> while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time.

Note that when the fellowship passes through Lorien and Gondor, the ring war is already in full force, the fellowship just doesn't notice a lot of it.

By the time they travel the Anduin, the river is considered a front line: Everything east of the river is already occupied by Sauron, while the areas directly west of it had been evacuated. The book mentions this as one reason why the land is so deserted. (In addition to the long-term decline of Gondor that of course also happened, illustrated by the deserted lookout posts and ruins around the Argonath)

The Mordor expansion should've started one-two generations ago. No mentions of recent ruins and the more likely reaction of the population on the best communication pathway in the local part of the continent should've been building walls and armies, no fast desertion of their homes.

Maintaining walls and supplying armies requires a fair amount of population though. Middle Earth is very thinly populated. The former Realm of Arnor is so thinly settled that the Northern Kingdom of the Dunedain had to be dissolved, and its people were reduced to a nomadic lifestyle. Sort of what happened to the crvilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century.

Yes, the whole thread is trying to find plausible reasons why the population does not recover after disasters. The elves are leaving and gondorians have issue reproducing. Everyone else should've been totally capable of taking those big chunks of land and building new societies there. Orcs should've just made them build more warlike cultures and not just hide, because orcs are raiders, not an well organized force which can deny territory against an determined adversary for long periods of time.

People live in Bree for centuries. Why there are no settlements between the shire and it? Why Bree hasn't expanded in the other directions?

There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon.

But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population gets established, Goblins will descend on it and hoover it all up to grow their population, but then probably die out when the food supply runs down again. So they have a boom-bust population cycle that keeps human populations suppressed.

The area in the north surrounding the Shire used to be a great kingdom, but it was wiped off the map by hordes of Orcs and Trolls and such fomented by the Witch King. There may also be a magical element to the success of the Orcs and other such creatures.

Whatever the logic or reasons, the fact is Middle Earth is severely under-populated compared to Europe and always has been. It's demographics are far too thin to support the kinds of developments we had, and every time they established kingdoms that might turn that around, they got violently crushed.

Bree is heavily fortified and paranoid for good reasons. The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret. As long as everyone thinks it's just a few scattered villages, as it has been for most of it's history, there's not enough there to send a big force of Orcs for. If the goblin king of the mountains knew how much bread, cheese and ale there was there for the taking, it would have got the scorched earth treatment long ago.

I think the predator-prey cycle is the correct explanation. Pre-industrial societies have enough problems with food production and disease limiting population growth, add in the equivalent of sapient wolves and it's a miracle that there are any intelligent populations left in Middle Earth at all. I think you could add to your reply to the parent comment that the reason the Orcs don't take over and establish their own civilization is that they are prone to cannibalism and infighting. When they exhaust their local supply of man-flesh they probably instantly turn on the closest group of Orcs and devour them instead. They also suffer from predation by giant spiders and probably from wild trolls as well.

The Shire is truly an anomaly in that they have eliminated or escaped detection by anything that likes to eat Hobbits.

> The Shire is truly an anomaly

Probably has a magical bubble around it. Seems like Gandalf’s little terrarium tbh.

It doesn't have a magical bubble. What it does have are some excellent natural defenses. The eastern border of the Shire is marked by the Brandywine river, which is wide and hard to cross, with only one bridge in the area. (The Shire was attacked by orcs and wolves once, during a particularly cold winter when the river froze over -- no magical bubble!) Past the river is is Buckland, which is much more dangerous than the Shire and acts as a buffer zone; the Bucklanders put a lot more effort into defense than the Shire hobbits do. After Buckland there's a twenty-mile-long protective wall, with its two gates guarded at all times. After that there's the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, which are both exceptionally hostile places for travelers to pass through, way worse than most of Middle Earth.

> The mission for the rangers isn't to militarily defend the region as a garrisoning force, it's to suppress any news or investigation of the Shire to keep it secret.

Reference please.

The Rangers do protect the Shire but there are no references to a 'secrecy' mission in the book IIRC.

There are main roads that pass nearby that are travelled at least by Dwarves and Elves. Frodo and the other hobbits themselves see Dwarves drinking at the Prancing Pony in Bree, where discussion of the Shire would undoubtedly have happened.

Saruman is also aware of the Shire, if only because Gandalf kept on about it.

The rangers are highly secretive, so much so that the people of Bree and the Shire don't even know they defend them. Of course they let Elves and Dwarves travel the road, why would they want to stop them?

Saruman's enthral to Sauron is relatively recent, and he never took Hobbits in any way seriously, he has no direct control of Mordor's forces anyway. Frankly they dodged a bullet a bit on that one, Saruman's betrayal could have been far more damaging if he'd been even slightly less arrogant and dismissive of others.

The shire is not special. Nothing before the adventure of Bilbo made anyone think that it should be kept secret. The hobbits are just reclusive, however, there are travelers passing through and Bree is on an actual crossroad.

I think it’s special in the sense that it is surrounded on almost all sides for hundreds of miles by dangerous depopulated wastelands. The only exception is Bree, and that seems like a much more threatened and precarious community. It’s on the wrong side of the Brandywine, and within much easier raiding distance from the mountains, and whatever still lurks in the wastes that used to be Angmar.

