My immediate thought is that the technium of Middle Earth did not develop like ours due to rhe ubiquity of magic.
Indeed, it is in these books that the last lights of magic are fading, and the world is being given over to other powers.
Imagine if there were like an additional physics sitting on top of ours, and its use was isolated to a few hereditary practitioners, and let us see if the mundanes can scraps together enough gumption for gunpowder. Who knows if it even works in those circumstances?
Its been a long time since i read the books so im not sure if this is present in the books, but there is gunpowder in the movies because the orcs use a bomb at one point.
The books are ambiguous. There's an explosion caused by a device made by Saruman, but it isn't described and there's no indication AFAIK if it's supposed to be simple black powder or something magical.
In the earliest iterations Tolkien imagined Middle-Earth to have steam punk technology. I believe it is because steam ships and rolling tanks are much closer to what Tolkien expierenced in the First World War when he first conceived his world.
I suspect over the course of his life Tolkien became more and more frustrated with technology, and removed most overt traces of it to bring his stories closer to what he read in Medieval folk lore.
The most common forms of magic in LotR is probably superior Elven knowledge of Arda. Their lifespan means that they can explore many topics to a far greater depth than a human could ever hope. Topics where it can take decades to comprehend the state of the art, and where humans have no choice but to specialize and fragment the subject into sub-disciplines.
"True magic" seems to stem from intimate knowledge of the more arcane and foundational aspects of Arda. The Ainur wield it instinctively, and only the most ancient Elves seem to be able to learn it. But also they struggle to use it on scale, which was one of the reasons the Rings of Power were forged. In the Third Age, advanced magic seems to only be used via the Rings of Power, and dissipates for good after the destruction of the One Ring.
Some of that plays into questions about why the Roman Empire didn't advance more technologically than it did. One of the explanations I've read is that, given ubiquitous slave labor, there was no need for labor saving devices which has been one of the drivers of industrialization.
> First, Middle Earth actually has coal! Something I was kinda surprised to discover. As mentioned in the quote introing this section, the Dwarves are explicitly described as mining coal in The Hobbit.
"Reassured, the boggies donned their greaves, corslets, gauntlets, and shoulder padding and slathered themselves with Bactine. Each was armed with a double-edged putty knife, its blade both keen and true. Goodgulf wore an old deep-sea diver’s suit of stoutest latex. Only the well-trimmed beard was recognizable through the helmet’s little round window. In his hand he carried an ancient and trusty weapon, called by the elves a Browning semiautomatic." - Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings
There are several sentient species simultaneously, and the resulting xenophobic/genocidal struggle takes huge toll - in particular the populations of those various species are small (in my view Tolkien is a bit unrealistic in the sense that in his world the most powerful species hadn't totally put others out of existence like for example Cro-Magnon did to Neanderthals). Industrial revolution is about scale (the machines make economic sense only in mass production) and small population can't have it.
> (in my view Tolkien is a bit unrealistic in the sense that in his world the most powerful species hadn't totally put others out of existence like for example Cro-Magnon did to Neanderthals)
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is 200,000 years old. Hominids are 5,000,000 years old at least. For most of the history of Cro-Magnons there were multiple hominid species. All non sub Saharan Africans are two percent or more Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture goes as high as 10% if I recall correctly.
For the overwhelming majority of human history there have been multiple species.
And, maybe that is why we only got civilization shortly after the last Neanderthal and Denisovan passed on. That doesn't explain why Australia didn't get it, first, though.
I do not understand how you think multiple human species could impede civilization formation. Can you explain? Also, Australia only left the Stone Age with British colonization. It was plausibly the least technologically advanced inhabited area on Earth at contact.
I only observe the coincidence: while we had Neanderthal about, no moves toward civilization. Any reason would be speculation; maybe they and the Denisovans knew better? If so, they may get the last laugh, as it crashes down around us.
Australia (Sahul, really) was a place with (apparently) no Neanderthal or Denisovans. Whatever would develop only in their absence should have happened there first. Or maybe in Sundaland and points north, before rising seas claimed all of that.
But civilization was well along for millennia before any appreciable "technological advancement", excepting maybe pottery, and things that decay and leave no trace. (Which is most things.)
> Australia (Sahul, really) was a place with (apparently) no Neanderthal or Denisovans.
Things have changed.
