Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
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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 inland part of the travel. We can say that this is due to lower birth rate in the numenorians who obviously have reproductive issues as mentioned in the books. Another reason is the brain, knowledge and capital drain caused by the large elvian immigration going for centuries. Dwarfs have the excuse of a long generation length to explain why they are not multiplying like rabbits for the thousands of years since the last world war, however, Tolkien does not provide a good reason for the other human nations, the orcs or even the hobbits.
Possible explanation might be the unstable security situation on the continent, however, most of the societies are not described as being constantly under the risk of a raid from nearby orc. 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. The south is not described, but nothing unusual there as well as far as the books go.
Note that when the fellowship passes through Lorien and Gondor, the ring war is already in full force, the fellowship just doesn't notice a lot of it.
By the time they travel the Anduin, the river is considered a front line: Everything east of the river is already occupied by Sauron, while the areas directly west of it had been evacuated. The book mentions this as one reason why the land is so deserted. (In addition to the long-term decline of Gondor that of course also happened, illustrated by the deserted lookout posts and ruins around the Argonath)
It’s not really possible to attack the orcs in their mountain homes for anyone except Dwarves. And even Dwarves understood their limits. In the War of the Dwarves and Orcs (TA 2793-2799) they sacked every orc stronghold from “Gundabad to the Gladden” but even then did not dare to enter Moria, where orcs remained secure and continued to multiply.
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 population at that time?
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 there's less people than we expect.) In c1400 the Nazgul begin their long destruction of the disunited (perennially entangled in civil war) kingdoms of Arnor. In c1500, Gondor is embroiled in devastating wars with Harad. In the 1600s a Great Plague depopulates the North and West: "many parts of Eriador become desolate"; not long before, Gondor has had a horrible civil war. During the plague, even the Shire suffers "great loss." In the 1800s Gondor is again involved in a costly war, this time against the Wainriders, and loses its eastern territories. In 1981 TA Moria falls. In the 2400s Gondor is again under a major attack by (though they do not know it) Sauron, and Sauron is able to use the Orcs in the Misty Mountains to effectively cut off Eriador from the rest of the continent. in the 2500s, the Gondorians are bailed out of a major disaster by the appearance of the Rohirrim, but shortly after, the dragons appear and decimate the dwarves. In the 2700s, after centuries of Orc attacks in the region, the Hobbits themselves defeat a band of Orcs; shortly after, Dale and the Iron Mountain fall to Smaug, Rhoah is nearly destroyed, and Gondor is attacked by fleets of Corsairs. In addition, there is a devastating winter that causes "great suffering and loss of life"; in the same century, Smaug annihilates Erebor and Dale, and there's a major, costly war between the dwarves and the Orcs.
In the following centuries, there are continual major Orc attacks. In 2900 Men finally abandon Ithilien. In 2911 there is another devastating winter, and the year after, great floods that result in the desertion of Tharbad and Minhiriath.
The Hobbit begins in 2941. Orcs have been in force for 1600 years.
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.
The Great Plague some time before and the Long Winter are explicitly said to have depopulated Eriador and left it "desolate." The Rangers were also not infallible. Obviously they did nothing to stop the Nazgul or large numbers of Saruman's agents in the time of the Lord of the Rings, nor did they stop the Orc-band that invaded the Shire a hundred years before the story.
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 past from their LOTR circumstance (IIRC they conquered the Shire from the Orcs?), though I recall very few details are given. One may also suspect a low reproduction rate judging by lifespan. Perhaps the Shire started from a low base, and only by LOTR had enough for an industrial revolution?
I though Hobbits were coming from the East of Middle Earth (I think Smeagol/Gollum was a part of a Hobbit community that hadn't migrated and so lived East of the mountains) and were granted the Shire by a king of Arnor, though they still had to fight orcs while there
Politics is a sufficient condition. Perhaps Sauron would not tolerate 'independent' Orcs he can't use as canon fodder?
>Again, the lack of people and trade on Anduin is a shocker for me.
Yeah, it's the humans which are hardest to explain away. Some peasants should have thought 'We're tried of paying taxes to Gondor. We'll just move and no one can or would even bother find us'.
