Something not mentioned in the article: Middle Earth is depopulated. Without large market, it does not make sense to produce at scale, nor you will have the capital to do it.
The main characters travel hundreds of kilometers down the biggest river around and they don't encounter other vessels or a populated settlement until they reach Minas Tirith. And I'm not even mentioning the missing cities and villages in the inland part of the travel. We can say that this is due to lower birth rate in the numenorians who obviously have reproductive issues as mentioned in the books. Another reason is the brain, knowledge and capital drain caused by the large elvian immigration going for centuries. Dwarfs have the excuse of a long generation length to explain why they are not multiplying like rabbits for the thousands of years since the last world war, however, Tolkien does not provide a good reason for the other human nations, the orcs or even the hobbits.
Possible explanation might be the unstable security situation on the continent, however, most of the societies are not described as being constantly under the risk of a raid from nearby orc. Aragorn is able to defend most of the north with a few hundred irregulars, while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time. The south is not described, but nothing unusual there as well as far as the books go.
> while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time.
Note that when the fellowship passes through Lorien and Gondor, the ring war is already in full force, the fellowship just doesn't notice a lot of it.
By the time they travel the Anduin, the river is considered a front line: Everything east of the river is already occupied by Sauron, while the areas directly west of it had been evacuated. The book mentions this as one reason why the land is so deserted. (In addition to the long-term decline of Gondor that of course also happened, illustrated by the deserted lookout posts and ruins around the Argonath)
The Mordor expansion should've started one-two generations ago. No mentions of recent ruins and the more likely reaction of the population on the best communication pathway in the local part of the continent should've been building walls and armies, no fast desertion of their homes.
Maintaining walls and supplying armies requires a fair amount of population though. Middle Earth is very thinly populated. The former Realm of Arnor is so thinly settled that the Northern Kingdom of the Dunedain had to be dissolved, and its people were reduced to a nomadic lifestyle. Sort of what happened to the crvilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century.
Yes, the whole thread is trying to find plausible reasons why the population does not recover after disasters. The elves are leaving and gondorians have issue reproducing. Everyone else should've been totally capable of taking those big chunks of land and building new societies there. Orcs should've just made them build more warlike cultures and not just hide, because orcs are raiders, not an well organized force which can deny territory against an determined adversary for long periods of time.
People live in Bree for centuries. Why there are no settlements between the shire and it? Why Bree hasn't expanded in the other directions?
There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon.
But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population gets established, Goblins will descend on it and hoover it all up to grow their population, but then probably die out when the food supply runs down again. So they have a boom-bust population cycle that keeps human populations suppressed.
The area in the north surrounding the Shire used to be a great kingdom, but it was wiped off the map by hordes of Orcs and Trolls and such fomented by the Witch King. There may also be a magical element to the success of the Orcs and other such creatures.
Whatever the logic or reasons, the fact is Middle Earth is severely under-populated compared to Europe and always has been. It's demographics are far too thin to support the kinds of developments we had, and every time they established kingdoms that might turn that around, they got violently crushed.
Bree is heavily fortified and paranoid for good reasons. The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret. As long as everyone thinks it's just a few scattered villages, as it has been for most of it's history, there's not enough there to send a big force of Orcs for. If the goblin king of the mountains knew how much bread, cheese and ale there was there for the taking, it would have got the scorched earth treatment long ago.
I think the predator-prey cycle is the correct explanation. Pre-industrial societies have enough problems with food production and disease limiting population growth, add in the equivalent of sapient wolves and it's a miracle that there are any intelligent populations left in Middle Earth at all. I think you could add to your reply to the parent comment that the reason the Orcs don't take over and establish their own civilization is that they are prone to cannibalism and infighting. When they exhaust their local supply of man-flesh they probably instantly turn on the closest group of Orcs and devour them instead. They also suffer from predation by giant spiders and probably from wild trolls as well.
The Shire is truly an anomaly in that they have eliminated or escaped detection by anything that likes to eat Hobbits.
It doesn't have a magical bubble. What it does have are some excellent natural defenses. The eastern border of the Shire is marked by the Brandywine river, which is wide and hard to cross, with only one bridge in the area. (The Shire was attacked by orcs and wolves once, during a particularly cold winter when the river froze over -- no magical bubble!) Past the river is is Buckland, which is much more dangerous than the Shire and acts as a buffer zone; the Bucklanders put a lot more effort into defense than the Shire hobbits do. After Buckland there's a twenty-mile-long protective wall, with its two gates guarded at all times. After that there's the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, which are both exceptionally hostile places for travelers to pass through, way worse than most of Middle Earth.
> The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret.
Reference please.
The Rangers do protect the Shire but there are no references to a 'secrecy' mission in the book IIRC.
There are main roads that pass nearby that are travelled at least by Dwarves and Elves. Frodo and the other hobbits themselves see Dwarves drinking at the Prancing Pony in Bree, where discussion of the Shire would undoubtedly have happened.
Saruman is also aware of the Shire, if only because Gandalf kept on about it.
The rangers are highly secretive, so much so that the people of Bree and the Shire don't even know they defend them. Of course they let Elves and Dwarves travel the road, why would they want to stop them?
Saruman's enthral to Sauron is relatively recent, and he never took Hobbits in any way seriously, he has no direct control of Mordor's forces anyway. Frankly they dodged a bullet a bit on that one, Saruman's betrayal could have been far more damaging if he'd been even slightly less arrogant and dismissive of others.
The shire is not special. Nothing before the adventure of Bilbo made anyone think that it should be kept secret. The hobbits are just reclusive, however, there are travelers passing through and Bree is on an actual crossroad.
I think it’s special in the sense that it is surrounded on almost all sides for hundreds of miles by dangerous depopulated wastelands. The only exception is Bree, and that seems like a much more threatened and precarious community. It’s on the wrong side of the Brandywine, and within much easier raiding distance from the mountains, and whatever still lurks in the wastes that used to be Angmar.
There are scattered communities across the region that used to be Arnor and Eriador, but they’re mostly pretty isolated and insular.
For whatever reasons, establishing a stable prosperous community in Middle Earth just seems to be really hard. You’d think with ploughs, and agriculture, and domesticated animals they’d have densely populated the whole region in under a thousand years, but their history is of massive wars that laid waste to anything that hot firmly established, and incredibly hard very long term struggle to get critical mass for a recovery.
Also in our world recovering wastelands and regrowing population was a long and difficult process. In principle there should be exponential growth at some point, but it takes quite long in general to get to the point where it really starts to take off.
But it also seems to be one of the very few places in Middle Earth that are settled. Everything between Bree and Gondor is pretty much empty wasteland with the occasional elven stronghold. The Rohirrim strike me more as steppe nomads than western knights; with all their hiking through that land, how many farms and villages to they encounter?
The spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana encountered advanced societies along the Amazonas river. He's the guy that came up with that name. What's left from these civilizations are Terra Preta deposits (extremely fertile black earth of very likely human origin) and petroglyphs that can be detected using LIDAR. Also, small tribes of natives with a noble class, which is quite unexpected for hunter-gatherer societies, but makes sense for more complex societies that suffered civilizational breakdown and had to change lifestyle. Sort of like the northern Dundedain :-)
“Only one war 60 years ago” underestimates the impact that goblins/orcs have. It’s not wars alone that cause depopulation, it’s the constant raids. The orcs have secure holds in the Misty Mountains that allow them to raid all surrounding areas at will. This keeps these areas thinly populated. The exceptions are places like Lake Town, which are highly defensible.
It’s not really possible to attack the orcs in their mountain homes for anyone except Dwarves. And even Dwarves understood their limits. In the War of the Dwarves and Orcs (TA 2793-2799) they sacked every orc stronghold from “Gundabad to the Gladden” but even then did not dare to enter Moria, where orcs remained secure and continued to multiply.
But there were not many orcs and goblins for a long time in many areas, as we learned from the books. They only came back and multiplied with the slow return-growth of Sauron.
I would be more interested in the period of when Moria was thriving - when they wrote the password for the back door right above it. Meaning, those must have been one of the most peaceful periods in the wider regions history. How dense was the population at that time?
> But there were not many orcs and goblins for a long time in many areas, as we learned from the books. They only came back and multiplied with the slow return-growth of Sauron.
Sauron had already returned c1000 TA to Dol Guldur. We're specifically told that evil things, such as Orcs, begin multiplying in number by c1300 TA, which triggers the migration of the Hobbits to the Shire (already we have an example of why there's less people than we expect.) In c1400 the Nazgul begin their long destruction of the disunited (perennially entangled in civil war) kingdoms of Arnor. In c1500, Gondor is embroiled in devastating wars with Harad. In the 1600s a Great Plague depopulates the North and West: "many parts of Eriador become desolate"; not long before, Gondor has had a horrible civil war. During the plague, even the Shire suffers "great loss." In the 1800s Gondor is again involved in a costly war, this time against the Wainriders, and loses its eastern territories. In 1981 TA Moria falls. In the 2400s Gondor is again under a major attack by (though they do not know it) Sauron, and Sauron is able to use the Orcs in the Misty Mountains to effectively cut off Eriador from the rest of the continent. in the 2500s, the Gondorians are bailed out of a major disaster by the appearance of the Rohirrim, but shortly after, the dragons appear and decimate the dwarves. In the 2700s, after centuries of Orc attacks in the region, the Hobbits themselves defeat a band of Orcs; shortly after, Dale and the Iron Mountain fall to Smaug, Rhoah is nearly destroyed, and Gondor is attacked by fleets of Corsairs. In addition, there is a devastating winter that causes "great suffering and loss of life"; in the same century, Smaug annihilates Erebor and Dale, and there's a major, costly war between the dwarves and the Orcs.
In the following centuries, there are continual major Orc attacks. In 2900 Men finally abandon Ithilien. In 2911 there is another devastating winter, and the year after, great floods that result in the desertion of Tharbad and Minhiriath.
The Hobbit begins in 2941. Orcs have been in force for 1600 years.
This is a great comment but I feel obliged to offer a real-world counterexample: Europe, which had endless cycles of war (plus a few plagues). The Thirty Years War alone killed 5m people.
Thank you so much for this. I wrote the GP comment but I couldn’t give specific examples apart from the War of the Dwarves and Orcs. It’s been too long since I read Tolkien.
Wars and plagues every couple hundred years or so. So what you are saying is that wars and plagues are significantly less frequent then they were in pre-industrial Earth.
"Wars and plagues" can vary in scale from having next to no impact to being world-changing events, so in isolation it tells you nothing.
One of the more common last names in Norway is still "Ødegaard", literally "Deserted farm", reflecting families who were residing on farms which still had not gotten a proper name by the time the tradition of using your fathers first-name as a last time started dying out. This even then - by the 1800's - involved re-clearing farms that had still not been re-settled after the Black Death.
Of the ca. 36500 farms which existed in Norway around year 1300, only about 16000 were still populated by 1520, and the population is believed by some sources to still have been only half of what it was in 1300. It was not until the 17th century that Norway "recovered" - that is, until it was back to pre-plague, levels, having lost several centuries of growth, but with population centres having changed, leaving many ancient farms still empty reminders.
In Norway, a disproportionate portion of the political and religious elite died. E.g. while almost the bishops in Sweden survived, all but the bishop of Oslo died in Norway. The Northern provinces of Norway were left to their own devices for a long time, without a functioning government, because so few government officials were left that the king chose to focus restoration in the South and largely just abandoned them.
That was one event.
I also don't recall running into Nazgul and Orcs while growing up near Oslo, and imagine facing that might have been a rather severe deterrent to growth.
EDIT: I'll add that Norway is a good reminder that a combination of destructive events, harsh conditions and the extremity of the hockey stick nature of population growth can explain a lot. Norway today has a population density of ~14 per km^2. In 1950 that would've been ~8. In the mid 18th century about ~3. In the aftermath of the plague, likely <1, and still <1 by the 16th century. You can still travel on foot for days through central Norway without meeting people if you stay clear of the places most popular with people out hiking for fun. A couple of centuries back, and not only would you be able to do that, but you'd have been likely to now and again come across farms that had been empty for centuries, despite centuries of a growth and recovery.
> I also don't recall running into Nazgul and Orcs while growing up near Oslo, and imagine facing that might have been a rather severe deterrent to growth.
Hah! A whole lot of Norwegian folklore involves stories about how a lot of our mountains are trolls who didn't get back in hiding before the sun came out... None of them explain where there'd be enough space for mountain sized trolls to hide during the days, though.
No, there was constant low-level warfare for 1600 years which even directly led to the Hobbits fleeing their original home. It’s also for example the reason why the troll-wastes are desolate. The major wars and disasters were on top of that.
It’s 1600 years of an active, organizing intelligence whittling the West away and which saw the _destruction_ of multiple major kingdoms and settlements prior to the beginning of the story. The people of Arnor were nearly exterminated as a result of the Witch-King, for example. These were not wars like medieval wars. They were wars that entailed abject slavery or genocide for the losers.
The shire hasn't seen any raids for generations and the only thing that protects them are a few hundred irregulars under the command of Aragorn. Another example for unexplainably depopulated region is the area between the shire and the sea. Far from the mountains, those lands are not known to have large settlements.
In Bilbo's youth, the Fell Winter took place, and "White Wolves" invaded Eriador.
