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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?

#391

Post by stjohnswarts »

DennisP wrote: post #344
danjac wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.

I assure you that people crisscrossed the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East all the time in ancient days. Egypt's big advantage was its ability to produce lots of food along the Nile River and settle down and focus on something beyond survival.

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

#392

Post by benlivengood »

I think the graph says it all: "something" happened in the 1500s that allowed or caused our industrial and scientific revolution along with the Enlightenment. The Romans, Babylonians, Mongols, Chinese, Persians, and probably the Incans and Mayans had large productive organized societies for hundreds or thousands of years but industrialization happened in non-empires across multiple countries in a relatively short span of time. It seem like industrialization was a result of the more fundamental discovery of the scientific method than time, organization, or empires. This was combined with the symbiotic need for power (to pump water out of mines, initially) and ability to supply it with engines that were newly possible from scientific experimentation in metallurgy and machining. Possibly gunpowder was the trigger since it required better machining and metallurgy that allowed engines.

Middle Earth presumably had the same problem with finding the initial conditions for scientific and industrial revolution, possibly amplified by the Enlightenment being impossible; mysticism and religion were real and active in the world and so pure scientific rationalism was doomed to fail, leaving the alchemists and would-be magicians in charge of "research". Humanity only narrowly escaped that trap, it seems.

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

#393

Post by cardiffspaceman »

nindalf wrote: post #148
alpaca128 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lower birth rate in the numenorians who obviously have reproductive issues as mentioned in the books I wonder if Elden Ring's lore took a bit of inspiration from this: > The Numen are a race of beings descended from otherworldly travelers. Long lived and seldom born, Queen Marika the Eternal is the primary member of this race.

George RR Martin wrote the lore for Elden Ring. He is intimately aware of Tolkien’s work. It’s not surprising to see such a homage.

Speaking of which, why doesn't any military in any kingdom in A Song of Ice and Fire have jets? That one immense building (pardon my spoiler-avoiding vagueness) with seemingly no interior columns led me to wonder this. But the answer may be that the book building and the show building are nothing alike, and the show exaggerates characteristics that aren't such a big deal or leaves out realistic details that interfere with making the building impressive. I have read part of the books but not the relevant part.

And I'm not even referring to the speed of movement that characters seem to mysteriously have.

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

#394

Post by peace4all »

CrazyStat wrote: post #369
peace4all wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has written a big book on evolution of Earth and theories around it. [1] It includes a whole chapter on plate tectonics, the preceding theories, and how plate tectonics itself was gradually accepted. In the book, there's also a large review on other scientific problems, like where the Sun gets energy from, why the Earth has magnetic field, where does internal the heat of the Earth come from, etc. Lots of "how do w…

If he was 100% aware of the status plate tectonics had at the time Tolkien was writing them he should not have criticized him as he did.

Maybe he was just sarcastic?

It’s a no brainer that a person cannot be equally oriented both in linguistics and in geology. ... So it would be quite possible to declare an amnesty to the Professor at this place: they say, an offense undoubtedly took place, but it does not pose a particular public danger.

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

#395

Post by wl »

panick21_ wrote: post #244
danjac wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

>> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.

> That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases.

It happened in many prominent cases. Egypt, for example, was called "the breadbasket of Rome."

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

#396

Post by xg15 »

pjscott wrote: post #388
xg15 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also, there are a few moments scattered throughout the book where the hobbits get to eavesdrop on conversations between Sauron's orcs and we gatch a few glimpses of Mordor's internal organisation. The tone of those conversations always struck me as surprisingly "modern" compared to the "epic medieval" style of the rest of the book: Orcs apparently have ID numbers, they complain about arrogant bosses, at some po…

Considering how worried the orcs were about informants reporting them for sedition, it sounds less like a modern military and more like one of the militaries where commissars shoot anybody who retreats. Add on to that the fact that Mordor's population is almost entirely enslaved, and it sounds rather like Stalin's USSR but with more competently-run agriculture.

No objection here. I meant "modern" more in the general sense that it sounded closer to present day than to the middle ages - but that doesn't have to mean we're talking about present-day (2020s) military.