There are scattered communities across the region that used to be Arnor and Eriador, but they’re mostly pretty isolated and insular.

For whatever reasons, establishing a stable prosperous community in Middle Earth just seems to be really hard. You’d think with ploughs, and agriculture, and domesticated animals they’d have densely populated the whole region in under a thousand years, but their history is of massive wars that laid waste to anything that hot firmly established, and incredibly hard very long term struggle to get critical mass for a recovery.

Also in our world recovering wastelands and regrowing population was a long and difficult process. In principle there should be exponential growth at some point, but it takes quite long in general to get to the point where it really starts to take off.

The entire area from the Shire to Bree IS settled, mostly with farms. There were also towns around Bree: they did!

Edit: with the exception of the Old Forest, which is actively hostile, and the Downs, that are inhabited by evil wights.

But it also seems to be one of the very few places in Middle Earth that are settled. Everything between Bree and Gondor is pretty much empty wasteland with the occasional elven stronghold. The Rohirrim strike me more as steppe nomads than western knights; with all their hiking through that land, how many farms and villages to they encounter?

> Sort of what happened to the civilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century.

Got any good sources on that? Sounds very interesting

The spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana encountered advanced societies along the Amazonas river. He's the guy that came up with that name. What's left from these civilizations are Terra Preta deposits (extremely fertile black earth of very likely human origin) and petroglyphs that can be detected using LIDAR. Also, small tribes of natives with a noble class, which is quite unexpected for hunter-gatherer societies, but makes sense for more complex societies that suffered civilizational breakdown and had to change lifestyle. Sort of like the northern Dundedain :-)

“Only one war 60 years ago” underestimates the impact that goblins/orcs have. It’s not wars alone that cause depopulation, it’s the constant raids. The orcs have secure holds in the Misty Mountains that allow them to raid all surrounding areas at will. This keeps these areas thinly populated. The exceptions are places like Lake Town, which are highly defensible.

It’s not really possible to attack the orcs in their mountain homes for anyone except Dwarves. And even Dwarves understood their limits. In the War of the Dwarves and Orcs (TA 2793-2799) they sacked every orc stronghold from “Gundabad to the Gladden” but even then did not dare to enter Moria, where orcs remained secure and continued to multiply.

But there were not many orcs and goblins for a long time in many areas, as we learned from the books. They only came back and multiplied with the slow return-growth of Sauron.

I would be more interested in the period of when Moria was thriving - when they wrote the password for the back door right above it. Meaning, those must have been one of the most peaceful periods in the wider regions history. How dense was the population at that time?

> But there were not many orcs and goblins for a long time in many areas, as we learned from the books. They only came back and multiplied with the slow return-growth of Sauron.

Sauron had already returned c1000 TA to Dol Guldur. We're specifically told that evil things, such as Orcs, begin multiplying in number by c1300 TA, which triggers the migration of the Hobbits to the Shire (already we have an example of why there's less people than we expect.) In c1400 the Nazgul begin their long destruction of the disunited (perennially entangled in civil war) kingdoms of Arnor. In c1500, Gondor is embroiled in devastating wars with Harad. In the 1600s a Great Plague depopulates the North and West: "many parts of Eriador become desolate"; not long before, Gondor has had a horrible civil war. During the plague, even the Shire suffers "great loss." In the 1800s Gondor is again involved in a costly war, this time against the Wainriders, and loses its eastern territories. In 1981 TA Moria falls. In the 2400s Gondor is again under a major attack by (though they do not know it) Sauron, and Sauron is able to use the Orcs in the Misty Mountains to effectively cut off Eriador from the rest of the continent. in the 2500s, the Gondorians are bailed out of a major disaster by the appearance of the Rohirrim, but shortly after, the dragons appear and decimate the dwarves. In the 2700s, after centuries of Orc attacks in the region, the Hobbits themselves defeat a band of Orcs; shortly after, Dale and the Iron Mountain fall to Smaug, Rhoah is nearly destroyed, and Gondor is attacked by fleets of Corsairs. In addition, there is a devastating winter that causes "great suffering and loss of life"; in the same century, Smaug annihilates Erebor and Dale, and there's a major, costly war between the dwarves and the Orcs.

In the following centuries, there are continual major Orc attacks. In 2900 Men finally abandon Ithilien. In 2911 there is another devastating winter, and the year after, great floods that result in the desertion of Tharbad and Minhiriath.

The Hobbit begins in 2941. Orcs have been in force for 1600 years.

This is a great comment but I feel obliged to offer a real-world counterexample: Europe, which had endless cycles of war (plus a few plagues). The Thirty Years War alone killed 5m people.

Non of those were genocidal wars between different species though.

The black death is a better real-life comparison point, and Europe actually took a lot of time to recover.

Thank you so much for this. I wrote the GP comment but I couldn’t give specific examples apart from the War of the Dwarves and Orcs. It’s been too long since I read Tolkien.