The Great Plague some time before and the Long Winter are explicitly said to have depopulated Eriador and left it "desolate." The Rangers were also not infallible. Obviously they did nothing to stop the Nazgul or large numbers of Saruman's agents in the time of the Lord of the Rings, nor did they stop the Orc-band that invaded the Shire a hundred years before the story.
See though that all of these disasters are spread over 1500 years. Most of them supposedly kill people, but they don't make the land uninhabitable and nothing stops from next generations repopulating them. Keep in mind that Europe suffers at least two big plagues, migration waves, a mini ice age and lots of other disasters. The main depopulation factors are hunger and food logistics collapse.
Norway took a several centuries to get back to ~1300 levels after the Black Death going from ~37k farms in 1300 to still only 16k farms by 1520, nation wide (and we're not talking large farms here, in most cases). Entire regions were entirely abandoned by the government. Many farms that were abandoned after the plague where not cleared until the 1800's.
If the population density was low to start with, and food production tough, recovery from even a single major enough event can take a very long time.
You blame it all on the black death, however, Norway was on the front line of the little ice age, so those farms might have not been populated because the land itself was not able to sustain cultivation reliably. Tolkien mentions only one bad winter, but I can allow that he wasn't well versed in climate sciences and regional climate patterns. As a result we have something that can suppress population growth to a minimal level, however, we don't have good proves in the text for such events in Middle Earth.
There's as far as I know nothing to support that the little ice age had much influence on the rebound of the population after the Black Death in Norway's case - you'll find documentation of farms right next to each other where one was not cleared and the other was, and where we can tell from tax records etc. once they were finally populated again that production capacity was comparable. It took centuries before the population had rebounded to the point where lesser farms were cleared again. As such it was first towards the end of the 1600's that the population was large enough to start hitting limits where the little ice age caused famine in Norway.
If the overall agricultural output is suppressed by LIA, then population recovery from the plague will be slowed down. From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500. There is a Wikipedia article about medieval demography, but the data there is even more positive and I'm not linking it here.
My point was that overall agricultural output in Norway per capita did not constrain growth again until the 1600's. The Black Death is often in Norway in fact considered to have lifted a lot of the surviving poor people out of poverty, because people previously subsistence farming on tiny plots could suddenly take on far more or more productive land and produce an excess. As I pointed out, it was not until the late 1600's that Norway faced famines again. The Black Death significantly increased food safety for the survivors in Norway. Despite this it took that long to recover the population size.
> From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500.
Hence the reason I pointed out that Norway did not, to show that the range of possible outcomes is substantial.
Differences for Norway included a harsher climate, and a landscape that in most of the country is not conducive to large scale farming in a constrained area (outside of a tiny part of the South East, even the "flat" parts are not particularly flat, and often rocky terrain), combined with a very low population density by European standards to start with. As a result, in a lot of places, while people had productive farms, the farm locations depends heavily on the terrain and are often spaced out, and a lot of focus was on e.g. raising sheep (which could, and still are, be let out to roam the mountain sides during the summer months). Recovery faced a lot of challenges, not least of which was simply that in parts of the country the next farm over might be many hours walk over tough terrain away, and during months of the year trying to go to the nearest village might be hazardous (winter months), or people might be up in the mountains far from people. There are still a few people living in places not reachable by road in Norway (and not just by the coast where they could compensate with access by boat). There are still large parts of the country where if it wasn't for cars getting from village to village might many places take days of walking (often horses or carts would not have been an option due to terrain).
Families could go the whole year without meeting any outsiders, and as a consequence marrying off your children and ensuring the family line survived, was a major ordeal in many parts of the country even when you had plenty of food, because the production of that food in Norway, even when the climate has been "good", has meant the farming part of the population has been spread out far more than many places.
There were no major cities. By the 1600's, Bergen, now Norways 2nd largest city, with 285k people, was by one source described as "definitely the largest city in the Nordics" with ca. 15000 people, as a result of being a major Hanseatic league trading port, but while it was larger than e.g. Copenhagen, Denmark (and Sweden) had many other cities of some note, Norway did not. The old capital, Trondheim, by then had reached 5000, and the other current cities in Norway had far fewer.
Even today there are parts of the country which if you avoided car travel would seem almost as desolate as in LOTR, and the population density today is more than 10x higher than before the Black Death. In the 150 years following the Black Death, you'd have walked through a landscape that would have appeared mostly untouched by man, with the very occasional farm, sometimes days apart, which half the time would be in ruins, and the very occasional small village.
>however, Tolkien does not provide a good reason for the other human nations, the orcs or even the hobbits.
Hm.. Orcs are easy to explain. I doubt Sauron or Saruman care at all about their lives. As the animated adaption put it: "When there's a whip there's a way". add in constant external warfare (and possible internal warfare too) and you end up with a low population.
Hobbits are implied to have a very different past from their LOTR circumstance (IIRC they conquered the Shire from the Orcs?), though I recall very few details are given. One may also suspect a low reproduction rate judging by lifespan. Perhaps the Shire started from a low base, and only by LOTR had enough for an industrial revolution?
> IIRC [Hobbits] conquered the Shire from the Orcs
I though Hobbits were coming from the East of Middle Earth (I think Smeagol/Gollum was a part of a Hobbit community that hadn't migrated and so lived East of the mountains) and were granted the Shire by a king of Arnor, though they still had to fight orcs while there
Internal warfare is caused by competing for the same resources. Orcs must be under external constraints to fight with each other instead of spreading around to occupy/pillage other resources. We can accept that they are constrained to certain habitats and the same could be even said about the dwarfs, however there are many human nations in the books and none of them has created large continues settlement zones. Again, the lack of people and trade on Anduin is a shocker for me.
>Internal warfare is caused by competing for the same resources.
Politics is a sufficient condition. Perhaps Sauron would not tolerate 'independent' Orcs he can't use as canon fodder?
>Again, the lack of people and trade on Anduin is a shocker for me.
Yeah, it's the humans which are hardest to explain away. Some peasants should have thought 'We're tried of paying taxes to Gondor. We'll just move and no one can or would even bother find us'.
You are giving far too much credit to internal conflict. Trapped between an empire of orcs on one side and those super racist elves on the other side (they certainly do consider humans a lower species, and how could you blame them given the humans' shocking lack of eternal youth), how much internal conflict can you expect? Even the most incompetent dictator wouldn't have a problem getting people to stand together.
Most older Elves regard being able to leave the world as a kindness, given how twisted it has become. The racist ones are either bitter or don't have much life experience.
Elves are not only long-lived, but also bound to Arda. When they die, they rest some time in Mandos' halls and then reincarnate. No matter how twisted and shitty the world becomes, they are stuck with it. No matter the traumas they suffer and the wrongs commited by them, they cannot escape it [the consequences]. Because their victims will be around forever too, and they can't forget either.
I'm not sure I get you. We were talking about possible internal conflict within the Orcs. Not sure Sauron gets their automatic allegiance, and if he does not, that's all the reason we need. As for humans, I don't have a good explanation there at all.
That paragraph referred to humans. For Fantasy races we can always come up with an explanation/excuse, but there should have been more humans along the route.
Politics is handwaving for the structural reasons for a conflict. No need for fighting each other if there is an easier gain to be found outside. At least not fights that would be significant enough to suppress the population growth.
In almost every battle with them, they had a vast superiority in numbers. Even after the catastrophic defeats they suffer when the Good Guys win, they seem to be able to quickly recover their numbers. It probably helps that they can thrive in environmentr where humans can't: high mountains, caves, the volcanic landscape of Mordor etc.
I don't think the Shire had enough hobbiton population for an industrial revolution. Estimates I have seen are below 200 000, maybe much fewer. Britain had about 10 million in the 18th century.
Before the industrial revolution and the move of work from fields to factories, there was the agricultural revolution, which trippled domestic food production, and coupled with increased imports allowed population to start increasing from about 1650 to reach 9 million by 1801 without increasing the number of agricultural workers required, giving millions of surplus population to work in those factories
Plus, pre-modern age agricultural revolution, no created fertilizer, no pesticides, poor storage (no refrigeration, limited preserves, pest control), and no forced irrigation.
So a drought, cicadas, pest explosion, shorter growing season, fungus/etc, wildfires, on and on, would immediately lend to famine, and perhaps war.
Lots of additional people die during famine, fighting each other for scraps.
> Aragorn is able to defend most of the north with a few hundred irregulars, while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time.
Which might be a good reason why the don't have a population boom: long periods of stability with low threat from war, low infant mortality and high food security seem to cause low birth rates (at least in our world). If your children are unlikely to die, people just have fewer of them.
Most of our population booms happen after wars or in areas with low life expectancy.
Middle Earth has no contraception (Tolkien is catholic) and the only way to stop multiplying is to stop doing... math. LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken. So, you are expected to have high birthrate until you occupy all the good lands and then some. After that you either rediscover Malthus or you start innovating to get more out of what you have.
That assumes homo sapiens levels of childbirth however. As a number of comments touch on, a lot of the lack of technological advance could be hand-waved away as a result of low birthrates and a generally low population. You could also perhaps factor in a general societal distaste for technology although human history suggests that societies which can't or won't create technology are overwhelmed by societies that do.
It’s not just magic. In the First Age children were more of a vanity project… every creature in existence had a downright biblical origin.
Men don’t even exist until the Second Age, and “cities” at that time are basically just family settlements, with maybe a few dozen generations of men. And at first they’re below replacement rate. Look at the family tree of Beor: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/B%C3%ABor#Genealogy… no one is having three kids. It’s two or one.
The Third Age is only a few thousand years later. There’s just not enough time at those kind of birth rates to blanket a continent the way humans have.
I'm not sure it's hand-wavy "magic." The essay is talking about things that are different in Middle Earth that could have led to the lack of an industrial revolution by the Third Age. Lower population growth (and slower population recovery after plagues and wars) seem like a pretty plausible factor.
It's also plausible that societal advancement was also just slower than with us when the author seems to assume it would be expected to advance at the same pace. (i.e. it's taken ME longer to reach a medieval level of advancement.) Certainly happened with plenty of areas in our world for geographical determination and other reasons--though, by effectively modeling ME on Europe and giving it horses and AFAIK familiar crops, that's a harder case to make.
Uh, the humans of Gondor were descended from Numenoreans, who were descended from the Houses of Edain, men who morphed from Neolithic kit technology to High Medieval (pre-plate armour and gunpowder) by being uplifted by Noldorian elves in Beleriand.
Unlike the humans from a certain other famous series, we knew the background of Gondorians all the way to their earliest fathers around year... 300? 800? Of the first age of the Sun.
Now, discounting that... I agree, ME has really low population growth. Might be caused by Gondorians and Arnorians living to 200+, 300+ years old earlier, when their culture were established; when the blood grows thin and they live like normal humans, their cultures ossified already; 40 - 50 year old normal human grooms and brides aren't as productive as 80-100 year old Numenorian grooms and brides.
> LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken.
Maybe the women are missing from not just from social life, but from the world. Not just the entwives[0] and the rarely seen dwarven women, but even human women are surprisingly rare. How many of all those many men making an appearance were married? Only hobbits seem to have actual families, but still not very big ones.
Maybe Middle Earth just isn't very fertile and can't sustain large populations. Maybe there's a very good reason why population levels are closer to Siberia.
The rohinims don't have that issue for example. Nor it is mentioned as an issue for the other human societies. That's why the situation of the ents is considered such an anomaly.
Sam, post war, has a large family, and some of the other hobbits do as well (Farmer Cotton, for example).
But it also seems that Frodo and Bilbo were NOT mentioned as being "strange" or anything, so it's not certain that everyone would marry and have a family of any size.
They were explicitly mentioned as being strange, though not explicitly for being bachelors. More for being rich, reclusive and unusually young-looking for their ages.
This is not as big of a problem as it sounds: large swathes of Siberia are depopulated, yet factories abound in China. All it takes is local concentration of population, which Middle-Earth has.
However, the industrial revolution did not start in Siberia and it is proving only that it can't start in a world with so far removed population centers. Waterways are the cheapest transport option and source of water for the crops, yet nobody lives next to the biggest river around. The only possible reason would be if there is nobody to live there.
Mordor was starting an industrial revolution which couldn't have been older than 60 years. Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.
> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.
What explains the lack of development in ancient Sumer or ancient Rome? Wait a hot minute, because we have no idea and could have no idea if there was a small industrial revolution 10K years before ancient Sumer was a suburb. There would be no way to know if something like actual stainless steel was forged 60K years ago and the technology was lost. This is the problem with the blogger's armchair reasoning.
Actually, we know for at least one industrial revolution in sumerian times a.k.a the beginning of the iron age. And we have a way to find for civilizations with larger impact by checking the isotopes locked in ice. This is the method for dating volcano eruptions and for tracking the produce of lead in antiquity.
Yes, but per the graph in the article, any earlier "industrial revolutions" and even the Roman Empire weren't even visible blips relative to the Western European industrial revolution.
> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.
But it also took many, many thousands of years for us to get to the industrial revolution.
And we did not have magic, we did not outsource stuff to elves and dwarves, we did not have wars with orcs and dragons and other monsters and no extremely powerful transcedental/imortal beings actively involved/shaping the development of history.
And we only overcome feudalism because of the plague and the discovery of the New World -- non of which happened in the LOTR universe.
> lower birth rate in the numenorians who obviously have reproductive issues as mentioned in the books
I wonder if Elden Ring's lore took a bit of inspiration from this:
> The Numen are a race of beings descended from otherworldly travelers. Long lived and seldom born, Queen Marika the Eternal is the primary member of this race.
