On the positive side, "noblesse oblige" actually works in The West, e.g., The Shire, etc. - (that's how you can tell the books are fantasy.) The lords actually care for their people, there's no grinding poverty, and with few exceptions efficiency is less valued than custom.
Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
271–280 of 428 posts
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#272Earlier 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…
This is a great comment but I feel obliged to offer a real-world counterexample: Europe, which had endless cycles of war (plus a few plagues). The Thirty Years War alone killed 5m people.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, this is also a myth. You are quoting Letter #131. But you are likely quoting secondary or tertiary sources and forgot the rest. Here's what you quote: > Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – 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)…
Could you expand on that? To me the second quote seems to support the reading of LOTR etc. as part of an attempt to create/ codify an English myth cycle
The last sentence is Tolkien admitting he aborted the project. He wrote The Hobbit as something of a children's tale in a bout of inspiration, and the LoTR when his publisher was weirded out by the alien nature of the silmarillion, asking instead for "more fun stuff with hobbits."
This can best be seen in the history of middle earth, his son's chronicle of the writing process for his father's work; volume VI covers the fellowship of the ring, and it is a doozy in first drafts compared to the mainstream published version. He basically tried to reboot Bilbo, and in later drafts his son, going on another quest for dragon gold. It was only after the thing was in full swing that those old impulses and sources found their way into the fabric of the story, sort of figuring out where it was going based on how far he'd wandered in the draft phase.
Anyway he wasn't trying to build english myths when he wrote the books he is famous for, that was more a young & ambitious college student's feverdream.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#274Earlier 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?
That was a proposed background but Tolkien never decided what their true background was.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases. > Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases. Again, most of the time that didn't happen. And you often didn't die of tropical diseases either. > Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Most towns we…
> That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions. Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.
> That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.
That doesn't change the numbers involved. Most things that farmers sowed for most of history didn't get burned by invading armies.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, we can all say "magic" and not think about it, but the fun here is in thinking and the hand-waving is not in the spirit of it.
I'm not sure it's hand-wavy "magic." The essay is talking about things that are different in Middle Earth that could have led to the lack of an industrial revolution by the Third Age. Lower population growth (and slower population recovery after plagues and wars) seem like a pretty plausible factor.
It's also plausible that societal advancement was also just slower than with us when the author seems to assume it would be expected to advance at the same pace. (i.e. it's taken ME longer to reach a medieval level of advancement.) Certainly happened with plenty of areas in our world for geographical determination and other reasons--though, by effectively modeling ME on Europe and giving it horses and AFAIK familiar crops, that's a harder case to make.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ge…
I think the predator-prey cycle is the correct explanation. Pre-industrial societies have enough problems with food production and disease limiting population growth, add in the equivalent of sapient wolves and it's a miracle that there are any intelligent populations left in Middle Earth at all. I think you could add to your reply to the parent comment that the reason the Orcs don't take over and establish their own civilization is that they are prone to cannibalism and infighting. When they exhaust their local supply of man-flesh they probably instantly turn on the closest group of Orcs and devour them instead. They also suffer from predation by giant spiders and probably from wild trolls as well.
The Shire is truly an anomaly in that they have eliminated or escaped detection by anything that likes to eat Hobbits.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#278The irony of the article following this commentary in the intro “overly detailed lore, meandering exposition”…
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree completely on the writing style. Even were the subject interesting - world-building in fiction generally is to me - the intensely hostile tone puts me off almost immediately. To be honest, I couldn't read past the first quarter without just rolling my eyes and closing the tab. It's an affectation that I feel has become more popular of late; this eye-rolling, obnoxious, "ha ha don't you hate reading this? Isn't…
Interesting, I found the tone to be tongue in cheek and sarcastic. I liked it.
Oh, I understand that it's not seriously hateful. I just don't find sarcastic or ironic hostility any more palatable than genuine hostility. Referring to the reader as a loser pedant for raising reasonable objections to obviously ridiculous claims is either insulting or time-wasting, to my eyes. If you like this style of writing, then so be it.
Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
#280Why didn't Ancient Greece have one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/ancient-greek-e...
The aeolipile was a toy - essentially an unsealed kettle on an axle. It had no mechanisms for building up pressure that could actually do some work. Their metal working wasn't good enough to build precision machinery at scale and their steel production was virtually non-existent compared with the amount you'd need to make a railway. There also wasn't an economic incentive - transport involved crossing hard mountainous terrain or - more usually - coastal trading. And they didn't have large quantities of co-located iron and coal.