This to me is one of the fundamental ways that Tolkien deliberately limited the perspective of his fantasy in order to give it the ring (no pun intended, heh) of an actual ancient saga of Anglo-Saxon peoples.
On the one hand, the people in this saga clearly think of their story as being hugely significant for the whole world across timeless ages (hello, the disaster of Numenor even changes the physical shape of the world!). On the other hand, from a broader perspective their story is ultimately a tale of petty chieftains squabbling over a region that could fit between New York and Chicago, in which “swarthy” peoples from the eastern and southern regions are so exotic as to seem barely human.
Inside the Middle-earth world, the story’s universal; outside that world, it’s much more limited and contingent on a particular ethnic perspective, and the lack of ethnic diversity is one of the “tells” revealing that. I think this was a brilliant stroke of craftsmanship on Tolkien’s part.
While the stories are entertaining, I would hardly call any of Tolkien’s work “brilliant.” He was just fortunate enough to be born and have lived and written at a time when his works could be easily translated into a mass market for wide consumption.
The only issue would be the way the forests were portrayed in the movies, but let’s take a look at The Amazon and the North American forests when the Europeans arrived. They were basically Human engineered parks. Fruit and nut trees abounded everywhere. Berries were commonplace. It is estimated that as much as one third of the eastern (US) forests were Chestnut trees. I would strongly expect a forest that the Elves have been living in for several thousand years to be similar. Wide meadows filled with root and seed vegetables, a heavy percentage of the trees bearing fruits and nuts. They don’t need modern style agriculture, they have everything they need in abundance.
The forests being cut down thousands of years ago and not coming back? Yeah, that’s an issue. Earth examples show that is not the case. Forests come back with a vengeance within a couple of hundred years at most.
Goblin Town and the Wargs? Now that’s a serious fucking problem. The Goblins may subsist on the same fruit, nuts and roots that the Elves do, but they do need meat and those Wargs definitely need it in abundance. The only suggestion I can make is a feast/famine boom and bust cycle, where periods of raiding by large numbers is caused by the fact that their population has grown to outstrip their food sources, forcing them out of the mountains to raid other lands.
Feeding Eriador doesn’t seem to be an issue, they have the Lake and all of it’s surrounding communities to bring them food. Feeding the Blue Mountains doesn’t seem so unlikely either with the Shire very nearby. Moria, on the other hand, is a serious conundrum. There don’t seem to be any agricultural communities anywhere nearby.
They ride horses, not flying carpets. They use swords and spears, not beams of light. They do require food of some kind - they can’t live on air. They are depicted as being somewhat magical, but that magic has limits. Tolkien doesn’t state that they get their food magically - this is just an extrapolation from the fact that he doesn’t show any fields.
I think you missed my point. I’m not trying to evaluate Tolkien’s works on their merits as literature, and I’m not arguing that the works or writing themselves rank as “brilliant”.
I’m just saying that from the standpoint of what he was trying to do in creating a sort of “English peoples’ saga”, I think it was a brilliant idea to deliberately limit the saga’s perspective in the ways that he did.
In short, the Middle-earth people’s lack of awareness of human ethnic diversity isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. A brilliant feature, in my opinion, since it accurately reproduces an important “blind spot” that the hypothetical authors of an ancient “English peoples’ saga” would actually have had.
My fanwank is that Elvish agriculture is not easily visible to humans.
The forests of Lorien and Greenwood are not wilderness. They are vast orchards. Between the trees, what looks like a grassy meadow, is actually a field of grain. That clump of shrubbery over there, has vegetables underneath. Everything that grows in an Elvish kingdom is either edible, or a medicinal herb. It is designed look like an uninhabited wilderness, but it is as natural as a bonsai tree.
I thought the Elf Rings were being used intentionally to stagnate Middle Earth (to prevent it from “diminishing”, IIRC). To stop change and to leave things exactly where they were. And that was the point of Galadrial’s rant when she was offered the One Ring–that she could freeze everything where it was or go into the West and let everything be “diminished” (ie: progress).
I never understood why the Elves were the good-guys (other than by comparison to Sauron) given that.
What about the Southrons, or men of Harad? Aren’t they depicted as “Brown” in both book and film?
We have no idea of the relative demographics of Harad vs. the North. Anyone adventuring around in Europe during the Middle Ages would also not find the majority of the population “some shade of brown”.
The Elf Rings may be the answer to this question. They’re explicitly named as the only thing that allows the Elves to remain a power in Middle Earth, but their exact function is unclear. I think it would be in keeping with the tenor of the books if the main function of an Elf Ring was to keep elven lands at peak fertility. While the rings exist, elf lands don’t know droughts, or blights, or deep snows, or poor harvests. While they still hold their power, this is enough to make the wilderness around the elf cities fertile enough to support the populations.
