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Comment by failrate | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

They had fireworks. Of course they may have been magical.

That strikes me as reasonable. With magic, they didn't need to invent things. They didn't need engineering.

There's also the hint, at least from the movies, that Sauron and Sarumon could produce an unlimited supply slave labor.

Dutch Disease but for magic

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.

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