Wars and plagues every couple hundred years or so. So what you are saying is that wars and plagues are significantly less frequent then they were in pre-industrial Earth.

"Wars and plagues" can vary in scale from having next to no impact to being world-changing events, so in isolation it tells you nothing.

One of the more common last names in Norway is still "Ødegaard", literally "Deserted farm", reflecting families who were residing on farms which still had not gotten a proper name by the time the tradition of using your fathers first-name as a last time started dying out. This even then - by the 1800's - involved re-clearing farms that had still not been re-settled after the Black Death.

Of the ca. 36500 farms which existed in Norway around year 1300, only about 16000 were still populated by 1520, and the population is believed by some sources to still have been only half of what it was in 1300. It was not until the 17th century that Norway "recovered" - that is, until it was back to pre-plague, levels, having lost several centuries of growth, but with population centres having changed, leaving many ancient farms still empty reminders.

In Norway, a disproportionate portion of the political and religious elite died. E.g. while almost the bishops in Sweden survived, all but the bishop of Oslo died in Norway. The Northern provinces of Norway were left to their own devices for a long time, without a functioning government, because so few government officials were left that the king chose to focus restoration in the South and largely just abandoned them.

That was one event.

I also don't recall running into Nazgul and Orcs while growing up near Oslo, and imagine facing that might have been a rather severe deterrent to growth.

EDIT: I'll add that Norway is a good reminder that a combination of destructive events, harsh conditions and the extremity of the hockey stick nature of population growth can explain a lot. Norway today has a population density of ~14 per km^2. In 1950 that would've been ~8. In the mid 18th century about ~3. In the aftermath of the plague, likely <1, and still <1 by the 16th century. You can still travel on foot for days through central Norway without meeting people if you stay clear of the places most popular with people out hiking for fun. A couple of centuries back, and not only would you be able to do that, but you'd have been likely to now and again come across farms that had been empty for centuries, despite centuries of a growth and recovery.

> I also don't recall running into Nazgul and Orcs while growing up near Oslo, and imagine facing that might have been a rather severe deterrent to growth.

But you did have trolls, right? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollhunter

Hah! A whole lot of Norwegian folklore involves stories about how a lot of our mountains are trolls who didn't get back in hiding before the sun came out... None of them explain where there'd be enough space for mountain sized trolls to hide during the days, though.

No, there was constant low-level warfare for 1600 years which even directly led to the Hobbits fleeing their original home. It’s also for example the reason why the troll-wastes are desolate. The major wars and disasters were on top of that.

It’s 1600 years of an active, organizing intelligence whittling the West away and which saw the _destruction_ of multiple major kingdoms and settlements prior to the beginning of the story. The people of Arnor were nearly exterminated as a result of the Witch-King, for example. These were not wars like medieval wars. They were wars that entailed abject slavery or genocide for the losers.

> How dense was the population at that time?

not well defined, but it was time of significant progress in metallurgy and magic, for example greater rings of power were forged at that time.

The shire hasn't seen any raids for generations and the only thing that protects them are a few hundred irregulars under the command of Aragorn. Another example for unexplainably depopulated region is the area between the shire and the sea. Far from the mountains, those lands are not known to have large settlements.

In Bilbo's youth, the Fell Winter took place, and "White Wolves" invaded Eriador.

The Great Plague some time before and the Long Winter are explicitly said to have depopulated Eriador and left it "desolate." The Rangers were also not infallible. Obviously they did nothing to stop the Nazgul or large numbers of Saruman's agents in the time of the Lord of the Rings, nor did they stop the Orc-band that invaded the Shire a hundred years before the story.

See though that all of these disasters are spread over 1500 years. Most of them supposedly kill people, but they don't make the land uninhabitable and nothing stops from next generations repopulating them. Keep in mind that Europe suffers at least two big plagues, migration waves, a mini ice age and lots of other disasters. The main depopulation factors are hunger and food logistics collapse.

Norway took a several centuries to get back to ~1300 levels after the Black Death going from ~37k farms in 1300 to still only 16k farms by 1520, nation wide (and we're not talking large farms here, in most cases). Entire regions were entirely abandoned by the government. Many farms that were abandoned after the plague where not cleared until the 1800's.

If the population density was low to start with, and food production tough, recovery from even a single major enough event can take a very long time.

You blame it all on the black death, however, Norway was on the front line of the little ice age, so those farms might have not been populated because the land itself was not able to sustain cultivation reliably. Tolkien mentions only one bad winter, but I can allow that he wasn't well versed in climate sciences and regional climate patterns. As a result we have something that can suppress population growth to a minimal level, however, we don't have good proves in the text for such events in Middle Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

There's as far as I know nothing to support that the little ice age had much influence on the rebound of the population after the Black Death in Norway's case - you'll find documentation of farms right next to each other where one was not cleared and the other was, and where we can tell from tax records etc. once they were finally populated again that production capacity was comparable. It took centuries before the population had rebounded to the point where lesser farms were cleared again. As such it was first towards the end of the 1600's that the population was large enough to start hitting limits where the little ice age caused famine in Norway.

