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Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

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Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#71

Post by sircastor »

peeters wrote: post #62

Interesting read. This caught my attention: > 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 t…

> 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.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#72

Post by schoen »

avmich wrote: post #57

From https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n21/francis-spufford/ope... : 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 fic…

> They all got pissed.

I.e., drunk (British English), not angry (American English)!

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#73

Post by postsantum »

analog31 wrote: post #27
failrate wrote: post #2

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…

That strikes me as reasonable. With magic, they didn't need to invent things. They didn't need engineering. There's also the hint, at least from the movies, that Sauron and Sarumon could produce an unlimited supply slave labor.

Dutch Disease but for magic

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#74

Post by jws »

postsantum wrote: post #14

For those who still wonder what if Mordor actually had an industrial revolution, here is an amazing fan-fiction book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

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.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#75

Post by kqr »

peeters wrote: post #62

Interesting read. This caught my attention: > 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 t…

Oh! The more I learn about Tolkien and LotR the more it all fits together. In hindsight, obviously it's an origin myth! Ticks all the boxes.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#76

Post by kqr »

nostrademons wrote: post #40
Barrin92 wrote: post #16

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, i…

As is common, fantasy stories depict individual heroes overthrowing bureaucracies.

(Harry Potter is an obvious exception where it's the other way around.)

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#77

Post by simonh »

lumost wrote: post #61

When I saw the equation for labor factor of LaborSupply x LaborProductivity / CostOfCoal 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 i…

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.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#78

Post by BarryMilo »

gostsamo wrote: post #68

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 in…

Another explanation: maybe they dont want to bring children into that dangerous world (and are all experts at the pull-out method).

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#79

Post by kqr »

gostsamo wrote: post #68

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 in…

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.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#80

Post by dylan604 »

gostsamo wrote: post #68

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 in…

Weren't orcs made by Sauron rather than being a natural species though? So they were never really born in the normal mammalian method.
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