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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?

#311

Post by WhompingWindows »

Industrial Revolutions required many things that Frodo's world lacked:

1) Abundant and cheap coal (heat, steel making, steam engines, etc). We know this didn't exist, for why should Saruman rely on the comparatively bad fuel of green wood to power his engine of war?

2) International demand for goods via global trade networks. The societies are clearly fragmented with little interchange...polar opposite of Europe in the 1750-1900 period.

3) Abundant laborers and innovators to create necessary machines. England had a number of innovative entrepeneurs who needed steam engines to pump water out of the mine so the miners could get the coal that was slightly deeper.

4) Scientific progress on metals, machining, and scientific method. Starting with Francis Bacon, Newton, and others, England saw a very strong burst of scientific progress right before industrialization.

5) Governmental support of industry (e.g. tariffs/regs in USA/Germany). This one is perhaps the hardest to study, we don't know much about governmental policy in LotR, but it seems to be monarchical and/or authoritarian, maybe war-lord driven...not what you need for an economic-technological revolution.

LotR in Frodo's Day is a sparsely populated world that used to be grand. If the Elves and Numenorians of old, with all their splendor, didn't start a revolution, then how could the ghost-towns of men and elves?

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

#312

Post by jerf »

danjac wrote: post #238
timoth3y wrote: post #190

The 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…

How is that different from real world history? Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

One of the great lessons to take away from a differential equations class... in my more dour moments, I think it's the only lesson to take away for most students in the course... is how common it is for iterated systems (which is almost anything embedded in "time", which is to say, everything we deal with in the real world) to be very sensitive to the strength of the feedback loop. It is trivial to construct systems that slowly, but surely, go to zero if you start with 0.5000000000000, but slowly but surely go to infinity if you start with 0.5000000000001. Small differences can be a big deal.

Also, it should be pointed out that our history is not full of industrial revolutions. There's the one that we're still living in, and arguably two or three that fizzled depending on exactly how you count and where you draw the line, and that's it. Industrial revolutions aren't easy in the real world!

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

#313

Post by klik99 »

Angostura wrote: post #241

I highly recommend "The Last Ring Bearer" for people who like to have a bit of fun with Tokien. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer Eskov's version of the story describes Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy on the verge of an industrial revolution, that poses a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as "crafting…

Honestly this reinterpretation is not that far from themes that exist in LOTR, given that it was partly an allegory of the wars. It's just making Mordor not represent fascism.

Reminds me of something I learned last week when I was thinking about how the Harry Potter goblins are (probably unintentionally) built from second-hand racist stereotypes. Apparently the Dwarves of Middle Earth represent Jewish faith and the Elves Christian. During the writing of The Hobbit, Tolkien was influenced by the anti-Jewish sentiment and there's a few questionable throw away lines about the warlike treasure hoarding Dwarves. Between The Hobbit and LOTR though, with an intense hatred of Hitler and having a brief and intensely close relationship with a Jewish friend he realized the error of his ways - showing the Dwarves in more positive light and making the Dwarves and Elves work together a key part of the story. Some say he was inverting the stereotypes of Wagners Ring and intentionally highlighting positive stereotypes.

This isn't entirely conjecture or revisionist analysis of the text either - he talked about how the Dwarfish language was intentionally Semite and indeed it has a Hebrew-like qualities.

So in a sense, "The Last Ring Bearer" isn't a unique idea - you can argue that Middle Earth of LOTR itself is a reinterpretation of the Middle Earth of The Hobbit.

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

#314

Post by havblue »

Industrial revolution aside, I think it's agreed on that the movies didn't get economics right: that we would absolutely see far more agriculture in Rohan and Gondor. Also, that the Hobbits had far too much food and quality goods relative to what you would expect their labor to be. While we definitely see a lot of consumption, we see relatively little production.

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

#315

Post by vidarh »

npongratz wrote: post #285
vidarh wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wars and plagues" can vary in scale from having next to no impact to being world-changing events, so in isolation it tells you nothing. One of the more common last names in Norway is still "Ødegaard", literally "Deserted farm", reflecting families who were residing on farms which still had not gotten a proper name by the time the tradition of using your fathers first-name as a last time started dying out. This even…

> I also don't recall running into Nazgul and Orcs while growing up near Oslo, and imagine facing that might have been a rather severe deterrent to growth. But you did have trolls, right? :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollhunter

Hah! A whole lot of Norwegian folklore involves stories about how a lot of our mountains are trolls who didn't get back in hiding before the sun came out... None of them explain where there'd be enough space for mountain sized trolls to hide during the days, though.

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

#316

Post by tablespoon »

zahllos wrote: post #301
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…

It is also clear that the author hasn't actually read the lord of the rings. It doesn't feature in the films but the scouring of the Shire happens after the defeat of Sauron, in which Saruman and Wormtongue take over the Shire and push the same industrialization they were pushing at Orthanc. They have a small battle, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is killed by Hobbits and then everything is right again for the…

> It is also clear that the author hasn't actually read the lord of the rings.

He even says so in one of the early paragraphs. Also this substank "Launched 15 days ago". Feels like clickbait self-promotion.

I'm not sure why anyone's wasting time with this nonsense question while not-high.

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

#317

Post by ghaff »

eru wrote: post #308
ghaff wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree but one of my general regrets with web publishing vs. pages on paper (or even a formatted PDF) is that footnotes which bulletproof, add nuance, provide parenthetical detail, etc. don't work nearly as well because you can't just glance at them.

Gwern does a good job with them on his website.

He does but you're still clicking through rather than casually glancing at the bottom of a page as you would be a book or paper. Footnotes (or endnotes) are fine on the web (or Kindle, etc.) for reference that most people won't read. They're less good for parenthetical text.

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

#319

Post by littlestymaar »

KineticLensman wrote: post #272
Amezarak wrote: post #157

Earlier 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. 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.

Non of those were genocidal wars between different species though.

The black death is a better real-life comparison point, and Europe actually took a lot of time to recover.

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

#320

Post by tablespoon »

endominus wrote: post #161
Maursault wrote: post #137

Seems clear the author: 1) knows next to nothing about Middle-Earth or Tolkien's larger work and honestly admits it, though continues to make sweeping generalizations about a subject they admittedly know little about; 2) knows nothing about classics, ancient history nor history of technology except perhaps bullet points gleaned from a pop documentary, iow, author displays extremely pedestrian and shallow knowledge or…

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…

IMHO, this is clickbait to troll up an audience for the author's new substack.
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