If the overall agricultural output is suppressed by LIA, then population recovery from the plague will be slowed down. From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500. There is a Wikipedia article about medieval demography, but the data there is even more positive and I'm not linking it here.

My point was that overall agricultural output in Norway per capita did not constrain growth again until the 1600's. The Black Death is often in Norway in fact considered to have lifted a lot of the surviving poor people out of poverty, because people previously subsistence farming on tiny plots could suddenly take on far more or more productive land and produce an excess. As I pointed out, it was not until the late 1600's that Norway faced famines again. The Black Death significantly increased food safety for the survivors in Norway. Despite this it took that long to recover the population size.

> From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500.

Hence the reason I pointed out that Norway did not, to show that the range of possible outcomes is substantial.

Differences for Norway included a harsher climate, and a landscape that in most of the country is not conducive to large scale farming in a constrained area (outside of a tiny part of the South East, even the "flat" parts are not particularly flat, and often rocky terrain), combined with a very low population density by European standards to start with. As a result, in a lot of places, while people had productive farms, the farm locations depends heavily on the terrain and are often spaced out, and a lot of focus was on e.g. raising sheep (which could, and still are, be let out to roam the mountain sides during the summer months). Recovery faced a lot of challenges, not least of which was simply that in parts of the country the next farm over might be many hours walk over tough terrain away, and during months of the year trying to go to the nearest village might be hazardous (winter months), or people might be up in the mountains far from people. There are still a few people living in places not reachable by road in Norway (and not just by the coast where they could compensate with access by boat). There are still large parts of the country where if it wasn't for cars getting from village to village might many places take days of walking (often horses or carts would not have been an option due to terrain).

Families could go the whole year without meeting any outsiders, and as a consequence marrying off your children and ensuring the family line survived, was a major ordeal in many parts of the country even when you had plenty of food, because the production of that food in Norway, even when the climate has been "good", has meant the farming part of the population has been spread out far more than many places.

There were no major cities. By the 1600's, Bergen, now Norways 2nd largest city, with 285k people, was by one source described as "definitely the largest city in the Nordics" with ca. 15000 people, as a result of being a major Hanseatic league trading port, but while it was larger than e.g. Copenhagen, Denmark (and Sweden) had many other cities of some note, Norway did not. The old capital, Trondheim, by then had reached 5000, and the other current cities in Norway had far fewer.

Even today there are parts of the country which if you avoided car travel would seem almost as desolate as in LOTR, and the population density today is more than 10x higher than before the Black Death. In the 150 years following the Black Death, you'd have walked through a landscape that would have appeared mostly untouched by man, with the very occasional farm, sometimes days apart, which half the time would be in ruins, and the very occasional small village.

You are missing the point in the fictional history which will change everything: the age of man. Of humans.

Yes humans can repopulate. And thus their era arrives. Thus your objection isn't a plot hole but part of what makes Tolkens work so interesting.

>however, Tolkien does not provide a good reason for the other human nations, the orcs or even the hobbits.

Hm.. Orcs are easy to explain. I doubt Sauron or Saruman care at all about their lives. As the animated adaption put it: "When there's a whip there's a way". add in constant external warfare (and possible internal warfare too) and you end up with a low population.

Hobbits are implied to have a very different past from their LOTR circumstance (IIRC they conquered the Shire from the Orcs?), though I recall very few details are given. One may also suspect a low reproduction rate judging by lifespan. Perhaps the Shire started from a low base, and only by LOTR had enough for an industrial revolution?

> IIRC [Hobbits] conquered the Shire from the Orcs

I though Hobbits were coming from the East of Middle Earth (I think Smeagol/Gollum was a part of a Hobbit community that hadn't migrated and so lived East of the mountains) and were granted the Shire by a king of Arnor, though they still had to fight orcs while there

Internal warfare is caused by competing for the same resources. Orcs must be under external constraints to fight with each other instead of spreading around to occupy/pillage other resources. We can accept that they are constrained to certain habitats and the same could be even said about the dwarfs, however there are many human nations in the books and none of them has created large continues settlement zones. Again, the lack of people and trade on Anduin is a shocker for me.

>Internal warfare is caused by competing for the same resources.

Politics is a sufficient condition. Perhaps Sauron would not tolerate 'independent' Orcs he can't use as canon fodder?

>Again, the lack of people and trade on Anduin is a shocker for me.

Yeah, it's the humans which are hardest to explain away. Some peasants should have thought 'We're tried of paying taxes to Gondor. We'll just move and no one can or would even bother find us'.

You are giving far too much credit to internal conflict. Trapped between an empire of orcs on one side and those super racist elves on the other side (they certainly do consider humans a lower species, and how could you blame them given the humans' shocking lack of eternal youth), how much internal conflict can you expect? Even the most incompetent dictator wouldn't have a problem getting people to stand together.

Most older Elves regard being able to leave the world as a kindness, given how twisted it has become. The racist ones are either bitter or don't have much life experience.