> Denisova admixture and the first modern human dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania
> It has recently been shown that ancestors of New Guineans and Bougainville Islanders have inherited a proportion of their ancestry from Denisovans, an archaic hominin group from Siberia. However, only a sparse sampling of populations from Southeast Asia and Oceania were analyzed. Here, we quantify Denisova admixture in 33 additional populations from Asia and Oceania. Aboriginal Australians, Near Oceanians, Polynesians, Fijians, east Indonesians, and Mamanwa (a "Negrito" group from the Philippines) have all inherited genetic material from Denisovans, but mainland East Asians, western Indonesians, Jehai (a Negrito group from Malaysia), and Onge (a Negrito group from the Andaman Islands) have not. These results indicate that Denisova gene flow occurred into the common ancestors of New Guineans, Australians, and Mamanwa but not into the ancestors of the Jehai and Onge and suggest that relatives of present-day East Asians were not in Southeast Asia when the Denisova gene flow occurred. Our finding that descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not all harbor Denisova admixture is inconsistent with a history in which the Denisova interbreeding occurred in mainland Asia and then spread over Southeast Asia, leading to all its earliest modern human inhabitants. Instead, the data can be most parsimoniously explained if the Denisova gene flow occurred in Southeast Asia itself. Thus, archaic Denisovans must have lived over an extraordinarily broad geographic and ecological range, from Siberia to tropical Asia.
The final sentence suggests there really were Denisovans running around in southeast Asia, way back when. But did they get as far as New Guinea / Australia?
It's a bit hard to imagine a mechanism by which presence of Neanderthals and Denisovans could have so effectively stalled development of the trappings of civilization. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. We like to think of ourselves as totally badass, but they could have been moreso. Maybe it was unsafe to settle down and build a village where they might swoop in and burn you out. And, our own ancestors could have been doing the same to them. It happened that "we" won.
Another problem is that Neanderthals and Denisovans are not known to have been in Africa. But there could have been any number of other, unknown badass H. species in Africa, besides. Or, maybe, why develop civilization "when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world"? [0]
The reason that Tolkien didn’t write an industrial revolution into the history of middle earth is that he hated industry. Hated how it destroyed bucolic village life.
Having this take on LoTR is pointless. Just an annoying waste of time.
Tolkien lived in a city in Oxford which was neither bucolic nor a village. It sounds more like you hate industry and wish to return to bucolic village life.
I have no idea if Tolkein loved or hated industry, but simply living in a city doesn't suddenly make you an industrialist as much as living in a village doesn't make you a farmer.
If anything, living in the city gives you an excellent perspective on the effects of industrialization, form ones own opinions from there.
Oxford is known for having some quite stunning villages surrounding it. I went back in the weekend for a reunion, the city itself is still quite pretty with plenty of river paths.
I’m definitely being too negative about something that is silly.
Im just tired of this kind of analysis. It’s common in ASOIAF space. there it is often done completely seriously. I spent a lot of time in that space, so I think I’m just overly sensitive.
The point of the article is to talk about the industrial revolution. It is no great feat of intelligence to figure out the reason something is not in a book is because the author didn't want it there. I personally thought these thoughts were a bit scattered but ultimately somewhat interesting. And the thought of Gandalf waving a .44 around is funny.
I think the point wasn't to interpret the books. The author hasn't read them, which is an obvious giveaway. As an excuse to write thousands of words about the starting conditions of the industrial revolution, it doesn't seem like a waste of time.
Yet, he had bellows forges. Curiously selective. And explosives, for his fireworks.
I think it was Saruman who did the industrial bit, and used wood for the fuel. (No dwarven miners to hand, I guess? But orcs like it underground.) But inventing guns all by himself seems like a tall order, even given several centuries' plotting.
That’s a favorite of mine. If you read it in English, remember it is a translated from Russian. There is a lot of awkward phrasing to a native English speaker which is probably idiomatic Russian that might have been better torn apart and rendered as native English.
Once you can forgive that, it’s a nicely paced story with all your friends from LOTR showing up.
The industrial revolution is in the book, it's the actual antagonist of the story. Tolkien was a devout Catholic distributist and Hobbingen was his ideal Catholic community of self reliant Hobbits who answer to wizards and kings, not to factory floor managers and administrators.
Right, the industrialists are literally right there in the form of Saruman and the Orcs of Isengard:
"Together, my lord Sauron, we shall rule this Middle-earth. The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the orc."
The orcs could be looked at as an allegory of the faceless, dehumanized, industrialized proletariat, people who had sold their soul to the machine. They can be seen crafting huge weapons of war, siege engines and such, in giant factories fueled by those coal deposits.
The reason the industrial revolution never happened in Middle Earth is because the Fellowship of the Ring prevented it.
If only Tolkien wrote another story where the industrial revolution in Middle Earth (as you describe it) occurs, along with a fellowship that brings it down and returns Middle Earth to it's former glory.
> (Harry Potter is an obvious exception where it's the other way around.)
It is? Harry spent a lot of time contending with bureaucracy, whether in the form of overbearing schoolteachers or a corrupt Ministry of Magic. One of the series’ major villains, Dolores Umbridge, is sort of a personification of bureaucracy.
As has been explained in more detail by more capable media critics than me, Harry Potter's overall narrative arc is about restoring bureaucracy, not overthrowing it. The problem are never the systems but individuals abusing them because they're evil (with little motivation given).
