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A comment on Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?. Parent comment

Re:Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution? by mcv on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @08:42AM (#31906896)
> 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/

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Re:Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution? by gostsamo on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @08:58AM (#31907085)
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.
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Re:Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution? by bombcar on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @09:58AM (#31907739)
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.

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Re:Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution? by vintermann on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @12:09PM (#31909547)
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.
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