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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?

#91

Post by lordnacho »

BarryMilo wrote: post #78
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).

Don't people make more kids in more dangerous places, the logic being that you need to spread your risk of not having descendants?

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

#92

Post by Hemospectrum »

sircastor wrote: post #71
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…

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.

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

#93

Post by hither_shores »

sircastor wrote: post #71
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…

Arthurian literature is Celtic myth seen through the eyes of medieval Frenchmen: it's British, but not English.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

dylan604 wrote: post #80
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.

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by thaumasiotes »

hirundo wrote: post #70

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. "Shut up." https://youtu.be/1-Uz0LMbWpI

But Tolkien also wrote in his correspondence that the eagles were a mistake for that reason. So he seems to have agreed with the criticism.

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

#96

Post by high_5 »

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…

Fascinating! Imagine such conversation:

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.

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

#98

Post by barry-cotter »

ncmncm wrote: post #49
barry-cotter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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 a…

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.

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

#99

Post by picsao »

gostsamo wrote: post #82
kqr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

War with ents is my most likely explanation, most of middle earth is the frontiers in inter species warfare.

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

#100

Post by gostsamo »

yyyk wrote: post #87
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…

>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 pa…

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.
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