If anything, framing it as "the bureaucracy overthrowing the hero" (or the hero making peace with the system, for a less dramatic interpretation) is only wrong because this implies the hero was ever at odds with the system to begin with. The system is never questioned (except by Hermione, who is portrayed as annoying an naive when she does it), only individual bad actors are identified defeated.
The ending of Harry Potter does not have wizards living openly alongside muggles, house elves liberated, mutual respect and trust between wizards and goblins, or the abolition of the Ministry. Instead it shows the next generation of students getting to experience the same exciting start in their train ride to Hogwarts with the implication that this time, things will be different because the evil people are REALLY gone this time.
Harry Potter is distinctly about protecting the "sanctity" of institutions, at the expense of individuality. Umbridge may be the personification of bureaucracy in our minds, but in JKR's, she's a threat to the image of British boarding schools being elite, character-building places for children. Note that, as a disciplinarian, she's functionally
equivalent to Snape. That was not Umbridge's "sin". Her sin was teaching to the test, removing the academic rigor of Hogwarts, presumably leaving it on par with lesser schools.
We might even look at her clothing and, in our minds, it looks very conservative. But in the wizard world, we never see anyone wearing such outlandishly colorful clothing. What looks like a makeup MLM saleswoman's outfit to us is a radical expression of individual style in the HP world.
In Harry Potter, individuality comes at a price. The more you express individualistic thought, living outside of the norms of society, the more impoverished you need to be to remain "good". Look at the Weasleys. Look at the Lovegoods. Those that attempt to be successful and individuals are default evil.
HP is so incredibly conservative, it's surprising everyone was surprised by JKR's politics.
Harry's single ambition through the books is becoming a member of the Wizarding police/SWAT team (Aurors), totally integrated into the system. The only things he had any personal problem with was occasionally who's in charge. In fact, he stays (almost) moot through the entire series of books on questions such as the fact of elves being literal slaves, where people who speak out (e.g. Hermione) are portrayed as shrill whiners.
On that one Harry takes a more individualistic approach: You can't save those who don't want to be saved. Most house elves are happy where they are and fear being freed, but Harry had no problem helping Dobby, who obviously wanted out.
It is also clear that the author hasn't actually read the lord of the rings.
It doesn't feature in the films but the scouring of the Shire happens after the defeat of Sauron, in which Saruman and Wormtongue take over the Shire and push the same industrialization they were pushing at Orthanc. They have a small battle, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is killed by Hobbits and then everything is right again for the last chapter.
I'd also say an industrial revolution of sorts is definitely a component of the story and unambiguously considered bad.
Will remain neutral on all other opinions, but to be clear, I use the substack as a home for my reddit shitposts, some random person put it on here and it blew up
Why are fantasy settings by and large medieval (and not evolving) probably has some interest (often the setting involves lost technology, "a great civilisation has disappeared". Tolkien does this too, with the silmarils, the fall of numenor). In fact per Tolkien law all the amazing elves are basically dying out and we're gonna be stuck with boring mortal men in the fourth age. So arguably all the good stuff has happened and we're on the road to ruin. Wonder if he read the daily mail?
A significant portion of authors might just be emulating Tolkien, I suppose. Also hard to have a secret elven forest base with high resolution satellite imagery, thermal imaging and precision guided weapons.
You don't need the books though, you can check online to see about the scouring of the shire and Saruman in general, which for the Tolkien case makes his views pretty clear.
If you really want to waste some time, consider that the eagles came and rescued Frodo/Bilbo from mount doom near the end. They could easily have flown them _into_ mordor in the first place, especially since at that time the Nazgul were not airborne, saving a very extensive tour of New Zealand (uh I mean middle earth) in the process. Would've needed far less elven bread and a smaller fellowship and got them more air miles. Gandalf could've also taken a spa holiday instead of an arduous hike, bungee jump with a balrog, death and resurrection, which I'm fairly sure weren't covered by his travel insurance and likely not recommended by his doctor.
Ultimately it is a story. In some senses alternative worlds allow you to compare "what ifs?" and this can be fun. However you have to be careful how much you read tvtropes...
The premise of the rather fascinating "Last Ringbearer" is that Mordor and the orcs were on the verge of a successful industrial revolution, only to be thwarted by the racist, imperialist alliance of the Fellowship.
This. Also, there are a few moments scattered throughout the book where the hobbits get to eavesdrop on conversations between Sauron's orcs and we gatch a few glimpses of Mordor's internal organisation.
The tone of those conversations always struck me as surprisingly "modern" compared to the "epic medieval" style of the rest of the book: Orcs apparently have ID numbers, they complain about arrogant bosses, at some point talk about one of the Nazgul's winged beasts like requesting a helicopter flight, talk about setting up on their own, etc.
The talk sounds more like that of a frustrated and cynical foot soldier in a modern millitary or an employee in a megacorp would sound than some medieval thug.
