Pedantic pedantic: The Druedain are the Pukel Men, the Wild Men, or Woses. They are found in the White Mountains in LOTR, and there were probably remnants in Eryn Vorn. They are also mentioned in The Silmarillion.
They are very distantly related to the Dunedain, being associated with the 3rd house of the Edain, and Beor the Old.
The Drúedain and the Dúnedain are distinct :) The Drúedain are the Púkel-men of the forest who help the Rohirrim navigate through the forest on their ride to Gondor and thereby bypass the troops that the Witch King had placed on the road to intercept them.
I would like to see a fantasy setting that really grapples with the seemingly bizarre military/population dynamics of Elves. The must be incredibly battle hardened and/or traumatized.
Not what you're asking for, but an interesting angle is R Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books. He has a race called the Cûnuroi who are approximately Elves, and they accept immortality in a deal with a race of depraved starfaring bio-engineers, except it renders them sterile. They go quite mad over the years, and require increasing levels of violence to feel anything at all.
Ooo, that sounds quite interesting. Which book is a good starting point for getting into it? Just asking because I don't want to look too closely and see spoilers. Thanks!
The first book is The Darkness That Comes Before, and it's the beginning of two trilogies (the second of which ends up with four books...) The first three books are as good as anything in the genre. They're quite dark, but have very deep metaphysics, the stakes are incredibly high, and the central character is fascinating. I would tempt you more but I'm trying not to spoil anything.
The books do go downhill (as does the author's mental health, I believe). But they are definitely worth knowing.
+1 to these books - they have some really interesting worldbuilding. Even the later books have some good parts (quite a good Moria-like sequence, some more exposition on the current state of the insane remnants of Cunuroi society), but they definitely do lose the plot a bit. I'm still not sure myself what really happened in the end.
Yeah it’s very interesting meeting the youngest Elf. But what happened at the end is pretty clear, I thought, and the series is called the Second Apocalypse after all.
Yeah, I’m thinking of more like hard military fantasy than sci-fi body horror.
I want to see elves that have to come to terms with the fact that will always be fighting wars outnumbered hundreds to one, attempting to make up for that gap by using their special characteristics. I don’t want to see them corrupted to debauchery by boredom, but to grim pragmatism by desperation.
With wizards-engineers spending hundreds of years on a project, I want to see bizarre siege weapons. Indirect fire guided by giant eagles. The other species should have to pull trench warfare into the fantasy era to reasonably do battle.
I think this was put vaguely into the back of my head by the Artemis Fowl books when I was a kid, I thought they had interesting vibes, but of course they were YA novels, and IMO this would be better set in a fantasy era.
I’ve been thinking about that too. I guess I want the equivalent of a hard scifi that goes into Elvish biology, culture, economics. The population has been declining for millennia, so a huge construction industry recession, presumably overall deflation, shrinking GDP. They don’t age and they have very few children, so presumably no school system, no retirement homes. It’s not clear if Elves get sick, so medicine probably entirely a military function. I’m pretty sure Elves heal, perhaps even regrow limbs, otherwise just random accidents and war wounds would leave a lot of crippled, blind Elves, but Tolkien seems to they all look youthful, clear skin, no obvious wounds.
Technology is static, perhaps even going backwards since the First Age, so no startups, no banking. Do Elves have money?
No elves are portrayed during their actual childhood, but elvish geneaologies are clearly stated. For example, Celebrian, the wife of Elrond and mother of Elladan, Elrohir, and Arwen, is the daughter of Celeborn and Galadriel.
Incidentally, Tolkien portrayed many half-elves during their childhood. Elwing, Elured, and Elurin were young children when the sons of Fëanor destroyed Doriath. Eärendil fled the destruction of Gondolin as a young child. And Elrond and Elros were young children when the remaining sons of Fëanor destroyed the Havens of Sirion. Bad luck runs in the family, or something.
I had the same thought: iirc, all the “elf children” Tolkien wrote about (albeit briefly) were half- elves. I can retcon explanations but have to wonder if Tolkien was intentional about that.
Thinking from a purely authorial standpoint, half-elves give a connection to the human audience, while full-elves are meant to be out of reach and ethereal.
