7 ms·

The world we see in the LotR and The Hobbit is what’s left over after a cataclysm wiped out the advanced civilizations. There are hardly any maintained roads bu

The world we see in the LotR and The Hobbit is what’s left over after a cataclysm wiped out the advanced civilizations. There are hardly any maintained roads but there are plenty of ruins suggesting a more advanced civilization once occupied and developed the land. I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed. What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.

Kalium 3y ago
It's also worth remembering that the world of LotR has people in it who were there for the advanced civilization. It's not beyond living memory. A number of those people are important minor characters, and the sense of loss helps form the backdrop for the ever-present grief of much of elven culture. The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.
BonitaPersona 3y ago
Also, the intentionality of it being a designed world. Some implicit features are intentionally designed to be messages themselves. For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional: 1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains! 2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races. Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course. I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.
- agentultra 3y ago
  Oh definitely, indeed. "The Machine," as he describes it in his letters, is the real villain... one you cannot even fight in any real way; it's always present and within all of us. We only get a hint in the stories that Middle-Earth is only one slice of the world at large. Mordor only seems to have diplomatic access to the states and countries outside of Middle-Earth. And he invites their armies to join with his to plunder this resource-rich and relatively undefended realm. But there is scarcely any mention of these other countries even in the Silmarillion and the other short stories since. They didn't need much detail because the story takes place around the small people standing against the forces arrayed around them. It's very intentional. Painfully so sometimes, which makes it a bit of a challenging work to enjoy. When it comes to world-building for telling stories, it seems like "simulating," is a time consuming and possibly fruitless endeavour. Fiction is fiction. Coming up with the salient histories and facts to give your story a sense of time and place is an intentional, designed artifact... and you only need enough to get the point across!
- angiosperm 3y ago
  As counterpoint, consider Kirill Yeskov's account of the events post-war: https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Absolutely: "Middle-earth’s population seems to be living in random towns scattered throughout that terra nullius, with barely any roads or any sort of economic network between them" The situation in the novel is basically analogous to western Europe in the dark ages. Which is not surprising since that was an era of Tolkien's interest and study. Western Europe after the fall of the (western) Roman empire was economically and politically very much "shrunken" from what it had been, and a bit of a backwater intellectually and economically. Infrastructure became poorly maintained for a couple centuries. Tolkien just extended that out over a thousand years or so, and extended the lifespan of the characters involved and added multiple "falls" -- 2nd age Gondor, Numenor, 1st age Beleriand, and beyond even to the time of the Noldor in Valinor before the kin slaying.
jerf 3y ago
The other thing I think worth remembering is that Middle Earth is still full of an awful lot of physical, relatively intelligent evil that has no real-world analog, even without significant activity by Sauron. Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood. Real wights and ghosts exist and have real killing power. Actual dragons exist in some places and they could make settlement impractical a hundred square miles at a time. You can read between the lines to believe that most outposts of civilization are still dedicating an awful lot of resources to defense (preventing expansion) and perhaps attacks that significantly impair entire towns are so commonplace as to not be mentioned. Mind you, in the end, I still think the balance favors some very simple expansion over the course of thousands of years, but there really are an awful lot of forces inhibiting it. Also, the movies made this solitude vastly worse. The books reveal that JRR Tolkien was aware that all the cities would be surrounded by farms and villages and be nations. The nations may be disconnected, harried by the aforementioned evil, and find it very difficult to expand, but he understood there would be infrastructure there. Movie Gondor is ludicrous nonsense; able to field a significant army and sustain a civilian population, but apparently the army and civilian population do not ever need to eat anything. Or the food just beams into their granaries from space. Or maybe their Numenorean background or Rohan's affinity with horses means they can eat grass. Because they don't have any farms or any other infrastructure. It's city, and then literally 100 feet outside of the city walls, you're in the wilderness, effectively as untamed as 100 miles away from the city. You might justify it on stylistic grounds, but it has no other justification. In the end you have to grant all authors grace. Nobody can run a full world simulation in their head accurately. If this is all we have to grant to JRR Tolkien, he asks for less than many other authors. Net-net I still think the wildernesses in his world are unrealistically sparsely populated, but it's far from the worst idea I've swallowed to read a book.
- soperj 3y ago
  > Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood. How is that evil?
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    They trick, kill, and consume humanoids.

