29 ms·
Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
- failrate 4y agoMy immediate thought is that the technium of Middle Earth did not develop like ours due to rhe ubiquity of magic. Indeed, it is in these books that the last lights of magic are fading, and the world is being given over to other powers. Imagine if there were like an additional physics sitting on top of ours, and its use was isolated to a few hereditary practitioners, and let us see if the mundanes can scraps together enough gumption for gunpowder. Who knows if it even works in those circumstances?
- analog31 4y agoThat strikes me as reasonable. With magic, they didn't need to invent things. They didn't need engineering. There's also the hint, at least from the movies, that Sauron and Sarumon could produce an unlimited supply slave labor.
- postsantum 4y agoDutch Disease but for magic
- samus 4y agoThe most common forms of magic in LotR is probably superior Elven knowledge of Arda. Their lifespan means that they can explore many topics to a far greater depth than a human could ever hope. Topics where it can take decades to comprehend the state of the art, and where humans have no choice but to specialize and fragment the subject into sub-disciplines. "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.
- ghaff 4y agoSome of that plays into questions about why the Roman Empire didn't advance more technologically than it did. One of the explanations I've read is that, given ubiquitous slave labor, there was no need for labor saving devices which has been one of the drivers of industrialization.
- bawolff 4y agoIts been a long time since i read the books so im not sure if this is present in the books, but there is gunpowder in the movies because the orcs use a bomb at one point.
- x3iv130f 4y agoIn the earliest iterations Tolkien imagined Middle-Earth to have steam punk technology. I believe it is because steam ships and rolling tanks are much closer to what Tolkien expierenced in the First World War when he first conceived his world. 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.
- imwillofficial 4y agoThe LoTR/Rambo x-over would be so epic. Taking down a balrog with an RPG never looked so cool
- MH15 4y agoA point made in the article is that industrialization was limited due to lack of coal but don't the dwarves use coal to run their forges?
- loeg 4y agoThis is like 25% in the article: > 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cosmiccatnap 4y ago"Confession time. I have never read Lord of the Rings" - the guy who wrote an entire article about how much he doesn't like it.
- muzani 4y agoIt hurts credibility right away, and I don't know if the author knows anything about guns or industry either.
- GolfPopper 4y agoReminds me of this: "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
- ncmncm 4y ago"As they climbed the rising gorge into the next chapter..."
- trhway 4y agoThere are several sentient species simultaneously, and the resulting xenophobic/genocidal struggle takes huge toll - in particular the populations of those various species are small (in my view Tolkien is a bit unrealistic in the sense that in his world the most powerful species hadn't totally put others out of existence like for example Cro-Magnon did to Neanderthals). Industrial revolution is about scale (the machines make economic sense only in mass production) and small population can't have it.
- barry-cotter 4y ago> (in my view Tolkien is a bit unrealistic in the sense that in his world the most powerful species hadn't totally put others out of existence like for example Cro-Magnon did to Neanderthals) 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.
- ncmncm 4y agoAnd, maybe that is why we only got civilization shortly after the last Neanderthal and Denisovan passed on. That doesn't explain why Australia didn't get it, first, though.
- barry-cotter 4y agoI do not understand how you think multiple human species could impede civilization formation. Can you explain? Also, Australia only left the Stone Age with British colonization. It was plausibly the least technologically advanced inhabited area on Earth at contact.
- ncmncm 4y agoI only observe the coincidence: while we had Neanderthal about, no moves toward civilization. Any reason would be speculation; maybe they and the Denisovans knew better? If so, they may get the last laugh, as it crashes down around us. Australia (Sahul, really) was a place with (apparently) no Neanderthal or Denisovans. Whatever would develop only in their absence should have happened there first. Or maybe in Sundaland and points north, before rising seas claimed all of that. But civilization was well along for millennia before any appreciable "technological advancement", excepting maybe pottery, and things that decay and leave no trace. (Which is most things.)
- r_harriso 4y agoThe reason that Tolkien didn’t write an industrial revolution into the history of middle earth is that he hated industry. Hated how it destroyed bucolic village life. Having this take on LoTR is pointless. Just an annoying waste of time.
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoTolkien lived in a city in Oxford which was neither bucolic nor a village. It sounds more like you hate industry and wish to return to bucolic village life.
- mikeyouse 4y agoTolkiens views weren’t subtle or complicated.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_of_the_Rings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord...