Elves are not only long-lived, but also bound to Arda. When they die, they rest some time in Mandos' halls and then reincarnate. No matter how twisted and shitty the world becomes, they are stuck with it. No matter the traumas they suffer and the wrongs commited by them, they cannot escape it [the consequences]. Because their victims will be around forever too, and they can't forget either.

I'm not sure I get you. We were talking about possible internal conflict within the Orcs. Not sure Sauron gets their automatic allegiance, and if he does not, that's all the reason we need. As for humans, I don't have a good explanation there at all.

I was referring to the second paragraph. Orcs usually don't pay taxes to Gondor.

That paragraph referred to humans. For Fantasy races we can always come up with an explanation/excuse, but there should have been more humans along the route.

Politics is handwaving for the structural reasons for a conflict. No need for fighting each other if there is an easier gain to be found outside. At least not fights that would be significant enough to suppress the population growth.

> I doubt Sauron or Saruman care at all about their lives.

Also, orcs were twisted elves, so perhaps they also had slow reproduction cycles?

In almost every battle with them, they had a vast superiority in numbers. Even after the catastrophic defeats they suffer when the Good Guys win, they seem to be able to quickly recover their numbers. It probably helps that they can thrive in environmentr where humans can't: high mountains, caves, the volcanic landscape of Mordor etc.

That was a proposed background but Tolkien never decided what their true background was.

I don't think the Shire had enough hobbiton population for an industrial revolution. Estimates I have seen are below 200 000, maybe much fewer. Britain had about 10 million in the 18th century.

Before the industrial revolution and the move of work from fields to factories, there was the agricultural revolution, which trippled domestic food production, and coupled with increased imports allowed population to start increasing from about 1650 to reach 9 million by 1801 without increasing the number of agricultural workers required, giving millions of surplus population to work in those factories

Plus, pre-modern age agricultural revolution, no created fertilizer, no pesticides, poor storage (no refrigeration, limited preserves, pest control), and no forced irrigation.

So a drought, cicadas, pest explosion, shorter growing season, fungus/etc, wildfires, on and on, would immediately lend to famine, and perhaps war.

Lots of additional people die during famine, fighting each other for scraps.

> Aragorn is able to defend most of the north with a few hundred irregulars, while the east participated in only one war 60 years ago that was done in a few weeks time.

Which might be a good reason why the don't have a population boom: long periods of stability with low threat from war, low infant mortality and high food security seem to cause low birth rates (at least in our world). If your children are unlikely to die, people just have fewer of them.

Most of our population booms happen after wars or in areas with low life expectancy.

Middle Earth has no contraception (Tolkien is catholic) and the only way to stop multiplying is to stop doing... math. LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken. So, you are expected to have high birthrate until you occupy all the good lands and then some. After that you either rediscover Malthus or you start innovating to get more out of what you have.

That assumes homo sapiens levels of childbirth however. As a number of comments touch on, a lot of the lack of technological advance could be hand-waved away as a result of low birthrates and a generally low population. You could also perhaps factor in a general societal distaste for technology although human history suggests that societies which can't or won't create technology are overwhelmed by societies that do.

I mean, we can all say "magic" and not think about it, but the fun here is in thinking and the hand-waving is not in the spirit of it.

It’s not just magic. In the First Age children were more of a vanity project… every creature in existence had a downright biblical origin.

Men don’t even exist until the Second Age, and “cities” at that time are basically just family settlements, with maybe a few dozen generations of men. And at first they’re below replacement rate. Look at the family tree of Beor: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/B%C3%ABor#Genealogy… no one is having three kids. It’s two or one.

The Third Age is only a few thousand years later. There’s just not enough time at those kind of birth rates to blanket a continent the way humans have.

I'm not sure it's hand-wavy "magic." The essay is talking about things that are different in Middle Earth that could have led to the lack of an industrial revolution by the Third Age. Lower population growth (and slower population recovery after plagues and wars) seem like a pretty plausible factor.

It's also plausible that societal advancement was also just slower than with us when the author seems to assume it would be expected to advance at the same pace. (i.e. it's taken ME longer to reach a medieval level of advancement.) Certainly happened with plenty of areas in our world for geographical determination and other reasons--though, by effectively modeling ME on Europe and giving it horses and AFAIK familiar crops, that's a harder case to make.

Uh, the humans of Gondor were descended from Numenoreans, who were descended from the Houses of Edain, men who morphed from Neolithic kit technology to High Medieval (pre-plate armour and gunpowder) by being uplifted by Noldorian elves in Beleriand.

Unlike the humans from a certain other famous series, we knew the background of Gondorians all the way to their earliest fathers around year... 300? 800? Of the first age of the Sun.

Now, discounting that... I agree, ME has really low population growth. Might be caused by Gondorians and Arnorians living to 200+, 300+ years old earlier, when their culture were established; when the blood grows thin and they live like normal humans, their cultures ossified already; 40 - 50 year old normal human grooms and brides aren't as productive as 80-100 year old Numenorian grooms and brides.

> LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken.