Also, orcs were twisted elves, so perhaps they also had slow reproduction cycles?
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 die, people just have fewer of them.
Most of our population booms happen after wars or in areas with low life expectancy.
Maybe the women are missing from not just from social life, but from the world. Not just the entwives[0] and the rarely seen dwarven women, but even human women are surprisingly rare. How many of all those many men making an appearance were married? Only hobbits seem to have actual families, but still not very big ones.
Maybe Middle Earth just isn't very fertile and can't sustain large populations. Maybe there's a very good reason why population levels are closer to Siberia.
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.
And I'm not even referring to the speed of movement that characters seem to mysteriously have.
Indeed, considering Tolkien's otherwise fully-defined universe (and the industrialisation in Mordor indicating that it can be done), it's a fun question, and they rather use the question as as springboard into quite a ranging discussion of the factors behind real Industrial Revolution rather than a comic-book-guy-style tear-down of LoTR specifically.
EDIT: It took quite some time between the early days of the industrial revolution and the first semi-automatic guns. Ignoring LOTR for a minute, if in story taking place in the 17th century the question of "why didn't X use a colt .45" is easily answered, because it wasn't invented yet.
So the very out-of-universe answer is: Because Tolkien decided against it. So the better question, and also the one we can use some source material to answer, would be why Tolkien decided against it and wrote a classic fantasy story.
well, if there was pump guns, it wouldn't be a medieval setting anymore, as you need some industrial base to manufacture them, industrial base which isn't exactly compatible with a medieval setting. Not to say you can't have guns in fantasy (Pillars of Eternity and Warhammer fantasy come to mind), but they are usually more primitive.
The other thing is fossil fuels. Industrial Revolution is about harnessing Coal and Oil.
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 settled the Shire about 3000 (edit: 1500, I can't count) years before the books.
[2] The idyllic setting, lack of traumatic narrative and their 1500-year settlement somewhat implies they haven't been through some kind of brutal population bottleneck recently.
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 the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the racist elves.[2] For example, Barad-dûr, Sauron's citadel, appears in chapter 2 as
...that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-dûr citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man – free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor.
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 of a barren desert inhabited by predatory worms the size of a multiple unit train that feed on walking excavators and then sweat psychedelics: fantasy is fantasy, what do you want from it?"
He also wrote a great book on the Earth evolution and life evolution, in which he also explains how science works and worked earlier, and what were older theories, and Popper criterium as well.
Here are some of his lectures for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEp7o0-w-uU
..and an interview with some charts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdyW9V10IEQ
(unfortunately, auto-translated automatic captions aren't readable, giving just an idea of what the talk is about)
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 "geologically impossible" at that time was rather different than when Yeskov was writing a few decades later.
It was not until the 1950s that widespread sea floor mapping and research, made possible by the now-unnecessarily-large-and-mostly-idle US Navy, provided conclusive evidence that forced the geology establishment to accept plate tectonics.
It's easy to forget how recently we stopped being totally wrong about things like that.
I would love to watch a YouTube video explaining the geology of Middle Earth and the geology science explaining why it's impossible.
You meant "paleontologist" or is it a pun around anthologies?
> Mordor then made its second mistake ... although, as it always is with strategic decisions, that could only be judged post factum: had the move worked, as it had every chance of doing, it would no doubt have been recorded as brilliant.
> That was when the Mirror first made a difference; imagine a contemporary fast-moving war in which one side has the advantage of spy satellites.
It's a pity that Tolkien Foundation actively battled any attempt to publish this book in English. Has that not been the case, I'm sure some publisher would appoint a professional translator to do a much better job at it.
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.
It also, IMO, has better and fairer treatment of the houses than the canon, which I felt was pretty reductive. (Gryffindor good, Slytherin evil, the other two may as well not exist.) I think the books would have been better to have, say, Hermione in Ravenclaw, Ron in Hufflepuff, and Harry in Gryffindor. The only thing that would have had to been dropped was the silly "Gryffindor wins the house cup every year" bit.
https://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/last_ringbearer/ Middle-earth according to Mordor
https://www.salon.com/2011/02/23/last_ringbearer_explanation... Why I reimagined "LOTR" from Mordor's perspective
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 disruptive startup and bank $50B? You'll hear dragon wings a-flappen.