- r_harriso 4y agoWow didn’t even take as much work as I suggested.
- r_harriso 4y agoSeems like you googled where he lived and haven’t read any analysis of his works and letters.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 4y agoI have no idea if Tolkein loved or hated industry, but simply living in a city doesn't suddenly make you an industrialist as much as living in a village doesn't make you a farmer. If anything, living in the city gives you an excellent perspective on the effects of industrialization, form ones own opinions from there.
- jmoak3 4y agoThis was so much fun to read and went farther than I could have expected
- postsantum 4y agoFor those who still wonder what if Mordor actually had an industrial revolution, here is an amazing fan-fiction book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
- jws 4y agoThat’s a favorite of mine. If you read it in English, remember it is a translated from Russian. There is a lot of awkward phrasing to a native English speaker which is probably idiomatic Russian that might have been better torn apart and rendered as native English. Once you can forgive that, it’s a nicely paced story with all your friends from LOTR showing up.
- kqr 4y agoWow, this is really good. I did not expect to get sucked in so quickly.
- giantg2 4y agoI'm not that into LOTR, but this was a very interesting read.
- Barrin92 4y agoThe industrial revolution is in the book, it's the actual antagonist of the story. Tolkien was a devout Catholic distributist and Hobbingen was his ideal Catholic community of self reliant Hobbits who answer to wizards and kings, not to factory floor managers and administrators.
- nostrademons 4y agoRight, 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, 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.
- galacticaactual 4y agoPaul Kingsnorth has some wonderful essays exploring this exact concept.
- avereveard 4y agoThis old game explores industrialized fantasy as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_M...
- thelittleone 4y agoIf only Tolkien wrote another story where the industrial revolution in Middle Earth (as you describe it) occurs, along with a fellowship that brings it down and returns Middle Earth to it's former glory.
- claytongulick 4y agoI hate to be "that guy", but honestly I had to stop reading at: > 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.
- chungy 4y agoPersonally, I read the books when I was 12 (slightly before the Peter Jackson Fellowship came out), and I was hooked the whole way through. I literally had sleepless nights from just reading on through the morning.
- progre 4y agoBut then the author goes on to quote LOTR quite extensively and brings up all sorts of economy tidbits ("the dwarves don't farm"), so they obviously have read LOTR.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bawolff 4y agoThe article wasn't actually about lotr
- yyyk 4y agoThe title aside, this essay is about why Middle Earth didn't have an industrial revolution. Unfortunately, it uses a model with a limiting assumption which it ignores, the assumption being that a certain population level is also required. 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.
- singron 4y agoThe world described in LoTR is not physically like ours. For instance, the orcs aren't described as bad guys because of their upbringing, culture, or subjective perception by the other races. Orcs are intrinsically evil. All the bad creatures of middle earth are described as if they radiate a natural and unalienable evil aura from their being. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
- samus 4y agoOrcs and other beings in LotR are evil because Morgoth infused the world with his essence and his ill will. At the end of the First Age, he was a shadow of his former self and was easily defeated by the other Valar. But since he basically turned Arda into his Ring, truly eliminating him would probably meant remaking Arda from scratch. Therefore, he was just cast out into the Void, and the Valar retreated to the few parts that were still intact. Of course, that's the official mythology, and the truth might be rather different. 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.
- darepublic 4y agoBack in my final year of high school I procrastinated my exams by reading Lord of the Rings. I felt like if I didn't get a good grade my life would be over but all of a sudden J.R. Tolkien's deep lore and meandering narrative were absolutely captivating.
- aaron695 4y ago
- RajT88 4y agoI have often wondered this as well. 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.
- akomtu 4y agoGandalf owned a rifle, that's why. If a magic wand is a concentrator of will that's roughly equivalent to a pistol, then a staff with a stone in it is a full size rifle.
- jltsiren 4y agoIt's been a while since I last read The Silmarillion, so some details might be wrong. 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.
- swayvil 4y agoAn engineer has a dream of a work, of a machine he can build. That is to say he has a vision, or hears a song. 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.