Speaking of which, why doesn't any military in any kingdom in A Song of Ice and Fire have jets? That one immense building (pardon my spoiler-avoiding vagueness) with seemingly no interior columns led me to wonder this. But the answer may be that the book building and the show building are nothing alike, and the show exaggerates characteristics that aren't such a big deal or leaves out realistic details that interfere with making the building impressive. I have read part of the books but not the relevant part.
And I'm not even referring to the speed of movement that characters seem to mysteriously have.
Indeed, considering Tolkien's otherwise fully-defined universe (and the industrialisation in Mordor indicating that it can be done), it's a fun question, and they rather use the question as as springboard into quite a ranging discussion of the factors behind real Industrial Revolution rather than a comic-book-guy-style tear-down of LoTR specifically.
Because during the time of the musket there were no pump guns neither.
EDIT: It took quite some time between the early days of the industrial revolution and the first semi-automatic guns. Ignoring LOTR for a minute, if in story taking place in the 17th century the question of "why didn't X use a colt .45" is easily answered, because it wasn't invented yet.
If we aren't going to "yes, and..."[1] our way into the actual topic at hand, consider that since they don't have the same standardised inches, even if they did had exactly a Colt .45", they wouldn't call it that, no more then we would call it a Colt .14T (where T is a Gondorian Royal Thumb).
But many parties are sparsely but explicitly described as making and using fantastically advanced marvels of somewhat magical technology in ancient times, some of which are still around like Sauron's Rings.
Probably the most honest reason to not have guns in Middle-Earth is that only stupid orcs, not the elves and dwarves who could easily develop them as school projects, would be interested in such tasteless weapons.
Easily accessible guns require tools that were absent, like screw making machines etc.
There were weapons, powerful weapons at that, but they depended heavily on artisanal production even if certain groups managed to reach manufacturing scale.
Also, Middle Earth is still licking wounds from the great wars with Melkor, which took away most of the advanced regions, and what Gondor and Arnor tried to rebuild got heavily whacked down by wars.
Random subsistence farmers spread across small hamlets do not make for industrial base, whereas Saruman and Sauron could use force to speedrun the development to provide resources for their forces (as both had knowledge of how to do it, even if we only take into account their experiences during wars of Beleriand - meanwhile the wizards other than Saruman stick to their oath of non-interference)
Sauron was never bound by the oaths Istari took, and Saruman broke his, and those involved not intervening too much. Most of the time, Gandalf & other Wizards were running around trying to keep things together so that societies could rebuild.
The remaining higher technology groups either lost the capability (Gondor), were destroyed (Arnor), are fighting constant war with Orcs with occasional dragon making problems that prevents building up proper industry (Dwarves), or are depopulated depressed groups that while not hoarding, do not interact with others anymore much and mostly use what remains of their industrial base to facilitate the last days of their race (Elves outside of Mirkwood - those in turn are trying but don't have much to build upon since Moria got overrun and they lost their main trading partner for technology).
The rest is down to subsistence farming levels without base of previous knowledge to rebuild or at least inspire.
I don't think all the Kingdoms of Men would have turned their noses up at a few cartloads of nice Dwarven culverin, regardless of what the Dwarves themselves (or those snooty elves) thought of them.
>> was seriously considered as a major plot at some point
So the very out-of-universe answer is: Because Tolkien decided against it. So the better question, and also the one we can use some source material to answer, would be why Tolkien decided against it and wrote a classic fantasy story.
Because he was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and not a historian of the 18th/19th centuries.
There's no Industrial Revolution in Anglo-Saxon mythology. Including it would have jarred in a dyschronistic way.
More than that, fantasy is based on nostalgia for heroic simplicity and straightforwardness, with a dash of magic to instil some child-like wonder.
The Industrial Revolution operated on a completely different narrative and moral basis. It was more about colonisation at home, using mechanisation to organise forced labour.
It's hard to be a brave Romantic hero in that kind of setting.
Haven't read the notes, but shouldn't Mordor, being an autocracy without a recognizeable middle class and a very lean political system focused on war, have very cheap labor?
Very cheap, but probably also quite unsophisticated. They can make basic stuff, but they also don't need to produce finer things. The Orcs make up for it with their numbers, and Sauron cares about power, not about wealth.
Right but I mean, that's not exactly the right conditions for industrialization. Who designs and builds the machines? Who does the research? Sauron solo?
Yes - Sauron is one of the remarkably few people in Middle-Earth who have not lost knowledge over time - the others are majorly proscribed from such actions (Wizards, including Saruman before he turned), or crushed into depression by what they lived through - depopulated Lindon where small remnants mostly builds ships for further movement west, the small settlement of Rivendell which doesn't have enough resources to spend on industrialization, the elves of lothlorien are in similar condition to Lindon, Arnor is so ruined that AFAIK there are no more cities that aren't ruins, and Dwarves are too harassed to expand much, though they have major win at Lone Mountain (but haven't recovered Moria).
Generally in the Middle-Earth, the parts we see, are post-apocalyptic environment constantly wrecked by wars and depopulated so hard most people are too busy raising crops to survive.
If we took a walk through the author's home, I am certain we would find every piece of furniture was assembled without reading the instructions. Without bothering with the source material, the blogger has wrapped themselves in Tolkien's world and just wants to play.
> in _medieval_ fanatsy setting, there are no pump guns
well, if there was pump guns, it wouldn't be a medieval setting anymore, as you need some industrial base to manufacture them, industrial base which isn't exactly compatible with a medieval setting. Not to say you can't have guns in fantasy (Pillars of Eternity and Warhammer fantasy come to mind), but they are usually more primitive.
They were made by Sauron’s boss. They breed on their own. Sauron has to convince the orcs to work for him; this was tough when he was in his more angelic form.
Quite possibly. I was never that deep into it, but have many many friends that are so I had heard them discussing various aspects. Clearly got some wires crossed
Unless mandated by ideology, people don't think that way about getting children. If a place gets too dangerous, people either die, take countermeasures, or flee.
It’s kinda implied that Sauron’s rings make individuals of the various races more interested in sticking around longer than in producing offspring. Hobbits were relatively unaffected and had lots of children.
But somehow, despite the fecundity of the Rosie Cotton-Gangees, with 13 children, the Shire had a total population of about 100k, the size of a small (edit: but not that small) town (or the UK population in 3000BC).
So either pre-reproductive mortality is through the roof, but never mentioned, they haven't been there long[1], or something bad happened recently (before the events in the LoTR)[2].
[1] Except Hobbits settled the Shire about 3000 (edit: 1500, I can't count) years before the books.
[2] The idyllic setting, lack of traumatic narrative and their 1500-year settlement somewhat implies they haven't been through some kind of brutal population bottleneck recently.
> So either pre-reproductive mortality is through the roof, but never mentioned
Well if we're in this framework of assuming middle earth functions (more-or-less) like our own pre-modern world, then pre-reproductive mortality is enormous. If the Gamgees had their children in Europe in the Middle Ages, then only 6-7 of their children would survive to the age of 10.
Considering that a Hobbit male is only considered an adult at 33 years old, I'd assume that hobbits in general reach sexual maturity later than humans as well, giving any particular hobbit a higher chance of dying before their first child than any particular human.
Plus we don't know if Rosie is an outlier or not - plenty of real-life women have had 10+ children, especially in pre-industrial societies. The average woman in pre-industrial Europe had 6-7 children but effective fertility was barely more than 2 due to pre-reproductive mortality - we didn't see a population explosion in Europe until the 18th century, rather the population very slowly ticked up over centuries and crashed back down in various calamities.
100,000 is still pretty low, but as far as I know there are events that would have caused population shocks, including major crop failures due to bad winters in Frodo's memory, and a few generations previously there were both plagues and even a mass migration of the entire Hobbit population to Hobbitton due to attacks by Orc bands.
We have some evidence that Rosie is an outlier - Bilbo's parents had one kid, Frodo's parents had one kid (though that was limited). According to a glance at the http://lotrproject.com it seems the known hobbit families are large, but it is possible that they're mainly the "gentry" and the amount of single/small families was larger (however, Sam is "lower class" apparently and is the 5th of 6).
Er, in Germany, 100k is the population where a city is allowed to call itself "Großstadt" - so big city, not small town.
In medieval times, people had lots of children, but most of them died very young. Of course this doesn't fit into Tolkien's idyllic description of the Shire, so it's not mentioned, but I guess families with 13 children who all survived to adulthood were the lucky exception...
Well also Rotherham in the UK is a town with over 100k people, though not US-style "small town", it's certainly not a city, and not even a particularly huge town (there are many 100k+ towns that aren't cities: the largest is Reading with nearly 1/4 million)
But that might be just a UK naming thing since "city" means something special (and isn't actually especially related to size: the smallest one is 1600 people).
But yes, perhaps it's not really a "small" town but just a town.
a) Historical populations were much smaller than current population, so 'big' scales similarly. The world population around 1700 was about 10% of current population.
So not only were there 90% fewer people, but most of them didn't live in cities. Paris, the largest city in Europe, had a population of around 150k-250k in 1500, depending where you look. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Middle_Ages#Popul...]
The Shire suffered terribly during the Great Plague and the Long Winter and also was invaded by Orcs at least once. The appendices say there was major loss of life. There was another very bad winter in Bilbo’s youth that was compounded by an invasion of “White Wolves.”
Indeed, though the Great Plague was over 1000 years ago, there was a famine more recently.
Maybe Hobbits really just are that resilient and cheerful that they just carry on despite massive depopulation events that would make the Black Death look fairly tame.
As a real world example consider the North of England. William the Bastard's genocidal "Harrying of the North" in 1069/70 either murdered or drove out over 75% of the population and left large areas severely depopulated for centuries.
Eskov's version of the story describes Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy on the verge of an industrial revolution, that poses a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the racist elves.[2] For example, Barad-dûr, Sauron's citadel, appears in chapter 2 as
...that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-dûr citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man – free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor.
I should add that Kirill Yeskov is a paleontologist and science popularizer. Here's his own explanation how he wrote "The Last Ringbearer": one of the reasons he mentions is that Middle Earth was impossible geologically:
"It would hardly occur to anyone to seriously analyze the functioning of the ecosystem of a barren desert inhabited by predatory worms the size of a multiple unit train that feed on walking excavators and then sweat psychedelics: fantasy is fantasy, what do you want from it?"
He also wrote a great book on the Earth evolution and life evolution, in which he also explains how science works and worked earlier, and what were older theories, and Popper criterium as well.
>Being a paleoantologist, he made a question to Tolkien's book: why the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible. And this started the "Last Ringbearer" book.
Unfortunately he missed the answer: at the time Tolkien was writing, plate tectonics was still considered an absurd hypothesis, the subject of mockery by "serious" geologists. As such the understanding of "geologically impossible" at that time was rather different than when Yeskov was writing a few decades later.
It was not until the 1950s that widespread sea floor mapping and research, made possible by the now-unnecessarily-large-and-mostly-idle US Navy, provided conclusive evidence that forced the geology establishment to accept plate tectonics.
It's easy to forget how recently we stopped being totally wrong about things like that.
If I recall correctly, the geography of Middle Earth was heavily changed during the wars between Morgoth and the Valas. I.e., it wasn't entirely shaped by natural processes but also by the willfull acts of semi-Gods
Meddlesome demons ruin everything. Too bad Feanor didn't think to create Stormbringer instead of the fucking Silmarils; he could have shoved it up Melkor's arse and then put the rest of the Valar and Maiar in their place.
Mordor is...it just doesn't work. It's a hard scrabble plain with a large inland sea bounded on 3 sides by jagged, abrupt mountains that are entirely isolated from any other ranges, and form right angles with each other...oh and the surround a cone volcano that just emerges from the ground.
Any one of these things (minus the, I repeat, NEAR PERFECT RIGHT ANGLES formed by the mountain range around Mordor) can be explained, but the conditions that lead to one preclude the other.
...are we just going to ignore the fact that Middle Earth also has wizards and mind-controlling rings?
I don't mean this dismissively, I just think more imagination is called for. If Mordor couldn't have arisen via normal plate tectonics, then geology must work differently on Middle Earth, or there must be other magical forces at play. (If I remembered anything significant about LoTR I would suggest a more specific theory.)
Oh sure, the in-universe explanation is that the fallen Valar Melkor, who became known as Morgoth the Black after his destruction of the Trees of the Valar, used his might to pervert and destroy the works of the other 11/12 Valar and "brought forth fire and leveled mountains and raised valleys" to create hellscapes out of their work, such that the Earth, instead of a garden, became discordant and all the plans of the Valar were marred. After the end of the First Age, when the host of the Valar came to the aid of Middle Earth and destroyed Melkor's fortress, and brought him to judgement to be cast into the Outer Dark, there was further geologic destruction as the powers of the hosts basically destroyed the continent/region of Middle Earth known as Beleriand.
After THAT there was a further catastrophe as the Numenoreans, corrupted into the Dark Arts by Sauron, who was their captive, decided to wage war on the Valar, who they believed were keeping the secret of immortality from them. The Valar were in a pickle, and abdicated their powers and called on Eru to judge, because this was outside their mandate. He Atlantis'd Numenor and destroyed the majority of their people (who had turned to worshiping Morgoth) - the Numenoreans who founded Gondor and Arnor and who created the political landscape of the Third and Fourth Ages were the remnant of that fallen civilization, who were warned of the destruction of the isle of Numenor and escaped on boats.
