Why is Middle Earth Stuck in Medieval Times?
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- čas přidán 24. 05. 2024
- In this video we explore a common question regarding Middle Earth, and why it has seemingly stayed in the Middle Ages for tens of thousands of years, without any changes in technology. Moreoever, we will examine Tolkien's literary reasons, his love of Medieval history, as well as the in-lore explanations for Middle Earth's seemingly stagnant world.
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Europe was populated by Hunter Gatherers 11.000 years ago Neolithic farmers came about 9000 years ago and the Yamnaya came around 5000 years ago during the copper age.
People are just generaly not aware of human time scales and what technology humans had at different times in history.
something i think you missed here is that tolkien (as you've stated previously) didn't view industrialisation as a good thing anyway, in his mind destroying the land for the sake of technology like we've done isn't becoming more advanced, it's falling to evil. there's a good reason why the shire (which seems to represent his ideal vision of how life should be) is very basic technologically, they have everything they need to support themselves and any advancement would come at the cost of harming their beautiful country. also, something i find quite funny is how everyone forgets that our modern interpretation of fantasy is largely based on lotr. being frozen in the middle ages or being in technological decline is a very common trope in fantasy nowadays, but when tolkien did it it was a very deliberate choice with actual narrative reasons rather than just generic flavouring. this kinda thing happens a lot with lotr, but it gets really frustrating when people fail to realise the significance of certain aspects of lotr and try to interpret the book as if it were just following tropes rather than making it's own decisions, or even worse when people try to apply modern fantasy tropes that don't even fit and completely miss the point
The hobbits may have been the most advanced. Bilbo had a clock on his mantle, served coffee to the Dwarves, and lit his pipe with matches. Hobbiton also had a mill.
Also, it looks like the Istar had gunpowder for various reasons - from Gandal's fireworks and "pine cone" grenades, to Saruman's bomb at Helm's Deep.
I like to imagine that some of the devices like the clocks may have come from other peoples to them....we can imagine that for instance the Dwarves could have done clockworks for them hehe. As we're told that Hobbits ""They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom"...Dwarves and Elves were often exchanging knowledge and skill with other peoples...Hobbits learned much in terms of construction and building, they learned to write and read from the Dunedain....indeed Hobbit show that progress or development of society from simpler more primitive state into more...civilized but are not the most apt for the quick development on their own..we are told that they learned much from other races. Yeah Gandalf use of the fireworks, as well as general explosives and flammable substances and their use by the Enemy as weapons demonstrates the difference (Sauron also had explosives his armies used them to blow up the walls of Rammas Echor), Saruman also shows knowledge of physics or optics rather with his talk about white light broken into colors :). Feanor making the crystals including palantiri and maybe possibly some optical devices? Then this knowledge was lost and of course the Dwarves of Iron Hills inventing new type of metal mesh to make the flexible armor covering for the legs etc. invention of Dain's people as we're told in the Hobbit...such things show that there are developments of craft and technology throughout Middle-earth.
In truth, weapons maybe the most advanced pieces of technology mankind has ever invented, one might make a not so slim argument, that defensive and offensive weaponry, architecture, and watercraft have been developed much more rapidly throughout human history than anything else like irrigation and plumbing, and harnessing steam and electric power, as well as metallurgy and gases and fossil fuels.
Your understanding of Tolkien's work is second to none. Thank you for making this content, it has made me appreciate Tolkien's work that much more!
It really means a lot, thank you for watching and for the kind words!!
I suppose you can’t guarantee a different world would advance through technology the way ours has, even if they have the same or better resources. THAT BEING SAID, It doesn’t help that some of the best known creators/inventors (like Feanor) tended to focus on projects that either weren’t *used* for any benefit, even when it it implied that they could be of use in the right hands (Silmarils), or had clear benefit but were only produced in small supply and never used to the *full potential* they could have if adjusted and widely distributed (Palantiri). There was clearly the potential for creations that could mimic (via magic and crafting) or exceed our modern technology, but I feel like the lack of unity among the peoples and tendency for the best and brightest to focus on personal projects (and their own rivalries) slowed things down a lot, as did the lack of equal access to education and how many great cities were destroyed by war.