This could also help explain the stagnation. There doesn’t appear to be such a thing as a poor elf. There aren’t any tenements in Rivendell. If there’s no need in elven society, there’s no impetus to invent. This also changes the equation on how much food is necessary to support an elven city, too - elf cities have a much lower population density than human cities of similar sizes.
I’m also partial to mbh’s idea: that elven agriculture looks like untamed wilderness to humans. Plus, elves aren’t human - while their diets are plainly similar, they may be able to live off food that humans can’t. If an elf can live off oak leaves, then that forest is the equivalent of a wheat field.
Isn’t it also possible that elven metabolism is such that they don’t require the same daily diet as a human? Perhaps their digestive systems are 100% efficient…is there any record of an elf excreting?
My “stealth agriculture” theory also includes the woodland animals. They keep herds of deer and flocks of bovids, the way Saami and Eskimos keep herds of reindeer. When they look like they are hunting, they are actually just culling the herd. After tending the garden for a few thousand years, they work out the ecological relationships, to the point where it looks like a natural ecosystem.
(bolding mine)
Eh? The human/elf crossings happen in the early days apart from Aragorn’s own marriage, and for from being a pureblood, he’s one of the very few humans who does have elves in the family tree, however distantly (as well as a Maia).
I don’t think we have nearly enough information about food production in Middle Earth to say if it’s realistic or not.
The Goblins of the Misty Mountains seem to make a living by raiding nearly villages (and catching fisheses), but who knows how the Wargs eat when they’re not joining in a Goblin hunt. How many are there? Are they there all year round?
The area to the west of the mountains is described as ‘fertile’ (the company climb up pine trees, but it’s mixed deciduous further down), with woodmen and villages living there. It’s a vast area, so I don’t see why there shouldn’t be enough prey for quite a few smart, non-picky wolves. It looks like we see pretty well all the Wargs in the area at once, so presumably they spend the rest of the time widely spaced.
Orcs and goblins seem to go through a boom and bust cycle, when the population is small, they mostly live in small groups, scavenging and attacking travellers, then when the population gets big they form proper armies and start raiding the neighbours. They appear to breed and grow fast, so neither Sauron nor Morgoth should have had to worry about feeding vast armies for long.
By the way, I wonder what the technology looks like in the Undying Lands- are the Elves of Middle Earth a sort of Amish enclave? Are there no Elves around now 'cos they left Earth?
What makes you think they aren’t? So far as I know, Tolkien never says anything about the skin color of the Hobbits, nor of Gondorians. The Haradrim, we’re told, are considered dark by the main characters, but then again, the Rohirrim are considered light. All that tells us is that the main characters consider “normal” to be somewhere in between those, but it doesn’t say where in between, nor how far apart the extremes are.
And there is considerable racial diversity, just expressed in different ways than color. The Druedain are definitely what we would consider a minority race, but distinguished by body shape instead of by pigmentation. So, for that matter, are the Dunedain, though they’re a privileged minority. Heck, the Hobbits themselves are a minority: Tolkien made clear in some of his peripheral writings that they are, in essence, human, just of a different size.
Aside from the mysteries of orc ecology, orc reproduction also leaves some gaping questions (probably best left unanswered). It was suggested by Tolkien that orcs are debased elves, and so reproduce sexually, but we never see any females. IIRC, in The Hobbit it’s mentioned that Gollum sometimes gobbles baby goblins. Jackson shows Saruman brewing up Uruk-hai in pits of slime, but that’s not in the books.
…and for all that Middle Earth felt incredibly real.
Many (not all) of the problems mentioned here are outside of the main camera’s frame as it were. I mean trade patterns and orc reproduction and even physiology isn’t something the casual reader thinks about, except in retrospect.
Allegedly Middle Earth has a pretty detailed backstory outside of the main books. Presumably it involves detailed lore, but not state of the art social or natural science.
Keep in mind, too, that there’s no reason to assume that elves have similar metabolic needs as humans. In fact, Tolkien hints that they don’t: During their long night run in pursuit of the Orcs who kidnapped Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, Aragorn and Gimli are exhausted, but Legolas is able to send his mind into “waking dreams” that are as restful as sleep to him. He runs all night and then, as they are dropping out of the barren hills into the grasslands of Rohan, says “Ah, the green smell! That is better than much sleep!” and start to run faster. (This is a further demonstration of Aragorn’s nobility - he’s able to resist the temptation to kick the smug bastard in the balls.) Elves, and for that matter dwarves, orcs and hobbits, may not need the same amount of food - and thus agriculture - that humans do.
Men and elves where designed by god. Dwarves were designed by a Valar. Dwarf physiology may be more unusual than elves’. Dwarves may be able to sustain themselves on nutrition found underground, even if the food would not nourish men.