Also it can be supposed that Mordor was a partial creation of Sauron, who fled there after the fall of Numenor as a spirit (could be wrong about that)
This is where a lot of people get stuck. They see the enormous effort put into world-building Middle-earth and can't help but see a gaping geologic hole. Yes, geology must work differently, but how? It frustrates people to see entire languages and histories fleshed out in minute detail on one hand, but on the other "rocks just do different, bud" on the other.
Tolkien was a linguist, not a geologist or economist (his anti-industrial and pro-monarchical/religious perspective were a resistance to the changes occurring in his time), so it's no surprise that he spent so much time on the linguistics.
His formative encounters with industrialization were the horrors of mechanized warfare in WW1, after which he retreated to the cloistered worlds of academia, religion (he was a devout Catholic), and the rural countryside of England. The perspectives and protagonists of his stories reflect that personal arc as well.
He was overtly trying to give England back a pre-modern mythology that he felt it had lost, because he felt that it was a better vehicle for introducing Christianity to children than the comparatively stark biblical stories.
Yes, we are on the same page as to what influences affected Tolkien, his limitations, his authorial intentions and goals, and the historical context in which his work was created.
What the geophillic fans wish to hear however is more akin to, "Yes, Tolkien operated within these constraints. It would be great if someone could fanfic or headcannon their way into a reasonable conclusion with the benefit of hindsight and scientific and narrative advances we've made in the meantime." It's a small gesture that opens a door rather than shuts one and provides just a bit more cognitive closure for the people who want it.
> What the geophillic fans wish to hear however is more akin to, "Yes, Tolkien operated within these constraints. It would be great if someone could fanfic or headcannon their way into a reasonable conclusion with the benefit of hindsight and scientific and narrative advances we've made in the meantime."
Note how he discusses plate tectonics and Tolkein's ignorance, having forgotten (or never realized) that plate tectonics was not taken seriously in Tolkein's time.
He has written a big book on evolution of Earth and theories around it. [1]
It includes a whole chapter on plate tectonics, the preceding theories, and how plate tectonics itself was gradually accepted. In the book, there's also a large review on other scientific problems, like where the Sun gets energy from, why the Earth has magnetic field, where does internal the heat of the Earth come from, etc. Lots of "how do we know that..." questions. A great review, highly recommend.
So he's 100% aware what status plate tectonics had in Tolkien's time. I think he also mentions that as a linguist he wasn't a geologist, and could draw the land whichever way he imagined.
It’s a no brainer that a person cannot be equally oriented both in linguistics and in geology. ... So it would be quite possible to declare an amnesty to the Professor at this place: they say, an offense undoubtedly took place, but it does not pose a particular public danger.
Brian Eno had these "Oblique Strategy" cards with pithy sayings printed on them. He would famously refer to the card deck when in need of inspiration. My favourite card says "Honor thy Error as a hidden intention."
Paleoanthologist is one of the best Freudian slips I've seen in a while. GO WITH IT!
I liked the idea of The Last Ringbearer, but I found the writing pretty awful, like something written by a teenager for an English assignment.
> Mordor then made its second mistake ... although, as it always is with strategic decisions, that could only be judged post factum: had the move worked, as it had every chance of doing, it would no doubt have been recorded as brilliant.
> That was when the Mirror first made a difference; imagine a contemporary fast-moving war in which one side has the advantage of spy satellites.
I would consider that a fault of the translation rather than the original writing, though not knowing Russian I couldn't say for sure. Translating literary works is a necessarily imperfect art, and as I understand it this translation was done on the translator's free time without compensation, so I'll take what I can get!
Translator is not to blame, since he's not a professional translator. Not even sure if he is a native English speaker. He did a translation because he was a fan of the original book in Russian, and I'm grateful to him, since otherwise I would not be able to read it.
It's a pity that Tolkien Foundation actively battled any attempt to publish this book in English. Has that not been the case, I'm sure some publisher would appoint a professional translator to do a much better job at it.
Honestly this reinterpretation is not that far from themes that exist in LOTR, given that it was partly an allegory of the wars. It's just making Mordor not represent fascism.
Reminds me of something I learned last week when I was thinking about how the Harry Potter goblins are (probably unintentionally) built from second-hand racist stereotypes. Apparently the Dwarves of Middle Earth represent Jewish faith and the Elves Christian. During the writing of The Hobbit, Tolkien was influenced by the anti-Jewish sentiment and there's a few questionable throw away lines about the warlike treasure hoarding Dwarves. Between The Hobbit and LOTR though, with an intense hatred of Hitler and having a brief and intensely close relationship with a Jewish friend he realized the error of his ways - showing the Dwarves in more positive light and making the Dwarves and Elves work together a key part of the story. Some say he was inverting the stereotypes of Wagners Ring and intentionally highlighting positive stereotypes.
This isn't entirely conjecture or revisionist analysis of the text either - he talked about how the Dwarfish language was intentionally Semite and indeed it has a Hebrew-like qualities.
So in a sense, "The Last Ring Bearer" isn't a unique idea - you can argue that Middle Earth of LOTR itself is a reinterpretation of the Middle Earth of The Hobbit.
On the topic of Harry Potter and reimaginative fan-fiction, there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, in which Harry is reimagined as a science- and technology-savvy rationalist.
It also, IMO, has better and fairer treatment of the houses than the canon, which I felt was pretty reductive. (Gryffindor good, Slytherin evil, the other two may as well not exist.) I think the books would have been better to have, say, Hermione in Ravenclaw, Ron in Hufflepuff, and Harry in Gryffindor. The only thing that would have had to been dropped was the silly "Gryffindor wins the house cup every year" bit.
Most of those can be avoided with a bit of foresight. Take Balrogs, for example: by the Third Age there weren't all that many of them left, and on the off-chance that you do run into one, you can lure it into a trap made from one of those extremely deep pits that Dwarves are so fond of digging. Just make sure the pit is narrow enough that it can't spread its wings (if they have wings) and be careful that the pit doesn't have water at the bottom to break the Balrog's fall -- you may need to use bilge pumps. Perhaps consult with someone who managed to beat one in a fight; Glorfindel is still around, and making regular visits to maintain friendly relations with the Elves is just good business sense. And of course you should make sure that certain key sections of tunnel can be collapsed; you'll want this anyway to deal with the nameless monstrosities older than the world itself that you start running into at a certain depth.
The other threats are analogous. Giant spiders? Creepy but overrated. Someone with decent aim can one-shot most of them with a thrown rock, as demonstrated by a Mr. Baggins of Hobbiton, and their territory is a fairly small portion of Mirkwood. Dragons? Definitely an issue, but one that can be mitigated by storing your treasure horde in a maze of tunnels too small for a dragon to crawl through -- or, better yet, use multiple geographically isolated hordes. And again, the ability to collapse certain sections of tunnel would be both technologically unchallenging and very helpful here. Arguably it was the Dwarves' lack of innovation that led to them having such persistent dragon issues.
One of the great lessons to take away from a differential equations class... in my more dour moments, I think it's the only lesson to take away for most students in the course... is how common it is for iterated systems (which is almost anything embedded in "time", which is to say, everything we deal with in the real world) to be very sensitive to the strength of the feedback loop. It is trivial to construct systems that slowly, but surely, go to zero if you start with 0.5000000000000, but slowly but surely go to infinity if you start with 0.5000000000001. Small differences can be a big deal.
Also, it should be pointed out that our history is not full of industrial revolutions. There's the one that we're still living in, and arguably two or three that fizzled depending on exactly how you count and where you draw the line, and that's it. Industrial revolutions aren't easy in the real world!
> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.
That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.
I assure you that people crisscrossed the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East all the time in ancient days. Egypt's big advantage was its ability to produce lots of food along the Nile River and settle down and focus on something beyond survival.
Egypt was a civilization for about 1500 years before the camel was domesticated. Before the camel, you weren't going to get an army across six hundred miles of desert, and Egypt was easy to defend from anyone trying to enter along the Nile.
Egypt's food production was certainly critical to its success, but its isolation was both its defense and its downfall. Other civilizations competed with each other and advanced their technology, while Egypt existed happily in isolation, unaware of new technologies like bronze and chariots. After the camel, along with ships able to carry significant cargo, Egypt's food production became a juicy target, and it was conquered by one civilization after another.
It's relative. The competing risk only has to be a little greater to bias the decision. (Or, more accurately, the perceived risk).
Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.
Innovation was heavily discouraged throughout history by vested interests it challenged. Printing did not pick up in the Ottoman empire due to guild of scribes, for example (I heard).
Many new world burgeoning civilizations got wiped out/stunted by natural things like droughts and the land being farmable and able to maintain large populations.
There just wasn't any need - they had a world filled with magic.
Why would you ruin the natural world for industrial gains? In fact the Orkai and the white wizard was quite industrious with their forges and their war machine production and the natural world pushed back.
That and I don't see the start up world being that different from a risk perspective just the outcomes are different. And maybe middle earth was still to early.
Any calculation of risk must include the outcomes.
In the real world, the worst case realistic scenario for a startup is that you fail and lose all your money, and maybe face lawsuits.
In a fantasy setting, the worst case realistic scenario is that your skin is flayed from your bones and you spend the rest of existence serving a liche as a skeleton warrior.
Filled with magic, is overstating the magical capabilities of the world.
Gandalf, one of the most powerful wizards in the world can't even throw fireballs at his enemies. He has to gather pine cones set them on fire, then throw the pine cones. Most of the humans were magicless and could have used a tractor.
This is pretty much it but it's larger than that. It's not just "magic", it's the whole nature of Tolkien's world. The world has a creator-all-powerful God and everybody in it knows it. He created all sentient creatures in it for his own entertainment. Everything that "is", is however he wants it to be and that's the nature of things, there's no Science to "discover". The world was flat like a thousand years ago until some men interfered with God's entertainment and he sank their island and reshaped the world round. Nobody doubts this too. There's many immortal beings out there you can ask firsthand (the Elves). Oh and those also know (or know someone who knows) the lesser gods that know the God. He's real.
Men in the world of Tolkien don't have any reason to "innovate" or even inquire about the world, really.
I was just joking but this interpretation is a great metaphor for our modern world.
A meme (not the 4chan kind) going around lately is the history of the modern world is us as a society knowing less - as opposed to esotericism which is a belief that sometime in the past all the knowledge existed and then we forgot it, it got fragmented, and we find the origin, the center, then we can be free or make gold out of lead or whatever. Scientific revolution, postmodernism etc starts from the assumption we don't know anything and we can't know anything - instead of an origin, knowledge permeates everything.
So if we have a fantasy world where there are actual immortal beings and magic really exists (even though rare as mentioned by another poster) then how can you ever start with the assumption that nobody in the world knows? If you want knowledge, it's a matter of finding the right person or the right ancient scrolls or artifact.
It's similar to manufacturing jobs from the past. Compared to other options, it was lucrative.
The reason why Henry Ford started paying people $5 was not out of generosity or to help them buy his vehicles. It's because the job was monotonous and people would constantly walk off the assembly line. People stayed because it provided a reasonable pathway to middle class when there weren't a lot of other viable options.
Don't forget 'forge the most beautiful, magical set of jewels in the history of history, and then Satan will steal them from you, so you and the boys go on a bloody, genocidal crusade to retrieve them, bringing everything you touch and everyone you meet to ruin.'
That, and 'structure your society towards acquisition of material wealth and technological advancement, so you start plundering and enslaving your neighbours, and eventually, under the guidance of Satan Jr, you decide to invade heaven. And get Atlantis'd.'
Asking why ME didn't have an industrial revolution is looking through a very particular, very uninteresting cultural lens. (It's uninteresting because 'economic growth at any cost' is a common, and rather uninteresting modern view on life, and rarely takes into account it's externalities. Which Tolkien really, really dislikes.)
Tolkien's Middle Earth doesn't need, or want more clever, vain people. Most of the horrible things that happened in it were caused by them.
Yea I wonder if the purpose of this article is to promote capitalism while using a cringey comparison to distract from it. I hope those brain cells were put to good use.
Anyway, middle earth was a setting built to tailor and flesh out the stories in them. Combined together these -are- productive value that people pay for in good times, it seems.
It was around this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the times in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its God-given place. In Reflections on the Psalms (1958), for example, Lewis had described it as learning ‘(which God forbid) to ... distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption’. Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines were at best a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. ‘I’m sure you are very wicked people,’ said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, ‘but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’
Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Tolkien: "Yes! Because it IS! magic."
Clarke looking baffled at the response and trying to explain it to himself on the latest round of ale ("welp, it's still the 1st round, it's going to be a long night").
The problem with scientific framework is that it takes man out of the equation and than tries to say that this is all there is (science is not good nor bad, just is, right?). Yet for all the progress we were given in the last three centuries a lot of bad came out of it too. Yet we can't blame it on the science because we can't have the holistic worldview from scientific standpoint.
Instruments transform possibilities insofar as they required a transformation of possibilities and a transformation of the mind to come about. And the profit with which they do so determines their worth.
The industrial revolution is in the book, it's the actual antagonist of the story. Tolkien was a devout Catholic distributist and Hobbingen was his ideal Catholic community of self reliant Hobbits who answer to wizards and kings, not to factory floor managers and administrators.
