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.
Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
171–180 of 428 posts
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 b…
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.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#173Earlier 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.
This is in LORT. Remember when the hobbits return to the Shire at the end, and have to set things straight?
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
As is common, fantasy stories depict individual heroes overthrowing bureaucracies. (Harry Potter is an obvious exception where it's the other way around.)
> (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.
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.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#175Earlier 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…
> I doubt Sauron or Saruman care at all about their lives. Also, orcs were twisted elves, so perhaps they also had slow reproduction cycles?
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.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 t…
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.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read Tolkien notes, industrialisation and Mordor as a industrial empire was seriously considered as a major plot at some point.
>> 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.
Well, I wouldn't say he decided to write it classic.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#179I 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.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#180I 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...