Sauron's and Saruman's architecture is also very clearly industrial - the book is much more explicit about that than the movie: Isengard is described as full of technology, while buildings in Mordor (and later in occupied Shire) are described as barracks and huts made out of bricks, connected by a regular network of roads. And then there is the "new mill" in the Shire...
YES! On a recent re-read the different tones Tolkien uses for different parts of the book were really apparent (I was readinbg it aloud to a child).
The two main modes are, of course, the pastoral Hobbit sections (not just in the shire, but right up to the end whenever we're following hobbits as our pov character you get to hear about day to day concerns of cooking and cleaning and homelife) and the high fantasy style of the Men esp anything with Aragorn and no hobbits (full names given at the drop of a hat and plentiful information about lineages and ancient battles).
But along side this we also get the oral/ lyric tradition exemplified by the Bombadil sideline, the rambling medieval scholar (gandalf reading the half descroyed chronicle in Moria) and yes, the grumblings of modern industrial bureacracy of the orcs and later the hobbits in Sharkey's thrall.
Not that it matters but I would argue that this sort of organization is strictly required to operate at the scale of armies in question.
The wars in the previous ages are described as being a bit more “equal” suggesting there were equally large hosts of humans/elves though, but maybe they’re able to organize “because magic” (e.g. elves may benefit from lembas bread allowing them to not have to worry about supply lines like the orcs).
Considering how worried the orcs were about informants reporting them for sedition, it sounds less like a modern military and more like one of the militaries where commissars shoot anybody who retreats. Add on to that the fact that Mordor's population is almost entirely enslaved, and it sounds rather like Stalin's USSR but with more competently-run agriculture.
No objection here. I meant "modern" more in the general sense that it sounded closer to present day than to the middle ages - but that doesn't have to mean we're talking about present-day (2020s) military.
It is so disheartening that I had to scroll halfway down the page to find the actual correct answer here. I don't understand how this couldn't be immediately obvious to anyone who has actually read the books.
Ironically, if Tolkien were still around I'm 100% sure he'd see the Jackson/Amazonification of LOTR as another real-world manifestation of the same forces that turned Orthanc into a huge weapons factory and nearly succeeded in turning the Shire into one big polluted light industrial zone: take something beautiful and unique, strap it down on a steel table and suck every ounce of value out of it, then toss its gasping dying husk into the dumpster on your way out to go party on your megayacht.
Very, very telling that The Scouring of the Shire was left out of the movies.
I was about to write the same thing. When I saw the title, my first thought was "because Tolkein would have had that happen over his dead body, and that's kind of the whole point." I thought this was common knowledge, especially among nerds.
Personally, I read the books when I was 12 (slightly before the Peter Jackson Fellowship came out), and I was hooked the whole way through. I literally had sleepless nights from just reading on through the morning.
But then the author goes on to quote LOTR quite extensively and brings up all sorts of economy tidbits ("the dwarves don't farm"), so they obviously have read LOTR.
The title aside, this essay is about why Middle Earth didn't have an industrial revolution. Unfortunately, it uses a model with a limiting assumption which it ignores, the assumption being that a certain population level is also required.
High-labour-cost, low-coal-cost is fine and might fit our world. However, to get people to spend years in R&D you need specialization and scale. Without the first you don't have R&D people. Without the second there's no profit or even much advantage to the new tech. To get both of these you, well, need people. A good number of people to support specialists which aren't part of the Nobility (or at least Nobles which are engaged in activities which weren't historically considered very Noble-like in nearly every society in our world), and a good number of people so that scale can generate a profit.
Industrial revolution can't happen by itself in ultra-sparse societies as in the LOTR era. The author cites estimates which are an order of magnitude lower than 17th century England, and I'd go one order of magnitude lower still*.
Now if he asked the question about Númenor that's a different matter... (Yes, it was destroyed, but there were populous colonies in Middle Earth which should have kept any tech?)
* Judging by the level of hostility involved and very high internal coherence of the protagonist societies I suspect a more total mobilization than your typical feudal society where losing simply meant the peasants served a different lord.
The world described in LoTR is not physically like ours. For instance, the orcs aren't described as bad guys because of their upbringing, culture, or subjective perception by the other races. Orcs are intrinsically evil. All the bad creatures of middle earth are described as if they radiate a natural and unalienable evil aura from their being.
There are two explanations for this: (1) this is an accurate explanation of a phenomenon or (2) it's an unreliable narrator projecting propaganda.
Orcs are also often associated with industrial activity. If (1) is true, then there might be a real connection between industry and evil. E.g. the downfall of the dwarves is related to their industrial greed. If (2) is true, there might be a stigma against industry due to its association with orcs.
