5 ms·

I'm confused why the technology level that is being compared with is medieval europe. To me it seems like lord of the rings fits much more into post-roman empir

I'm confused why the technology level that is being compared with is medieval europe. To me it seems like lord of the rings fits much more into post-roman empire collapsing europe. There are remenants of what were once powerful states floating around, but clearly much decayed. The land is not so much terra nullius so much as the big states only recognize the other big states and the rest of the land mostly escapes their notice so to them it is not described as "owned" People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?

d--b 3y ago
"Post roman empire collapsing europe" is the textbook definition of the Middle Ages (from 476 to 1492).
- arethuza 3y ago
  Shouldn't that be post Western empire collapsing - the Eastern Empire lasted almost another thousand years?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    It's weird to think that the Eastern Roman Empire only fell 39 years before Columbus discovered America. (At least, it's weird for me. I expect that the Roman Empire - even the eastern version - was a long time earlier.)
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      And the Russian empire is arguably a continuation of Byzantium / third Roman Empire with a Czar (Caesar) until the Russian Revolution.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        The first czar was crowned in 1547 (104 years after the end of the Eastern Empire), so I'm not sure that it's a "continuation" in any real way. It may be a continuation in peoples' minds, but it's not a continuation in the way the Eastern Empire was.
      - angiosperm 3y ago
        The Russians would have wanted you to think so, anyway. Likewise, Fat Carl in France.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      The eastern wasn’t much of an empire the last few hundred years. Its influence barely extended beyond Constantinople.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    In 400 CE, the empire controlled the entire Mediterranean coast, all of modern day France, Spain, Italy, England and the entire Balkans. In 717 CE, the Eastern Empire controlled most of modern day Turkey and some scattered enclaves in Greece and Italy. If that's not a collapse, I don't understand the meaning of the word.
- JKolios 3y ago
  Which textbook is that? 1492 is Late Renaissance at the cusp of the Early Modern age.
  - narag 3y ago
    It's not easy to find single events or dates that define a change of historical period, that don't happen overnight and uniformly globally. The arts were indeed more advanced. But 1492 has a number of interesting events. It's the year that Spain got unified as the first modern state, with a centralized court. That's a crucial event to get over feudalism. Coincidentally it's the same year Columbus reached the Americas, so it's an event relevant to globalization. Erasmus, also a central figure, was ordained that year.
  - poulpy123 3y ago
    Most of the textbooks use the definition of middle ages to be between the fall of the western Roman empire and the one of the eastern Roman empire
- Perceval 3y ago
  The Early Medieval period, the immediate post-collapse centuries, are also referred to as the Dark Ages, distinct from the High Medieval Period and Renaissance Period.
- bawolff 3y ago
  1000 years is a pretty big range
- matthewowen 3y ago
  There's a pretty big difference between 1300AD and 600AD For example, by 1300 you have Kings of England with substantial documentary index. In 600 you have ongoing Anglo-Saxon settlement, the written evidence is poor, but there seem to be tens or hundreds of independent political units. There are reasons people refer to the early middle ages specifically as the "dark ages".
bluGill 3y ago
> People travel via horseback because how else would they travel? Walk. Seriously, people walk in general, not ride horses. You use the horse to carry cargo, or haul a wagon (oxen would be better for pulling a wagon - they eat less so despite being slower they are more economical, plus the anatomy of oxen make a harness easier). The people though don't ride in the wagon they walk behind. Wagons without modern suspension are rough rides and you can walk farther than the horse or oxen can in a day, and just as fast. Thus horses were only rarely used for human transport through most of history. The only time horse transport makes sense is when you have a regular system of change points and so the horses "run" (probably at a trot not a run, but I'm not an expert on horses so if details matters do your own research) faster than you can for an hour or two then you trade horses while the first horses rest until tomorrow. In this way you can travel a lot faster than you could by walking, but it depends on the whole system which is very expensive to setup/run. Anyone who needed to save money would walk even when that system existed. Thus such systems - where they even existed - were often used for mail where spread across thousands of letters the cost was cheap enough that you could afford the speed.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Right —- I find it interesting that Hollywood and modern life (horse racing and our own sedentary existence) has skewed our perception of this. An averagely fit horse can travel maybe ten miles further than an averagely fit person in a day. But not as far if you expect them to maintain a pace faster than a person, with a person and belongings on their back. At the limits of our endurance, human ultra-runners perform about as well as horses over very long distances in terms of simple endurance — carrying our own weight without stopping. It’s only over short distances that horses have such obvious advantages. If you had a horse and you needed to cover great distance, you spent as much of that time as you could doing your own walking.
  - noirscape 3y ago
    I think a lot of that comes from the perception where the horse was replaced by the automobile for casual travel. Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot. There's also the image of the most famous start/stop horse network of all: the Pony Express, which probably played a part in setting up this imagery - for an onlooker, postal workers would travel from one side to the other on a single horse, permitting (for the time) very fast deliveries. In reality it was a series of well maintained stables and lots of start-stop segments to keep a horse in good condition, but that's not something you're going to notice if you're not a mailman. (The Pony Express also wasn't sustainable and went bankrupt rather quickly, but it's legacy is pretty lasting.)
notahacker 3y ago
Agree it's closer to early medieval than late medieval, but Post-Roman Europe contained 50m-ish people in countless villages and surviving towns that might not have written enough down to interest chroniclers, but would have been very much in evidence to anyone walking down from Northern Europe to Turkey to deliver a ring! Whereas Tolkien makes a point of emphasising how depopulated areas are. It's not that he simply avoids mentioning settlements where nothing interesting happens, it's that he makes a point of the Fellowship being isolated for the majority of the journey, and mapping and naming settlements that were supposed to be tiny military outposts or a lone abandoned inn or completely irrelevant to the story.

