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How Many Hobbits? A Demographic Analysis of Middle Earth
- lainga 3y ago> The takeaway here is that my regions are smaller than most European countries. Did the author miss certain relevant developments in the period 1789-1945? Maybe overlaying a map post-Westphalia would be more reasonable
- rossdavidh 3y agoI think that statement was aimed at readers whose idea of what a typical size for a country is, are informed only by modern times.
- hyggetrold 3y agoOne thing we will never know is how many Druedain there were.
- zabzonk 3y agopedantic: Dúnedain
- Perenti 3y agoPedantic pedantic: The Druedain are the Pukel Men, the Wild Men, or Woses. They are found in the White Mountains in LOTR, and there were probably remnants in Eryn Vorn. They are also mentioned in The Silmarillion. They are very distantly related to the Dunedain, being associated with the 3rd house of the Edain, and Beor the Old.
- rossdavidh 3y agoI love you guys.
- johngossman 3y agoI’m not sure which I find scarier: that you knew this, or that I did too. And yet, I forgot my dentist appointment. Or maybe that’s why I forgot it.
- zabzonk 3y agoyep, sorry, my bad
- labster 3y agoSo basically Middle-earth’s version of Austrians and Australians.
- hydrok9 3y agoWoses aka Woads (Picts, known for "painting" themselves with tattoos).
- smeenai 3y agoThe Drúedain and the Dúnedain are distinct :) The Drúedain are the Púkel-men of the forest who help the Rohirrim navigate through the forest on their ride to Gondor and thereby bypass the troops that the Witch King had placed on the road to intercept them.
- bee_rider 3y agoI would like to see a fantasy setting that really grapples with the seemingly bizarre military/population dynamics of Elves. The must be incredibly battle hardened and/or traumatized.
- Deprecate9151 3y agoHave you read, or at least read about, The Silmarillion? Your assumption about their trauma is very correct.
- thom 3y agoNot what you're asking for, but an interesting angle is R Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books. He has a race called the Cûnuroi who are approximately Elves, and they accept immortality in a deal with a race of depraved starfaring bio-engineers, except it renders them sterile. They go quite mad over the years, and require increasing levels of violence to feel anything at all.
- climb_stealth 3y agoOoo, that sounds quite interesting. Which book is a good starting point for getting into it? Just asking because I don't want to look too closely and see spoilers. Thanks!
- thom 3y agoThe first book is The Darkness That Comes Before, and it's the beginning of two trilogies (the second of which ends up with four books...) The first three books are as good as anything in the genre. They're quite dark, but have very deep metaphysics, the stakes are incredibly high, and the central character is fascinating. I would tempt you more but I'm trying not to spoil anything. The books do go downhill (as does the author's mental health, I believe). But they are definitely worth knowing.
- beaumayns 3y ago+1 to these books - they have some really interesting worldbuilding. Even the later books have some good parts (quite a good Moria-like sequence, some more exposition on the current state of the insane remnants of Cunuroi society), but they definitely do lose the plot a bit. I'm still not sure myself what really happened in the end.
- georgeoliver 3y ago> Again, these are not the densities that actually prevail in Middle Earth Obviously the author of TFA knows LoTR is a fantasy novel but I still find this comment hilarious for some reason.
- Aeolun 3y agoI like these kinds of analysis of books because you can be almost certain that the author did not have historical populations in mind when deciding on settlement and army sizes. Though I’ll admit Tolkien could be an outlier here. He seems to have been quite thorough on a bunch of things.
- jandrese 3y agoI remember an analysis of the plate tectonics of Middle Earth and coming to the conclusion that it doesn't really work, but you can't blame Tolkien for this as the entire field of plate tectonics was invented a few years after he made the map.
- labster 3y agoI think it’s this one: https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-up-mountains-of-middle-earth/ https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u... I just read it because I’m thinking about writing a crossover fanfic between Tolkien and Sailor Moon set at the end of the Fourth Age/Silver Millennium, and I need to figure out the geography. I’ve mainly settled on throwing out Tolkien’s map, drinking a long draught of Graham Hancock kool-aid, and setting the thing in the Younger Dryas. (The core conceit: Eärendil’s silmaril === Usagi’s silver crystal.)
- becquerel 3y agoI think it is your moral duty to write this fanfic.
- labster 3y agoI have a very little bit written here, but it’s been a while. Other projects, of course, and I think I’m allowed to overthink on a Tolkien fic. http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=13894 http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=13...
- canjobear 3y ago
- pdonis 3y agoAs a long time LotR fan I love this article. I do have one nitpick, though: on the map of Bree that is shown towards the end, there is a North gate. But there are only two gates mentioned in LotR, the West and the South gates, where the East Road passes through. The North gate on the map in the article has a road going to Deadmen's Dike, but the road to Deadmen's Dike (Fornost) in LotR is the Greenway, which intersects the East Road just outside the West gate of Bree (and as well as running north to Fornost, runs south past the Barrow Downs and, after intersecting the road from Sarn Ford, goes on to Tharbad and Gondor).
