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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?

#101

Post by saagarjha »

jltsiren wrote: post #45

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 cre…

> Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys.

Ah, so it’s the Bay Area.

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

#102

Post by kqr »

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.

No, but as someone else pointed out: industrialism was going strong in Mordor and maybe even other places?

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

#103

Post by yyyk »

gostsamo wrote: post #100
yyyk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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'.

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

#104

Post by vogre »

thelittleone wrote: post #55
nostrademons wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Try “the Last Ringbearer”.

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

#105

Post by _carbyau_ »

saagarjha wrote: post #101
jltsiren wrote: post #45

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 cre…

> Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys. Ah, so it’s the Bay Area.

There really is a bubble effect. Everything is always about the Bay area... :-P

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

#106

Post by hef19898 »

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…

The author lost me at tge first paragraph: he never read it, and still he wonders why, in medieval fanatsy setting, there are no pump guns.

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

#107

Post by ncmncm »

barry-cotter wrote: post #98
ncmncm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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

#108

Post by adhesive_wombat »

junofan wrote: post #86
BarryMilo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#109

Post by adhesive_wombat »

hef19898 wrote: post #106
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…

The author lost me at tge first paragraph: he never read it, and still he wonders why, in medieval fanatsy setting, there are no pump guns.

So why are there no pump guns?

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.

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

#110

Post by bencollier49 »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #19
r_harriso wrote: post #11

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.

Bit of a stretch to figure Oxford as "ravaged by industry" though, isn't it? The Cotswolds are suffused with bucolicity.
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