Right, the industrialists are literally right there in the form of Saruman and the Orcs of Isengard:
"Together, my lord Sauron, we shall rule this Middle-earth. The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the orc."
The orcs could be looked at as an allegory of the faceless, dehumanized, industrialized proletariat, people who had sold their soul to the machine. They can be seen crafting huge weapons of war, siege engines and such, in giant factories fueled by those coal deposits.
The reason the industrial revolution never happened in Middle Earth is because the Fellowship of the Ring prevented it.
It is also clear that the author hasn't actually read the lord of the rings.
It doesn't feature in the films but the scouring of the Shire happens after the defeat of Sauron, in which Saruman and Wormtongue take over the Shire and push the same industrialization they were pushing at Orthanc. They have a small battle, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is killed by Hobbits and then everything is right again for the last chapter.
I'd also say an industrial revolution of sorts is definitely a component of the story and unambiguously considered bad.
Why are fantasy settings by and large medieval (and not evolving) probably has some interest (often the setting involves lost technology, "a great civilisation has disappeared". Tolkien does this too, with the silmarils, the fall of numenor). In fact per Tolkien law all the amazing elves are basically dying out and we're gonna be stuck with boring mortal men in the fourth age. So arguably all the good stuff has happened and we're on the road to ruin. Wonder if he read the daily mail?
A significant portion of authors might just be emulating Tolkien, I suppose. Also hard to have a secret elven forest base with high resolution satellite imagery, thermal imaging and precision guided weapons.
You don't need the books though, you can check online to see about the scouring of the shire and Saruman in general, which for the Tolkien case makes his views pretty clear.
If you really want to waste some time, consider that the eagles came and rescued Frodo/Bilbo from mount doom near the end. They could easily have flown them _into_ mordor in the first place, especially since at that time the Nazgul were not airborne, saving a very extensive tour of New Zealand (uh I mean middle earth) in the process. Would've needed far less elven bread and a smaller fellowship and got them more air miles. Gandalf could've also taken a spa holiday instead of an arduous hike, bungee jump with a balrog, death and resurrection, which I'm fairly sure weren't covered by his travel insurance and likely not recommended by his doctor.
Ultimately it is a story. In some senses alternative worlds allow you to compare "what ifs?" and this can be fun. However you have to be careful how much you read tvtropes...
Will remain neutral on all other opinions, but to be clear, I use the substack as a home for my reddit shitposts, some random person put it on here and it blew up
If only Tolkien wrote another story where the industrial revolution in Middle Earth (as you describe it) occurs, along with a fellowship that brings it down and returns Middle Earth to it's former glory.
> (Harry Potter is an obvious exception where it's the other way around.)
It is? Harry spent a lot of time contending with bureaucracy, whether in the form of overbearing schoolteachers or a corrupt Ministry of Magic. One of the series’ major villains, Dolores Umbridge, is sort of a personification of bureaucracy.
As has been explained in more detail by more capable media critics than me, Harry Potter's overall narrative arc is about restoring bureaucracy, not overthrowing it. The problem are never the systems but individuals abusing them because they're evil (with little motivation given).
If anything, framing it as "the bureaucracy overthrowing the hero" (or the hero making peace with the system, for a less dramatic interpretation) is only wrong because this implies the hero was ever at odds with the system to begin with. The system is never questioned (except by Hermione, who is portrayed as annoying an naive when she does it), only individual bad actors are identified defeated.
The ending of Harry Potter does not have wizards living openly alongside muggles, house elves liberated, mutual respect and trust between wizards and goblins, or the abolition of the Ministry. Instead it shows the next generation of students getting to experience the same exciting start in their train ride to Hogwarts with the implication that this time, things will be different because the evil people are REALLY gone this time.
Harry Potter is distinctly about protecting the "sanctity" of institutions, at the expense of individuality. Umbridge may be the personification of bureaucracy in our minds, but in JKR's, she's a threat to the image of British boarding schools being elite, character-building places for children. Note that, as a disciplinarian, she's functionally
equivalent to Snape. That was not Umbridge's "sin". Her sin was teaching to the test, removing the academic rigor of Hogwarts, presumably leaving it on par with lesser schools.
We might even look at her clothing and, in our minds, it looks very conservative. But in the wizard world, we never see anyone wearing such outlandishly colorful clothing. What looks like a makeup MLM saleswoman's outfit to us is a radical expression of individual style in the HP world.
In Harry Potter, individuality comes at a price. The more you express individualistic thought, living outside of the norms of society, the more impoverished you need to be to remain "good". Look at the Weasleys. Look at the Lovegoods. Those that attempt to be successful and individuals are default evil.
HP is so incredibly conservative, it's surprising everyone was surprised by JKR's politics.
Harry's single ambition through the books is becoming a member of the Wizarding police/SWAT team (Aurors), totally integrated into the system. The only things he had any personal problem with was occasionally who's in charge. In fact, he stays (almost) moot through the entire series of books on questions such as the fact of elves being literal slaves, where people who speak out (e.g. Hermione) are portrayed as shrill whiners.
On that one Harry takes a more individualistic approach: You can't save those who don't want to be saved. Most house elves are happy where they are and fear being freed, but Harry had no problem helping Dobby, who obviously wanted out.
The premise of the rather fascinating "Last Ringbearer" is that Mordor and the orcs were on the verge of a successful industrial revolution, only to be thwarted by the racist, imperialist alliance of the Fellowship.
It is so disheartening that I had to scroll halfway down the page to find the actual correct answer here. I don't understand how this couldn't be immediately obvious to anyone who has actually read the books.
Ironically, if Tolkien were still around I'm 100% sure he'd see the Jackson/Amazonification of LOTR as another real-world manifestation of the same forces that turned Orthanc into a huge weapons factory and nearly succeeded in turning the Shire into one big polluted light industrial zone: take something beautiful and unique, strap it down on a steel table and suck every ounce of value out of it, then toss its gasping dying husk into the dumpster on your way out to go party on your megayacht.
Very, very telling that The Scouring of the Shire was left out of the movies.
I was about to write the same thing. When I saw the title, my first thought was "because Tolkein would have had that happen over his dead body, and that's kind of the whole point." I thought this was common knowledge, especially among nerds.
This. Also, there are a few moments scattered throughout the book where the hobbits get to eavesdrop on conversations between Sauron's orcs and we gatch a few glimpses of Mordor's internal organisation.
The tone of those conversations always struck me as surprisingly "modern" compared to the "epic medieval" style of the rest of the book: Orcs apparently have ID numbers, they complain about arrogant bosses, at some point talk about one of the Nazgul's winged beasts like requesting a helicopter flight, talk about setting up on their own, etc.
The talk sounds more like that of a frustrated and cynical foot soldier in a modern millitary or an employee in a megacorp would sound than some medieval thug.
Sauron's and Saruman's architecture is also very clearly industrial - the book is much more explicit about that than the movie: Isengard is described as full of technology, while buildings in Mordor (and later in occupied Shire) are described as barracks and huts made out of bricks, connected by a regular network of roads. And then there is the "new mill" in the Shire...
YES! On a recent re-read the different tones Tolkien uses for different parts of the book were really apparent (I was readinbg it aloud to a child).
The two main modes are, of course, the pastoral Hobbit sections (not just in the shire, but right up to the end whenever we're following hobbits as our pov character you get to hear about day to day concerns of cooking and cleaning and homelife) and the high fantasy style of the Men esp anything with Aragorn and no hobbits (full names given at the drop of a hat and plentiful information about lineages and ancient battles).
But along side this we also get the oral/ lyric tradition exemplified by the Bombadil sideline, the rambling medieval scholar (gandalf reading the half descroyed chronicle in Moria) and yes, the grumblings of modern industrial bureacracy of the orcs and later the hobbits in Sharkey's thrall.
Not that it matters but I would argue that this sort of organization is strictly required to operate at the scale of armies in question.
The wars in the previous ages are described as being a bit more “equal” suggesting there were equally large hosts of humans/elves though, but maybe they’re able to organize “because magic” (e.g. elves may benefit from lembas bread allowing them to not have to worry about supply lines like the orcs).
Considering how worried the orcs were about informants reporting them for sedition, it sounds less like a modern military and more like one of the militaries where commissars shoot anybody who retreats. Add on to that the fact that Mordor's population is almost entirely enslaved, and it sounds rather like Stalin's USSR but with more competently-run agriculture.
No objection here. I meant "modern" more in the general sense that it sounded closer to present day than to the middle ages - but that doesn't have to mean we're talking about present-day (2020s) military.
> Middle Earth is framed, explicitly, as an account of the history of our world. That is, the world of the Lord of the Rings is one and the same as our world, just at a very different point in its history. Thus, while Middle Earth may possess resources that we do not, such as Mithril, unless the resources of our world were deposited later, they must have been available to the people of Middle Earth.
I think this is a common mistake when analyzing Tolkien's work. His universe isn't meant to be the history of Earth, it's supposed to be an origin myth of England. With all the caveats that go with similar origin myths. To quote the letter that prefaces The Silmarillion:
> I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands.
Why hasn't the world of LoTR had an industrial revolution? Well for the same reason Troy didn't. Because if it did, it wouldn't be an origin myth. It's no more reasonable to discount the worldbuilding of Tolkien for incongruences with history than it is to discount the "worldbuilding" of Homer.
Funnily enough, this is also a myth. You are quoting Letter #131. But you are likely quoting secondary or tertiary sources and forgot the rest.
Here's what you quote:
> Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion
And here's what you missed:
> Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. (…) I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.
Indeed it was long ago when that attempt was aborted: it was the Book Of Lost Tales which would have been the missing Anglo-Saxon mythology but that has been abandoned around 1920. Christopher Tolkien clearly stated most elements defining and peculiar to BOLT are not present in later works. There are many versions of the Silmarillion but there's only one version of BOLT.
Tolkien's work is a solution in search of a problem though. It's unsurprising to conclude that English has so few stories if he discards all its Germanic and Skandinavian heritage!
He did not. He reached for those Scandinavian and Germanic stories, to fashion his own, and England's. But to say that the stories of the English would have been the same as the stories of other Germanic and Scandinavian people's assumes much less diversity among all those peoples than had actually existed.
But clearly thats not strictly “English” or “British”. The mythos of Nationalism was strong in Tolkiens time (which sorta continue to this day). Every “Nation” needed a homogeneous population with a shared culture and strong bonds that bind them together; one way of doing this was to appeal to an origin myth.
I was quoting directly from my copy of the Silmarillion. But I don't agree that that later paragraph invalidates the premise that the lore of LoTR has its roots in an attempt to create English mythology. This letter was written after LoTR was written (but not yet published), and it was inspired and written under the very effort that he later give up. That he didn't end up publishing the entire mythos doesn't mean that it's not a valid lens under which to interpret his work. Indeed, it's a necessary lens.
Could you expand on that? To me the second quote seems to support the reading of LOTR etc. as part of an attempt to create/ codify an English myth cycle
The last sentence is Tolkien admitting he aborted the project. He wrote The Hobbit as something of a children's tale in a bout of inspiration, and the LoTR when his publisher was weirded out by the alien nature of the silmarillion, asking instead for "more fun stuff with hobbits."
This can best be seen in the history of middle earth, his son's chronicle of the writing process for his father's work; volume VI covers the fellowship of the ring, and it is a doozy in first drafts compared to the mainstream published version. He basically tried to reboot Bilbo, and in later drafts his son, going on another quest for dragon gold. It was only after the thing was in full swing that those old impulses and sources found their way into the fabric of the story, sort of figuring out where it was going based on how far he'd wandered in the draft phase.
Anyway he wasn't trying to build english myths when he wrote the books he is famous for, that was more a young & ambitious college student's feverdream.
> Anyway he wasn't trying to build english myths when he wrote the books he is famous for, that was more a young & ambitious college student's feverdream.
If that feverish worldbuilding formed the ultimate setting of LoTR, would it not be relevant in evaluating that world?
It didn't. A few ideas from BOLT survive in the Silmarillion but it is certainly not a setting of LotR. Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.
> Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.
We're not talking about some abandoned setting of LotR, we're talking about the world of the book that was actually published. Which is absolutely the world of the Silmarillion (also as published).
Well, yes, but what I am saying is that the few ideas that survived from BOLT into Silmarillion didn't form LotR -- they are too distant relatives so to speak.
> I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands.
My immediate thought was “What about King Arthur?!” But then I begin to wonder how much Arthurian legend has been enriched purely in the 20th century.
“The once and future king” -where a lot of the modern take on Arthur came from - was punished in 1958, 4 years after the Lord of the Rings.
According to Wikipedia, Arthurian legend was popular in the Middle Ages, but kind of fell out of favor.
There's one other problem with Arthurian legend, and it's a doozy. Arthur's alleged subjects were the Celtic peoples who lived in Britain before the invasion of the Anglo-Saxon tribes speaking proto-English. If you use this as the origin story of England, you're making English people the bad guys. Tolkien must have realized this.
Tolkien actually addressed Arthurian legend immediately after that quote I posted:
> Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
LoTR had an industrial revolution. It was called Isengard and people didn’t like how it turned out. Elves were anti technology so there would be downward pressure until they upped and left. Dwarves probably reproduced slowly and were recovering from being orc and dragon chow. Numenorians reproduced slowly and they were also recovering from the plagues and wars. This leaves hobbits who were idyllic. Oh, and the wizards were forbidden to show their abilities.