Orcs and other beings in LotR are evil because Morgoth infused the world with his essence and his ill will. At the end of the First Age, he was a shadow of his former self and was easily defeated by the other Valar. But since he basically turned Arda into his Ring, truly eliminating him would probably meant remaking Arda from scratch. Therefore, he was just cast out into the Void, and the Valar retreated to the few parts that were still intact. Of course, that's the official mythology, and the truth might be rather different.
There is no inherent stigma against industry in itself in LotR. Many peoples (Noldor, Numenoreans, Dwarfes) engaged in industry, but it tends to further greed and hunger for power, which makes individuals and whole societies easier to manipulate and play off against each other.
Back in my final year of high school I procrastinated my exams by reading Lord of the Rings. I felt like if I didn't get a good grade my life would be over but all of a sudden J.R. Tolkien's deep lore and meandering narrative were absolutely captivating.
My own pet theory is that in worlds with magic users, magic gets used to solve the problems which technological advancements would otherwise be developed for.
Of course, we get some fantasy lands like this, where magic itself was the major discovery behind the industrial revolution (see: League of Legends' animation, "Arcane", "Wheel of Time" novels).
Then you have something like "Flight of Dragons" where science can be applied to how some of the magical elements work, but still are fundamentally incompatible. Almost like "Schrodinger's wizard", once you start analyzing the magic, it starts fading.
Gandalf owned a rifle, that's why. If a magic wand is a concentrator of will that's roughly equivalent to a pistol, then a staff with a stone in it is a full size rifle.
It's been a while since I last read The Silmarillion, so some details might be wrong.
The reason why Middle-earth did not have an industrial revolution is supernatural. When the Ainur sang the songs of creation, there was discord. Melkor, the mightiest of them, wanted to create something of his own, which was the root of all evil. The world they created was flawed. Within the world, the minds of those who seek to create were easily corrupted.
Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys. Think of dwarves or the Noldor in general. Or think about Fëanor who created the Silmarils or Celebrimbor who created the Rings of Power. Sauron and Saruman were both servants of Aulë the Smith, and look what they became.
There was industry in Mordor and in Isengard. Dwarves also had it, and the Noldor probably as well. Even hobbits managed to create some by the end of the LotR. But that industry never led to sustained prosperity. In the end, there was always war and destruction, because the world was flawed from the beginning.
Presumably also the Numenoreans had it. The description of latter-day Numenor reads like they were technologically very advanced. The question is how far, but it seems fair to assume there was a sharp drop after the Fall because of the colonies not being self-sufficient enough to maintain their tech level. If we consider the stories in the Silmarillon to be handed down orally, the most advanced technologies could have simply been left out or summarized as "magic". No point detailing them if there's nothing in the daily lives of your audience that is comparable.
Numenor always sounded like a reference to the United States; virgin land blessed with immense resources, ideal conditions for a centralized power to grow wealthy materially and dominate the rest of middle earth.
I doubt if they had “industry”; they probably had “advanced feudalism” with large capacity for shipbuilding and manufacturing arms. But that was because of the large continent and population. In a sense, its more similar to the Roman Empire.
If you want to see a movie featuring both wizards and industrial technology, check out Wizards (1977) by Ralph Bakshi. Keep an open mind though, Bakshi's movies are a trip.
Ok, I stopped reading about 1/2 way though, because middle earth didn't need an industrial revolution because they were all hippie communities living close to nature and they didn't need one be because they had magic distracting them and solving their most pressing problems.
Need a clean house, just study to make a magic broom, or buy one in the magic shop. Need to get somewhere fast, take an eagle, etc. Why waste your time inventing gunpowder when you can learn some magic and shoot fireballs from your staff.
Most of the characters did not have magic. Gandalf had magic, but he was also basically an angel sent from heaven to guide middle earth. Its not like he was a normal inhabitant
It was around this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the times in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its God-given place. In Reflections on the Psalms (1958), for example, Lewis had described it as learning ‘(which God forbid) to ... distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption’. Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines were at best a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. ‘I’m sure you are very wicked people,’ said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, ‘but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’
Instruments transform possibilities insofar as they required a transformation of possibilities and a transformation of the mind to come about. And the profit with which they do so determines their worth.
Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Tolkien: "Yes! Because it IS! magic."
Clarke looking baffled at the response and trying to explain it to himself on the latest round of ale ("welp, it's still the 1st round, it's going to be a long night").
The problem with scientific framework is that it takes man out of the equation and than tries to say that this is all there is (science is not good nor bad, just is, right?). Yet for all the progress we were given in the last three centuries a lot of bad came out of it too. Yet we can't blame it on the science because we can't have the holistic worldview from scientific standpoint.
What I wondered looking at that chart of GDP over time.. is what is the point of using a measure made to measure the economies of the modern world, to measure completely different economies of the past.. of course its going to look flat and then take off.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadI suspect over the course of his life Tolkien became more and more frustrated with technology, and removed most overt traces of it to bring his stories closer to what he read in Medieval folk lore.