The reason you would not write a scene with your ultimate villain on the toilet is the same impulse Tolkien may have felt here.
The reason Eldar children are rare is that elves progress through childhood and youth at the same rate as humans, then have an indefinite adulthood. So for an elf that lives say 2k years, they spend 1% of their life as a child.
I don't see why that's "creepy", just because it seems weird to you and too hard to contemplate. In a future world where people stop aging at adulthood, this would be normal: everyone would seem to be 25 or 30, and there could be huge age-gaps in relationships. Why is that wrong?
In practice, however, age itself would probably become valuable on the dating market. Since people would look young indefinitely (until some tragic accident), youth probably wouldn't be valued any more, but quite the opposite: older people would have valuable and interesting life experience, and probably better finances too thanks to compound interest. So your grandmother's high school teacher might not be that interested in your son because he's too young and inexperienced.
Another thing that would likely happen is that relationships would no longer be assumed to be life-long. We already have accepted divorce pretty well these days, but in the ageless future, it'll probably be normal for marriage-type relationships to have pre-agreed time limits.
Neuroplasticity, and the loss thereof with age would cause older elves to get quite ornery and unsociable. The only active elvish couple depicted is Galadriel and Celeborn.
Tolkien actually wrote a lot on this sort of stuff, you can find it in the Nature of Middle Earth. Elven marriages are, however, lifelong. Even the death of a spouse did not permit remarriage, except in on very exceptional case.
FWIW, Elven childhood and growth was actually also much longer than human childhood, but it was quick in the eyes of the Elves.
> Even the death of a spouse did not permit remarriage
that's because on death elves reincarnate in Valinor. The exception was given when the spouse refused to reincarnate (and a lot of pain resulted form that incident).
Arwen is over 2000 years old when she marries Aragon. She is related to him by her grandfather Eärendil (which is a grand, grand grand ancestor of Aragon through Elros).
There’s nothing creepy about most relationships. Most of the world had women getting married at 14. We just put a stop to it because we don’t like the power imbalance but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.
That question could be asked about almost everyone in Middle Earth given how little discussion there is of it. The only explicit mention of a price that I can remember is the twelve silver pennies that are paid to Bill Ferny for his pony (and an additional eighteen paid by Butterbur to Merry as compensation for the lost animals). One would assume that money is used in the Shire, but it is never mentioned--for example, we never see anyone actually paying for drinks at the Green Dragon. Everywhere else items just appear and there is no discussion of any of the behind the scenes processes that produce them or how those processes work.
The book does say that Bilbo comes from a wealthy family. And becomes even richer thanks to his share of treasure from that adventure with the dragon and the dwarves.
> The book does say that Bilbo comes from a wealthy family.
Yes, and that the Sackville-Bagginses are particularly focused on wealth. Tolkien may not discuss specific financial exchanges in the Shire much, but he does paint a picture of the socioeconomic hierarchy and the position of the characters from the Shire within it.
I'm not sure I like that you say this as though it's an absolute truth versus your own interpretation of what "elves" are and this theory about them turning into woodland spirits.
First of all, elves appear in many different books, series, movies, and there are no hard and fast "rules" for elves. I mean, they're fictional first of all! There are no dogmatic universal laws governing them.
Also, in the Lord of the Rings, there is nothing canonical that states elves lose their bodies and become woodland spirits without "magic."
Elves do Fade and become disembodied spirits haunting remote places, maybe even to this day, according to Tolkien. Manipulating those spirits was the main reason Sauron was called the Necromancer.
It’s just a natural process that has nothing to do with “sources of magic”, Elves lived the vast majority of their time in ME without “sources of magic.” This conceit came from Rings of Power, I am pretty sure.
Elves "fade" because they live so long their spirits gradually "wear out" their bodies due to the fallen nature of the material world (thanks to Morgoth), which the power of the Valar can repair - the Valar also literally reincarnate them when they die, because Elves are not supposed to be without bodies in Valinor period (unless they've been bad.) They are quite capable of living for many, many thousands of years without any "source of magic".
I think RoP introduced this idea, but it is not in Tolkien.