Middle Earth was not filled with innovative disrupters because the risk and reward equation strongly discouraged innovation.
The other threats are analogous. Giant spiders? Creepy but overrated. Someone with decent aim can one-shot most of them with a thrown rock, as demonstrated by a Mr. Baggins of Hobbiton, and their territory is a fairly small portion of Mirkwood. Dragons? Definitely an issue, but one that can be mitigated by storing your treasure horde in a maze of tunnels too small for a dragon to crawl through -- or, better yet, use multiple geographically isolated hordes. And again, the ability to collapse certain sections of tunnel would be both technologically unchallenging and very helpful here. Arguably it was the Dwarves' lack of innovation that led to them having such persistent dragon issues.
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.
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 were not buried and most coal miners don't die in collapses.
That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.
Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.
> 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."
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!
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.
Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.
It's not different from the vast majority of real world history.
Why would you ruin the natural world for industrial gains? In fact the Orkai and the white wizard was quite industrious with their forges and their war machine production and the natural world pushed back.
That and I don't see the start up world being that different from a risk perspective just the outcomes are different. And maybe middle earth was still to early.
In the real world, the worst case realistic scenario for a startup is that you fail and lose all your money, and maybe face lawsuits.
In a fantasy setting, the worst case realistic scenario is that your skin is flayed from your bones and you spend the rest of existence serving a liche as a skeleton warrior.
Gandalf, one of the most powerful wizards in the world can't even throw fireballs at his enemies. He has to gather pine cones set them on fire, then throw the pine cones. Most of the humans were magicless and could have used a tractor.
Men in the world of Tolkien don't have any reason to "innovate" or even inquire about the world, really.
The reason why Henry Ford started paying people $5 was not out of generosity or to help them buy his vehicles. It's because the job was monotonous and people would constantly walk off the assembly line. People stayed because it provided a reasonable pathway to middle class when there weren't a lot of other viable options.
That, and 'structure your society towards acquisition of material wealth and technological advancement, so you start plundering and enslaving your neighbours, and eventually, under the guidance of Satan Jr, you decide to invade heaven. And get Atlantis'd.'
Asking why ME didn't have an industrial revolution is looking through a very particular, very uninteresting cultural lens. (It's uninteresting because 'economic growth at any cost' is a common, and rather uninteresting modern view on life, and rarely takes into account it's externalities. Which Tolkien really, really dislikes.)
Tolkien's Middle Earth doesn't need, or want more clever, vain people. Most of the horrible things that happened in it were caused by them.
Anyway, middle earth was a setting built to tailor and flesh out the stories in them. Combined together these -are- productive value that people pay for in good times, it seems.
It was around this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the times in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its God-given place. In Reflections on the Psalms (1958), for example, Lewis had described it as learning ‘(which God forbid) to ... distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption’. Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines were at best a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. ‘I’m sure you are very wicked people,’ said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, ‘but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’
I.e., drunk (British English), not angry (American English)!
Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Tolkien: "Yes! Because it IS! magic."
Clarke looking baffled at the response and trying to explain it to himself on the latest round of ale ("welp, it's still the 1st round, it's going to be a long night").
The problem with scientific framework is that it takes man out of the equation and than tries to say that this is all there is (science is not good nor bad, just is, right?). Yet for all the progress we were given in the last three centuries a lot of bad came out of it too. Yet we can't blame it on the science because we can't have the holistic worldview from scientific standpoint.
"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, industrialized proletariat, people who had sold their soul to the machine. They can be seen crafting huge weapons of war, siege engines and such, in giant factories fueled by those coal deposits.
The reason the industrial revolution never happened in Middle Earth is because the Fellowship of the Ring prevented it.
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 last chapter.
I'd also say an industrial revolution of sorts is definitely a component of the story and unambiguously considered bad.
(Harry Potter is an obvious exception where it's the other way around.)
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.
