How much technological progress was there from 10,000 BC to 1000 BC?
Bronze, iron, farming, the wheel, written language, mathematics, irrigation, animal husbandry, domestication of the cow, horse, lamb, pig, and dog, sailing, music, cartography, literature, theatre, the arch, astronomy, currency…
Been playing Civ lately?
Tell it to Reality Chuck. He’s the one that brought up wands. I’m just pointing out that, if magic is a real thing, the by any reasonable definition, a wand is technology.
How do we know the inhabitants of Middle Earth didn’t advance technology during the Third Age? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The narrator was not really concerned about such things.
Fair enough, please accept my apology.
Actually it appears we know they lost some tech, did not advance, again except for those clever Hobbits.
Surely the problem is that 99% of the population had neither?
The books are a pretty much a travelogue across middle-earth, when the protagonists walked from one side of the country to the other and visited nearly every seat of power or state capitol along the way, you would have to think you got a pretty good sense of what things were like…
But other than that, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Well, that’s partly because when time shattered, the monks didn’t get everything put back together quite right, so they ended up with anachronisms galore.
As for 3000 years of technological stagnation, would a Roman find much to marvel at in the technology of 1,000 years later? Probably would be distressed at the lack of baths, plumbing and good roads.
The history of the Third Age is one of decline, not stagnation. Kingdoms fade away. Countries fall apart, populations decline and vanish. Humans are surrounded by the ruins of past accomplishments that they can’t match and don’t understand. By the end of the Third Age the people of Middle Earth are on the brink of total ruin. It took literally heroic efforts just to preserve some small remnants of previous ages, and now even that is no longer enough.
In the Second Age, an army of men and elves marched out to defeat Sauron–and they succeeded. In the Third Age they can barely defend themselves against just one of Sauron’s armies. They defeat the army besieging Gondor, but there are more armies waiting in Mordor. So they ride out to certain defeat in the hopes that some Deus Ex Machina will save them. Lucky for them the hand of providence intervenes, and they are able to delay the destruction for another age.
The narrator never talks about things that likely would’ve seen innovation. Were there improvements in plows, planters, reapers, etc? Improvements in textiles, dyes, or tailoring? How about netting, hooks, or weirs? Better paper, inks, pens? Better brewing, baking, preservatives? Improved saddles, yokes, undercarriages, or wheels? Ceramics, glassware, masonry? We have no way of knowing. The books focus on heroes, heritage, and language, but not so much the nuts and bolts of everyday living of ordinary people and their technologies.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of technologies we do see where there hasn’t been much innovation. The characters do use weapons, and there don’t seem to have been any innovations there. Likewise transportation and communications. In fact, in all of those categories where we can make comparisons, the end-of-Third-Age tech is far inferior to that of older ages: The best swords are so great because they’re old, and the Third Age has nothing at all like the Palantirs or Eärendil’s ship.
You’ll need to specify what year you’re talking about taking a Roman from and to, but in any 1000 year stretch with Romans there were significant advances in technology - and for a decent chunk of the Roman empire you hit modern or future times with a thousand year jump!
I would think it would tend to have the opposite effect. Wizards using their monopoly on magic to run the world would drive people to develop an equalizer such as technology.
That has a nice ring to it…
The Hobbit mentions mining coal, although there’s not a lot of evidence they’re using it for much. Certainly not for steam engines or steel mills.
What do you think the Númenóreans were up to? They assembled a vast invincible war fleet to invade the Undying Lands. And look what it got them.
Cooking and home-heating. We take those for granted, nowadays, but in the pre-electricity days, it took a lot of forest to sustain a community’s fuel needs. Coal was much easier, if you had it.
And when Sharkey’s men took over, they built up a lot of industry. Just what the industry was, or how it worked, wasn’t specified, but it involved a lot of black smoke.
Well admittedly it took GOD to put a dent in their plans.
The population was too low to support the infrastructure and trade needed for technological advancement.