4 ms·

> while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time. Note that when the fellowship passes through Lorien and Gondor, t

by xg15 4y ago

> while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time. 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)

gostsamo 4y ago
The Mordor expansion should've started one-two generations ago. No mentions of recent ruins and the more likely reaction of the population on the best communication pathway in the local part of the continent should've been building walls and armies, no fast desertion of their homes.
- samus 4y ago
  Maintaining walls and supplying armies requires a fair amount of population though. Middle Earth is very thinly populated. The former Realm of Arnor is so thinly settled that the Northern Kingdom of the Dunedain had to be dissolved, and its people were reduced to a nomadic lifestyle. Sort of what happened to the crvilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century.
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    Yes, the whole thread is trying to find plausible reasons why the population does not recover after disasters. The elves are leaving and gondorians have issue reproducing. Everyone else should've been totally capable of taking those big chunks of land and building new societies there. Orcs should've just made them build more warlike cultures and not just hide, because orcs are raiders, not an well organized force which can deny territory against an determined adversary for long periods of time. People live in Bree for centuries. Why there are no settlements between the shire and it? Why Bree hasn't expanded in the other directions?
    - Amezarak 4y ago
      The entire area from the Shire to Bree IS settled, mostly with farms. There were also towns around Bree: they did! Edit: with the exception of the Old Forest, which is actively hostile, and the Downs, that are inhabited by evil wights.
      - mcv 4y ago
        But it also seems to be one of the very few places in Middle Earth that are settled. Everything between Bree and Gondor is pretty much empty wasteland with the occasional elven stronghold. The Rohirrim strike me more as steppe nomads than western knights; with all their hiking through that land, how many farms and villages to they encounter?
    - simonh 4y ago
      There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon. But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population gets established, Goblins will descend on it and hoover it all up to grow their population, but then probably die out when the food supply runs down again. So they have a boom-bust population cycle that keeps human populations suppressed. The area in the north surrounding the Shire used to be a great kingdom, but it was wiped off the map by hordes of Orcs and Trolls and such fomented by the Witch King. There may also be a magical element to the success of the Orcs and other such creatures. Whatever the logic or reasons, the fact is Middle Earth is severely under-populated compared to Europe and always has been. It's demographics are far too thin to support the kinds of developments we had, and every time they established kingdoms that might turn that around, they got violently crushed. Bree is heavily fortified and paranoid for good reasons. The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret. As long as everyone thinks it's just a few scattered villages, as it has been for most of it's history, there's not enough there to send a big force of Orcs for. If the goblin king of the mountains knew how much bread, cheese and ale there was there for the taking, it would have got the scorched earth treatment long ago.
  - zwirbl 4y ago
    > Sort of what happened to the civilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century. Got any good sources on that? Sounds very interesting
    - samus 4y ago
      The spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana encountered advanced societies along the Amazonas river. He's the guy that came up with that name. What's left from these civilizations are Terra Preta deposits (extremely fertile black earth of very likely human origin) and petroglyphs that can be detected using LIDAR. Also, small tribes of natives with a noble class, which is quite unexpected for hunter-gatherer societies, but makes sense for more complex societies that suffered civilizational breakdown and had to change lifestyle. Sort of like the northern Dundedain :-)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by xg15 4y ago

gostsamo 4y ago

The Mordor expansion should've started one-two generations ago. No mentions of recent ruins and the more likely reaction of the population on the best communication pathway in the local part of the continent should've been building walls and armies, no fast desertion of their homes.

samus 4y ago
Maintaining walls and supplying armies requires a fair amount of population though. Middle Earth is very thinly populated. The former Realm of Arnor is so thinly settled that the Northern Kingdom of the Dunedain had to be dissolved, and its people were reduced to a nomadic lifestyle. Sort of what happened to the crvilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century.
- gostsamo 4y ago
  Yes, the whole thread is trying to find plausible reasons why the population does not recover after disasters. The elves are leaving and gondorians have issue reproducing. Everyone else should've been totally capable of taking those big chunks of land and building new societies there. Orcs should've just made them build more warlike cultures and not just hide, because orcs are raiders, not an well organized force which can deny territory against an determined adversary for long periods of time. People live in Bree for centuries. Why there are no settlements between the shire and it? Why Bree hasn't expanded in the other directions?
  - Amezarak 4y ago
    The entire area from the Shire to Bree IS settled, mostly with farms. There were also towns around Bree: they did! Edit: with the exception of the Old Forest, which is actively hostile, and the Downs, that are inhabited by evil wights.
    - mcv 4y ago
      But it also seems to be one of the very few places in Middle Earth that are settled. Everything between Bree and Gondor is pretty much empty wasteland with the occasional elven stronghold. The Rohirrim strike me more as steppe nomads than western knights; with all their hiking through that land, how many farms and villages to they encounter?
  - simonh 4y ago
    There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon. But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population gets established, Goblins will descend on it and hoover it all up to grow their population, but then probably die out when the food supply runs down again. So they have a boom-bust population cycle that keeps human populations suppressed. The area in the north surrounding the Shire used to be a great kingdom, but it was wiped off the map by hordes of Orcs and Trolls and such fomented by the Witch King. There may also be a magical element to the success of the Orcs and other such creatures. Whatever the logic or reasons, the fact is Middle Earth is severely under-populated compared to Europe and always has been. It's demographics are far too thin to support the kinds of developments we had, and every time they established kingdoms that might turn that around, they got violently crushed. Bree is heavily fortified and paranoid for good reasons. The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret. As long as everyone thinks it's just a few scattered villages, as it has been for most of it's history, there's not enough there to send a big force of Orcs for. If the goblin king of the mountains knew how much bread, cheese and ale there was there for the taking, it would have got the scorched earth treatment long ago.
- zwirbl 4y ago
  > Sort of what happened to the civilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century. Got any good sources on that? Sounds very interesting
  - samus 4y ago
    The spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana encountered advanced societies along the Amazonas river. He's the guy that came up with that name. What's left from these civilizations are Terra Preta deposits (extremely fertile black earth of very likely human origin) and petroglyphs that can be detected using LIDAR. Also, small tribes of natives with a noble class, which is quite unexpected for hunter-gatherer societies, but makes sense for more complex societies that suffered civilizational breakdown and had to change lifestyle. Sort of like the northern Dundedain :-)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]