11–20 of 428 posts
Having this take on LoTR is pointless. Just an annoying waste of time.
A point made in the article is that industrialization was limited due to lack of coal but don't the dwarves use coal to run their forges?
> 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.
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 machi…
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.
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…
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.
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 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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord...