I doubt they could support themselves for any length of time by hunting alone without depleting the game in the immediate area of their settlements. OK, maybe elves can range over very large areas to hunt, but they wouldn’t have nearly as much time to sing and dance as they seem too.
This is completely wrong. There haven’t been any sedentary hunter-gatherer societies that have survived in the same place for even a few thousand years, let alone “hundreds of thousands.” (Modern humans have only been around for about 200,000 years in any case.)
Virtually the only sedentary hunter-gatherer societies we know about have exploited exceptionally rich marine resources, such as the Indians of the Pacific Northwest of North America. Nearly all other hunter-gatherers have at least seasonal movements to take advantage of resources in other parts of their territory, and to avoid overexploiting the game and food plants in one area. Many hunter gatherers are nomadic.
Please provide a cite for sedentary village-dwelling societies that did not practice significant agriculture (aside from those making use of rich marine resources or other special cases).
The Amazonian Indians, Africans, and other peoples that you may think of as “hunter-gatherers” are actually agriculturalists who remain in the same villages for decades. Now their agriculture may not be enormous in scale, but villages generally have nearby fields from which they harvest their crops. These are supplemented by some hunting and gathering wild foods, but most of the calories come from agriculture. We don’t see anything like this with respect to elves. The forest seems to be unbroken except in the immediate area of their settlements.
No, I’m working from my knowledge of traditional societies (having spent some time working with them in South and Central America and Africa). I think that you may not really be aware of how such societies actually feed themselves.
I don’t think you can reasonably compare elves to any historical Earth culture without a whole lotta hand-waivin’. They have at least one super-food in lembas of which one cake supplies several days’ worth of nutrition; we don’t have any cultivated crop or other food that energy-dense for comparison.
And elves also have crop fertilization far beyond even our current technology – one box of dirt from Galadriel’s garden causes the entire (devastated) Shire to super-produce for an entire year.
With that sort of tech, it is probably conceivable to have high-density population centers that aren’t supported by as extensive an infrastructure as we would expect from human history (or the present).
On a GOT board pre-TV series and specifically re the book back history I had mentioned this as a similar quibble with “Game of Thrones” chronology where you have a static “steel swords” medieval world that has existed for thousands and thousands of years without significant scientific or cultural advancement. It was especially odd in GOT in that you had this group of people called “Maesters” who are essentially defacto engineers and scientists with thousands of years of history doing those things. You kind of had to ask what the hell they were doing if it resulted in a completely static society.
One of the people on that board told me there was actually a specific name for this literary sci-fi "static medieval culture " trope but I forget it.
Basically, you’re just saying that they feed themselves by magic (AKA the “A wizard did it” explanation). Ok, but I wouldn’t regard that as holding up to “close scrutiny.”
I hate to imagine the sewerage system for Lorien. Probably no different from that of folks living in mountainous areas with little soil cover: culverts and ditches dumping the good stuff into the main rivers.
For all Tolkien’s denials that the elves use “magic”… they basically use magic. So, yeah. Since that, at least, makes the elves’ society internally consistent if nothing else, it’s kind of uninteresting to apply “strict scrutiny” to them. What basis of comparison is there?
The other cultures, though – dwarves, hobbits, goblins – those seem ripe for comparison to known cultures. And they definately crumble under strict scrutiny. (Particularly the ones that are known cultures with the names changed: like, the Shire.)
An underground pit house on flat ground is ok but excavating into the side of a hill? You’ll have a major collapse every month if you don’t do regular maintenance and re-timbering.
But what he’s saying is spelled out, no? They do have super food and super fertilizer. These things aren’t so fantastical for an ancient magical race to have developed - certainly not equivalent to “a wizard did it”.
I just got done reading The Hobbit, and the wargs are not all mounts for orcs and goblins. They make an alliance for warfare to go root around and raid for food and goodies. The wargs are actually intelligent wolves with a language of their own.
[pp185:
I will tell you what Gandalf heard, though Bilbo did not understand it. The Wargs and the goblins often helped one another in wicked deeds. Goblins do not usually venture very far from their mountains, unless they are driven out and are looking for new homes, or are marching to war (which I am glad to say has not happened for a long while). But in those days they sometimes used to go on raids, especially to get food or slaves to work for them. Then they often got the Wargs to help and shared the plunder with them. Sometimes they rode on wolves like men do on horses. Now it seemed that a great goblin-raid had been planned for that very night. The Wargs had come to meet the goblins and the goblins were late. The reason, no doubt, was the death of the Great Goblin, and all the excitement caused by the dwarves and Bilbo and the wizard, for whom they were probably still hunting. ]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Trebuchet MS]So there, goblins allied with the wargs that lived outside the caverns to hunt and raid, though wargs were not subservient to the goblins and orcs.
As to world reality?
You have 4 Dwarven regions, Moria, the original Dwarven city under the Lonely Mountain that was the focus of The Hobbit, Iron Mountain and Blue Mountain. Dwarves mainly mined for minerals and gems, in the Hobbit it mentioned that after they got kicked out of the Lonely Mountain they did everything from finesmithing, to blacksmithing to falling so low as to mine for coal. They originally traded for foods and anything they couldn’t get from mining for it.
You have The Shire and a sliver of area on the other side of the river towards Bree for the Hobbits in the later times, earlier they were more widespread. The hobbits did farm and raise small livestock like goats, sheep, chickens and such.
For Elves, there are more or less 3 areas left, Rivendel, Mirkwood and Lothlorien - in the time of LOTR they had been pulling back and leaving for the West. They are mentioned as hunting, gathering, trading for precious metals and gems, and one guesses stuff like fine fabrics - they get butter, wine and bacon from the humans near the Lonely Mountain as that is the side of Mirkwood they are on.
For Humans, there were several races of Human, Dunedain, Numenoreans and Dunlendings. By the time that LOTR came around, they had more or less started blending and even cross breeding with elves and orcs so Strider being pureblood was unusual. The human lands of Rohan and Gondor, and Dunland are all mainly horse nomads and farmers with a couple major cities [think Mongols and Rus], and the northerners near Forochel are much like our Sammi, fishers and ranching semi-nomads.
The shire more or less runs up into the human lands on the north, east and southern borders. Elves live more or less further eastwards along with most of the dwarves - only the Blue Mountain dwarves were off to the west. Really, the shire is stuck off to the west of almost everything. Travel time is compressed in the books - it took Beorn, Gandalf and Bilbo almost a year to get back from the Lonely Mountain, they did take a break of a couple months in Rivendel, and one of a couple months in the winter at Beorns home and I really didn’t try to tack how long it took them to go to the lonely Mountain, but they did get bogged down for something like a couple months in the Elven palace in Mirkwood, a couple weeks each with Elrond and Beorn and I think a couple weeks in Esgaroth.
So if you look at it in terms of our world, think of it as being Eastern, Northern, Western and Southern Europe of probably 100 AD [though not politically, just areas of population surrounded by wilderness that was dangerous to travel through unless in an armed party.]
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That, and the absurd “deus ex machina” ending with the atom bomb. Who the hell would believe a contrivance like that? The author obviously ran out of ideas.
For some fantasy settings, I can buy that there would be stagnation if society’s best and brightest become wizards rather than doctors and engineers and so forth, but as far as I know that’s not a factor in Middle Earth.
Doe anyone have reliable population figures?
For Elves at least, their are fading away. Are there 5,000 by the end of the Third age?
Bilbo’s mithril shirt was worth more than the Shire and everything in it - and it was less than 1/14th of the wealth of Eriador. Certainly post Hobbit Dwarves could buy food from Dale / Laketown. And when Moria was in its heyday they certainly could import roast meat off the bone. (In between it becomes more problematic)
We know Sauron had slaves farming Nurn
Gondor had the Pelennor Fields
Didn’t we just have a thread on orc food?
Someone in that thread found a quote from LOTR saying that Sauron’s armies were supplied with food by the Southerners who allied with him. There’s also many references to lands to the east that were under Sauron’s sway.
Er, I don’t know. Reading The Children of Hurin and the Silmarillion, I got the impression that the elves (and some of the Men, to some degree) advanced very rapidly, guided by the Valar. But when all the trouble with Melkor/Morgoth started, things went south very fast. Beleriand got sunk, and a lot of Elves died, so that set things back quite a bit. Then Men were given Numenor and the wisdom of the Valar, but screwed that up. Sauron rose to power, then fell but didn’t die. There was a period of peace (2500 years, give or take), but the Kingdom of Gondor was decimated, fractured, and eventually fell apart, and much was lost.
Basically, I’m not seeing that much stagnation, more periods of advancements followed by setbacks. I think you’re looking at real human history, imposing that on ME and saying they’re stagnant because they didn’t develop electricity and the internal combustion engine in 7,000 years. The human race was much older than that before we developed the technological advances of this past few centuries. So I could argue that humans were “stagnant” for longer than 7,000 years (well, there WAS the transition from hunter gathering to argriculture). Further, Sauramon’s experiments with machinery and weapons/armor production on a massive scale would surely lead to major breakthroughs for Gondor and Rohan and lead them at least to an industrial age.
Anyway, to address the OP: Tolkien painted ME as myths and legends written after the fact (I believe he actually explained some errors as mistakes on the part of the “historians”). He made it clear that there was a ton of stuff going on that was being glossed over to focus on the main story (for example the battles going on in the north between Sauron’s forces and the Elves and Dwarves are hinted at but the stories are not told). Anyway, the orcs (and most of the bad guys in general) are described as much smaller in the books than depicted in PJ’s movies, so they wouldn’t need that much food, and they’d presumably supplement their diet with humans, elves, and the occasional weak/sick orc. The population of ME, never huge to begin with, was (at the time of the War of the Ring) fairly small, having been decimated in wars and such. Again, Peter Jackson tried to give the impression of hugeness and massive amounts of people that (IMO) wasn’t entirely accurate. I don’t really see anything implausible in LOTR. There were farming communities that could support themselves (Bree, Rohan, Gondor), and those who relied at least somewhat on trading goods for food (Elves and Dwarves). I’m not seeing a problem with feeding everyone, at least not in Middle Earth…
However, if you start delving into the Silmarillion, things get a bit more tricky. I’m sure there were some Elves that farmed, and many more that hunted and fished. But Morgoth’s armies made Sauron’s look small and weak. What was he feeding them? His fortress was surrounded by mountains, and if he raided the Elves and humans food supplies enough to feed his armies, then the Elves and Humans would have starved. Yeah, there were evil men in Beleriand under Morgoth’s service, but they didn’t seem like that much of an agricultural society (more army fodder), and in any case I doubt they’d have been able to grow enough food to feed Morgoth’s massive armies. I actually fanwanked this while reading The Children of Hurin by thinking that Morgoth’s troops, being created from evil and twisted powers, didn’t NEED to eat. Sauron, not being as powerful, did not have the ability to sustain his armies, so they did need food.
Ok, in the context of the world of Middle Earth, where magic works, I can buy that the elves could rely on some kind of magic or enchantment to provide them with enough food. By their economy is definitely other-worldly.
Another example. What did Balin’s colony in Moria live on? They certainly weren’t trading with Lorien, and there were no settlements of men nearby. The colony was small and didn’t last for many years, but it’s still hard to imagine dwarves supporting themselves by hunting in the areas around the caverns. Maybe they grew mushrooms.
I was including Dale as part of the area around Lake-town/Esgaroth.
You don’t quite seem to have grasped the fact that elves are magic. While objections to the feasibility of Men or Hobbit economies can reasonably be based on appeals to the limitations of ordinary mortals, those of Elvish economies cannot.
:dubious: I didn’t say “in the same place”. My point is that sedentary hunter-gatherer societies are well-known throughout human history, so they seem like a perfectly reasonable model for an Elvish-enhanced version that would sustain a stable magical civilization.
That doesn’t mean that the forest doesn’t contain plenty of magically delicious and nourishing foodstuffs. The Elvish combination of delight in wild nature and ability to produce superfoods with superfertility means that they get a lot of calories out of what superficially looks like a wilderness, although an exceptionally beautiful and enchanting wilderness.
Finally! You get it!
You can’t use the same kind of “close scrutiny” to assess the feasibility of a society of immortal beings with magically enhanced relationship to and control over the natural world as you would apply to a society of ordinary human beings, or beings with the same limitations of ordinary humans.
The economies of non-magical mortals such as Men and Hobbits are sustained in Tolkien’s world by the type of large-scale agriculture you talk about, but there’s no reason that Elvish societies would have to be.
I really don’t understand why it’s taking you so long to comprehend this. Usually people who don’t have the imagination to envision how a society of beings with magic powers might work aren’t interested in reading Tolkien in the first place.
The social economy of Dwarves in Tolkien is definitely more questionable than that of Elves or Men and Hobbits. Perhaps in pioneer situations they do more agriculture than they can be bothered with when they live in more stable populous communities and can trade for food with non-Dwarves.
“Sedentary” means “living in the same place.” Sedentary hunter-gatherer societies are very rare in human history (being limited to very rich environments, as I said earler). Hunter-gatherers generally move seasonally or are nomadic, and don’t live in fixed settlements as elves do. The rise of fixed settlements with permanent structures mostly dates to the beginnings of agriculture.
As I said before, please provide a cite for a hunter-gatherer society that had fixed settlements, other than those in exceptionally rich environments.
Magic is certainly present in Tolkien’s world, but it has its limitations. Elves don’t fly about through the air, or dematerialize, or turn people to ashes with their gaze. Why shouldn’t they, if they are magical beings? It’s reasonable to examine just how far elvish magic extends. Tolkien’s world doesn’t require that elves should have to rely on magic to feed themselves. It just seems that magic is the only way to explain it, given the evidence we see.
I think you’re not paying enough attention. Everything that Tolkien says about elves’ interactions with the natural world, especially with growing things, reflects powers that mortals consider “magical”. Their foods are incredibly delicious and abundant and sustaining, and their garden earth is super-fertile. Why would anybody even start out from the assumption that feeding an Elvish community requires the same amount of ordinary agricultural land and labor that it would take to feed a pre-industrial human community?
The noticeable lack of ethnic diversity has always bothered me. Since the “default” coloration of mankind is some shade of brown (and it was even when Tolkien was writing) then the majority of the people in Middle Earth should be some shade of brown.Middle Earth demographics don’t reflect that fact (neither do Peter Jackson’s films).
I can “buy” the slow progression of technology. Gunpowder was invented by the Chinese in 10th century but was put to its fullest effect until 19th century, almost 1,000 years later. Also Babbage’s difference engine to more than 100 years to be developed into a practical computer. Technology is as “fast” as its users need it to be.