- saagarjha 4y ago> Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys. Ah, so it’s the Bay Area.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoThere really is a bubble effect. Everything is always about the Bay area... :-P
- samus 4y agoPresumably also the Numenoreans had it. The description of latter-day Numenor reads like they were technologically very advanced. The question is how far, but it seems fair to assume there was a sharp drop after the Fall because of the colonies not being self-sufficient enough to maintain their tech level. If we consider the stories in the Silmarillon to be handed down orally, the most advanced technologies could have simply been left out or summarized as "magic". No point detailing them if there's nothing in the daily lives of your audience that is comparable.
- MiddleEndian 4y agoIf you want to see a movie featuring both wizards and industrial technology, check out Wizards (1977) by Ralph Bakshi. Keep an open mind though, Bakshi's movies are a trip.
- odessacubbage 4y agoi'm glad you changed your last name, you son of a bitch
- StillBored 4y agoOk, I stopped reading about 1/2 way though, because middle earth didn't need an industrial revolution because they were all hippie communities living close to nature and they didn't need one be because they had magic distracting them and solving their most pressing problems. 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)
- bawolff 4y agoMost of the characters did not have magic. Gandalf had magic, but he was also basically an angel sent from heaven to guide middle earth. Its not like he was a normal inhabitant
- lstodd 4y agoThis was investigated in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- totetsu 4y agoWhat I wondered looking at that chart of GDP over time.. is what is the point of using a measure made to measure the economies of the modern world, to measure completely different economies of the past.. of course its going to look flat and then take off.
- avmich 4y agoFrom https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n21/francis-spufford/operation-backfire https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n21/francis-spufford/ope... : 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.’
- daniel-cussen 4y agoInstruments transform possibilities insofar as they required a transformation of possibilities and a transformation of the mind to come about. And the profit with which they do so determines their worth.
- schoen 4y ago> They all got pissed. I.e., drunk (British English), not angry (American English)!
- littlestymaar 4y agoThank you!
- high_5 4y agoFascinating! Imagine such conversation: 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.
- djur 4y ago> As mentioned in the quote introing this section, the Dwarves are explicitly described as mining coal in The Hobbit. 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.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoBut but but LOTR includes some nice Andean taters, fried up just right.
- lumost 4y agoWhen I saw the equation for labor factor of 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.
- kqr 4y agoRobots 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.
- lumost 4y agoIt 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.
- kqr 4y agoYou 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.
- simonh 4y agoIt’s happening already. Industrial wages in China have been ramping up significantly for over a decade as the rural labour pool gets tapped out, manufacturers climb the value chain, and the work force up-skills. This is why a lot of low value add manufacturing is moving to Vietnam. 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.
- peeters 4y agoInteresting read. This caught my attention: > 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.
- sircastor 4y ago> 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. 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.
- Hemospectrum 4y agoThere's one other problem with Arthurian legend, and it's a doozy. Arthur's alleged subjects were the Celtic peoples who lived in Britain before the invasion of the Anglo-Saxon tribes speaking proto-English. If you use this as the origin story of England, you're making English people the bad guys. Tolkien must have realized this.
- quantified 4y agoI just wonder why he doesn't have army-flattening magic? Why does he draw his sword so much? Talking to eagles is cool, but lifting and catapulting boulders would be much more effective at defeating orcs and whatnot.
- samus 4y agoThe last time the Ainur wielded that kind of magic, during the aptly named War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, entire continents were rendered uninhabitable and sunk below the sea. It might or might not have been an admonishment about the unprecedented destructive power of nukes. 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.
- gostsamo 4y agoSomething not mentioned in the article: Middle Earth is depopulated. Without large market, it does not make sense to produce at scale, nor you will have the capital to do it. 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.
- BarryMilo 4y agoAnother explanation: maybe they dont want to bring children into that dangerous world (and are all experts at the pull-out method).
- junofan 4y agoIt’s kinda implied that Sauron’s rings make individuals of the various races more interested in sticking around longer than in producing offspring. Hobbits were relatively unaffected and had lots of children.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoBut somehow, despite the fecundity of the Rosie Cotton-Gangees, with 13 children, the Shire had a total population of about 100k, the size of a small (edit: but not that small) town (or the UK population in 3000BC). 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.
- hirundo 4y agoTolkien answered this question quite well to an interviewer, although in a somewhat different form. "People would run into me at the pub and ask me why I didn't just have the eagles carry the hobbits to mordor, it would have been so much easier. And I told them the same thing I'll tell you now. "Shut up." https://youtu.be/1-Uz0LMbWpI https://youtu.be/1-Uz0LMbWpI
- thaumasiotes 4y agoBut Tolkien also wrote in his correspondence that the eagles were a mistake for that reason. So he seems to have agreed with the criticism.
