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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

The world we see in the LotR and The Hobbit is what’s left over after a cataclysm wiped out the advanced civilizations. There are hardly any maintained roads but there are plenty of ruins suggesting a more advanced civilization once occupied and developed the land.

I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed.

What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.

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The other thing I think worth remembering is that Middle Earth is still full of an awful lot of physical, relatively intelligent evil that has no real-world analog, even without significant activity by Sauron. Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood. Real wights and ghosts exist and have real killing power. Actual dragons exist in some places and they could make settlement impractical a hundred square miles at a time. You can read between the lines to believe that most outposts of civilization are still dedicating an awful lot of resources to defense (preventing expansion) and perhaps attacks that significantly impair entire towns are so commonplace as to not be mentioned.

Mind you, in the end, I still think the balance favors some very simple expansion over the course of thousands of years, but there really are an awful lot of forces inhibiting it.

Also, the movies made this solitude vastly worse. The books reveal that JRR Tolkien was aware that all the cities would be surrounded by farms and villages and be nations. The nations may be disconnected, harried by the aforementioned evil, and find it very difficult to expand, but he understood there would be infrastructure there. Movie Gondor is ludicrous nonsense; able to field a significant army and sustain a civilian population, but apparently the army and civilian population do not ever need to eat anything. Or the food just beams into their granaries from space. Or maybe their Numenorean background or Rohan's affinity with horses means they can eat grass. Because they don't have any farms or any other infrastructure. It's city, and then literally 100 feet outside of the city walls, you're in the wilderness, effectively as untamed as 100 miles away from the city. You might justify it on stylistic grounds, but it has no other justification.

In the end you have to grant all authors grace. Nobody can run a full world simulation in their head accurately. If this is all we have to grant to JRR Tolkien, he asks for less than many other authors. Net-net I still think the wildernesses in his world are unrealistically sparsely populated, but it's far from the worst idea I've swallowed to read a book.

> Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood.

How is that evil?

They trick, kill, and consume humanoids.

It's just defence, same as what the humanoids are doing.

They're violating the rule: "Food that talks is not food." [0]

You can use a framework of moral relativism where intelligent spiders have no need to adhere to human-centric rules, and all, but I prefer the moral absolutism that no one who can understand I don't want to be eaten is morally permitted to eat me.

[0] https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-11-30

It's kind of ignoring the history of cannibalism within the human race. It's tempting to say that we're past that, but most stuff comes back into vogue at some point in time.

There is not a single animal that wants to be eaten, what are you talking about?

We just draw a line saying: this is ok, this is not, arbitrarily. Nobody, nothing, wants to suffer. That's one of the rare things life universally agrees on.

There is no need for words to express that.

And I think it's ok to do so, but if we can eat whales, octopus, and take cows and chickens and make their existence hell until we consume them, labeling a spider as "evil" because it likes eating humans is far fetched.

I mean, my moral framework may be simple, but it's consistent, and more importantly, it makes it morally impermissible to kill and eat me.

If the giant spiders were unintelligent, they'd not be moral actors, and then eating people might be a bad thing, but it wouldn't be a morally bad (evil) thing.

If their prey weren't intelligent, my moral framework doesn't (currently) include an absolute prohibition on killing and eating animals, so that would be morally acceptable.

But because both the spider and their prey were intelligent, my rules kick in and it is immoral for the spiders to eat people, or vice versa.

(Now, there may be a loophole in that killing people for the purposes of eating them is always unacceptable, but there are circumstances where it is at least forgivable to kill [eg, self defense], and also circumstances where it is likewise acceptable to eat already dead intelligent creatures, but you have to be careful not to create a moral hazard where the killing is done on a pretext.)

I'll note that Aragog in Harry Potter, an intelligent spider who wanted to feed Harry and Ron to her spawn, isn't likely evil. She isn't exactly good either of course.

I think the "evil" concept is baked into the themes of the books. While men are capable of evil, Shelob, Morgoth, Sauron etc are basically the embodiment of sin and incapable of good. So the only way you can say they aren't evil is if you ignore the prose and judge them by their actions against the worst humanity can accomplish.

It isn't defense. They target non-aggressive travelers. Furthermore, Intelligent spiders in the Tolkien universe are canonically descended from primordial evil, and are characterized by a predatory hunger and lack of compassion.

I'm literally replying to the quote:

> Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood.

Doesn't sound like targeting non-aggressive travelers.

That quote isn't a self-contained description of the entire Tolkien universe, and pointing back to it isn't a rebuttal of additional information.

You may have made some assumptions based on it, but those assumptions were wrong.

Furthermore, "preventing expansion" does not necessarily imply morally acceptable self defense.

I don't see any additional information, only your opinion on the subject.