There's also the hint, at least from the movies, that Sauron and Sarumon could produce an unlimited supply slave labor.
"True magic" seems to stem from intimate knowledge of the more arcane and foundational aspects of Arda. The Ainur wield it instinctively, and only the most ancient Elves seem to be able to learn it. But also they struggle to use it on scale, which was one of the reasons the Rings of Power were forged. In the Third Age, advanced magic seems to only be used via the Rings of Power, and dissipates for good after the destruction of the One Ring.
> First, Middle Earth actually has coal! Something I was kinda surprised to discover. As mentioned in the quote introing this section, the Dwarves are explicitly described as mining coal in The Hobbit.
"Reassured, the boggies donned their greaves, corslets, gauntlets, and shoulder padding and slathered themselves with Bactine. Each was armed with a double-edged putty knife, its blade both keen and true. Goodgulf wore an old deep-sea diver’s suit of stoutest latex. Only the well-trimmed beard was recognizable through the helmet’s little round window. In his hand he carried an ancient and trusty weapon, called by the elves a Browning semiautomatic." - Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is 200,000 years old. Hominids are 5,000,000 years old at least. For most of the history of Cro-Magnons there were multiple hominid species. All non sub Saharan Africans are two percent or more Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture goes as high as 10% if I recall correctly.
For the overwhelming majority of human history there have been multiple species.
Australia (Sahul, really) was a place with (apparently) no Neanderthal or Denisovans. Whatever would develop only in their absence should have happened there first. Or maybe in Sundaland and points north, before rising seas claimed all of that.
But civilization was well along for millennia before any appreciable "technological advancement", excepting maybe pottery, and things that decay and leave no trace. (Which is most things.)
Things have changed.
> Denisova admixture and the first modern human dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania
> It has recently been shown that ancestors of New Guineans and Bougainville Islanders have inherited a proportion of their ancestry from Denisovans, an archaic hominin group from Siberia. However, only a sparse sampling of populations from Southeast Asia and Oceania were analyzed. Here, we quantify Denisova admixture in 33 additional populations from Asia and Oceania. Aboriginal Australians, Near Oceanians, Polynesians, Fijians, east Indonesians, and Mamanwa (a "Negrito" group from the Philippines) have all inherited genetic material from Denisovans, but mainland East Asians, western Indonesians, Jehai (a Negrito group from Malaysia), and Onge (a Negrito group from the Andaman Islands) have not. These results indicate that Denisova gene flow occurred into the common ancestors of New Guineans, Australians, and Mamanwa but not into the ancestors of the Jehai and Onge and suggest that relatives of present-day East Asians were not in Southeast Asia when the Denisova gene flow occurred. Our finding that descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Southeast Asia do not all harbor Denisova admixture is inconsistent with a history in which the Denisova interbreeding occurred in mainland Asia and then spread over Southeast Asia, leading to all its earliest modern human inhabitants. Instead, the data can be most parsimoniously explained if the Denisova gene flow occurred in Southeast Asia itself. Thus, archaic Denisovans must have lived over an extraordinarily broad geographic and ecological range, from Siberia to tropical Asia.
https://europepmc.org/article/MED/21944045
It's a bit hard to imagine a mechanism by which presence of Neanderthals and Denisovans could have so effectively stalled development of the trappings of civilization. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. We like to think of ourselves as totally badass, but they could have been moreso. Maybe it was unsafe to settle down and build a village where they might swoop in and burn you out. And, our own ancestors could have been doing the same to them. It happened that "we" won.
Another problem is that Neanderthals and Denisovans are not known to have been in Africa. But there could have been any number of other, unknown badass H. species in Africa, besides. Or, maybe, why develop civilization "when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world"? [0]
[0] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...
Having this take on LoTR is pointless. Just an annoying waste of time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord...
If anything, living in the city gives you an excellent perspective on the effects of industrialization, form ones own opinions from there.
Im just tired of this kind of analysis. It’s common in ASOIAF space. there it is often done completely seriously. I spent a lot of time in that space, so I think I’m just overly sensitive.
I think it was Saruman who did the industrial bit, and used wood for the fuel. (No dwarven miners to hand, I guess? But orcs like it underground.) But inventing guns all by himself seems like a tall order, even given several centuries' plotting.
bucolic
relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life. "the church is lovely for its bucolic setting"
He wrote it, with focus on negative effect - note ending of the book.
Curiously Shire has numerous products that require industrial base, without industrial revolution being present.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
Once you can forgive that, it’s a nicely paced story with all your friends from LOTR showing up.
"Together, my lord Sauron, we shall rule this Middle-earth. The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the orc."
The orcs could be looked at as an allegory of the faceless, dehumanized, industrialized proletariat, people who had sold their soul to the machine. They can be seen crafting huge weapons of war, siege engines and such, in giant factories fueled by those coal deposits.
The reason the industrial revolution never happened in Middle Earth is because the Fellowship of the Ring prevented it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_M...