When the age of men begins, the modern world begins. Tolkien was not interested in writing about that having seen it’s horrors first hand. And as others have written, the population density was very low. Rohan mustered 7-10k riders from the adult male (+1j population.
Depends on how you define it, they had no problem with metallurgy, cloth-making (with properties better than high-teach real world clothes and considered as magic by outsiders), advanced food processing, excellent weaponry, shipbuilding and so on...
The Numenorians actually also had a technological revolution, although I don't know whether it was industrial. They unfortunately faced the setback of being almost entirely wiped out when their continent was sunk by Illuvatar.
Both the Elvish and Numenorian comments discussed hand-made, almost magical creations similar to what we imagine pre-industrial. So I think we're all in agreement that there were some amazing things created, but not at scale (perhaps aside from weaponry, but that's probably a long, slow accretion) and not for consumption.
Seems clear the author: 1) knows next to nothing about Middle-Earth or Tolkien's larger work and honestly admits it, though continues to make sweeping generalizations about a subject they admittedly know little about; 2) knows nothing about classics, ancient history nor history of technology except perhaps bullet points gleaned from a pop documentary, iow, author displays extremely pedestrian and shallow knowledge or understanding of these vast subjects; 3) has taken at least one high school level course that included discussion of the Industrial Revolution; 4) likes guns, maybe owns a gun, has no great reason to own or use a gun other than childish affectation or perhaps even obsession.
It should also be said that the bloggers writing style is profusely insulting, almost like they're intentionally sabotaging anyone's ability to take them seriously, even if the question could have been interesting, instead the author indulged their immaturity.
Agree completely on the writing style. Even were the subject interesting - world-building in fiction generally is to me - the intensely hostile tone puts me off almost immediately. To be honest, I couldn't read past the first quarter without just rolling my eyes and closing the tab. It's an affectation that I feel has become more popular of late; this eye-rolling, obnoxious, "ha ha don't you hate reading this? Isn't this whole article just infuriating? Why don't you share it with your friends so they can get equally outraged?" kind of article. Perhaps it does work as a way to game engagement metrics, but it makes a lot of commentary stupider and more unpleasant than it needs to be.
Oh, I understand that it's not seriously hateful. I just don't find sarcastic or ironic hostility any more palatable than genuine hostility. Referring to the reader as a loser pedant for raising reasonable objections to obviously ridiculous claims is either insulting or time-wasting, to my eyes. If you like this style of writing, then so be it.
I was interested in the topic but the snide tone was very difficult to get through.
If I had read it when I was much younger I might have enjoyed it, but I've read so much writing with a similar tone that at this point I consider comes off as cliched. Especially in combination with the verbal sparring with strawmen device.
I was able to get through it mostly, but my motivation decreased as I increasingly got the feeling that the author was researching in service of a pre-determined point rather than doing an "investigation" as claimed in the beginning.
> But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs?
Misconception. Coal doesn't come from dinosaurs; primarily it comes from plants (algae, trees) and plankton. It was formed in the carboniferous period, during which the evolution of plants had preceded the evolution of microbes that were able to digest lignin and cellulose; thus, vast piles of carbon-containing material piled up, got compressed, and formed the coal (and oil) deposits we see today. Yes, of course sometimes animals fell into the bogs and became part of the deposits, but trying to explain the scale of carbon deposits with mass graves of dinosaurs is a little silly.
Haha. Granted I didn't check his footnotes, but that's pretty lazy writing, and feels more like he corrected it as an afterthought rather than editing his core text.
I sort of agree but one of my general regrets with web publishing vs. pages on paper (or even a formatted PDF) is that footnotes which bulletproof, add nuance, provide parenthetical detail, etc. don't work nearly as well because you can't just glance at them.
He does but you're still clicking through rather than casually glancing at the bottom of a page as you would be a book or paper. Footnotes (or endnotes) are fine on the web (or Kindle, etc.) for reference that most people won't read. They're less good for parenthetical text.
They should still be working as ever. You may have changed the zoom level or possibly we changed some dimension slightly and your screen is no longer wide enough to provide adequate space for sidenotes.
(And I'd point out that even when you don't have sidenotes, the footnotes are still better than usual because they pop up on hover - no click necessary unless you disabled JS entirely, at which point /shrug, you've indicated you don't want fancy frills so enjoy your old-fashioned 1995-style footnote hyperlinks.)
The point made a bit further in article is that in Middle Earth, unlike our world, there is no carboniferous period of millions of years before the ascent of intelligent hominids. The events of Lord of the Rings happen ~50k years after the creation of the world.
It's been a while since I last read The Silmarillion, so some details might be wrong.
The reason why Middle-earth did not have an industrial revolution is supernatural. When the Ainur sang the songs of creation, there was discord. Melkor, the mightiest of them, wanted to create something of his own, which was the root of all evil. The world they created was flawed. Within the world, the minds of those who seek to create were easily corrupted.
Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys. Think of dwarves or the Noldor in general. Or think about Fëanor who created the Silmarils or Celebrimbor who created the Rings of Power. Sauron and Saruman were both servants of Aulë the Smith, and look what they became.
There was industry in Mordor and in Isengard. Dwarves also had it, and the Noldor probably as well. Even hobbits managed to create some by the end of the LotR. But that industry never led to sustained prosperity. In the end, there was always war and destruction, because the world was flawed from the beginning.
Presumably also the Numenoreans had it. The description of latter-day Numenor reads like they were technologically very advanced. The question is how far, but it seems fair to assume there was a sharp drop after the Fall because of the colonies not being self-sufficient enough to maintain their tech level. If we consider the stories in the Silmarillon to be handed down orally, the most advanced technologies could have simply been left out or summarized as "magic". No point detailing them if there's nothing in the daily lives of your audience that is comparable.
Numenor always sounded like a reference to the United States; virgin land blessed with immense resources, ideal conditions for a centralized power to grow wealthy materially and dominate the rest of middle earth.
I doubt if they had “industry”; they probably had “advanced feudalism” with large capacity for shipbuilding and manufacturing arms. But that was because of the large continent and population. In a sense, its more similar to the Roman Empire.
The reason that Tolkien didn’t write an industrial revolution into the history of middle earth is that he hated industry. Hated how it destroyed bucolic village life.
Having this take on LoTR is pointless. Just an annoying waste of time.
The point of the article is to talk about the industrial revolution. It is no great feat of intelligence to figure out the reason something is not in a book is because the author didn't want it there. I personally thought these thoughts were a bit scattered but ultimately somewhat interesting. And the thought of Gandalf waving a .44 around is funny.
I think the point wasn't to interpret the books. The author hasn't read them, which is an obvious giveaway. As an excuse to write thousands of words about the starting conditions of the industrial revolution, it doesn't seem like a waste of time.
Yet, he had bellows forges. Curiously selective. And explosives, for his fireworks.
I think it was Saruman who did the industrial bit, and used wood for the fuel. (No dwarven miners to hand, I guess? But orcs like it underground.) But inventing guns all by himself seems like a tall order, even given several centuries' plotting.
I’m definitely being too negative about something that is silly.
Im just tired of this kind of analysis. It’s common in ASOIAF space. there it is often done completely seriously. I spent a lot of time in that space, so I think I’m just overly sensitive.
Tolkien lived in a city in Oxford which was neither bucolic nor a village. It sounds more like you hate industry and wish to return to bucolic village life.
I have no idea if Tolkein loved or hated industry, but simply living in a city doesn't suddenly make you an industrialist as much as living in a village doesn't make you a farmer.
If anything, living in the city gives you an excellent perspective on the effects of industrialization, form ones own opinions from there.
Oxford is known for having some quite stunning villages surrounding it. I went back in the weekend for a reunion, the city itself is still quite pretty with plenty of river paths.
> I have never read Lord of the Rings. I’ve tried. It’s boring as hell.
The images in your blog suggest that you find the war really funny and exciting. As LOTR is a book talking extensively about the real nature of war, it may change your point of view and you probably should avoid reading it. Maybe is just not the book for you.
In any case, yes there is an industrial revolution in the second book (focused in the consequences of such revolution). The concept of a bomb is present also, so having fire weapons shouldn't be a problem. Technology plays a big role in most of the history. Often as contrast to the country life.
Gandalf uses a Colt .45 at the end of the book to kill the mischievous indian chief and save Rosita's sheep farm. Is in the last Peter Jackson's version: the Return of the Writer's Block.
The title aside, this essay is about why Middle Earth didn't have an industrial revolution. Unfortunately, it uses a model with a limiting assumption which it ignores, the assumption being that a certain population level is also required.
High-labour-cost, low-coal-cost is fine and might fit our world. However, to get people to spend years in R&D you need specialization and scale. Without the first you don't have R&D people. Without the second there's no profit or even much advantage to the new tech. To get both of these you, well, need people. A good number of people to support specialists which aren't part of the Nobility (or at least Nobles which are engaged in activities which weren't historically considered very Noble-like in nearly every society in our world), and a good number of people so that scale can generate a profit.
Industrial revolution can't happen by itself in ultra-sparse societies as in the LOTR era. The author cites estimates which are an order of magnitude lower than 17th century England, and I'd go one order of magnitude lower still*.
Now if he asked the question about Númenor that's a different matter... (Yes, it was destroyed, but there were populous colonies in Middle Earth which should have kept any tech?)
* Judging by the level of hostility involved and very high internal coherence of the protagonist societies I suspect a more total mobilization than your typical feudal society where losing simply meant the peasants served a different lord.
That’s a favorite of mine. If you read it in English, remember it is a translated from Russian. There is a lot of awkward phrasing to a native English speaker which is probably idiomatic Russian that might have been better torn apart and rendered as native English.
Once you can forgive that, it’s a nicely paced story with all your friends from LOTR showing up.
> You would think it’s the middle ages, but human society has actually been around in Middle Earth about as long as it has in ours.
The time span since the Industrial Revolution compared to the history of humankind (let alone humanoids) is a tiny fraction, so even a tiny bit of variation in "about as long" can explain all the technological difference between rocket-propelled grenades and catapults.
But the actual reason why there is no modern technology in Middle Earth has of course nothing to do with economics or engineering, but with the personal tastes of Tolkien. He wanted to create a medieval saga, not sci-fi, and judging by its popularity, he did a great job.
"Reassured, the boggies donned their greaves, corslets, gauntlets, and shoulder padding and slathered themselves with Bactine. Each was armed with a double-edged putty knife, its blade both keen and true. Goodgulf wore an old deep-sea diver’s suit of stoutest latex. Only the well-trimmed beard was recognizable through the helmet’s little round window. In his hand he carried an ancient and trusty weapon, called by the elves a Browning semiautomatic." - Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings
Read "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which is exactly this. The Boss, before being sent into the past, ran an arms factory. He gets some 19th century technology going and builds weapons in quantity.
Steel came late. Not until the Bessemer process in the 1880s was steel produced in volume. Steel as an exotic material, about as rare as titanium today, dates back to the Roman Empire at least. Early blast furnaces were seen in medieval Spain and 5th century China. But good steel could only be produced in small quantity by those processes. For the longest time, nobody got the heating, the ingredients (mostly iron ore, coal, and limestone) and the air injection right, so they could not get mild steel in quantity.
A medieval society could have built a Bessemer converter if they knew how and the right minerals were available. It's the metallurgy that's hard; the thing itself is simple.
For someone who hates the Lord of the Rings, that's surprisingly well researched. And yet, a lot of his reasoning doesn't make sense. Because population levels in Middle Earth are far lower than in 18th century England, labour costs should be high?
Population levels in Middle Earth strike me as closer to those of Siberia or the eastern European steppe (perhaps with the Ural in the role of the Misty Mountains?) than to those of western Europe. And I think everybody agrees that Siberia was never going to be a good spot for the industrial revolution to start.
To have high labour costs, you need high productivity; you need industry. Most of the industry in Middle Earth seems to be involved in making weapons and jewelry, and not much else. To have high inventiveness, you need a lot of people. I suppose the industrial revolution could start in England because it was both fairly densely populated, but also highly productive. Perhaps because they had the trade network to sell their goods all over the world?
There doesn't seem to be much trade in Middle Earth. There barely are any cities! I mean, Gondor seems to be by far the largest and richest country, and what cities do they have beyond Minas Tirith, Osgiliath and Erech? The rest of Middle Earth seems to be almost completely empty. The various travelling groups would frequently walk for days without encountering any farms or villages.
I don't know why Middle Earth is so empty, but given that it is, it seems like a very unlikely place for the industrial revolution to take place.
The parts of Middle-earth we see in the books are empty, because Sauron has been fighting a war against the Numenoreans and their allies for 2000 years. He has also been winning the war.
Northern Eriador, roughly the area between Shire and Rivendell, used to be Arnor. The northern counterpart to Gondor was first weakened in civil wars and then destroyed by the armies of the Witch King. People don't return to the area, because they believe the ruins of the cities are haunted.
The Misty Mountains are infested with orcs. Few people live near the mountains, except in Dunland in the south.
Anduin runs between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood. Few people are willing to live near them. Particularly because Sauron built his fortress in the southern Mirkwood and spent most of the last 2000 years there. Further south, the lands west of the river are near Lorien and Fangorn, and people are afraid of the beings living in those forests. On the eastern side, the lands between Mirkwood and Mordor are either barren or were ruined in the battles at the end of the Second Age.