In the second or the third movie about Bilbo, this is revealed a bit, when the Elven king is ranting against this or that. During talking, he "drops" his magic a bit, and you can see that underneath magical makeup, he's severely scarred in his face.
This is the scene, Thranduil telling Thorin Oakenshield “Do not talk to me of dragon fire! I know its wrath and ruin. I have faced the great serpents of the North!”:
That line has always stuck out and annoyed me. What does that even mean in the context of Middle Earth economy? Who could pay that much to determine the price?
Maybe it’s a naïve calculation extrapolated from more realistic exchanges of small bits of mithril for reasonable plots of land? Then if you multiple the land by the amount of mithril in the mail, you get something bigger than the shire?
“Worth” could be interpreted broadly - not necessarily putting a figure on it. Perhaps there were covetous men who would desire the mithril more than they would desire ownership of a large plot of land.
I grew up in a rural area. I remember clearly our high school teacher talking about some government boondoggle and he walked us through a black board calculation that showed that it wasted more money than the entire worth of all the homes and farms in the dozen or so towns and villages our high school drew from.
The mithril coat was beautiful, rare, made of the most valuable metal in existence and, essentially, magical.
Gandalf is more or less a demigod/angel with a sort of focus on wisdom and a particular interest in the importance of the overlooked “common people” of Middle Earth, so it wouldn’t be that surprising, I guess, for him to have a magical insight into the value of the Shire.
Given that he tends see overlooked value in these common folks, it does seem wildly out of character that he would compare the value of their entire little community to a piece of armor, however fine. Although, I guess, it isn’t like he’s rubbing it in Frodo’s face or anything. I guess he just wanted Gimli to appreciate the value of the gift…
I think it's just him highlighting the rarity and value of something that would otherwise never be accessible to them. In the middle ages would an extremely high-end suit of armour cost less than a village? I don't know, but rarity was at a higher premium for elite goods back then.
Quite common brands sell handbags that cost several month's rent of a western european house. An airplane costs millions. Military planes billions. Amounts so staggering large they could easily pay for the rebuilding of entire countries after a disaster.
It reminds me of the Japanese bubble economy of the 1980s when it was claimed that (due to absurd real estate prices in Tokyo) that the Imperial Palace was worth more than all of California.
I've always assumed that commerce was diminished in the area LotR takes place because, generally speaking, all the nations are in decline. Population or otherwise.
From the anthropology I've been reading, it seems that many societies got by with debt -- and complex forms of it! -- with no need for money. Especially because of their long lives and stable communities, debt relations would be effective for elves. Money is only necessary in a society where a transaction is indeed transactional, independent from future relationship.
> ’m pretty sure Elves heal, perhaps even regrow limbs, otherwise just random accidents and war wounds would leave a lot of crippled, blind Elves, but Tolkien seems to they all look youthful, clear skin, no obvious wounds.
Tolkien and Peter Jackson shouldn't be confused. There are plenty of maimed elves. Maedhros, the eldest son of Feanor, was one-handed after his hand was cut off. Turin was also friends Gwindor, who was crippled, maimed, and somehow disfigured. His brother was also blinded, then later dismembered in front of Gwindor.
Hmmmph. I would never confuse Tolkien for Jackson, I simply forgot about these cases. Thanks for the reminder. My thought is like this: I have a collection of small scars from burning myself on hot pans, nicking myself climbing over a barbed wire fence, etc. If I were Elrond’s age, especially if I was a warrior and training for war, I’d be a mass of scars unless there was some sort of healing going on. Maybe they are exceptionally careful. Whether it just happens or maybe they use healing spells, but I suspect some sort of regeneration of at least minor wounds.
1) they are the ones who remained in Middle-Earth, while others (e.g. Elrond's wife) departed west over the Sea to get away from the violence of Middle-Earth
2) they are ageless, and seem to have a very high adult:child ratio and essentially no elderly, so nearly the entire population is "military age"
Taken together, this could plausibly give not much under 50% able to serve in the military in extremis. Relative to Hobbits, Orcs, or Dwarves, the Elves are biologically far more different than Men.