(Harry Potter is an obvious exception where it's the other way around.)
It is? Harry spent a lot of time contending with bureaucracy, whether in the form of overbearing schoolteachers or a corrupt Ministry of Magic. One of the series’ major villains, Dolores Umbridge, is sort of a personification of bureaucracy.
If anything, framing it as "the bureaucracy overthrowing the hero" (or the hero making peace with the system, for a less dramatic interpretation) is only wrong because this implies the hero was ever at odds with the system to begin with. The system is never questioned (except by Hermione, who is portrayed as annoying an naive when she does it), only individual bad actors are identified defeated.
The ending of Harry Potter does not have wizards living openly alongside muggles, house elves liberated, mutual respect and trust between wizards and goblins, or the abolition of the Ministry. Instead it shows the next generation of students getting to experience the same exciting start in their train ride to Hogwarts with the implication that this time, things will be different because the evil people are REALLY gone this time.
We might even look at her clothing and, in our minds, it looks very conservative. But in the wizard world, we never see anyone wearing such outlandishly colorful clothing. What looks like a makeup MLM saleswoman's outfit to us is a radical expression of individual style in the HP world.
In Harry Potter, individuality comes at a price. The more you express individualistic thought, living outside of the norms of society, the more impoverished you need to be to remain "good". Look at the Weasleys. Look at the Lovegoods. Those that attempt to be successful and individuals are default evil.
HP is so incredibly conservative, it's surprising everyone was surprised by JKR's politics.
It doesn't feature in the films but the scouring of the Shire happens after the defeat of Sauron, in which Saruman and Wormtongue take over the Shire and push the same industrialization they were pushing at Orthanc. They have a small battle, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is killed by Hobbits and then everything is right again for the last chapter.
I'd also say an industrial revolution of sorts is definitely a component of the story and unambiguously considered bad.
He even says so in one of the early paragraphs. Also this substank "Launched 15 days ago". Feels like clickbait self-promotion.
I'm not sure why anyone's wasting time with this nonsense question while not-high.
A significant portion of authors might just be emulating Tolkien, I suppose. Also hard to have a secret elven forest base with high resolution satellite imagery, thermal imaging and precision guided weapons.
You don't need the books though, you can check online to see about the scouring of the shire and Saruman in general, which for the Tolkien case makes his views pretty clear.
If you really want to waste some time, consider that the eagles came and rescued Frodo/Bilbo from mount doom near the end. They could easily have flown them _into_ mordor in the first place, especially since at that time the Nazgul were not airborne, saving a very extensive tour of New Zealand (uh I mean middle earth) in the process. Would've needed far less elven bread and a smaller fellowship and got them more air miles. Gandalf could've also taken a spa holiday instead of an arduous hike, bungee jump with a balrog, death and resurrection, which I'm fairly sure weren't covered by his travel insurance and likely not recommended by his doctor.
Ultimately it is a story. In some senses alternative worlds allow you to compare "what ifs?" and this can be fun. However you have to be careful how much you read tvtropes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
The tone of those conversations always struck me as surprisingly "modern" compared to the "epic medieval" style of the rest of the book: Orcs apparently have ID numbers, they complain about arrogant bosses, at some point talk about one of the Nazgul's winged beasts like requesting a helicopter flight, talk about setting up on their own, etc.
The talk sounds more like that of a frustrated and cynical foot soldier in a modern millitary or an employee in a megacorp would sound than some medieval thug.
Sauron's and Saruman's architecture is also very clearly industrial - the book is much more explicit about that than the movie: Isengard is described as full of technology, while buildings in Mordor (and later in occupied Shire) are described as barracks and huts made out of bricks, connected by a regular network of roads. And then there is the "new mill" in the Shire...
The two main modes are, of course, the pastoral Hobbit sections (not just in the shire, but right up to the end whenever we're following hobbits as our pov character you get to hear about day to day concerns of cooking and cleaning and homelife) and the high fantasy style of the Men esp anything with Aragorn and no hobbits (full names given at the drop of a hat and plentiful information about lineages and ancient battles).
But along side this we also get the oral/ lyric tradition exemplified by the Bombadil sideline, the rambling medieval scholar (gandalf reading the half descroyed chronicle in Moria) and yes, the grumblings of modern industrial bureacracy of the orcs and later the hobbits in Sharkey's thrall.
The wars in the previous ages are described as being a bit more “equal” suggesting there were equally large hosts of humans/elves though, but maybe they’re able to organize “because magic” (e.g. elves may benefit from lembas bread allowing them to not have to worry about supply lines like the orcs).
Curiously Shire has numerous products that require industrial base, without industrial revolution being present.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_o...
