How Many Hobbits? A Demographic Analysis of Middle Earth

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"

Have you read, or at least read about, The Silmarillion? Your assumption about their trauma is very correct.

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.

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?

So many questions

I suppose there are several explanations:

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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 think that statement was aimed at readers whose idea of what a typical size for a country is, are informed only by modern times.

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.

Maybe they're growing edible fungi underground? Between Mordor and Isengard, they clearly had impressive command of biotech.

pedantic: Dúnedain

I would be surprised if he didn't :D

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.

Tolkien did have diffent human "races" in the books. Check the following link for a description of one of them: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Easterlings

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch

That backwater agrarian villages/hunter gathering tribes have the same diverse ethnicites as downtown Los Angeles is a different issue.