What about magic? Instead of being a great utility, it might have actually set middle earth back in terms of technological development. Who needs a voice-activated door when there is magic? Who needs technological efficiency when you can just eat some Lembas and work all day and night?
Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
321–330 of 428 posts
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia. What explains the lack of development in ancient Sumer or ancient Rome? Wait a hot minute, because we have no idea and could have no idea if there was a small industrial revolution 10K years before ancient Sumer was a suburb. There would be no way to know if something like actual stainless steel was forged 60K years ago and the technology was lost…
Actually, we know for at least one industrial revolution in sumerian times a.k.a the beginning of the iron age. And we have a way to find for civilizations with larger impact by checking the isotopes locked in ice. This is the method for dating volcano eruptions and for tracking the produce of lead in antiquity.
Yes, but per the graph in the article, any earlier "industrial revolutions" and even the Roman Empire weren't even visible blips relative to the Western European industrial revolution.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Being a paleoantologist, he made a question to Tolkien's book: why the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible. And this started the "Last Ringbearer" book. Unfortunately he missed the answer: at the time Tolkien was writing, plate tectonics was still considered an absurd hypothesis, the subject of mockery by "serious" geologists. As such the understanding of "geologica…
> the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible I would love to watch a YouTube video explaining the geology of Middle Earth and the geology science explaining why it's impossible.
Here's Kirill Yeskov's own explanation how he wrote it, Google-translated:
https://fan-lib-ru.translate.goog/e/eskov/text_0150.shtml?_x...
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should add that Kirill Yeskov is a paleontologist and science popularizer. Here's his own explanation how he wrote "The Last Ringbearer": one of the reasons he mentions is that Middle Earth was impossible geologically: https://fan-lib-ru.translate.goog/e/eskov/text_0150.shtml?_x... In which he also mentions another famous book: "It would hardly occur to anyone to seriously analyze the functioning of the ecosystem o…
> paleoanthologist You meant "paleontologist" or is it a pun around anthologies?
no, just my mistake, corrected, ty
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Being a paleoantologist, he made a question to Tolkien's book: why the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible. And this started the "Last Ringbearer" book. Unfortunately he missed the answer: at the time Tolkien was writing, plate tectonics was still considered an absurd hypothesis, the subject of mockery by "serious" geologists. As such the understanding of "geologica…
> the Middle Earth had such strange land mass distribution, which is geologically impossible I would love to watch a YouTube video explaining the geology of Middle Earth and the geology science explaining why it's impossible.
Not a video but still a good read on this: https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u...
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#326Something 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.
I kind of agree, it doesn’t really make sense to read a critique of a book series, by someone who has not read said book series..
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#327Hilarious.
I think the major thematic element of the story is that the industrial revolution was already happening and the societies that rejected it were failing.
The hobbits were basically isolationists and it simply took the scouring to reach them.
The Rohirrim were basically obsolete. Living in wooden houses in the hills and plains raising horses and sheep.
Gondor, once the great home of civilization and a beacon of prosperity, mostly destitute and hardly able to resist the influence of Mordor.
The elves were almost completely drained, having fought a war of attrition against a superior enemy for thousands of years. They were preparing to emigrate from the land at the beginning of the stories as there were so few of them left.
Mordor was where the industrial revolution was under way. Sauron had clearly united several nations and had been involved in trade with them for hundreds of years. He’d shown the orcs and humans that followed his cause how to make coke, mine coal, and produce the vast quantities of goods required to field an army. Nothing they made was the quality attributed to the crafts of elves, dwarves, and the other ancient civilizations but they made up for it in numbers, in trade, etc.
Ultimately though the reason Gandalf didn’t have a big rifle was because the major theme of the story was one of resisting industrial revolution. Tolkien often spoke of, “the Machine.” I think he was essentially an anti-capitalist.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#328Why didnt many human civilizations like Egypt, Rome, China, etc have an industrial revolution? Many of the technologies like steam engines and clocks were in Rome and China. However they were mire curiosities and never scaled up.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#329Semi-tangent: I am a bit partial to the idea that the abolition of Slavery in England itself and the restriction of the slave trade in the empire during the period of roughly 1772 until 1807 was partly responsible for the industrial revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807
Correlation does not equal causation, but there is a potential causal mechanism. This could have been a factor in the increase in labor costs in England itself at least, which helped drive the popularization of mechanized labor amplifying devices. The industrial revolution really took off a decade or two after the slave trade act of 1807, which would have been long enough for existing slaves to start aging out and since the act restricted the slave trade it would have been tough to replace them.
If we'd roundly abolished slavery in ancient times I wonder if we'd be on our way to the Centauri system right now.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#330The article presents an engineering answer to s sociological question. The reason technology did not advance in Middle Earth is because innovation was not rewarded. Innovation and experimentation were punished. Mine a little too deeply? You awaken a balrog that kills you an everyone you have ever known. Want to expand into that verdant area across the river? You didn't expect giant spiders, did you? Build a disruptiv…
The article is fun, but I have my own theory - necessity is the mother of invention. In a magic world, where's the necessity?
This is pretty much it but it's larger than that. It's not just "magic", it's the whole nature of Tolkien's world. The world has a creator-all-powerful God and everybody in it knows it. He created all sentient creatures in it for his own entertainment. Everything that "is", is however he wants it to be and that's the nature of things, there's no Science to "discover". The world was flat like a thousand years ago until some men interfered with God's entertainment and he sank their island and reshaped the world round. Nobody doubts this too. There's many immortal beings out there you can ask firsthand (the Elves). Oh and those also know (or know someone who knows) the lesser gods that know the God. He's real.
Men in the world of Tolkien don't have any reason to "innovate" or even inquire about the world, really.