Ironically, if Tolkien were still around I'm 100% sure he'd see the Jackson/Amazonification of LOTR as another real-world manifestation of the same forces that turned Orthanc into a huge weapons factory and nearly succeeded in turning the Shire into one big polluted light industrial zone: take something beautiful and unique, strap it down on a steel table and suck every ounce of value out of it, then toss its gasping dying husk into the dumpster on your way out to go party on your megayacht.
Very, very telling that The Scouring of the Shire was left out of the movies.
They don't 'answer' to either wizards or kings.
> Confession time. I have never read Lord of the Rings. I’ve tried. It’s boring as hell.
When your whole article is based on something you have zero knowledge about... Sorry, I'm just not going to spend the time.
High-labour-cost, low-coal-cost is fine and might fit our world. However, to get people to spend years in R&D you need specialization and scale. Without the first you don't have R&D people. Without the second there's no profit or even much advantage to the new tech. To get both of these you, well, need people. A good number of people to support specialists which aren't part of the Nobility (or at least Nobles which are engaged in activities which weren't historically considered very Noble-like in nearly every society in our world), and a good number of people so that scale can generate a profit.
Industrial revolution can't happen by itself in ultra-sparse societies as in the LOTR era. The author cites estimates which are an order of magnitude lower than 17th century England, and I'd go one order of magnitude lower still*.
Now if he asked the question about Númenor that's a different matter... (Yes, it was destroyed, but there were populous colonies in Middle Earth which should have kept any tech?)
* Judging by the level of hostility involved and very high internal coherence of the protagonist societies I suspect a more total mobilization than your typical feudal society where losing simply meant the peasants served a different lord.
There are two explanations for this: (1) this is an accurate explanation of a phenomenon or (2) it's an unreliable narrator projecting propaganda.
Orcs are also often associated with industrial activity. If (1) is true, then there might be a real connection between industry and evil. E.g. the downfall of the dwarves is related to their industrial greed. If (2) is true, there might be a stigma against industry due to its association with orcs.
There is a fan-fiction that expands in the vein of (2), although I haven't read it yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
There is no inherent stigma against industry in itself in LotR. Many peoples (Noldor, Numenoreans, Dwarfes) engaged in industry, but it tends to further greed and hunger for power, which makes individuals and whole societies easier to manipulate and play off against each other.
My own pet theory is that in worlds with magic users, magic gets used to solve the problems which technological advancements would otherwise be developed for.
Of course, we get some fantasy lands like this, where magic itself was the major discovery behind the industrial revolution (see: League of Legends' animation, "Arcane", "Wheel of Time" novels).
Then you have something like "Flight of Dragons" where science can be applied to how some of the magical elements work, but still are fundamentally incompatible. Almost like "Schrodinger's wizard", once you start analyzing the magic, it starts fading.
There's a lot of different takes on it.
The reason why Middle-earth did not have an industrial revolution is supernatural. When the Ainur sang the songs of creation, there was discord. Melkor, the mightiest of them, wanted to create something of his own, which was the root of all evil. The world they created was flawed. Within the world, the minds of those who seek to create were easily corrupted.
Middle-earth is a world where the creations of engineers often make the world worse and the engineers themselves tend to become bad guys. Think of dwarves or the Noldor in general. Or think about Fëanor who created the Silmarils or Celebrimbor who created the Rings of Power. Sauron and Saruman were both servants of Aulë the Smith, and look what they became.
There was industry in Mordor and in Isengard. Dwarves also had it, and the Noldor probably as well. Even hobbits managed to create some by the end of the LotR. But that industry never led to sustained prosperity. In the end, there was always war and destruction, because the world was flawed from the beginning.
This could be called a lesser song, compared to Ainur's. Just a distraction really.
And in this state of distraction he acts.
Of course he's the bad guy.
Ah, so it’s the Bay Area.
I doubt if they had “industry”; they probably had “advanced feudalism” with large capacity for shipbuilding and manufacturing arms. But that was because of the large continent and population. In a sense, its more similar to the Roman Empire.
Need a clean house, just study to make a magic broom, or buy one in the magic shop. Need to get somewhere fast, take an eagle, etc. Why waste your time inventing gunpowder when you can learn some magic and shoot fireballs from your staff.
(ok tongue in cheek)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
It was around this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the times in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its God-given place. In Reflections on the Psalms (1958), for example, Lewis had described it as learning ‘(which God forbid) to ... distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption’. Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines were at best a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. ‘I’m sure you are very wicked people,’ said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, ‘but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’
I.e., drunk (British English), not angry (American English)!
Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Tolkien: "Yes! Because it IS! magic."
Clarke looking baffled at the response and trying to explain it to himself on the latest round of ale ("welp, it's still the 1st round, it's going to be a long night").
The problem with scientific framework is that it takes man out of the equation and than tries to say that this is all there is (science is not good nor bad, just is, right?). Yet for all the progress we were given in the last three centuries a lot of bad came out of it too. Yet we can't blame it on the science because we can't have the holistic worldview from scientific standpoint.