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 point talk about one of the Nazgul's winged beasts like requesting a helicopter flight, talk about setting up on their own, etc.
The talk sounds more like that of a frustrated and cynical foot soldier in a modern millitary or an employee in a megacorp would sound than some medieval thug.
Sauron's and Saruman's architecture is also very clearly industrial - the book is much more explicit about that than the movie: Isengard is described as full of technology, while buildings in Mordor (and later in occupied Shire) are described as barracks and huts made out of bricks, connected by a regular network of roads. And then there is the "new mill" in the Shire...
The two main modes are, of course, the pastoral Hobbit sections (not just in the shire, but right up to the end whenever we're following hobbits as our pov character you get to hear about day to day concerns of cooking and cleaning and homelife) and the high fantasy style of the Men esp anything with Aragorn and no hobbits (full names given at the drop of a hat and plentiful information about lineages and ancient battles).
But along side this we also get the oral/ lyric tradition exemplified by the Bombadil sideline, the rambling medieval scholar (gandalf reading the half descroyed chronicle in Moria) and yes, the grumblings of modern industrial bureacracy of the orcs and later the hobbits in Sharkey's thrall.
The wars in the previous ages are described as being a bit more “equal” suggesting there were equally large hosts of humans/elves though, but maybe they’re able to organize “because magic” (e.g. elves may benefit from lembas bread allowing them to not have to worry about supply lines like the orcs).
Curiously Shire has numerous products that require industrial base, without industrial revolution being present.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_o...
They don't 'answer' to either wizards or kings.
> Middle Earth is framed, explicitly, as an account of the history of our world. That is, the world of the Lord of the Rings is one and the same as our world, just at a very different point in its history. Thus, while Middle Earth may possess resources that we do not, such as Mithril, unless the resources of our world were deposited later, they must have been available to the people of Middle Earth.
I think this is a common mistake when analyzing Tolkien's work. His universe isn't meant to be the history of Earth, it's supposed to be an origin myth of England. With all the caveats that go with similar origin myths. To quote the letter that prefaces The Silmarillion:
> 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) in legends of other lands.
Why hasn't the world of LoTR had an industrial revolution? Well for the same reason Troy didn't. Because if it did, it wouldn't be an origin myth. It's no more reasonable to discount the worldbuilding of Tolkien for incongruences with history than it is to discount the "worldbuilding" of Homer.
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) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion
And here's what you missed:
> Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. (…) I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.
Indeed it was long ago when that attempt was aborted: it was the Book Of Lost Tales which would have been the missing Anglo-Saxon mythology but that has been abandoned around 1920. Christopher Tolkien clearly stated most elements defining and peculiar to BOLT are not present in later works. There are many versions of the Silmarillion but there's only one version of BOLT.
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.
My immediate thought was “What about King Arthur?!” But then I begin to wonder how much Arthurian legend has been enriched purely in the 20th century. “The once and future king” -where a lot of the modern take on Arthur came from - was punished in 1958, 4 years after the Lord of the Rings.
According to Wikipedia, Arthurian legend was popular in the Middle Ages, but kind of fell out of favor.
> Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
When the age of men begins, the modern world begins. Tolkien was not interested in writing about that having seen it’s horrors first hand. And as others have written, the population density was very low. Rohan mustered 7-10k riders from the adult male (+1j population.
Depends on how you define it, they had no problem with metallurgy, cloth-making (with properties better than high-teach real world clothes and considered as magic by outsiders), advanced food processing, excellent weaponry, shipbuilding and so on...
It should also be said that the bloggers writing style is profusely insulting, almost like they're intentionally sabotaging anyone's ability to take them seriously, even if the question could have been interesting, instead the author indulged their immaturity.
If I had read it when I was much younger I might have enjoyed it, but I've read so much writing with a similar tone that at this point I consider comes off as cliched. Especially in combination with the verbal sparring with strawmen device.
I was able to get through it mostly, but my motivation decreased as I increasingly got the feeling that the author was researching in service of a pre-determined point rather than doing an "investigation" as claimed in the beginning.
The style would have been palatable if they had actually done their research.
It's a joke. You're not supposed to take it seriously.