Maybe the women are missing from not just from social life, but from the world. Not just the entwives[0] and the rarely seen dwarven women, but even human women are surprisingly rare. How many of all those many men making an appearance were married? Only hobbits seem to have actual families, but still not very big ones.

Maybe Middle Earth just isn't very fertile and can't sustain large populations. Maybe there's a very good reason why population levels are closer to Siberia.

[0] https://xkcd.com/2609/

The rohinims don't have that issue for example. Nor it is mentioned as an issue for the other human societies. That's why the situation of the ents is considered such an anomaly.

Sam, post war, has a large family, and some of the other hobbits do as well (Farmer Cotton, for example).

But it also seems that Frodo and Bilbo were NOT mentioned as being "strange" or anything, so it's not certain that everyone would marry and have a family of any size.

They were explicitly mentioned as being strange, though not explicitly for being bachelors. More for being rich, reclusive and unusually young-looking for their ages.

This is not as big of a problem as it sounds: large swathes of Siberia are depopulated, yet factories abound in China. All it takes is local concentration of population, which Middle-Earth has.

However, the industrial revolution did not start in Siberia and it is proving only that it can't start in a world with so far removed population centers. Waterways are the cheapest transport option and source of water for the crops, yet nobody lives next to the biggest river around. The only possible reason would be if there is nobody to live there.

No, but as someone else pointed out: industrialism was going strong in Mordor and maybe even other places?

Mordor was starting an industrial revolution which couldn't have been older than 60 years. Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.

> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.

What explains the lack of development in ancient Sumer or ancient Rome? Wait a hot minute, because we have no idea and could have no idea if there was a small industrial revolution 10K years before ancient Sumer was a suburb. There would be no way to know if something like actual stainless steel was forged 60K years ago and the technology was lost. This is the problem with the blogger's armchair reasoning.

Actually, we know for at least one industrial revolution in sumerian times a.k.a the beginning of the iron age. And we have a way to find for civilizations with larger impact by checking the isotopes locked in ice. This is the method for dating volcano eruptions and for tracking the produce of lead in antiquity.

Yet look at today, with climate change.

How many areas are seeing reliable ice layer formation? Stuff at the top (most recent) is melting away, too!

So... if the same thing happened before, Industrialization, co2, eventual collapse after warming, ice records may be unreliable...

Yes, but per the graph in the article, any earlier "industrial revolutions" and even the Roman Empire weren't even visible blips relative to the Western European industrial revolution.

> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia.

But it also took many, many thousands of years for us to get to the industrial revolution. And we did not have magic, we did not outsource stuff to elves and dwarves, we did not have wars with orcs and dragons and other monsters and no extremely powerful transcedental/imortal beings actively involved/shaping the development of history.

And we only overcome feudalism because of the plague and the discovery of the New World -- non of which happened in the LOTR universe.

The church lost a lot of their influence as well.

Capitalism and the European Enlightenment overcame feudalism. Precursors of both can be found already before the discovery of the Americas.

War with ents is my most likely explanation, most of middle earth is the frontiers in inter species warfare.

I think Tolkien would have mentioned this somewhere. The Ents are notably isolationist.

Ah yes, the ents seem to dislike mankind and their axes. Maybe so!

> lower birth rate in the numenorians who obviously have reproductive issues as mentioned in the books

I wonder if Elden Ring's lore took a bit of inspiration from this:

> The Numen are a race of beings descended from otherworldly travelers. Long lived and seldom born, Queen Marika the Eternal is the primary member of this race.

George RR Martin wrote the lore for Elden Ring. He is intimately aware of Tolkien’s work. It’s not surprising to see such a homage.

Speaking of which, why doesn't any military in any kingdom in A Song of Ice and Fire have jets? That one immense building (pardon my spoiler-avoiding vagueness) with seemingly no interior columns led me to wonder this. But the answer may be that the book building and the show building are nothing alike, and the show exaggerates characteristics that aren't such a big deal or leaves out realistic details that interfere with making the building impressive. I have read part of the books but not the relevant part.

And I'm not even referring to the speed of movement that characters seem to mysteriously have.

The author lost me at tge first paragraph: he never read it, and still he wonders why, in medieval fanatsy setting, there are no pump guns.

So why are there no pump guns?

Indeed, considering Tolkien's otherwise fully-defined universe (and the industrialisation in Mordor indicating that it can be done), it's a fun question, and they rather use the question as as springboard into quite a ranging discussion of the factors behind real Industrial Revolution rather than a comic-book-guy-style tear-down of LoTR specifically.

Because during the time of the musket there were no pump guns neither.

EDIT: It took quite some time between the early days of the industrial revolution and the first semi-automatic guns. Ignoring LOTR for a minute, if in story taking place in the 17th century the question of "why didn't X use a colt .45" is easily answered, because it wasn't invented yet.

If we aren't going to "yes, and..."[1] our way into the actual topic at hand, consider that since they don't have the same standardised inches, even if they did had exactly a Colt .45", they wouldn't call it that, no more then we would call it a Colt .14T (where T is a Gondorian Royal Thumb).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...