- torbencarstens 3y agoThis is not quite true, while you're correct that there is no third gate, the Greenway (as pictured in the upper left corner of the 3 picture illustration you're referring to) is not the road which is shown in the "close-up" (lower center picture) of Bree which goes "To Deadman Dike". The illustrations are taken from "The Atlas of Middle-Earth" and the road which goes diagonally north-west from the prancing pony towards the greenway (Old North Road) is described as follows in "The Atlas of Middle-Earth" (pg. 124; At the Prancing Pony): > A drawing shows a lane which curves north from the Great [East] Road, one branch climbing to the crest of the hill, while another leads through a small opening in the hedge for a shorter route to Combe and Archet. The "North Gate" shown on the picture is the "small opening through the hedge". I'd say it was probably marked as a "Gate" here since Bree is surrounded by a Dike/Hedge and should simply illustrate that you can't simply cross on a "normal" road here. The drawing which is being referred to here appears in `The Return of The Shadow` (History of Middle-Earth Book 6) as `Plan of Bree` in Chapter `XX The Third Phase (2): At the Sign of the Prancing Pony` The drawing "Plan of Bree" by Tolkien can also be seen on pg 45 (Illustration 25) in "The Art of The Lord of the Rings"
- pdonis 3y agoHm, interesting. I guess I need to dig out my old copy of The Atlas of Middle-Earth from wherever it is hiding...
- snoopsnopp 3y ago[flagged]
- alehlopeh 3y agoSo Antioch is a good stand-in for Gondor, and then it’s also a good stand-in for Edoras? Huh? The author starts off with some numbers, then makes up some arbitrary numbers, and then claims they yield some other numbers, and compares these numbers to someone else’s made up numbers, at least six times.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoYeah, it seems more like a fun mental exercise that went slightly out of hand than an attempt at a serious scientific analysis (which is perfectly fine and the latter wouldn’t really be possible anyway given the context). However I have to agree on this point. While Antioch might make sense for Minas Tirith. Albeit to quite a limited extent since it was a sea port and a major trade center being one of the last stops on the silk road.. While Minas Tirith was primarily a fortress which was probably not self sustainable on its own without food, wealth and population transfers from the other provinces in Gondor (so more like Constantinople just with massively less trade and built on the side of a mountain). Edoras seems like a completely different type of settlement in almost every conceivable way and should probably be compared to Eastern or Central European towns.
- Perenti 3y agoI think Edoras/Rohan might be a reference to Breton Celtic horse culture. The Lords of Brittany, the House of Rohan, traced their ancestry to Conan Meriadoc. In Lotr, Meriadoc Brandybuck is the halfling who swears allegiance to King Theoden of Rohan in Edoras. The analogy doesn't go too far though, as the Rohirrim came from the vales of Anduin, near the Grey Mountains, while Conan's settlement, if it happened, was on return from defeat outside Rome. He was from Wales before that.
- hydrok9 3y agoWales is Celtic and pre-dates Brittany. Bretons came from Britain before or after the invasion.
- WalterBright 3y agoI once read about a professor who had made it his career studying Romeo & Juliet. He knew everything there was to know about it. He said he'd trade all that knowledge to see the play again for the first time.
- paulddraper 3y ago[flagged]
- falcor84 3y agoIt's something I've been thinking about actually, as I get older. There's this old joke about how dementia is quite nice, as far as diseases go, since it doesn't hurt and you constantly learn new things. I was particularly thinking that if we end up "uploading" ourselves into computer storage, we might intentionally do some memory cleanup, and occasionally allow ourselves to re-experience things "for the first time".
- Ntrails 3y ago> I was particularly thinking that if we end up "uploading" ourselves into computer storage, we might intentionally do some memory cleanup, and occasionally allow ourselves to re-experience things "for the first time". If you're into reading fiction, there's some fun elements of this in Permutation City by Greg Egan
- Log_out_ 3y agoSo knowing the maximum yield medieval farming fields can produce.. How many Hobbits till starvation and civil war?
- hschne 3y agoCan't wait for the analysis on Orc numbers. Given that their home turf is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash and dust I don't see them fielding the numbers they do. Not much arable land in Mordor, is there?
- kryptiskt 3y agoIt actually comes up in LOTR, The Gorgoroth Plateau isn't representative of all of Mordor, the fertile lands (because of the volcanic soil) around lake Nurnen in southern Mordor is mentioned as the source of Mordor's food.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoMaybe they're growing edible fungi underground? Between Mordor and Isengard, they clearly had impressive command of biotech.
- adrianN 3y agoWhere do they get fungus substrate? Fungi are heterotroph afaik.
- DeathArrow 3y agoHow many people in Westeros, Essos, Sothoros and Ulthos?
- DeathArrow 3y agoWhen watching Rings of Power, some human looked Caucasian, some looked like Asians, some like Africans, some like Aboriginals. I thought a fictional universe doesn't have the same human races as Earth, and also might be contrary to Tolkien's vie since Earth doesn't have hobbits, dwarves, elves, and orcs.
- msh 3y agoTolkien did have diffent human "races" in the books. Check the following link for a description of one of them: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Easterlings https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Easterlings
- ralfd 3y agoTolkiens Middle-Earth is though _our_ Earth. It is an instance of the "found manuscript conceit" with Tolkien just being the english translator of Bilbos writings. A copy of Bilbos manuscript (with later notes and additions by other scribes) survived until our time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch That backwater agrarian villages/hunter gathering tribes have the same diverse ethnicites as downtown Los Angeles is a different issue.
- pvaldes 3y agoEarth = terra, Middle = Medio Mediterranean middle earth is a borrowed concept
- veddox 3y agoYes, but it comes from Norse mythology, not Latin: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Midgard https://www.britannica.com/topic/Midgard As a scholar of early medieval literature, Tolkien borrows tons of ideas from the Edda and other mythological sources. (To give him his due, he masterfully reinterprets and combines what he „borrows“.)
- poulpy123 3y agoI like the article but I would be surprised if Tolkien gave a lot of thought to these questions
- gpderetta 3y agoI would be surprised if he didn't :D