Misconception. Coal doesn't come from dinosaurs; primarily it comes from plants (algae, trees) and plankton. It was formed in the carboniferous period, during which the evolution of plants had preceded the evolution of microbes that were able to digest lignin and cellulose; thus, vast piles of carbon-containing material piled up, got compressed, and formed the coal (and oil) deposits we see today. Yes, of course sometimes animals fell into the bogs and became part of the deposits, but trying to explain the scale of carbon deposits with mass graves of dinosaurs is a little silly.
> Yes, strictly speaking dinosaurs aren’t needed for coal as coal mostly is made of plant biomass, you fun ruining hack of a pedant.
https://featherlessbipeds.substack.com/p/why-didnt-gandalf-o...
Commenters beware, the article is filled with such gotchas for the careless reader.
Which I found out about recently.
The reason why Middle-earth did not have an industrial revolution is supernatural. When the Ainur sang the songs of creation, there was discord. Melkor, the mightiest of them, wanted to create something of his own, which was the root of all evil. The world they created was flawed. Within the world, the minds of those who seek to create were easily corrupted.
Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys. Think of dwarves or the Noldor in general. Or think about Fëanor who created the Silmarils or Celebrimbor who created the Rings of Power. Sauron and Saruman were both servants of Aulë the Smith, and look what they became.
There was industry in Mordor and in Isengard. Dwarves also had it, and the Noldor probably as well. Even hobbits managed to create some by the end of the LotR. But that industry never led to sustained prosperity. In the end, there was always war and destruction, because the world was flawed from the beginning.
Ah, so it’s the Bay Area.
This could be called a lesser song, compared to Ainur's. Just a distraction really.
And in this state of distraction he acts.
Of course he's the bad guy.
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 more similar to the Roman Empire.
Having this take on LoTR is pointless. Just an annoying waste of time.
I think it was Saruman who did the industrial bit, and used wood for the fuel. (No dwarven miners to hand, I guess? But orcs like it underground.) But inventing guns all by himself seems like a tall order, even given several centuries' plotting.
bucolic
relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life. "the church is lovely for its bucolic setting"
He wrote it, with focus on negative effect - note ending of the book.
Curiously Shire has numerous products that require industrial base, without industrial revolution being present.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_o...
Im just tired of this kind of analysis. It’s common in ASOIAF space. there it is often done completely seriously. I spent a lot of time in that space, so I think I’m just overly sensitive.
If anything, living in the city gives you an excellent perspective on the effects of industrialization, form ones own opinions from there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord...
The images in your blog suggest that you find the war really funny and exciting. As LOTR is a book talking extensively about the real nature of war, it may change your point of view and you probably should avoid reading it. Maybe is just not the book for you.
In any case, yes there is an industrial revolution in the second book (focused in the consequences of such revolution). The concept of a bomb is present also, so having fire weapons shouldn't be a problem. Technology plays a big role in most of the history. Often as contrast to the country life.
Gandalf uses a Colt .45 at the end of the book to kill the mischievous indian chief and save Rosita's sheep farm. Is in the last Peter Jackson's version: the Return of the Writer's Block.
High-labour-cost, low-coal-cost is fine and might fit our world. However, to get people to spend years in R&D you need specialization and scale. Without the first you don't have R&D people. Without the second there's no profit or even much advantage to the new tech. To get both of these you, well, need people. A good number of people to support specialists which aren't part of the Nobility (or at least Nobles which are engaged in activities which weren't historically considered very Noble-like in nearly every society in our world), and a good number of people so that scale can generate a profit.
Industrial revolution can't happen by itself in ultra-sparse societies as in the LOTR era. The author cites estimates which are an order of magnitude lower than 17th century England, and I'd go one order of magnitude lower still*.
Now if he asked the question about Númenor that's a different matter... (Yes, it was destroyed, but there were populous colonies in Middle Earth which should have kept any tech?)
* Judging by the level of hostility involved and very high internal coherence of the protagonist societies I suspect a more total mobilization than your typical feudal society where losing simply meant the peasants served a different lord.
