>That doesn’t make any sense though, assuming a couple of thousand people lived there initially with all the ample land a population of ~2000 would have increas

>That doesn’t make any sense though, assuming a couple of thousand people lived there initially with all the ample land a population of ~2000 would have increased to over 100k at a somewhat conservative growth rate of ~2%... >So overall I don’t think we can really apply real world demographics to middle earth. There certainly must have been some force/factor not directly described by Tolkien that kept growth rates very low. Perhaps women in Tolkein's world are far less fertile than in our world (except for Samwise's wife). Or maybe they developed some effective contraception.