- Animats 4y agoRead "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which is exactly this. The Boss, before being sent into the past, ran an arms factory. He gets some 19th century technology going and builds weapons in quantity. 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.
- King-Aaron 4y agoWow, it's almost as if a work of fiction isn't meant to be historically accurate
- dingosity 4y agodude sort of missed the point of LOTR.
- plaguepilled 4y agoThis feels like something that would have passed as comedy 10 years ago, but feels tried and predictable now.
- mulligan 4y agomore importantly, why didn't he use the 50 caliber Desert Eagle?
- pvaldes 4y ago> I have never read Lord of the Rings. I’ve tried. It’s boring as hell. 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.
- xg15 4y agoObligatory TVTropes link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis 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.
- t_mann 4y ago> You would think it’s the middle ages, but human society has actually been around in Middle Earth about as long as it has in ours. 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.
- Maursault 4y agoSeems 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 understanding of these vast subjects; 3) has taken at least one high school level course that included discussion of the Industrial Revolution; 4) likes guns, maybe owns a gun, has no great reason to own or use a gun other than childish affectation or perhaps even obsession. 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.
- endominus 4y agoAgree 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 this whole article just infuriating? Why don't you share it with your friends so they can get equally outraged?" kind of article. Perhaps it does work as a way to game engagement metrics, but it makes a lot of commentary stupider and more unpleasant than it needs to be.
- sixQuarks 4y agoInteresting, I found the tone to be tongue in cheek and sarcastic. I liked it.
- endominus 4y agoOh, 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.
- pdimitar 4y agoThis could have been an interesting table discussion but that person really wants to make themselves look better than their imagined theoretical opponents. It's off-putting and I'd avoid them if such a discussion happened around me.
- ianai 4y agoThey don’t have an easy to get to and relatively dense energy source. I often wonder where humanity would be without coal and fossil fuels. I doubt anyone would have created trains using just horse power.
- dsq 4y agoI read Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion. Until Numenor fell Arda was flat as a plate, which would prevent formations of coal, oil and other minerals necessary for basic industrial technology. While it's true that in the third age the world became a conventional globe, would Eru have put in fossil fuels? Probably not.
- RalfWausE 4y agoI think the best explanation could be taken from another novel: "The Wiz Biz" - The explanation there is, that physics in this world simply don't work like on earth, magic on on the other hand...
- eternauta3k 4y agoPlease stop plotting exponentially-growing things in a linear scale. Of course it shoots up at the end of the graph.
- timoth3y 4y agoThe 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 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.
- oDot 4y agoCompared to the very lucrative job of digging for coal...
- tomrod 4y agoIt may not be lucrative now, but it was needed to launch the industrial revolution.
- bumby 4y agoIt's similar to manufacturing jobs from the past. Compared to other options, it was lucrative. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoCoal mining in the UK was very lucrative, but wealthy people hired armed men to ensure they took the wealth rather than the miners.
- danjac 4y agoHow 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.
- rsecora 4y agoThere was an industrial revolution, but it was being developed at Isengard/Orthanc (saruman tower) and at Barar Dur. 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.
- smallerfish 4y ago> But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs? 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.
- rendall 4y agoAh, you missed the author's footnote to your excerpt. > 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-own-a-colt-45#footnote-18 https://featherlessbipeds.substack.com/p/why-didnt-gandalf-o... Commenters beware, the article is filled with such gotchas for the careless reader.
- smallerfish 4y agoHaha. Granted I didn't check his footnotes, but that's pretty lazy writing, and feels more like he corrected it as an afterthought rather than editing his core text.
- ghaff 4y agoI 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.
- eru 4y agoGwern does a good job with them on his website.
- LordHeini 4y agoI would say Middle Earth just lacks fertilizer. 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).
- andsoitis 4y agoAn industrial revolution (or, more generally, other scientific developments) are not necessary to the story and not typical of the fantasy genre. 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. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy)
- nathias 4y ago"It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help."
- jleyank 4y agoLoTR had an industrial revolution. It was called Isengard and people didn’t like how it turned out. Elves were anti technology so there would be downward pressure until they upped and left. Dwarves probably reproduced slowly and were recovering from being orc and dragon chow. Numenorians reproduced slowly and they were also recovering from the plagues and wars. This leaves hobbits who were idyllic. Oh, and the wizards were forbidden to show their abilities. 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.