Once you can forgive that, it’s a nicely paced story with all your friends from LOTR showing up.
The time span since the Industrial Revolution compared to the history of humankind (let alone humanoids) is a tiny fraction, so even a tiny bit of variation in "about as long" can explain all the technological difference between rocket-propelled grenades and catapults.
But the actual reason why there is no modern technology in Middle Earth has of course nothing to do with economics or engineering, but with the personal tastes of Tolkien. He wanted to create a medieval saga, not sci-fi, and judging by its popularity, he did a great job.
"Reassured, the boggies donned their greaves, corslets, gauntlets, and shoulder padding and slathered themselves with Bactine. Each was armed with a double-edged putty knife, its blade both keen and true. Goodgulf wore an old deep-sea diver’s suit of stoutest latex. Only the well-trimmed beard was recognizable through the helmet’s little round window. In his hand he carried an ancient and trusty weapon, called by the elves a Browning semiautomatic." - Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings
Steel came late. Not until the Bessemer process in the 1880s was steel produced in volume. Steel as an exotic material, about as rare as titanium today, dates back to the Roman Empire at least. Early blast furnaces were seen in medieval Spain and 5th century China. But good steel could only be produced in small quantity by those processes. For the longest time, nobody got the heating, the ingredients (mostly iron ore, coal, and limestone) and the air injection right, so they could not get mild steel in quantity.
A medieval society could have built a Bessemer converter if they knew how and the right minerals were available. It's the metallurgy that's hard; the thing itself is simple.
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 to those of western Europe. And I think everybody agrees that Siberia was never going to be a good spot for the industrial revolution to start.
To have high labour costs, you need high productivity; you need industry. Most of the industry in Middle Earth seems to be involved in making weapons and jewelry, and not much else. To have high inventiveness, you need a lot of people. I suppose the industrial revolution could start in England because it was both fairly densely populated, but also highly productive. Perhaps because they had the trade network to sell their goods all over the world?
There doesn't seem to be much trade in Middle Earth. There barely are any cities! I mean, Gondor seems to be by far the largest and richest country, and what cities do they have beyond Minas Tirith, Osgiliath and Erech? The rest of Middle Earth seems to be almost completely empty. The various travelling groups would frequently walk for days without encountering any farms or villages.
I don't know why Middle Earth is so empty, but given that it is, it seems like a very unlikely place for the industrial revolution to take place.
Northern Eriador, roughly the area between Shire and Rivendell, used to be Arnor. The northern counterpart to Gondor was first weakened in civil wars and then destroyed by the armies of the Witch King. People don't return to the area, because they believe the ruins of the cities are haunted.
The Misty Mountains are infested with orcs. Few people live near the mountains, except in Dunland in the south.
Anduin runs between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood. Few people are willing to live near them. Particularly because Sauron built his fortress in the southern Mirkwood and spent most of the last 2000 years there. Further south, the lands west of the river are near Lorien and Fangorn, and people are afraid of the beings living in those forests. On the eastern side, the lands between Mirkwood and Mordor are either barren or were ruined in the battles at the end of the Second Age.
Osgiliath, Minas Anor/Tirith, and Minas Ithil/Morgul used to be three great cities of Gondor. However, Minas Ithil was lost and Osgiliath abandoned long ago. At the end of the Third Age, most of the population of Gondor lives in the coastal areas protected by the White Mountains and Minas Tirith. Pelargir is a major port near the mouth of Anduin, and Dol Amroth is another major city.
We know little of the lands to the east and to the south, except that they were capable of sending large armies against Gondor.
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... )
This is one of the key places where The Hobbit is unavoidably discontinuous with LOTR. Bilbo also has matches and a clock. Tolkien considered a larger revision of The Hobbit to bring it in line with LOTR but ended up only significantly reworking "Puzzles In The Dark", the chapter where Bilbo meets Gollum and obtains the ring. (Apparently the first edition also had a reference to tomatoes, which were replaced with pickles.) I don't think it's a strong basis for any arguments about the worldbuilding of Middle-earth.
I suspect over the course of his life Tolkien became more and more frustrated with technology, and removed most overt traces of it to bring his stories closer to what he read in Medieval folk lore.