d--b 3y ago

"Post roman empire collapsing europe" is the textbook definition of the Middle Ages (from 476 to 1492).

arethuza 3y ago
Shouldn't that be post Western empire collapsing - the Eastern Empire lasted almost another thousand years?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  It's weird to think that the Eastern Roman Empire only fell 39 years before Columbus discovered America. (At least, it's weird for me. I expect that the Roman Empire - even the eastern version - was a long time earlier.)
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    And the Russian empire is arguably a continuation of Byzantium / third Roman Empire with a Czar (Caesar) until the Russian Revolution.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      The first czar was crowned in 1547 (104 years after the end of the Eastern Empire), so I'm not sure that it's a "continuation" in any real way. It may be a continuation in peoples' minds, but it's not a continuation in the way the Eastern Empire was.
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      The Russians would have wanted you to think so, anyway. Likewise, Fat Carl in France.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    The eastern wasn’t much of an empire the last few hundred years. Its influence barely extended beyond Constantinople.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  In 400 CE, the empire controlled the entire Mediterranean coast, all of modern day France, Spain, Italy, England and the entire Balkans. In 717 CE, the Eastern Empire controlled most of modern day Turkey and some scattered enclaves in Greece and Italy. If that's not a collapse, I don't understand the meaning of the word.
JKolios 3y ago
Which textbook is that? 1492 is Late Renaissance at the cusp of the Early Modern age.
- narag 3y ago
  It's not easy to find single events or dates that define a change of historical period, that don't happen overnight and uniformly globally. The arts were indeed more advanced. But 1492 has a number of interesting events. It's the year that Spain got unified as the first modern state, with a centralized court. That's a crucial event to get over feudalism. Coincidentally it's the same year Columbus reached the Americas, so it's an event relevant to globalization. Erasmus, also a central figure, was ordained that year.
- poulpy123 3y ago
  Most of the textbooks use the definition of middle ages to be between the fall of the western Roman empire and the one of the eastern Roman empire
Perceval 3y ago
The Early Medieval period, the immediate post-collapse centuries, are also referred to as the Dark Ages, distinct from the High Medieval Period and Renaissance Period.
bawolff 3y ago
1000 years is a pretty big range
matthewowen 3y ago
There's a pretty big difference between 1300AD and 600AD For example, by 1300 you have Kings of England with substantial documentary index. In 600 you have ongoing Anglo-Saxon settlement, the written evidence is poor, but there seem to be tens or hundreds of independent political units. There are reasons people refer to the early middle ages specifically as the "dark ages".

bluGill 3y ago

> People travel via horseback because how else would they travel? Walk. Seriously, people walk in general, not ride horses. You use the horse to carry cargo, or haul a wagon (oxen would be better for pulling a wagon - they eat less so despite being slower they are more economical, plus the anatomy of oxen make a harness easier). The people though don't ride in the wagon they walk behind. Wagons without modern suspension are rough rides and you can walk farther than the horse or oxen can in a day, and just as fast. Thus horses were only rarely used for human transport through most of history. The only time horse transport makes sense is when you have a regular system of change points and so the horses "run" (probably at a trot not a run, but I'm not an expert on horses so if details matters do your own research) faster than you can for an hour or two then you trade horses while the first horses rest until tomorrow. In this way you can travel a lot faster than you could by walking, but it depends on the whole system which is very expensive to setup/run. Anyone who needed to save money would walk even when that system existed. Thus such systems - where they even existed - were often used for mail where spread across thousands of letters the cost was cheap enough that you could afford the speed.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Right —- I find it interesting that Hollywood and modern life (horse racing and our own sedentary existence) has skewed our perception of this. An averagely fit horse can travel maybe ten miles further than an averagely fit person in a day. But not as far if you expect them to maintain a pace faster than a person, with a person and belongings on their back. At the limits of our endurance, human ultra-runners perform about as well as horses over very long distances in terms of simple endurance — carrying our own weight without stopping. It’s only over short distances that horses have such obvious advantages. If you had a horse and you needed to cover great distance, you spent as much of that time as you could doing your own walking.
- noirscape 3y ago
  I think a lot of that comes from the perception where the horse was replaced by the automobile for casual travel. Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot. There's also the image of the most famous start/stop horse network of all: the Pony Express, which probably played a part in setting up this imagery - for an onlooker, postal workers would travel from one side to the other on a single horse, permitting (for the time) very fast deliveries. In reality it was a series of well maintained stables and lots of start-stop segments to keep a horse in good condition, but that's not something you're going to notice if you're not a mailman. (The Pony Express also wasn't sustainable and went bankrupt rather quickly, but it's legacy is pretty lasting.)

notahacker 3y ago

Agree it's closer to early medieval than late medieval, but Post-Roman Europe contained 50m-ish people in countless villages and surviving towns that might not have written enough down to interest chroniclers, but would have been very much in evidence to anyone walking down from Northern Europe to Turkey to deliver a ring! Whereas Tolkien makes a point of emphasising how depopulated areas are. It's not that he simply avoids mentioning settlements where nothing interesting happens, it's that he makes a point of the Fellowship being isolated for the majority of the journey, and mapping and naming settlements that were supposed to be tiny military outposts or a lone abandoned inn or completely irrelevant to the story.