Orcs are elves who were corrupted and mutilated by Morgoth, so hypothetically elves and orcs might have more shared biology. Hobbits are probably an offshoot or variant of men. Elves, dwarves and men all had separate "awakenings" so they don't have any shared ancestry at all. However, earlier races of men (and especially Numenoreans) were more similar to elves, being larger, wiser and having longer lifespans.
The thing about orcs being corrupted elves isn’t canon, as Tolkien himself never settled on a theory for the origins of orcs. I’m personally against this theory because an elf put under extreme duress will likely just pop back to the Halls of Mandos; when orcs were first bred the way from the West was still open.
Fair, I was just stating the commonly accepted origin. Personally, I think the origin of orcs remaining shadowy and mysterious with numerous contradictory accounts is the best canon. After all, Morgoth works secretly to sow confusion and dissent.
Arguably, Tolkien did say (in the Silmarillion) that orcs were corrupted elves, and then also said (in Unfinished Tales) that orcs were corrupted Wose. Then he also said that Saruman made orcs from corrupted Men.
Most plausibly, since there are numerous cases of different groups of orcs looking at least as different from one another as, say, Hobbits and Men and Wose and Dwarves, "orc" is just a term for any humanoid whose form has been corrupted by a Dark Lord.
It depends on what your conception of elvish immortality is.
For instance, you could postulate that the defining feature of elves is that they do not change, mentally as well as physically, once they reach maturity. Their personality crystallizes, as firmly as their biology, and whatever happens to them over the millennia they live, they will remain themselves.
This makes them very different than you and I, but IMO it's also very compatible with the way elves are presented in Tolkien.
The Non-Men from Prince of Nothing are more or less elf-equivalent, and I thought it gives a much darker and more interesting interpretation on the impact that immortality and tremendous historic loss can have on such a race.
However, I reckon the only reason these dynamics seem bizarre is that they would be very bizarre for humans, but elves are definitely not humans; their nature could potentially be very different, especially in LOTR where they have an infinite lifespan and a very different creation than other peoples.
Elves are basically aliens, however human-like they look. Would it be strange to find such dynamics in an alien species of octopus-shaped creatures that communicate through electromagnetic fields?
I like these kinds of analysis of books because you can be almost certain that the author did not have historical populations in mind when deciding on settlement and army sizes.
Though I’ll admit Tolkien could be an outlier here. He seems to have been quite thorough on a bunch of things.
I remember an analysis of the plate tectonics of Middle Earth and coming to the conclusion that it doesn't really work, but you can't blame Tolkien for this as the entire field of plate tectonics was invented a few years after he made the map.
I just read it because I’m thinking about writing a crossover fanfic between Tolkien and Sailor Moon set at the end of the Fourth Age/Silver Millennium, and I need to figure out the geography. I’ve mainly settled on throwing out Tolkien’s map, drinking a long draught of Graham Hancock kool-aid, and setting the thing in the Younger Dryas. (The core conceit: Eärendil’s silmaril === Usagi’s silver crystal.)
I think you need to assume that Middle-Earth is set in a fantasy world where there are no plate tectonics. The world there isn't even spherical.
It's a bit similar to the world in "Game of Thrones": that one too is a fantasy world that doesn't follow the regular laws of astrophysics, and doesn't even appear to be a planet at all.
At the time of the third age Middle-Earth is indeed spherical. Eru explicitly changed it after the fall of Numenor, putting Valinor out of reach. It was flat before.
The final war with Morgoth also destroyed a good chunk of western middle earth
With such common and devastating divine interventions it is not surprising that plate tectonic is not a good predictor of geography :D.
Note that Arda is supposed to be planet Earth , circa ~10000 years ago, but of course the geography only vaguely matches.
> did not have historical populations in mind when deciding on settlement and army sizes.
European populations were not
at all static. There were many massive population declines more or less going back to the beginning of agriculture as far as we can tell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_decline
Climate change, the plague (usually one accompanied the other) and to a much lesser extent warfare occasionally reduced populations on a regional scale by more than 70%. Often leaving large areas very sparsely inhabited or even abandoned.
As dar as we know the last major plague in Middle Earth occurred almost 1400 years before the events described in the LOTR yet the populations never seemingly recovered in much of it.