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

#397

Post by hguant »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #345
hguant wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>geology science explaining why it's impossible. Mordor is...it just doesn't work. It's a hard scrabble plain with a large inland sea bounded on 3 sides by jagged, abrupt mountains that are entirely isolated from any other ranges, and form right angles with each other...oh and the surround a cone volcano that just emerges from the ground. Any one of these things (minus the, I repeat, NEAR PERFECT RIGHT ANGLES formed…

...are we just going to ignore the fact that Middle Earth also has wizards and mind-controlling rings? I don't mean this dismissively, I just think more imagination is called for. If Mordor couldn't have arisen via normal plate tectonics, then geology must work differently on Middle Earth, or there must be other magical forces at play. (If I remembered anything significant about LoTR I would suggest a more specific t…

Oh sure, the in-universe explanation is that the fallen Valar Melkor, who became known as Morgoth the Black after his destruction of the Trees of the Valar, used his might to pervert and destroy the works of the other 11/12 Valar and "brought forth fire and leveled mountains and raised valleys" to create hellscapes out of their work, such that the Earth, instead of a garden, became discordant and all the plans of the Valar were marred. After the end of the First Age, when the host of the Valar came to the aid of Middle Earth and destroyed Melkor's fortress, and brought him to judgement to be cast into the Outer Dark, there was further geologic destruction as the powers of the hosts basically destroyed the continent/region of Middle Earth known as Beleriand.

After THAT there was a further catastrophe as the Numenoreans, corrupted into the Dark Arts by Sauron, who was their captive, decided to wage war on the Valar, who they believed were keeping the secret of immortality from them. The Valar were in a pickle, and abdicated their powers and called on Eru to judge, because this was outside their mandate. He Atlantis'd Numenor and destroyed the majority of their people (who had turned to worshiping Morgoth) - the Numenoreans who founded Gondor and Arnor and who created the political landscape of the Third and Fourth Ages were the remnant of that fallen civilization, who were warned of the destruction of the isle of Numenor and escaped on boats.

Also it can be supposed that Mordor was a partial creation of Sauron, who fled there after the fall of Numenor as a spirit (could be wrong about that)

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

#398

Post by peeters »

chx wrote: post #384
peeters wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If that feverish worldbuilding formed the ultimate setting of LoTR, would it not be relevant in evaluating that world?

It didn't. A few ideas from BOLT survive in the Silmarillion but it is certainly not a setting of LotR. Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.

> Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.

We're not talking about some abandoned setting of LotR, we're talking about the world of the book that was actually published. Which is absolutely the world of the Silmarillion (also as published).

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

#399

Post by kqr »

lumost wrote: post #307
kqr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots do not save money. They may optimise some other part of the value chain which could increase profits, but robots are a more expensive workforce than humans.

It depends on the values in the above equation. If the labor cost of reconfiguring injection molding machines rises above 3d printers, then companies will use 3d printers. If the labor cost of having someone click parts together goes to high relative to the cost of building a robot for the same task, then a robot will be developed for the task.

You are assuming that there's no labour required to care for the robots, when in practise, the labour it takes to care for robots and adapt processes around them is often more expensive than that to do the job to begin with.

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

#400

Post by kelseyfrog »

danans wrote: post #373
kelseyfrog wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> geology must work differently on Middle Earth This is where a lot of people get stuck. They see the enormous effort put into world-building Middle-earth and can't help but see a gaping geologic hole. Yes, geology must work differently, but how? It frustrates people to see entire languages and histories fleshed out in minute detail on one hand, but on the other "rocks just do different, bud" on the other.

Tolkien was a linguist, not a geologist or economist (his anti-industrial and pro-monarchical/religious perspective were a resistance to the changes occurring in his time), so it's no surprise that he spent so much time on the linguistics. His formative encounters with industrialization were the horrors of mechanized warfare in WW1, after which he retreated to the cloistered worlds of academia, religion (he was a dev…

Yes, we are on the same page as to what influences affected Tolkien, his limitations, his authorial intentions and goals, and the historical context in which his work was created.

What the geophillic fans wish to hear however is more akin to, "Yes, Tolkien operated within these constraints. It would be great if someone could fanfic or headcannon their way into a reasonable conclusion with the benefit of hindsight and scientific and narrative advances we've made in the meantime." It's a small gesture that opens a door rather than shuts one and provides just a bit more cognitive closure for the people who want it.

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