Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

> Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat

This is _only_ because, in medieval times, when there was enough food people had more children until there was no longer enough food for everyone, maintaining the equilibrium and making it to be "just enough" most of the times, with a lot of "not enough" between those. Incidentally that is also how most animals and normal evolution operate.

But what if they only have ~2 children per couple, so they CAN easily maintain this lifestyle? Specially given they are long-lived (taking care of things long-term) and have culture+technology either from abroad or from long ago (mills, craftsmen, etc). I can definitely see this more plausible than the jump to classes the post does.

As a personal note, once I visited the UK countryside and was surprised by the amount of wild berries there were, we grabbed a bunch and there was definitely enough that we could've eaten for few days. Sure probably not a whole town and not all year round, but these were _just_ the wild ones, with a bit of work I can see how lush the land could become.

One distinctive feature of the Shire, is that it was surrounded by mostly empty space. A combination of emigration (the Elves), war (Arnor and later Arthedain vs. Angmar), and plague, had opened up a lot of open space. This is not just how the Hobbits got the Shire in the first place (the King of Arthedain had spare land to grant them), it also allowed them to expand when their population needed to. Buckland was described by JRRT as a "colony" of the Shire, and after the LotR they expanded westward again, creating the Westmarch (hence "the Red Book of Westmarch", which LotR was supposedly translated from).

What the Hobbits would have done if they had been in a place without room to expand, is interesting to debate, but in the actual Third Age they could have lots of kids, and just expand into more good farmland when they needed to, because emigration, war, and plague had cleared the areas around them.

> > Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat

I think this is the crux of all the other socio-economic superstructure arguments the article's author makes. The assertion is that Tolkien's fantasy world of wizards, wraiths, walking trees, dragons, invisibility rings, dwarves, elves, etc would have a realistic medieval material production culture.

In order to imagine an idealized/fantasy bucolic shire, wouldn't Tolkien just imagine soil that's more fertile and nutritional crops with higher yield? Would this be the furthest he asks the reader to stretch their imagination?

We already have a real-world example of that[1], which is in medieval times in China, the land was a lot more fertile than in Europe, and with a crop also more nutrition dense (rice). So what happened there is that, instead of achieving something similar to the Shire, the plots of land became smaller per family, to achieve again an equilibrium where each family had enough to eat for themselves, but not a lot to spare. So more fertile/nutritional crops, while it would def help the Shire, would not be the whole answer without some sort of population management.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...

Yes, that's one example, but it's not the only way that species adapt to resource availability.

Ecologists have hypothesized r-selected and K-selected species as differing responses to resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Homo sapiens may be r-selected. Different cultures of homo sapiens may lean more toward r- or more towards K- (this is part of the thesis of Eric Jones's The European Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Miracle).

Insofar as Tolkien's work is a fantasy and Hobbits are not real, would it strain our credulity to imagine that they are K-selected?

kids were an important resource and in many cultures still are. At some point cheap labor and eventually are the retirement plan.

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