There's also the hint, at least from the movies, that Sauron and Sarumon could produce an unlimited supply slave labor.
"True magic" seems to stem from intimate knowledge of the more arcane and foundational aspects of Arda. The Ainur wield it instinctively, and only the most ancient Elves seem to be able to learn it. But also they struggle to use it on scale, which was one of the reasons the Rings of Power were forged. In the Third Age, advanced magic seems to only be used via the Rings of Power, and dissipates for good after the destruction of the One Ring.
That fertilizer would be needed to free a lot of people from menial field work and allow them and their children to dig for coal or toil in factories.
Imho coal is not all that necessary for an industrial revolution. To run factories, one could use water power for the textile industry for example.
And i would recommend to make charcoal out of Lóriens forests for the smelteries (which actually would be quite good due to the low sulfur content of charcoal).
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.
Need a clean house, just study to make a magic broom, or buy one in the magic shop. Need to get somewhere fast, take an eagle, etc. Why waste your time inventing gunpowder when you can learn some magic and shoot fireballs from your staff.
(ok tongue in cheek)
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.
LaborSupply x LaborProductivity / CostOfCoal
I couldn't help but think of modern robotics and industrial automation as
LaborSupply x LaborProductivity / CostOfSoftware
Given the extreme cost of software development, and the diminishing cost of labor due to globalization - it's no wonder we don't have robots everywhere. It will be curious if the current wage spike leads to increased automation.
As a result Chinese manufacturers are investing heavily in robots. This isn’t really to replace workers though, as such, it’s that at the macro level they’re running low on workers willing to do those tasks. And before someone says “all they need up do is pay more for them to do it”, that’s missing the point. A lot of people in China have higher aspirations now. Fewer and fewer of them want to be clicking together bits on a production line any more, no matter how well it pays. They increasingly have the skills for higher value work, and want to use them.
There are two explanations for this: (1) this is an accurate explanation of a phenomenon or (2) it's an unreliable narrator projecting propaganda.
Orcs are also often associated with industrial activity. If (1) is true, then there might be a real connection between industry and evil. E.g. the downfall of the dwarves is related to their industrial greed. If (2) is true, there might be a stigma against industry due to its association with orcs.
There is a fan-fiction that expands in the vein of (2), although I haven't read it yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
There is no inherent stigma against industry in itself in LotR. Many peoples (Noldor, Numenoreans, Dwarfes) engaged in industry, but it tends to further greed and hunger for power, which makes individuals and whole societies easier to manipulate and play off against each other.
But I do have an opinion on it. And boy, will I let you know what it is!
(Note: I'm not even a fan of LotR. More Silmarillion, so I'm not defendig LotR but to criticise something you haven't read... that must be the root of all internet evil).
My own pet theory is that in worlds with magic users, magic gets used to solve the problems which technological advancements would otherwise be developed for.
Of course, we get some fantasy lands like this, where magic itself was the major discovery behind the industrial revolution (see: League of Legends' animation, "Arcane", "Wheel of Time" novels).
Then you have something like "Flight of Dragons" where science can be applied to how some of the magical elements work, but still are fundamentally incompatible. Almost like "Schrodinger's wizard", once you start analyzing the magic, it starts fading.
There's a lot of different takes on it.
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?
2) Racism/nationalism. Magicians should have been working with dwarves to develop technology. Instead the only magician who concentrated on developing industrial technology worked with a manufactured slave species that lacked dwarf institutional knowledge, and additionally focused all of his efforts in developing war technology.
"Shut up."
The Scouring of the Shire was also pretty much clearly analogous to the industrialization of the English Countryside
Building a world that not just happens to be in a particular phase of history at the time a story takes place, but is somehow perpetually stuck in the middle ages for thousands and thousands of years seems to be surprisingly common in fantasy.
The middle earth kingdoms (Rivendel, Gordon, Rohan), were feudal domains with little incentive to change.
Fortunately for the kingdoms, their counterparts were also corrupted totalitarian regimes without balance of power.
> Confession time. I have never read Lord of the Rings. I’ve tried. It’s boring as hell.
