The names connected by his philological studies formed for Tolkien the possibility of a kind of downward progression, from his long-lost mythical world of Númenor in the Second Age, to his fantasy world of Middle-earth in the Third Age, also now lost, to the real ancient Germanic and Anglo-Saxon thousands of years later, and finally down to the modern world, where names like Edwin still survive, all (in the fiction) that is left of Middle-earth, carrying for the knowledgeable philologist a hint of a rich living English mythology. Shippey notes that in Númenor, the myth would have been still stronger, as being an Elf-friend, one of the hated Elendili, marked a person out to the King's Men faction as a target for human sacrifice to Morgoth. Tolkien's continuous playing with names led to characters and situations, and sometimes to stories.