Osgiliath, Minas Anor/Tirith, and Minas Ithil/Morgul used to be three great cities of Gondor. However, Minas Ithil was lost and Osgiliath abandoned long ago. At the end of the Third Age, most of the population of Gondor lives in the coastal areas protected by the White Mountains and Minas Tirith. Pelargir is a major port near the mouth of Anduin, and Dol Amroth is another major city.
We know little of the lands to the east and to the south, except that they were capable of sending large armies against Gondor.
> As mentioned in the quote introing this section, the Dwarves are explicitly described as mining coal in The Hobbit.
This is one of the key places where The Hobbit is unavoidably discontinuous with LOTR. Bilbo also has matches and a clock. Tolkien considered a larger revision of The Hobbit to bring it in line with LOTR but ended up only significantly reworking "Puzzles In The Dark", the chapter where Bilbo meets Gollum and obtains the ring. (Apparently the first edition also had a reference to tomatoes, which were replaced with pickles.) I don't think it's a strong basis for any arguments about the worldbuilding of Middle-earth.
My immediate thought is that the technium of Middle Earth did not develop like ours due to rhe ubiquity of magic.
Indeed, it is in these books that the last lights of magic are fading, and the world is being given over to other powers.
Imagine if there were like an additional physics sitting on top of ours, and its use was isolated to a few hereditary practitioners, and let us see if the mundanes can scraps together enough gumption for gunpowder. Who knows if it even works in those circumstances?
In the earliest iterations Tolkien imagined Middle-Earth to have steam punk technology. I believe it is because steam ships and rolling tanks are much closer to what Tolkien expierenced in the First World War when he first conceived his world.
I suspect over the course of his life Tolkien became more and more frustrated with technology, and removed most overt traces of it to bring his stories closer to what he read in Medieval folk lore.
Its been a long time since i read the books so im not sure if this is present in the books, but there is gunpowder in the movies because the orcs use a bomb at one point.
The books are ambiguous. There's an explosion caused by a device made by Saruman, but it isn't described and there's no indication AFAIK if it's supposed to be simple black powder or something magical.
The most common forms of magic in LotR is probably superior Elven knowledge of Arda. Their lifespan means that they can explore many topics to a far greater depth than a human could ever hope. Topics where it can take decades to comprehend the state of the art, and where humans have no choice but to specialize and fragment the subject into sub-disciplines.
"True magic" seems to stem from intimate knowledge of the more arcane and foundational aspects of Arda. The Ainur wield it instinctively, and only the most ancient Elves seem to be able to learn it. But also they struggle to use it on scale, which was one of the reasons the Rings of Power were forged. In the Third Age, advanced magic seems to only be used via the Rings of Power, and dissipates for good after the destruction of the One Ring.
Some of that plays into questions about why the Roman Empire didn't advance more technologically than it did. One of the explanations I've read is that, given ubiquitous slave labor, there was no need for labor saving devices which has been one of the drivers of industrialization.
That fertilizer would be needed to free a lot of people from menial field work and allow them and their children to dig for coal or toil in factories.
Imho coal is not all that necessary for an industrial revolution. To run factories, one could use water power for the textile industry for example.
And i would recommend to make charcoal out of Lóriens forests for the smelteries (which actually would be quite good due to the low sulfur content of charcoal).
I think the graph says it all: "something" happened in the 1500s that allowed or caused our industrial and scientific revolution along with the Enlightenment. The Romans, Babylonians, Mongols, Chinese, Persians, and probably the Incans and Mayans had large productive organized societies for hundreds or thousands of years but industrialization happened in non-empires across multiple countries in a relatively short span of time.
It seem like industrialization was a result of the more fundamental discovery of the scientific method than time, organization, or empires. This was combined with the symbiotic need for power (to pump water out of mines, initially) and ability to supply it with engines that were newly possible from scientific experimentation in metallurgy and machining. Possibly gunpowder was the trigger since it required better machining and metallurgy that allowed engines.
Middle Earth presumably had the same problem with finding the initial conditions for scientific and industrial revolution, possibly amplified by the Enlightenment being impossible; mysticism and religion were real and active in the world and so pure scientific rationalism was doomed to fail, leaving the alchemists and would-be magicians in charge of "research". Humanity only narrowly escaped that trap, it seems.
Ok, I stopped reading about 1/2 way though, because middle earth didn't need an industrial revolution because they were all hippie communities living close to nature and they didn't need one be because they had magic distracting them and solving their most pressing problems.
Need a clean house, just study to make a magic broom, or buy one in the magic shop. Need to get somewhere fast, take an eagle, etc. Why waste your time inventing gunpowder when you can learn some magic and shoot fireballs from your staff.
Most of the characters did not have magic. Gandalf had magic, but he was also basically an angel sent from heaven to guide middle earth. Its not like he was a normal inhabitant
This could have been an interesting table discussion but that person really wants to make themselves look better than their imagined theoretical opponents. It's off-putting and I'd avoid them if such a discussion happened around me.
Semi-tangent: I am a bit partial to the idea that the abolition of Slavery in England itself and the restriction of the slave trade in the empire during the period of roughly 1772 until 1807 was partly responsible for the industrial revolution.
Correlation does not equal causation, but there is a potential causal mechanism. This could have been a factor in the increase in labor costs in England itself at least, which helped drive the popularization of mechanized labor amplifying devices. The industrial revolution really took off a decade or two after the slave trade act of 1807, which would have been long enough for existing slaves to start aging out and since the act restricted the slave trade it would have been tough to replace them.
If we'd roundly abolished slavery in ancient times I wonder if we'd be on our way to the Centauri system right now.
I couldn't help but think of modern robotics and industrial automation as
LaborSupply x LaborProductivity / CostOfSoftware
Given the extreme cost of software development, and the diminishing cost of labor due to globalization - it's no wonder we don't have robots everywhere. It will be curious if the current wage spike leads to increased automation.
It’s happening already. Industrial wages in China have been ramping up significantly for over a decade as the rural labour pool gets tapped out, manufacturers climb the value chain, and the work force up-skills. This is why a lot of low value add manufacturing is moving to Vietnam.
As a result Chinese manufacturers are investing heavily in robots. This isn’t really to replace workers though, as such, it’s that at the macro level they’re running low on workers willing to do those tasks. And before someone says “all they need up do is pay more for them to do it”, that’s missing the point. A lot of people in China have higher aspirations now. Fewer and fewer of them want to be clicking together bits on a production line any more, no matter how well it pays. They increasingly have the skills for higher value work, and want to use them.
Robots do not save money. They may optimise some other part of the value chain which could increase profits, but robots are a more expensive workforce than humans.
It depends on the values in the above equation. If the labor cost of reconfiguring injection molding machines rises above 3d printers, then companies will use 3d printers. If the labor cost of having someone click parts together goes to high relative to the cost of building a robot for the same task, then a robot will be developed for the task.
You are assuming that there's no labour required to care for the robots, when in practise, the labour it takes to care for robots and adapt processes around them is often more expensive than that to do the job to begin with.
The world described in LoTR is not physically like ours. For instance, the orcs aren't described as bad guys because of their upbringing, culture, or subjective perception by the other races. Orcs are intrinsically evil. All the bad creatures of middle earth are described as if they radiate a natural and unalienable evil aura from their being.
There are two explanations for this: (1) this is an accurate explanation of a phenomenon or (2) it's an unreliable narrator projecting propaganda.
Orcs are also often associated with industrial activity. If (1) is true, then there might be a real connection between industry and evil. E.g. the downfall of the dwarves is related to their industrial greed. If (2) is true, there might be a stigma against industry due to its association with orcs.
Orcs and other beings in LotR are evil because Morgoth infused the world with his essence and his ill will. At the end of the First Age, he was a shadow of his former self and was easily defeated by the other Valar. But since he basically turned Arda into his Ring, truly eliminating him would probably meant remaking Arda from scratch. Therefore, he was just cast out into the Void, and the Valar retreated to the few parts that were still intact. Of course, that's the official mythology, and the truth might be rather different.
There is no inherent stigma against industry in itself in LotR. Many peoples (Noldor, Numenoreans, Dwarfes) engaged in industry, but it tends to further greed and hunger for power, which makes individuals and whole societies easier to manipulate and play off against each other.
But I do have an opinion on it. And boy, will I let you know what it is!
(Note: I'm not even a fan of LotR. More Silmarillion, so I'm not defendig LotR but to criticise something you haven't read... that must be the root of all internet evil).
Back in my final year of high school I procrastinated my exams by reading Lord of the Rings. I felt like if I didn't get a good grade my life would be over but all of a sudden J.R. Tolkien's deep lore and meandering narrative were absolutely captivating.
What I wondered looking at that chart of GDP over time.. is what is the point of using a measure made to measure the economies of the modern world, to measure completely different economies of the past.. of course its going to look flat and then take off.
If you want to figure out why the Industrial Revolution didn't happen somewhere imaginary, you might want to consider those places on Earth where it was imported instead of having happened. That is: comparing to the UK is less interesting than comparing to countries that at that same time didn't transition. I am no historian and Western; as such my view on what happened around that time in Asia, Africa, South-America, Australia is limited. (History class here focuses on the Industrial Revolution). But if there was no IR in any of those areas, surely those would be a better model for investigating the main question.
My own pet theory is that in worlds with magic users, magic gets used to solve the problems which technological advancements would otherwise be developed for.
Of course, we get some fantasy lands like this, where magic itself was the major discovery behind the industrial revolution (see: League of Legends' animation, "Arcane", "Wheel of Time" novels).
Then you have something like "Flight of Dragons" where science can be applied to how some of the magical elements work, but still are fundamentally incompatible. Almost like "Schrodinger's wizard", once you start analyzing the magic, it starts fading.
Industrial Revolutions required many things that Frodo's world lacked:
1) Abundant and cheap coal (heat, steel making, steam engines, etc). We know this didn't exist, for why should Saruman rely on the comparatively bad fuel of green wood to power his engine of war?
2) International demand for goods via global trade networks. The societies are clearly fragmented with little interchange...polar opposite of Europe in the 1750-1900 period.
3) Abundant laborers and innovators to create necessary machines. England had a number of innovative entrepeneurs who needed steam engines to pump water out of the mine so the miners could get the coal that was slightly deeper.
4) Scientific progress on metals, machining, and scientific method. Starting with Francis Bacon, Newton, and others, England saw a very strong burst of scientific progress right before industrialization.
5) Governmental support of industry (e.g. tariffs/regs in USA/Germany). This one is perhaps the hardest to study, we don't know much about governmental policy in LotR, but it seems to be monarchical and/or authoritarian, maybe war-lord driven...not what you need for an economic-technological revolution.
LotR in Frodo's Day is a sparsely populated world that used to be grand. If the Elves and Numenorians of old, with all their splendor, didn't start a revolution, then how could the ghost-towns of men and elves?
1) An obvious failure of public education. They weren't training/apprenticing enough magicians.
2) Racism/nationalism. Magicians should have been working with dwarves to develop technology. Instead the only magician who concentrated on developing industrial technology worked with a manufactured slave species that lacked dwarf institutional knowledge, and additionally focused all of his efforts in developing war technology.
A fun piece of speculation so I'm trying not to take it too seriously. But it takes a giant leap of faith to say coal was not the primary driver of the Industrial Revolution. First, it introduced a massive energy surplus far greater than annual solar inputs for the first time in human history. You can't just brush off physics and claim this surplus, once discovered, is somehow substitutable on the open market as if human labor could compete in Watt-hours. The presence of ultra-concentrated forms of energy with a high ROI was the driving factor in investing in technology for their extraction. A perfect circle: coal gives us more energy, to build better machines, which let us access more coal, etc. Change the economics and there is no incentive to industrialize unless you've got an army of Orcs to bootstrap the energy budget. Even if a human society could industrialize without fossil carbon, why do we see literally no evidence of such a thing ever happening on earth?
Tolkien answered this question quite well to an interviewer, although in a somewhat different form. "People would run into me at the pub and ask me why I didn't just have the eagles carry the hobbits to mordor, it would have been so much easier. And I told them the same thing I'll tell you now.
Building a world that not just happens to be in a particular phase of history at the time a story takes place, but is somehow perpetually stuck in the middle ages for thousands and thousands of years seems to be surprisingly common in fantasy.
I read Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion.
Until Numenor fell Arda was flat as a plate, which would prevent formations of coal, oil and other minerals necessary for basic industrial technology. While it's true that in the third age the world became a conventional globe, would Eru have put in fossil fuels? Probably not.
What about magic? Instead of being a great utility, it might have actually set middle earth back in terms of technological development. Who needs a voice-activated door when there is magic? Who needs technological efficiency when you can just eat some Lembas and work all day and night?
Substitution effect. When you already have magic, the incentive to develop technological means to do the same things is drastically reduced. This magic vs. technology theme is explored in many works, though to be fair all I know of were written after LotR.
Personally, I read the books when I was 12 (slightly before the Peter Jackson Fellowship came out), and I was hooked the whole way through. I literally had sleepless nights from just reading on through the morning.
But then the author goes on to quote LOTR quite extensively and brings up all sorts of economy tidbits ("the dwarves don't farm"), so they obviously have read LOTR.
An industrial revolution (or, more generally, other scientific developments) are not necessary to the story and not typical of the fantasy genre.
