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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?

#221

Post by matkoniecz »

nosianu wrote: post #149
nindalf wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Only one war 60 years ago” underestimates the impact that goblins/orcs have. It’s not wars alone that cause depopulation, it’s the constant raids. The orcs have secure holds in the Misty Mountains that allow them to raid all surrounding areas at will. This keeps these areas thinly populated. The exceptions are places like Lake Town, which are highly defensible. It’s not really possible to attack the orcs in their mo…

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…

> How dense was the population at that time?

not well defined, but it was time of significant progress in metallurgy and magic, for example greater rings of power were forged at that time.

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

#222

Post by Amezarak »

gostsamo wrote: post #186
samus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the whole thread is trying to find plausible reasons why the population does not recover after disasters. The elves are leaving and gondorians have issue reproducing. Everyone else should've been totally capable of taking those big chunks of land and building new societies there. Orcs should've just made them build more warlike cultures and not just hide, because orcs are raiders, not an well organized force whi…

The entire area from the Shire to Bree IS settled, mostly with farms. There were also towns around Bree: they did!

Edit: with the exception of the Old Forest, which is actively hostile, and the Downs, that are inhabited by evil wights.

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

#223

Post by simonh »

gostsamo wrote: post #186
samus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the whole thread is trying to find plausible reasons why the population does not recover after disasters. The elves are leaving and gondorians have issue reproducing. Everyone else should've been totally capable of taking those big chunks of land and building new societies there. Orcs should've just made them build more warlike cultures and not just hide, because orcs are raiders, not an well organized force whi…

There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon.

But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population gets established, Goblins will descend on it and hoover it all up to grow their population, but then probably die out when the food supply runs down again. So they have a boom-bust population cycle that keeps human populations suppressed.

The area in the north surrounding the Shire used to be a great kingdom, but it was wiped off the map by hordes of Orcs and Trolls and such fomented by the Witch King. There may also be a magical element to the success of the Orcs and other such creatures.

Whatever the logic or reasons, the fact is Middle Earth is severely under-populated compared to Europe and always has been. It's demographics are far too thin to support the kinds of developments we had, and every time they established kingdoms that might turn that around, they got violently crushed.

Bree is heavily fortified and paranoid for good reasons. The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret. As long as everyone thinks it's just a few scattered villages, as it has been for most of it's history, there's not enough there to send a big force of Orcs for. If the goblin king of the mountains knew how much bread, cheese and ale there was there for the taking, it would have got the scorched earth treatment long ago.

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

#224

Post by matkoniecz »

mcv wrote: post #220

For someone who hates the Lord of the Rings, that's surprisingly well researched. And yet, a lot of his reasoning doesn't make sense. Because population levels in Middle Earth are far lower than in 18th century England, labour costs should be high? Population levels in Middle Earth strike me as closer to those of Siberia or the eastern European steppe (perhaps with the Ural in the role of the Misty Mountains?) than t…

> I don't know why Middle Earth is so empty

Literal force of evil repeatedly maliciously sabotaging things or waging warfare has not helped.

(also, on different level - it was fitting aesthetics wanted by Tolkien, partially reaction to industrial and heavily populated UK - see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_o... )

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

#225

Post by matkoniecz »

wetpaws wrote: post #114
hef19898 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you read Tolkien notes, industrialisation and Mordor as a industrial empire was seriously considered as a major plot at some point.

Mordor (and Isengard) are actually depicted as industrial complexes of the worst kind (including lack of effectiveness)

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

#226

Post by matkoniecz »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #118
wetpaws wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

Haven't read the notes, but shouldn't Mordor, being an autocracy without a recognizeable middle class and a very lean political system focused on war, have very cheap labor?

> have very cheap labor

It has that, given that almost everyone is enslaved.

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

#227

Post by ghaff »

gostsamo wrote: post #202
wongarsu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aragorn is able to defend most of the north with a few hundred irregulars, while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time. Which might be a good reason why the don't have a population boom: long periods of stability with low threat from war, low infant mortality and high food security seem to cause low birth rates (at least in our world). If your children are unlikely to…

Middle Earth has no contraception (Tolkien is catholic) and the only way to stop multiplying is to stop doing... math. LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken. So, you are expected to have high birthrate until you occupy all the good lands and then some. After that you either rediscover Malthus or you start innovating to get more out of what you…

That assumes homo sapiens levels of childbirth however. As a number of comments touch on, a lot of the lack of technological advance could be hand-waved away as a result of low birthrates and a generally low population. You could also perhaps factor in a general societal distaste for technology although human history suggests that societies which can't or won't create technology are overwhelmed by societies that do.

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

#228

Post by Amezarak »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #108
peyton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

The Shire suffered terribly during the Great Plague and the Long Winter and also was invaded by Orcs at least once. The appendices say there was major loss of life. There was another very bad winter in Bilbo’s youth that was compounded by an invasion of “White Wolves.”

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

#229

Post by btmcnellis »

pm90 wrote: post #201
samus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably also the Numenoreans had it. The description of latter-day Numenor reads like they were technologically very advanced. The question is how far, but it seems fair to assume there was a sharp drop after the Fall because of the colonies not being self-sufficient enough to maintain their tech level. If we consider the stories in the Silmarillon to be handed down orally, the most advanced technologies could hav…

Numenor always sounded like a reference to the United States; virgin land blessed with immense resources, ideal conditions for a centralized power to grow wealthy materially and dominate the rest of middle earth. I doubt if they had “industry”; they probably had “advanced feudalism” with large capacity for shipbuilding and manufacturing arms. But that was because of the large continent and population. In a sense, its…

Numenor was explicitly an allusion to Atlantis.

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

#230

Post by floraandfauna »

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.

It is so disheartening that I had to scroll halfway down the page to find the actual correct answer here. I don't understand how this couldn't be immediately obvious to anyone who has actually read the books.

Ironically, if Tolkien were still around I'm 100% sure he'd see the Jackson/Amazonification of LOTR as another real-world manifestation of the same forces that turned Orthanc into a huge weapons factory and nearly succeeded in turning the Shire into one big polluted light industrial zone: take something beautiful and unique, strap it down on a steel table and suck every ounce of value out of it, then toss its gasping dying husk into the dumpster on your way out to go party on your megayacht.

Very, very telling that The Scouring of the Shire was left out of the movies.

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