- jcranberry 4y agoThe Numenorians actually also had a technological revolution, although I don't know whether it was industrial. They unfortunately faced the setback of being almost entirely wiped out when their continent was sunk by Illuvatar.
- jleyank 4y agoBoth the Elvish and Numenorian comments discussed hand-made, almost magical creations similar to what we imagine pre-industrial. So I think we're all in agreement that there were some amazing things created, but not at scale (perhaps aside from weaponry, but that's probably a long, slow accretion) and not for consumption.
- matkoniecz 4y ago> Elves were anti technology 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...
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoThat's what Mordor is. The Scouring of the Shire was also pretty much clearly analogous to the industrialization of the English Countryside
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
- mcv 4y agoFor someone who hates the Lord of the Rings, that's surprisingly well researched. And yet, a lot of his reasoning doesn't make sense. Because population levels in Middle Earth are far lower than in 18th century England, labour costs should be high? 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.
- matkoniecz 4y ago> I don't know why Middle Earth is so empty 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_of_the_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_o... )
- jltsiren 4y agoThe parts of Middle-earth we see in the books are empty, because Sauron has been fighting a war against the Numenoreans and their allies for 2000 years. He has also been winning the war. 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.
- moomin 4y agoMy take has always been that there have been industrial revolutions, but they’ve been suppressed. Tolkien’s description of evil is “the fires and forges of Mordor”.
- ghaff 4y agoAfter thinking about it a bit, the major obstacle I run into with having a coherent explanation for the lack of industrialization is that Mordor did industrialize at some level. And it doesn't take that much of an industrialization advantage to be able to overwhelm opponents. 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.
- notacoward 4y agoSubstitution effect. When you already have magic, the incentive to develop technological means to do the same things is drastically reduced. This magic vs. technology theme is explored in many works, though to be fair all I know of were written after LotR.
- Angostura 4y agoI 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 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.
- peace4all 4y agoI should add that Kirill Yeskov is a paleontologist and science popularizer. Here's his own explanation how he wrote "The Last Ringbearer": one of the reasons he mentions is that Middle Earth was impossible geologically: https://fan-lib-ru.translate.goog/e/eskov/text_0150.shtml?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEp7o0-w-uU ..and an interview with some charts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdyW9V10IEQ 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)
- ubermonkey 4y agoISTR a similar discussion about the same lack of development over time in the Game of Thrones universe, which has persisted in an essentially feudal state for, what, 8-10,000 years? In that discussion, the answers were (I think?) "dragons and magic."
- waynecochran 4y agoWhy didn’t Rome develop a space program?
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoWhy didn't Ancient Greece have one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/ancient-greek-energy-storage-technology-challenges-teslas-batteries/#gref https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/ancient-greek-e...
- KineticLensman 4y agoThe 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.
- landmass 4y agoOn 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.
- luxuryballs 4y agoThe irony of the article following this commentary in the intro “overly detailed lore, meandering exposition”…
- manceraio 4y agoModern science differs from Middle Earth knowledge in having the willingness to admit ignorance. No scientific law, concept, theory or idea is sacred. 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?
- neaden 4y agoMiddle Earth doesn't have Christianity, and indeed the books really lack any real discussion of religion. God exists and so do angels, but there are no clergy or real religious rituals.
- inawarminister 4y agoThere are a lot of religious rituals... For Melkor and Sauron. The Silmarrion in Finroth ad Adalabeth also mention Christianity in an allegorical form. Heh. Still, you're right.
- omarhaneef 4y agoI wish I could reproduce the passages from memory but as I recall, Tolkien as narrator in LOTR abhorred the cutting down of trees and the development that went on. His protagonists are all nature lovers in the original form, some very direct ones (walking trees, eagles etc) and the antagonists all want to cut down trees and build towns over them and so forth. 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.
- mrcheesebreeze 4y agohere's a funny idea: no islamic golden age which meant no european enlightenment. 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.
- mannykannot 4y agoClearly, Middle Earth is a Bostromesque simulation in which technological thoughts are largely suppressed - and we know who coded it.
- najari 4y ago>>>Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution? 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.
- eru 4y ago> 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..