But many parties are sparsely but explicitly described as making and using fantastically advanced marvels of somewhat magical technology in ancient times, some of which are still around like Sauron's Rings.

Probably the most honest reason to not have guns in Middle-Earth is that only stupid orcs, not the elves and dwarves who could easily develop them as school projects, would be interested in such tasteless weapons.

Easily accessible guns require tools that were absent, like screw making machines etc.

There were weapons, powerful weapons at that, but they depended heavily on artisanal production even if certain groups managed to reach manufacturing scale.

Also, Middle Earth is still licking wounds from the great wars with Melkor, which took away most of the advanced regions, and what Gondor and Arnor tried to rebuild got heavily whacked down by wars.

Random subsistence farmers spread across small hamlets do not make for industrial base, whereas Saruman and Sauron could use force to speedrun the development to provide resources for their forces (as both had knowledge of how to do it, even if we only take into account their experiences during wars of Beleriand - meanwhile the wizards other than Saruman stick to their oath of non-interference)

Saruman and Sauron are the only ones who seem interested in industrialization and in mass production for masses of orcs.

Sauron was never bound by the oaths Istari took, and Saruman broke his, and those involved not intervening too much. Most of the time, Gandalf & other Wizards were running around trying to keep things together so that societies could rebuild.

The remaining higher technology groups either lost the capability (Gondor), were destroyed (Arnor), are fighting constant war with Orcs with occasional dragon making problems that prevents building up proper industry (Dwarves), or are depopulated depressed groups that while not hoarding, do not interact with others anymore much and mostly use what remains of their industrial base to facilitate the last days of their race (Elves outside of Mirkwood - those in turn are trying but don't have much to build upon since Moria got overrun and they lost their main trading partner for technology).

The rest is down to subsistence farming levels without base of previous knowledge to rebuild or at least inspire.

I don't think all the Kingdoms of Men would have turned their noses up at a few cartloads of nice Dwarven culverin, regardless of what the Dwarves themselves (or those snooty elves) thought of them.

If you read Tolkien notes, industrialisation and Mordor as a industrial empire was seriously considered as a major plot at some point.

Mordor (and Isengard) are actually depicted as industrial complexes of the worst kind (including lack of effectiveness)

>> was seriously considered as a major plot at some point

So the very out-of-universe answer is: Because Tolkien decided against it. So the better question, and also the one we can use some source material to answer, would be why Tolkien decided against it and wrote a classic fantasy story.

Because he was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and not a historian of the 18th/19th centuries.

There's no Industrial Revolution in Anglo-Saxon mythology. Including it would have jarred in a dyschronistic way.

More than that, fantasy is based on nostalgia for heroic simplicity and straightforwardness, with a dash of magic to instil some child-like wonder.

The Industrial Revolution operated on a completely different narrative and moral basis. It was more about colonisation at home, using mechanisation to organise forced labour.

It's hard to be a brave Romantic hero in that kind of setting.

Well, I wouldn't say he decided to write it classic.

Haven't read the notes, but shouldn't Mordor, being an autocracy without a recognizeable middle class and a very lean political system focused on war, have very cheap labor?

Very cheap, but probably also quite unsophisticated. They can make basic stuff, but they also don't need to produce finer things. The Orcs make up for it with their numbers, and Sauron cares about power, not about wealth.

Right but I mean, that's not exactly the right conditions for industrialization. Who designs and builds the machines? Who does the research? Sauron solo?

Yes - Sauron is one of the remarkably few people in Middle-Earth who have not lost knowledge over time - the others are majorly proscribed from such actions (Wizards, including Saruman before he turned), or crushed into depression by what they lived through - depopulated Lindon where small remnants mostly builds ships for further movement west, the small settlement of Rivendell which doesn't have enough resources to spend on industrialization, the elves of lothlorien are in similar condition to Lindon, Arnor is so ruined that AFAIK there are no more cities that aren't ruins, and Dwarves are too harassed to expand much, though they have major win at Lone Mountain (but haven't recovered Moria).

Generally in the Middle-Earth, the parts we see, are post-apocalyptic environment constantly wrecked by wars and depopulated so hard most people are too busy raising crops to survive.

> have very cheap labor

It has that, given that almost everyone is enslaved.

If we took a walk through the author's home, I am certain we would find every piece of furniture was assembled without reading the instructions. Without bothering with the source material, the blogger has wrapped themselves in Tolkien's world and just wants to play.

> in _medieval_ fanatsy setting, there are no pump guns

well, if there was pump guns, it wouldn't be a medieval setting anymore, as you need some industrial base to manufacture them, industrial base which isn't exactly compatible with a medieval setting. Not to say you can't have guns in fantasy (Pillars of Eternity and Warhammer fantasy come to mind), but they are usually more primitive.

I kind of agree, it doesn’t really make sense to read a critique of a book series, by someone who has not read said book series..

It's not that it 'doesn't make sense' it's that you can't get to economies of scale, which are necessary in some conditions.

The other thing is fossil fuels. Industrial Revolution is about harnessing Coal and Oil.

This is covered in the article, comparing population density with several real world cities pre-industrial revolution.

