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Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

>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 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?

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> IIRC [Hobbits] conquered the Shire from the Orcs

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

Internal warfare is caused by competing for the same resources. Orcs must be under external constraints to fight with each other instead of spreading around to occupy/pillage other resources. We can accept that they are constrained to certain habitats and the same could be even said about the dwarfs, however there are many human nations in the books and none of them has created large continues settlement zones. Again, the lack of people and trade on Anduin is a shocker for me.

>Internal warfare is caused by competing for the same resources.

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'.

Politics is handwaving for the structural reasons for a conflict. No need for fighting each other if there is an easier gain to be found outside. At least not fights that would be significant enough to suppress the population growth.

You are giving far too much credit to internal conflict. Trapped between an empire of orcs on one side and those super racist elves on the other side (they certainly do consider humans a lower species, and how could you blame them given the humans' shocking lack of eternal youth), how much internal conflict can you expect? Even the most incompetent dictator wouldn't have a problem getting people to stand together.

I'm not sure I get you. We were talking about possible internal conflict within the Orcs. Not sure Sauron gets their automatic allegiance, and if he does not, that's all the reason we need. As for humans, I don't have a good explanation there at all.

I was referring to the second paragraph. Orcs usually don't pay taxes to Gondor.

That paragraph referred to humans. For Fantasy races we can always come up with an explanation/excuse, but there should have been more humans along the route.

Most older Elves regard being able to leave the world as a kindness, given how twisted it has become. The racist ones are either bitter or don't have much life experience.

Elves are not only long-lived, but also bound to Arda. When they die, they rest some time in Mandos' halls and then reincarnate. No matter how twisted and shitty the world becomes, they are stuck with it. No matter the traumas they suffer and the wrongs commited by them, they cannot escape it [the consequences]. Because their victims will be around forever too, and they can't forget either.

> I doubt Sauron or Saruman care at all about their lives.

Also, orcs were twisted elves, so perhaps they also had slow reproduction cycles?

In almost every battle with them, they had a vast superiority in numbers. Even after the catastrophic defeats they suffer when the Good Guys win, they seem to be able to quickly recover their numbers. It probably helps that they can thrive in environmentr where humans can't: high mountains, caves, the volcanic landscape of Mordor etc.

That was a proposed background but Tolkien never decided what their true background was.

I don't think the Shire had enough hobbiton population for an industrial revolution. Estimates I have seen are below 200 000, maybe much fewer. Britain had about 10 million in the 18th century.

Before the industrial revolution and the move of work from fields to factories, there was the agricultural revolution, which trippled domestic food production, and coupled with increased imports allowed population to start increasing from about 1650 to reach 9 million by 1801 without increasing the number of agricultural workers required, giving millions of surplus population to work in those factories

Plus, pre-modern age agricultural revolution, no created fertilizer, no pesticides, poor storage (no refrigeration, limited preserves, pest control), and no forced irrigation.

So a drought, cicadas, pest explosion, shorter growing season, fungus/etc, wildfires, on and on, would immediately lend to famine, and perhaps war.

Lots of additional people die during famine, fighting each other for scraps.

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