In contrast in Europe recovery took about 300-400 years. However we must take into account that the plague remained endemic and kept reoccurring regularly during those periods, which put a massive downwards pressure on population growth.
From what we can tell human populations can grow at an extremely fast pace by premodern standards if resources are ample and climatic conditions are good.
For instance according to some estimates the populations of medieval England and some other countries in Northern Europe might have almost tripled between the 1100s and the 1300s.
In a completely empty place like Eriador that must have happened at an even faster rate (e.g. the British colonies in New England).
After the collapse of the Northern kingdoms Bree supposedly thrived for centuries without any major calamities. That doesn’t make any sense though, assuming a couple of thousand people lived there initially with all the ample land a population of ~2000 would have increased to over 100k at a somewhat conservative growth rate of ~2% (and it’s unlikely that its initial population could’ve ever been that low considering all the refugees etc.). Something similar applies to the Shire as well.
So overall I don’t think we can really apply real world demographics to middle earth. There certainly must have been some force/factor not directly described by Tolkien that kept growth rates very low.
>That doesn’t make any sense though, assuming a couple of thousand people lived there initially with all the ample land a population of ~2000 would have increased to over 100k at a somewhat conservative growth rate of ~2%...
>So overall I don’t think we can really apply real world demographics to middle earth. There certainly must have been some force/factor not directly described by Tolkien that kept growth rates very low.
Perhaps women in Tolkein's world are far less fertile than in our world (except for Samwise's wife). Or maybe they developed some effective contraception.
I think that war and continuous friction with other intelligent races might partially explain the lack of growth. Remember that the age of man is only supposed starts after the third age, so plain divine will keeping humans from growing could indeed explain it within the context of the legendarium.
I think one factor is that Tolkien had read a lot of actual classical and medieval literature. So he would know what felt right for a story even if he didn't know the historic and economic details.
> Though I’ll admit Tolkien could be an outlier here.
To quote a military historian‘s analysis: „ Tolkien’s first-person experience of war and his deep grounding in medieval and Anglo-Saxon literature means that – while Tolkien does not stop to discuss Aragorn’s tax policy – Middle Earth tends to fit within the ‘zone of the possible’ much more neatly than Westeros. Armies in Middle Earth move at normal speeds, the economic and population systems (and the human terrain with them) make sense, characters behave within the confines of religious belief and social custom, and so on.“ (https://acoup.blog/2019/10/06/new-acquisitions-how-fast-do-a...)
Tolkien would have had at least a pretty good instinct for the feel of the post-Roman world as he was heavily exposed to primary sources... and lived in the turn-of-the-century English countryside, which would have still felt recognizably pre-modern.
Many subsequent authors will have only seen modern or American or no countryside at all and get their impressions of "the middle ages" from a mostly-fictional cultural pastiche of Tolkien (who was really writing a Late Antique world), Dungeons and Dragons, Monty Python, etc. so it's no surprise their worlds are rather implausible.
I agree with all the rest of your comment, but I think this point is only partly correct. Gondor can be interpreted as Byzantinian (late Antiquity), but Rohan is rather Anglo-Saxon (early Middle Ages), and the Shire actually quite modern (18th-19th century England). Numenor of course is Atlantean (romanticised classical Antiquity), the Druadain are Stone/Bronze Age, and the Elves - are the Elves.
I do have one nitpick, though: on the map of Bree that is shown towards the end, there is a North gate. But there are only two gates mentioned in LotR, the West and the South gates, where the East Road passes through. The North gate on the map in the article has a road going to Deadmen's Dike, but the road to Deadmen's Dike (Fornost) in LotR is the Greenway, which intersects the East Road just outside the West gate of Bree (and as well as running north to Fornost, runs south past the Barrow Downs and, after intersecting the road from Sarn Ford, goes on to Tharbad and Gondor).
This is not quite true, while you're correct that there is no third gate, the Greenway (as pictured in the upper left corner of the 3 picture illustration you're referring to) is not the road which is shown in the "close-up" (lower center picture) of Bree which goes "To Deadman Dike".