- bricemo 4y agoI have always had a similar train of thought around zombie apocalypse fiction. If there was a mass zombie outbreak it would be totally solved within five years. Houses would be reinforced with zombie proof doors and walls. Weapons would be available for purchase that are tested as most affective against zombies. Roads would have guard rails and zombie proof walls to keep them out. It would slowly transform from a crisis to a nuisance like wild animals. There’s no reason it would continue going on year after year
- WhompingWindows 4y agoIndustrial 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?
- havblue 4y agoIndustrial 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.
- midislack 4y agoWhy didn't Frodo hop on one of those big eagles and fly the ring to Mt. Doom?
- neaden 4y agoBecause the great eagles were proud and would have been tempted by the ring, and even if they weren't the Nazgul have their fellbeasts and Orcs have bows so they would have been attacked.
- j_m_b 4y agoWhat about magic? Instead of being a great utility, it might have actually set middle earth back in terms of technological development. Who needs a voice-activated door when there is magic? Who needs technological efficiency when you can just eat some Lembas and work all day and night?
- wigster 4y agowasn't the whole thing that the rise of Isengard and the uruk orcs represented the coming of the industrial revolution (which tolkien hated)?
- agentultra 4y agoHilarious. 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.
- agentultra 4y agoCharacterization of Sauron is a bit off. 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.
- peter303 4y agoWhy didnt many human civilizations like Egypt, Rome, China, etc have an industrial revolution? Many of the technologies like steam engines and clocks were in Rome and China. However they were mire curiosities and never scaled up.
- winReInstall 4y agoSlavery, cheap labour is a poison for inventiveness. Why build alexa, if you can buy a alexa. Why build with concrete 3d printers, if slave-labour is plenty. 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.
- api 4y agoSemi-tangent: I am a bit partial to the idea that the abolition of Slavery in England itself and the restriction of the slave trade in the empire during the period of roughly 1772 until 1807 was partly responsible for the industrial revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807 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.
- iso1337 4y agohttps://acoup.blog/tag/lord-of-the-rings/ https://acoup.blog/tag/lord-of-the-rings/ https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/ 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.
- intrasight 4y agoEasy to answer by asking this question: why did the west have an industrial revolution. The answer is that we first had a financial revolution. Modern finance precipitated the industrial revolution. So the question should be: why hadn't Middle Earth invented finance? My answer is that it wasn't an obvious or given revolution in the real world. You may as well ask why didn't Eukaryotes arrive 10 million years earlier. Some things are just random and improbable.
- pessimizer 4y ago1) An obvious failure of public education. They weren't training/apprenticing enough magicians. 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Beldin 4y agoIf you want to figure out why the Industrial Revolution didn't happen somewhere imaginary, you might want to consider those places on Earth where it was imported instead of having happened. That is: comparing to the UK is less interesting than comparing to countries that at that same time didn't transition. I am no historian and Western; as such my view on what happened around that time in Asia, Africa, South-America, Australia is limited. (History class here focuses on the Industrial Revolution). But if there was no IR in any of those areas, surely those would be a better model for investigating the main question.
- benlivengood 4y agoI 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> I have never read Lord of the Rings. 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).
- leepowers 4y ago> So, Middle Earth had coal, but did it need coal? I don’t think so. 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.
- rdtsc 4y ago> Or, to put it another way, coal is the product of prehistoric biomass used to power steam engines that did a bit of an oopsie on the climate. But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs? Why would it need dinosaurs to have coal. Wouldn’t it just need trees?
- inawarminister 4y agoThere's actually a long fan Novel about this! It's called Saruman of Many Devices, and I really enjoyed it until the alt battle of Pelennor fields.
- perrygeo 4y agoA fun piece of speculation so I'm trying not to take it too seriously. But it takes a giant leap of faith to say coal was not the primary driver of the Industrial Revolution. First, it introduced a massive energy surplus far greater than annual solar inputs for the first time in human history. You can't just brush off physics and claim this surplus, once discovered, is somehow substitutable on the open market as if human labor could compete in Watt-hours. The presence of ultra-concentrated forms of energy with a high ROI was the driving factor in investing in technology for their extraction. A perfect circle: coal gives us more energy, to build better machines, which let us access more coal, etc. Change the economics and there is no incentive to industrialize unless you've got an army of Orcs to bootstrap the energy budget. Even if a human society could industrialize without fossil carbon, why do we see literally no evidence of such a thing ever happening on earth?