Paraphrasing from Wikipedia:
Unlike science fiction and horror, works in the fantasy genre are distinguished in that they typically don't include scientific or macabre themes. Fantasy typically features prominently settings the emulate earth but with a sense of otherness. Magic and supernatural elements are common as main plot elements, theme, or setting.
The aeolipile was a toy - essentially an unsealed kettle on an axle. It had no mechanisms for building up pressure that could actually do some work. Their metal working wasn't good enough to build precision machinery at scale and their steel production was virtually non-existent compared with the amount you'd need to make a railway. There also wasn't an economic incentive - transport involved crossing hard mountainous terrain or - more usually - coastal trading. And they didn't have large quantities of co-located iron and coal.
I wish I could reproduce the passages from memory but as I recall, Tolkien as narrator in LOTR abhorred the cutting down of trees and the development that went on. His protagonists are all nature lovers in the original form, some very direct ones (walking trees, eagles etc) and the antagonists all want to cut down trees and build towns over them and so forth.
It is likely that the witch king and the Nazgul are trying to get an industrial revolution going and the heroes keep cutting interrupting their attempts each 11k years or so.
Easy to answer by asking this question: why did the west have an industrial revolution. The answer is that we first had a financial revolution. Modern finance precipitated the industrial revolution. So the question should be: why hadn't Middle Earth invented finance? My answer is that it wasn't an obvious or given revolution in the real world. You may as well ask why didn't Eukaryotes arrive 10 million years earlier. Some things are just random and improbable.
If you want to see a movie featuring both wizards and industrial technology, check out Wizards (1977) by Ralph Bakshi. Keep an open mind though, Bakshi's movies are a trip.
> Or, to put it another way, coal is the product of prehistoric biomass used to power steam engines that did a bit of an oopsie on the climate. But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs?
Why would it need dinosaurs to have coal. Wouldn’t it just need trees?
Industrial revolution aside, I think it's agreed on that the movies didn't get economics right: that we would absolutely see far more agriculture in Rohan and Gondor. Also, that the Hobbits had far too much food and quality goods relative to what you would expect their labor to be. While we definitely see a lot of consumption, we see relatively little production.
> So, Middle Earth had coal, but did it need coal? I don’t think so.
The author focuses on energy sources for machine power. But what about generating high heat for metallurgy? Coal burns longer and hotter than wood, and releases fewer particulates. Also coal is more energy dense than wood, making it easier to transport.
"It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help."
On the positive side, "noblesse oblige" actually works in The West, e.g., The Shire, etc. - (that's how you can tell the books are fantasy.) The lords actually care for their people, there's no grinding poverty, and with few exceptions efficiency is less valued than custom.
I think the major thematic element of the story is that the industrial revolution was already happening and the societies that rejected it were failing.
The hobbits were basically isolationists and it simply took the scouring to reach them.
The Rohirrim were basically obsolete. Living in wooden houses in the hills and plains raising horses and sheep.
Gondor, once the great home of civilization and a beacon of prosperity, mostly destitute and hardly able to resist the influence of Mordor.
The elves were almost completely drained, having fought a war of attrition against a superior enemy for thousands of years. They were preparing to emigrate from the land at the beginning of the stories as there were so few of them left.
Mordor was where the industrial revolution was under way. Sauron had clearly united several nations and had been involved in trade with them for hundreds of years. He’d shown the orcs and humans that followed his cause how to make coke, mine coal, and produce the vast quantities of goods required to field an army. Nothing they made was the quality attributed to the crafts of elves, dwarves, and the other ancient civilizations but they made up for it in numbers, in trade, etc.
Ultimately though the reason Gandalf didn’t have a big rifle was because the major theme of the story was one of resisting industrial revolution. Tolkien often spoke of, “the Machine.” I think he was essentially an anti-capitalist.
Mordor essentially rose to power without him and industrialization happened mostly in his absence.
Saruman tried to found his own nation on his own and used much of the technology developed by Mordor to do so.
Sauron arose out of his ghostly form and tried to take over Mordor from the religious angle and force his dominance through the Ring.
Had the Ring remained hidden I don’t doubt that Gondor would have eventually fell, Orthanc may have risen to take its place, and the Elves, dwarves, and Hobbits would simply be forced to comply with the new world order. So vast and established was the revolution at the point the story began.
ISTR a similar discussion about the same lack of development over time in the Game of Thrones universe, which has persisted in an essentially feudal state for, what, 8-10,000 years?
In that discussion, the answers were (I think?) "dragons and magic."
Why didnt many human civilizations like Egypt, Rome, China, etc have an industrial revolution? Many of the technologies like steam engines and clocks were in Rome and China. However they were mire curiosities and never scaled up.
Slavery, cheap labour is a poison for inventiveness.
Why build alexa, if you can buy a alexa. Why build with concrete 3d printers, if slave-labour is plenty.
One of the reasons of pushing UBI is, that without it, complex artifacts (lawn cutting robots) are slowly replaced by their wage-slavery equivalent and innovation becomes nothing but a curiosity to be displayed on some southern domus terrace during a orgy.
I just wonder why he doesn't have army-flattening magic? Why does he draw his sword so much? Talking to eagles is cool, but lifting and catapulting boulders would be much more effective at defeating orcs and whatnot.
The last time the Ainur wielded that kind of magic, during the aptly named War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, entire continents were rendered uninhabitable and sunk below the sea. It might or might not have been an admonishment about the unprecedented destructive power of nukes.
The Istari were sent to lead and inspire the peoples of Middle Earth, and being clad in flesh was supposed to give them greater empathy for their plight. By leading with force they likely would not have been able to resist the temptation of the Rings of Power ane would have turned into dark lords themselves, like what happened with Saruman.
They could still access their full power, but were only supposed to use it in extreme emergencies. The Balrog of Moria was unaccounted for in the plans of the Ainur, and likely would have wrecked Gandalf's plans completely even if the Fellowship had managed to escape it.
I think the best explanation could be taken from another novel: "The Wiz Biz" - The explanation there is, that physics in this world simply don't work like on earth, magic on on the other hand...
They don’t have an easy to get to and relatively dense energy source. I often wonder where humanity would be without coal and fossil fuels. I doubt anyone would have created trains using just horse power.
Gandalf owned a rifle, that's why. If a magic wand is a concentrator of will that's roughly equivalent to a pistol, then a staff with a stone in it is a full size rifle.
My take has always been that there have been industrial revolutions, but they’ve been suppressed. Tolkien’s description of evil is “the fires and forges of Mordor”.
After thinking about it a bit, the major obstacle I run into with having a coherent explanation for the lack of industrialization is that Mordor did industrialize at some level. And it doesn't take that much of an industrialization advantage to be able to overwhelm opponents.
ADDED: That said, maybe Mordor was just starting to industrialize and maybe wasn't quite at the point where it could conquer all given magic etc.
> First, Middle Earth actually has coal! Something I was kinda surprised to discover. As mentioned in the quote introing this section, the Dwarves are explicitly described as mining coal in The Hobbit.
Modern science differs from Middle Earth knowledge in having the willingness to admit ignorance. No scientific law, concept, theory or idea is sacred.
I don't think Middle Earth Christianity, Islam or whatever other premodern traditions of knowledge would agree in those two views. Everything that was important to know about the world was already known and written in the Bible, Qur'an or the Vedas.
How on earth there was going to be any secret of the universe yet to be discovered by mere immortals?
Middle Earth doesn't have Christianity, and indeed the books really lack any real discussion of religion. God exists and so do angels, but there are no clergy or real religious rituals.
here's a funny idea: no islamic golden age which meant no european enlightenment.
Yeah middle earth's history is completely different, there is no europe or arabia.
Despite this it would be funny that the easterling's lack of mathmatical progress would lead to the free men not advancing like they hypothetically could have.
There are several sentient species simultaneously, and the resulting xenophobic/genocidal struggle takes huge toll - in particular the populations of those various species are small (in my view Tolkien is a bit unrealistic in the sense that in his world the most powerful species hadn't totally put others out of existence like for example Cro-Magnon did to Neanderthals). Industrial revolution is about scale (the machines make economic sense only in mass production) and small population can't have it.
> (in my view Tolkien is a bit unrealistic in the sense that in his world the most powerful species hadn't totally put others out of existence like for example Cro-Magnon did to Neanderthals)
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is 200,000 years old. Hominids are 5,000,000 years old at least. For most of the history of Cro-Magnons there were multiple hominid species. All non sub Saharan Africans are two percent or more Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture goes as high as 10% if I recall correctly.
For the overwhelming majority of human history there have been multiple species.
And, maybe that is why we only got civilization shortly after the last Neanderthal and Denisovan passed on. That doesn't explain why Australia didn't get it, first, though.
I do not understand how you think multiple human species could impede civilization formation. Can you explain? Also, Australia only left the Stone Age with British colonization. It was plausibly the least technologically advanced inhabited area on Earth at contact.
I only observe the coincidence: while we had Neanderthal about, no moves toward civilization. Any reason would be speculation; maybe they and the Denisovans knew better? If so, they may get the last laugh, as it crashes down around us.
Australia (Sahul, really) was a place with (apparently) no Neanderthal or Denisovans. Whatever would develop only in their absence should have happened there first. Or maybe in Sundaland and points north, before rising seas claimed all of that.
But civilization was well along for millennia before any appreciable "technological advancement", excepting maybe pottery, and things that decay and leave no trace. (Which is most things.)
> Australia (Sahul, really) was a place with (apparently) no Neanderthal or Denisovans.
Things have changed.
> Denisova admixture and the first modern human dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania
> It has recently been shown that ancestors of New Guineans and Bougainville Islanders have inherited a proportion of their ancestry from Denisovans, an archaic hominin group from Siberia. However, only a sparse sampling of populations from Southeast Asia and Oceania were analyzed. Here, we quantify Denisova admixture in 33 additional populations from Asia and Oceania. Aboriginal Australians, Near Oceanians, Polynesians, Fijians, east Indonesians, and Mamanwa (a "Negrito" group from the Philippines) have all inherited genetic material from Denisovans, but mainland East Asians, western Indonesians, Jehai (a Negrito group from Malaysia), and Onge (a Negrito group from the Andaman Islands) have not. These results indicate that Denisova gene flow occurred into the common ancestors of New Guineans, Australians, and Mamanwa but not into the ancestors of the Jehai and Onge and suggest that relatives of present-day East Asians were not in Southeast Asia when the Denisova gene flow occurred. Our finding that descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not all harbor Denisova admixture is inconsistent with a history in which the Denisova interbreeding occurred in mainland Asia and then spread over Southeast Asia, leading to all its earliest modern human inhabitants. Instead, the data can be most parsimoniously explained if the Denisova gene flow occurred in Southeast Asia itself. Thus, archaic Denisovans must have lived over an extraordinarily broad geographic and ecological range, from Siberia to tropical Asia.
The final sentence suggests there really were Denisovans running around in southeast Asia, way back when. But did they get as far as New Guinea / Australia?
It's a bit hard to imagine a mechanism by which presence of Neanderthals and Denisovans could have so effectively stalled development of the trappings of civilization. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. We like to think of ourselves as totally badass, but they could have been moreso. Maybe it was unsafe to settle down and build a village where they might swoop in and burn you out. And, our own ancestors could have been doing the same to them. It happened that "we" won.
Another problem is that Neanderthals and Denisovans are not known to have been in Africa. But there could have been any number of other, unknown badass H. species in Africa, besides. Or, maybe, why develop civilization "when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world"? [0]
Because the great eagles were proud and would have been tempted by the ring, and even if they weren't the Nazgul have their fellbeasts and Orcs have bows so they would have been attacked.
>>>Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
Because they studied physics and understood that the industrial revolution leads to doom.
The exponential GDP growth is us considering natural resources free and unlimited in our economic model, while there is in fact a finite amount of resource (we've passed peak production crude oil in 2018). This very free use of resource leads to climate change, increasing the pressure on the production of 'renewable' resource like food. In physics, no infinite growth in a finite planet.
Their world sustained civilization for 45,000 years because they didn't have an industrial revolution.
Our civilization is ~11,000 years old at best, I'm not entirely convinced the GDP curve will continue to grow exponentially for the next 34,000 years.
I have always had a similar train of thought around zombie apocalypse fiction. If there was a mass zombie outbreak it would be totally solved within five years. Houses would be reinforced with zombie proof doors and walls. Weapons would be available for purchase that are tested as most affective against zombies. Roads would have guard rails and zombie proof walls to keep them out. It would slowly transform from a crisis to a nuisance like wild animals. There’s no reason it would continue going on year after year
The main characters travel hundreds of kilometers down the biggest river around and they don't encounter other vessels or a populated settlement until they reach Minas Tirith. And I'm not even mentioning the missing cities and villages in the inland part of the travel. We can say that this is due to lower birth rate in the numenorians who obviously have reproductive issues as mentioned in the books. Another reason is the brain, knowledge and capital drain caused by the large elvian immigration going for centuries. Dwarfs have the excuse of a long generation length to explain why they are not multiplying like rabbits for the thousands of years since the last world war, however, Tolkien does not provide a good reason for the other human nations, the orcs or even the hobbits.
Possible explanation might be the unstable security situation on the continent, however, most of the societies are not described as being constantly under the risk of a raid from nearby orc. Aragorn is able to defend most of the north with a few hundred irregulars, while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time. The south is not described, but nothing unusual there as well as far as the books go.