I didn't present any personal opinions, just additional facts and context from the books. If you want to ignore it and latch onto some misguided moral relativist notion about the spiders being good an defensive, fine. However, the books and author literally says the opposite. The spiders are Tolkien equivalent of demon spawn, have invaded the forest, and now pretty on travelers.

> the books and author literally says the opposite

Should be easy to find a quote then.

Im not interested in finding a citation for you to prove a point. You cam take it for what it is, look it up, or not.

I tried mate. Couldn't find shit.

We eat and kill non aggressive animals all the time. We are predator, and history has shown how little compassion we can demonstrate.

You and I are also very much the descendant of mass murderers that waged wars, raped and tortured.

I don't consider myself evil, but because of this, I just think the spider is acting like a spider.

I don't see that being evil either.

Shelob and other descendants of Ungoliant are certainly evil.

"But still she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness."

Now if you're interested in non-evil spiders I highly recommend deepness in the sky by Vernor Vinge.

More non-evil spiders: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Pretty one-sided view. Elves and Men both feast and eat living things as well.

Most people don't eat species with human level intelligence.

Only because we've killed most of the whales already.

The fact that it's what makes it not evil is a huge philosophical debate.

Also we did enslaved our own, raped them, and killed them, pretending they were not intelligent and didn't have a soul.

We do eat octopus, which have demonstrated level of intelligence close to a human child.

Also, suffering is not proportional to intelligence, are you evil because you make life suffers, or because it understands how you do it ?

I don't think it's that clear cut. And I'm not sure we would stop to eat beef if tomorrow somebody proved they are quite smart.

The orgies of meat we bath into based on factories that turn chickens and cows existences into support to grow protein and nothing else does remind me of the spider.

By that description, that makes pretty much all humans in our civilization evil.

We do exactly that.

You probably need to read Kirill Yeskov's version of the story:

https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition

This is Tolkien, not a nihilistic modern fantasy series. The spiders are evil almost by definition. See the Silmarillion as to the details within the universe.

If you have a problem with that, feel free to headcanon it away. I don't care. But in terms of understanding the world of JRR Tolkien at least as written, they're evil. Not just misunderstood, but actively in the service of the outright destruction of the world, lacking only the agency to do so.

At least Tolkien actually had a few pages dedicated to the food and villagers being brought into Minas Tirith in preparation for the war.

You'd have to go to his source to decipher this. He was inspired by Beowulf, and the dragon in that story is based in general dragon mythology of its times. These could be read (in a non-Christian, pagan frame, which is where Tolkien was working) as allegories of environmental/ecological dangers - deadly wildlife, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.

The original dragons were fought to release the rain. The hero who fought the dragon was always named "Third" in the local language; he came after King and Priest, who got actual names. In later versions, the dragon had rustled cattle and the hero retrieved them. Those became princesses only very, very recently.

Also, the intentionality of it being a designed world. Some implicit features are intentionally designed to be messages themselves.

For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional:

1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains!

2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races.

Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course.

I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.

Oh definitely, indeed. "The Machine," as he describes it in his letters, is the real villain... one you cannot even fight in any real way; it's always present and within all of us.

We only get a hint in the stories that Middle-Earth is only one slice of the world at large. Mordor only seems to have diplomatic access to the states and countries outside of Middle-Earth. And he invites their armies to join with his to plunder this resource-rich and relatively undefended realm.

But there is scarcely any mention of these other countries even in the Silmarillion and the other short stories since. They didn't need much detail because the story takes place around the small people standing against the forces arrayed around them.

It's very intentional. Painfully so sometimes, which makes it a bit of a challenging work to enjoy.

When it comes to world-building for telling stories, it seems like "simulating," is a time consuming and possibly fruitless endeavour. Fiction is fiction. Coming up with the salient histories and facts to give your story a sense of time and place is an intentional, designed artifact... and you only need enough to get the point across!

As counterpoint, consider Kirill Yeskov's account of the events post-war: https://archive.org/details/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition

It's also worth remembering that the world of LotR has people in it who were there for the advanced civilization. It's not beyond living memory. A number of those people are important minor characters, and the sense of loss helps form the backdrop for the ever-present grief of much of elven culture.

The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.

Absolutely:

"Middle-earth’s population seems to be living in random towns scattered throughout that terra nullius, with barely any roads or any sort of economic network between them"

The situation in the novel is basically analogous to western Europe in the dark ages. Which is not surprising since that was an era of Tolkien's interest and study. Western Europe after the fall of the (western) Roman empire was economically and politically very much "shrunken" from what it had been, and a bit of a backwater intellectually and economically. Infrastructure became poorly maintained for a couple centuries.

Tolkien just extended that out over a thousand years or so, and extended the lifespan of the characters involved and added multiple "falls" -- 2nd age Gondor, Numenor, 1st age Beleriand, and beyond even to the time of the Noldor in Valinor before the kin slaying.

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