When your whole article is based on something you have zero knowledge about... Sorry, I'm just not going to spend the time.
Paraphrasing from Wikipedia: Unlike science fiction and horror, works in the fantasy genre are distinguished in that they typically don't include scientific or macabre themes. Fantasy typically features prominently settings the emulate earth but with a sense of otherness. Magic and supernatural elements are common as main plot elements, theme, or setting.
It is likely that the witch king and the Nazgul are trying to get an industrial revolution going and the heroes keep cutting interrupting their attempts each 11k years or so.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...
Great high quality blog from a historian analyzing the logistics of LOTR and other fantasy settings.
Why would it need dinosaurs to have coal. Wouldn’t it just need trees?
The author focuses on energy sources for machine power. But what about generating high heat for metallurgy? Coal burns longer and hotter than wood, and releases fewer particulates. Also coal is more energy dense than wood, making it easier to transport.
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.
Mordor essentially rose to power without him and industrialization happened mostly in his absence.
Saruman tried to found his own nation on his own and used much of the technology developed by Mordor to do so.
Sauron arose out of his ghostly form and tried to take over Mordor from the religious angle and force his dominance through the Ring.
Had the Ring remained hidden I don’t doubt that Gondor would have eventually fell, Orthanc may have risen to take its place, and the Elves, dwarves, and Hobbits would simply be forced to comply with the new world order. So vast and established was the revolution at the point the story began.
In that discussion, the answers were (I think?) "dragons and magic."
One of the reasons of pushing UBI is, that without it, complex artifacts (lawn cutting robots) are slowly replaced by their wage-slavery equivalent and innovation becomes nothing but a curiosity to be displayed on some southern domus terrace during a orgy.
The Istari were sent to lead and inspire the peoples of Middle Earth, and being clad in flesh was supposed to give them greater empathy for their plight. By leading with force they likely would not have been able to resist the temptation of the Rings of Power ane would have turned into dark lords themselves, like what happened with Saruman.
They could still access their full power, but were only supposed to use it in extreme emergencies. The Balrog of Moria was unaccounted for in the plans of the Ainur, and likely would have wrecked Gandalf's plans completely even if the Fellowship had managed to escape it.
ADDED: That said, maybe Mordor was just starting to industrialize and maybe wasn't quite at the point where it could conquer all given magic etc.
> First, Middle Earth actually has coal! Something I was kinda surprised to discover. As mentioned in the quote introing this section, the Dwarves are explicitly described as mining coal in The Hobbit.
I don't think Middle Earth Christianity, Islam or whatever other premodern traditions of knowledge would agree in those two views. Everything that was important to know about the world was already known and written in the Bible, Qur'an or the Vedas.
How on earth there was going to be any secret of the universe yet to be discovered by mere immortals?
The Silmarrion in Finroth ad Adalabeth also mention Christianity in an allegorical form. Heh. Still, you're right.
Yeah middle earth's history is completely different, there is no europe or arabia.
Despite this it would be funny that the easterling's lack of mathmatical progress would lead to the free men not advancing like they hypothetically could have.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is 200,000 years old. Hominids are 5,000,000 years old at least. For most of the history of Cro-Magnons there were multiple hominid species. All non sub Saharan Africans are two percent or more Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture goes as high as 10% if I recall correctly.
For the overwhelming majority of human history there have been multiple species.
Because they studied physics and understood that the industrial revolution leads to doom.
The exponential GDP growth is us considering natural resources free and unlimited in our economic model, while there is in fact a finite amount of resource (we've passed peak production crude oil in 2018). This very free use of resource leads to climate change, increasing the pressure on the production of 'renewable' resource like food. In physics, no infinite growth in a finite planet.
Their world sustained civilization for 45,000 years because they didn't have an industrial revolution. Our civilization is ~11,000 years old at best, I'm not entirely convinced the GDP curve will continue to grow exponentially for the next 34,000 years.
Are you willing to bet on that? Perhaps with a somewhat shorter time horizon, so we can close out the bet before we die?
Btw, keep in mind that Lord of the Rings is fiction..