3 ms·

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

• 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.