Kalium 3y ago

It's also worth remembering that the world of LotR has people in it who were there for the advanced civilization. It's not beyond living memory. A number of those people are important minor characters, and the sense of loss helps form the backdrop for the ever-present grief of much of elven culture. The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.

BonitaPersona 3y ago

Also, the intentionality of it being a designed world. Some implicit features are intentionally designed to be messages themselves. For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional: 1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains! 2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races. Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course. I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.

agentultra 3y ago
Oh definitely, indeed. "The Machine," as he describes it in his letters, is the real villain... one you cannot even fight in any real way; it's always present and within all of us. We only get a hint in the stories that Middle-Earth is only one slice of the world at large. Mordor only seems to have diplomatic access to the states and countries outside of Middle-Earth. And he invites their armies to join with his to plunder this resource-rich and relatively undefended realm. But there is scarcely any mention of these other countries even in the Silmarillion and the other short stories since. They didn't need much detail because the story takes place around the small people standing against the forces arrayed around them. It's very intentional. Painfully so sometimes, which makes it a bit of a challenging work to enjoy. When it comes to world-building for telling stories, it seems like "simulating," is a time consuming and possibly fruitless endeavour. Fiction is fiction. Coming up with the salient histories and facts to give your story a sense of time and place is an intentional, designed artifact... and you only need enough to get the point across!
angiosperm 3y ago
As counterpoint, consider Kirill Yeskov's account of the events post-war: https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Absolutely: "Middle-earth’s population seems to be living in random towns scattered throughout that terra nullius, with barely any roads or any sort of economic network between them" The situation in the novel is basically analogous to western Europe in the dark ages. Which is not surprising since that was an era of Tolkien's interest and study. Western Europe after the fall of the (western) Roman empire was economically and politically very much "shrunken" from what it had been, and a bit of a backwater intellectually and economically. Infrastructure became poorly maintained for a couple centuries. Tolkien just extended that out over a thousand years or so, and extended the lifespan of the characters involved and added multiple "falls" -- 2nd age Gondor, Numenor, 1st age Beleriand, and beyond even to the time of the Noldor in Valinor before the kin slaying.

jerf 3y ago

The other thing I think worth remembering is that Middle Earth is still full of an awful lot of physical, relatively intelligent evil that has no real-world analog, even without significant activity by Sauron. Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood. Real wights and ghosts exist and have real killing power. Actual dragons exist in some places and they could make settlement impractical a hundred square miles at a time. You can read between the lines to believe that most outposts of civilization are still dedicating an awful lot of resources to defense (preventing expansion) and perhaps attacks that significantly impair entire towns are so commonplace as to not be mentioned. Mind you, in the end, I still think the balance favors some very simple expansion over the course of thousands of years, but there really are an awful lot of forces inhibiting it. Also, the movies made this solitude vastly worse. The books reveal that JRR Tolkien was aware that all the cities would be surrounded by farms and villages and be nations. The nations may be disconnected, harried by the aforementioned evil, and find it very difficult to expand, but he understood there would be infrastructure there. Movie Gondor is ludicrous nonsense; able to field a significant army and sustain a civilian population, but apparently the army and civilian population do not ever need to eat anything. Or the food just beams into their granaries from space. Or maybe their Numenorean background or Rohan's affinity with horses means they can eat grass. Because they don't have any farms or any other infrastructure. It's city, and then literally 100 feet outside of the city walls, you're in the wilderness, effectively as untamed as 100 miles away from the city. You might justify it on stylistic grounds, but it has no other justification. In the end you have to grant all authors grace. Nobody can run a full world simulation in their head accurately. If this is all we have to grant to JRR Tolkien, he asks for less than many other authors. Net-net I still think the wildernesses in his world are unrealistically sparsely populated, but it's far from the worst idea I've swallowed to read a book.

soperj 3y ago
> Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood. How is that evil?
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  They trick, kill, and consume humanoids.