The illustrations are taken from "The Atlas of Middle-Earth" and the road which goes diagonally north-west from the prancing pony towards the greenway (Old North Road) is described as follows in "The Atlas of Middle-Earth" (pg. 124; At the Prancing Pony):
> A drawing shows a lane which curves north from the Great [East] Road, one branch climbing to the crest of the hill, while another leads through a small opening in the hedge for a shorter route to Combe and Archet.
The "North Gate" shown on the picture is the "small opening through the hedge". I'd say it was probably marked as a "Gate" here since Bree is surrounded by a Dike/Hedge and should simply illustrate that you can't simply cross on a "normal" road here.
The drawing which is being referred to here appears in `The Return of The Shadow` (History of Middle-Earth Book 6) as `Plan of Bree` in Chapter `XX The Third Phase (2): At the Sign of the Prancing Pony`
The drawing "Plan of Bree" by Tolkien can also be seen on pg 45 (Illustration 25) in "The Art of The Lord of the Rings"
So Antioch is a good stand-in for Gondor, and then it’s also a good stand-in for Edoras? Huh?
The author starts off with some numbers, then makes up some arbitrary numbers, and then claims they yield some other numbers, and compares these numbers to someone else’s made up numbers, at least six times.
Yeah, it seems more like a fun mental exercise that went slightly out of hand than an attempt at a serious scientific analysis (which is perfectly fine and the latter wouldn’t really be possible anyway given the context).
However I have to agree on this point. While Antioch might make sense for Minas Tirith. Albeit to quite a limited extent since it was a sea port and a major trade center being one of the last stops on the silk road.. While Minas Tirith was primarily a fortress which was probably not self sustainable on its own without food, wealth and population transfers from the other provinces in Gondor (so more like Constantinople just with massively less trade and built on the side of a mountain).
Edoras seems like a completely different type of settlement in almost every conceivable way and should probably be compared to Eastern or Central European towns.
I think Edoras/Rohan might be a reference to Breton Celtic horse culture. The Lords of Brittany, the House of Rohan, traced their ancestry to Conan Meriadoc.
In Lotr, Meriadoc Brandybuck is the halfling who swears allegiance to King Theoden of Rohan in Edoras.
The analogy doesn't go too far though, as the Rohirrim came from the vales of Anduin, near the Grey Mountains, while Conan's settlement, if it happened, was on return from defeat outside Rome. He was from Wales before that.
It's something I've been thinking about actually, as I get older.
There's this old joke about how dementia is quite nice, as far as diseases go, since it doesn't hurt and you constantly learn new things.
I was particularly thinking that if we end up "uploading" ourselves into computer storage, we might intentionally do some memory cleanup, and occasionally allow ourselves to re-experience things "for the first time".
> I was particularly thinking that if we end up "uploading" ourselves into computer storage, we might intentionally do some memory cleanup, and occasionally allow ourselves to re-experience things "for the first time".
If you're into reading fiction, there's some fun elements of this in Permutation City by Greg Egan
Can't wait for the analysis on Orc numbers. Given that their home turf is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash and dust I don't see them fielding the numbers they do. Not much arable land in Mordor, is there?
It actually comes up in LOTR, The Gorgoroth Plateau isn't representative of all of Mordor, the fertile lands (because of the volcanic soil) around lake Nurnen in southern Mordor is mentioned as the source of Mordor's food.
When watching Rings of Power, some human looked Caucasian, some looked like Asians, some like Africans, some like Aboriginals.
I thought a fictional universe doesn't have the same human races as Earth, and also might be contrary to Tolkien's vie since Earth doesn't have hobbits, dwarves, elves, and orcs.
Tolkiens Middle-Earth is though _our_ Earth. It is an instance of the "found manuscript conceit" with Tolkien just being the english translator of Bilbos writings. A copy of Bilbos manuscript (with later notes and additions by other scribes) survived until our time.
As a scholar of early medieval literature, Tolkien borrows tons of ideas from the Edda and other mythological sources. (To give him his due, he masterfully reinterprets and combines what he „borrows“.)
Did the author miss certain relevant developments in the period 1789-1945? Maybe overlaying a map post-Westphalia would be more reasonable
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