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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 r

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.
- gostsamo 4y ago
  The shire is not special. Nothing before the adventure of Bilbo made anyone think that it should be kept secret. The hobbits are just reclusive, however, there are travelers passing through and Bree is on an actual crossroad.
  - simonh 4y ago
    I think it’s special in the sense that it is surrounded on almost all sides for hundreds of miles by dangerous depopulated wastelands. The only exception is Bree, and that seems like a much more threatened and precarious community. It’s on the wrong side of the Brandywine, and within much easier raiding distance from the mountains, and whatever still lurks in the wastes that used to be Angmar. There are scattered communities across the region that used to be Arnor and Eriador, but they’re mostly pretty isolated and insular. For whatever reasons, establishing a stable prosperous community in Middle Earth just seems to be really hard. You’d think with ploughs, and agriculture, and domesticated animals they’d have densely populated the whole region in under a thousand years, but their history is of massive wars that laid waste to anything that hot firmly established, and incredibly hard very long term struggle to get critical mass for a recovery.
    - samus 4y ago
      Also in our world recovering wastelands and regrowing population was a long and difficult process. In principle there should be exponential growth at some point, but it takes quite long in general to get to the point where it really starts to take off.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  > 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. Reference please. The Rangers do protect the Shire but there are no references to a 'secrecy' mission in the book IIRC. There are main roads that pass nearby that are travelled at least by Dwarves and Elves. Frodo and the other hobbits themselves see Dwarves drinking at the Prancing Pony in Bree, where discussion of the Shire would undoubtedly have happened. Saruman is also aware of the Shire, if only because Gandalf kept on about it.

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.

gostsamo 4y ago
The shire is not special. Nothing before the adventure of Bilbo made anyone think that it should be kept secret. The hobbits are just reclusive, however, there are travelers passing through and Bree is on an actual crossroad.
- simonh 4y ago
  I think it’s special in the sense that it is surrounded on almost all sides for hundreds of miles by dangerous depopulated wastelands. The only exception is Bree, and that seems like a much more threatened and precarious community. It’s on the wrong side of the Brandywine, and within much easier raiding distance from the mountains, and whatever still lurks in the wastes that used to be Angmar. There are scattered communities across the region that used to be Arnor and Eriador, but they’re mostly pretty isolated and insular. For whatever reasons, establishing a stable prosperous community in Middle Earth just seems to be really hard. You’d think with ploughs, and agriculture, and domesticated animals they’d have densely populated the whole region in under a thousand years, but their history is of massive wars that laid waste to anything that hot firmly established, and incredibly hard very long term struggle to get critical mass for a recovery.
  - samus 4y ago
    Also in our world recovering wastelands and regrowing population was a long and difficult process. In principle there should be exponential growth at some point, but it takes quite long in general to get to the point where it really starts to take off.
KineticLensman 4y ago
> 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. Reference please. The Rangers do protect the Shire but there are no references to a 'secrecy' mission in the book IIRC. There are main roads that pass nearby that are travelled at least by Dwarves and Elves. Frodo and the other hobbits themselves see Dwarves drinking at the Prancing Pony in Bree, where discussion of the Shire would undoubtedly have happened. Saruman is also aware of the Shire, if only because Gandalf kept on about it.