   It is not becoming in us to cast reproach upon those who lived in the daybreak of a dark age, for not seeing clearly all that we see in the more perfect day.

   1849, Jonathan Crane, A Historical Sketch of the Second Congregational Church in Attleborough, page 44

   That, as then conceived of, was the Christ for that dark age, for men too carnal-minded to conceive of Him or have Him revealed to them in His higher, true character.

   1881, Edmund A. Beaman, Swedenborg and the New Age, page 183

   The dark age that I have alluded to is one that affected all Europe, and to-day the relics of this barbarous past rule all mankind.

   1890, The True Life: As Lived and Taught by Mary Hayes-Chynoweth, page 339

   The eighth century was the dark age in Greece ; after that , though learning revives, more of an effort is required to keep up the forms of ancient Greek scholarship.

   1904, William Paton Ker, The Dark Ages, page 343

   Newton's comparison of himself to a child on the seashore might be taken as evidence that the classical age of modern physics was a dark age and knew it.

   1927, Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Antiquity - Volume 1, page 438

2. A time period about which there is very little information.

   By his summary treatment he suggests that, for him too, the period after the coming of the Dorians was a dark age, in the limited sense that he knew no more about it than anyone else.

   2017, A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece

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   But if by a dark age you mean an age concerning which we are altogether in the dark ; and as , in applying this to our own , the Subject and Object , we and the age become identical and commutable terms ; I bid adieu to all reasoning by implication, to all legerdemain of inferential logic, and at once bring notorious facts to bear out my assertion.

   1884, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Volume 4, page 441

   Apart from the Akallabêth, these are fragmentary and, to a degree, unresolved, and for this reason the second Age has long remained something of a " dark age " for Tolkien's readers : lost between the mythology of the First and the epic fiction of the Third , its full grandeur was only slowly revealed to the public through the painstaking , almost archaeological efforts of Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher.

   2023, David Day, Illustrated World of Tolkien: The Second Age, page 8

1. alternativeAlternative form of Dark Ages.