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 :-)