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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 ana
by 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 agoThey trick, kill, and consume humanoids.
- soperj 3y agoIt's just defence, same as what the humanoids are doing.
- saalweachter 3y agoThey're violating the rule: "Food that talks is not food." [0] You can use a framework of moral relativism where intelligent spiders have no need to adhere to human-centric rules, and all, but I prefer the moral absolutism that no one who can understand I don't want to be eaten is morally permitted to eat me. [0] https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-11-30 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-11-30
- soperj 3y agoIt's kind of ignoring the history of cannibalism within the human race. It's tempting to say that we're past that, but most stuff comes back into vogue at some point in time.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoThere is not a single animal that wants to be eaten, what are you talking about? We just draw a line saying: this is ok, this is not, arbitrarily. Nobody, nothing, wants to suffer. That's one of the rare things life universally agrees on. There is no need for words to express that. And I think it's ok to do so, but if we can eat whales, octopus, and take cows and chickens and make their existence hell until we consume them, labeling a spider as "evil" because it likes eating humans is far fetched.
- saalweachter 3y agoI mean, my moral framework may be simple, but it's consistent, and more importantly, it makes it morally impermissible to kill and eat me. If the giant spiders were unintelligent, they'd not be moral actors, and then eating people might be a bad thing, but it wouldn't be a morally bad (evil) thing. If their prey weren't intelligent, my moral framework doesn't (currently) include an absolute prohibition on killing and eating animals, so that would be morally acceptable. But because both the spider and their prey were intelligent, my rules kick in and it is immoral for the spiders to eat people, or vice versa. (Now, there may be a loophole in that killing people for the purposes of eating them is always unacceptable, but there are circumstances where it is at least forgivable to kill [eg, self defense], and also circumstances where it is likewise acceptable to eat already dead intelligent creatures, but you have to be careful not to create a moral hazard where the killing is done on a pretext.)
- mnw21cam 3y agoAt least Tolkien actually had a few pages dedicated to the food and villagers being brought into Minas Tirith in preparation for the war.
- greenhearth 3y agoYou'd have to go to his source to decipher this. He was inspired by Beowulf, and the dragon in that story is based in general dragon mythology of its times. These could be read (in a non-Christian, pagan frame, which is where Tolkien was working) as allegories of environmental/ecological dangers - deadly wildlife, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.
- angiosperm 3y agoThe original dragons were fought to release the rain. The hero who fought the dragon was always named "Third" in the local language; he came after King and Priest, who got actual names. In later versions, the dragon had rustled cattle and the hero retrieved them. Those became princesses only very, very recently.