Weren't orcs made by Sauron rather than being a natural species though? So they were never really born in the normal mammalian method.

They were made by Sauron’s boss. They breed on their own. Sauron has to convince the orcs to work for him; this was tough when he was in his more angelic form.

You might be thinking of the "genetically enhanced" Uruk Hai orcs created by Saruman.

Quite possibly. I was never that deep into it, but have many many friends that are so I had heard them discussing various aspects. Clearly got some wires crossed

If I'm not mistaken, Melkor (Morgoth) created orcs by corrupting elves. Saruman created Uruk-Hai by breeding orcs with humans.

Another explanation: maybe they dont want to bring children into that dangerous world (and are all experts at the pull-out method).

Don't people make more kids in more dangerous places, the logic being that you need to spread your risk of not having descendants?

Unless mandated by ideology, people don't think that way about getting children. If a place gets too dangerous, people either die, take countermeasures, or flee.

It’s kinda implied that Sauron’s rings make individuals of the various races more interested in sticking around longer than in producing offspring. Hobbits were relatively unaffected and had lots of children.

But somehow, despite the fecundity of the Rosie Cotton-Gangees, with 13 children, the Shire had a total population of about 100k, the size of a small (edit: but not that small) town (or the UK population in 3000BC).

So either pre-reproductive mortality is through the roof, but never mentioned, they haven't been there long[1], or something bad happened recently (before the events in the LoTR)[2].

[1] Except Hobbits settled the Shire about 3000 (edit: 1500, I can't count) years before the books.

[2] The idyllic setting, lack of traumatic narrative and their 1500-year settlement somewhat implies they haven't been through some kind of brutal population bottleneck recently.

> So either pre-reproductive mortality is through the roof, but never mentioned

Well if we're in this framework of assuming middle earth functions (more-or-less) like our own pre-modern world, then pre-reproductive mortality is enormous. If the Gamgees had their children in Europe in the Middle Ages, then only 6-7 of their children would survive to the age of 10.

Considering that a Hobbit male is only considered an adult at 33 years old, I'd assume that hobbits in general reach sexual maturity later than humans as well, giving any particular hobbit a higher chance of dying before their first child than any particular human.

Plus we don't know if Rosie is an outlier or not - plenty of real-life women have had 10+ children, especially in pre-industrial societies. The average woman in pre-industrial Europe had 6-7 children but effective fertility was barely more than 2 due to pre-reproductive mortality - we didn't see a population explosion in Europe until the 18th century, rather the population very slowly ticked up over centuries and crashed back down in various calamities.

100,000 is still pretty low, but as far as I know there are events that would have caused population shocks, including major crop failures due to bad winters in Frodo's memory, and a few generations previously there were both plagues and even a mass migration of the entire Hobbit population to Hobbitton due to attacks by Orc bands.

We have some evidence that Rosie is an outlier - Bilbo's parents had one kid, Frodo's parents had one kid (though that was limited). According to a glance at the http://lotrproject.com it seems the known hobbit families are large, but it is possible that they're mainly the "gentry" and the amount of single/small families was larger (however, Sam is "lower class" apparently and is the 5th of 6).

Er, in Germany, 100k is the population where a city is allowed to call itself "Großstadt" - so big city, not small town.

In medieval times, people had lots of children, but most of them died very young. Of course this doesn't fit into Tolkien's idyllic description of the Shire, so it's not mentioned, but I guess families with 13 children who all survived to adulthood were the lucky exception...

Well also Rotherham in the UK is a town with over 100k people, though not US-style "small town", it's certainly not a city, and not even a particularly huge town (there are many 100k+ towns that aren't cities: the largest is Reading with nearly 1/4 million)

But that might be just a UK naming thing since "city" means something special (and isn't actually especially related to size: the smallest one is 1600 people).

But yes, perhaps it's not really a "small" town but just a town.

Two things to consider here:

a) Historical populations were much smaller than current population, so 'big' scales similarly. The world population around 1700 was about 10% of current population.

b) And maybe the bigger effect, we've had MASSIVE urbanization in the last 100-150 years. In 1500, Europe had urbanization rates well below 10% [https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Demograph...], compared with 72% in 2015.

So not only were there 90% fewer people, but most of them didn't live in cities. Paris, the largest city in Europe, had a population of around 150k-250k in 1500, depending where you look. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Middle_Ages#Popul...]

The Shire suffered terribly during the Great Plague and the Long Winter and also was invaded by Orcs at least once. The appendices say there was major loss of life. There was another very bad winter in Bilbo’s youth that was compounded by an invasion of “White Wolves.”

Well they were all over Eriador. There were plagues and other such disasters.

Indeed, though the Great Plague was over 1000 years ago, there was a famine more recently.

Maybe Hobbits really just are that resilient and cheerful that they just carry on despite massive depopulation events that would make the Black Death look fairly tame.

As a real world example consider the North of England. William the Bastard's genocidal "Harrying of the North" in 1069/70 either murdered or drove out over 75% of the population and left large areas severely depopulated for centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North