I thin people overestimate the speed of progress in our own history.
Great points about the palantiri and other advanced tech too!
This is probably my favourite aspect of Tolkien's legendarium. The way he sustains the narrative coherence of very limited technological development over several thousand years within the context of highly sophistricated civilisations is quite remarkable.
Medieval Stasis is also pretty common in various cultural mythologies. For example, Greek myths depict the Hellenic world as being like Bronze-Age Mycenaean Greece for centuries before the Trojan War. And Hindu myths often explicitly involve India remaining Vedic-era India for tens of thousands of years.
It's fairly common for premodern people to depict the people in their legends as being similar to those in the present. For instance, I've seen stained glass windows depicting Roman soldiers as knights with medieval polearms.
However, we know that's not the case in the Silmarillion. Sting, Orcrist and other significant weapons are not made of bronze or obsidian (enchanted or otherwise), and there are moments in the Silmarillion where it is a plot point that one group has iron weapons and another doesn't, or that the dwarfs (if they're not Durin's folk they're dwarfs, not dwarves, if I remember correctly) have an armour type incorporating steel masks that can resist dragonfire. Tolkein also shows a recognition in his works that elves and men had to learn their technology, it's just that the technology level at the end of the Third Age appears to be more or less at the same level (and with less magic added) compared to the First.
Because his goal was to essentially create a new mythic cycle, though, it is possible that this was a deliberate choice. Other myths do tend to recognise a period where humans didn't have technology at all, it just tends to skip straight from 'nothing' to 'what we have at the time we made artwork of the legends'.
I've seen interpretations, and they have some merit, that Numenor was industrialised, albeit possibly in a way that had skipped gunpowder weapons (nobody could threaten them militarily anyway, they might not have thought to develop their weaponry further, similar to how China had gunpowder first but fell behind European developments because European nations were under greater threat from their neighbours and thus had more incentive to improve military technology) - with some of the descriptions of their marvels being essentially cases of how near-modern or even postmodern technology might be described by someone centuries or millennia after all the factories and universities had drowned. It's worth remembering that Elendil and his followers, however powerful they were from the perspective of other humans, were a relatively small rebel group and probably didn't have the critical mass of scientists and engineers to maintain that technological base.
This goes double if you consider the possibility that the lesson that the Gondorians took from the fall of Numenor was that the science and technology of Numenor was sacrilegious, prompting them to take steps to actively prevent the recreation of an educated caste of natural philosophers and inventors that might recreate such a society.
just remember that it took humans a million years to go from one form of stone hand axe to a new better kind, sometimes technology takes a while to develop
I don't think modern humans have been around for a million years. More to the point, though, things sped up rapidly since technology progressed past stone. Three thousand years ago, the most advanced human civilisations were still using bronze. Meanwhile, in Arda, they had good steel and generally medieval technology at the start of the First Age of Sun, and had good steel and generally medieval technology at the end of the Third Age over seven thousand years afterwards.
There are possible explanations for this, but it taking hundreds of thousands of years to figure out civilisation, or even taking seven thousand years to go from the first city to the Iron Age, is not the same as sitting at a medieval technology level for sixty or seventy centuries.
Another great thought provoking video. Keep up the great work. 😎👍
middle earth isn't stuck in medieval times they are just casually in a hodge podge of different eras of britain. with the utmost west being more medieval hamlet, rohan anglo-saxon pre medieval, gondor is fantastical medieval, mordor and to a degree isengard are the rapid industrialization tolkien was against you know big billowing stacks of ash clouds polluting the air emanating from the warforges building vehicles of war and the land once green and pure reduced to a wasteland of brick and mortar and ash blown streets.
You always seem to strike topics and questions that I always pondered upon but didn't have an answer to. Great videos and even better the creator :)
Thank you so much!!
But all those examples technology are military technology, anything that kills is advanced.
I think also the Armors depicted in fan arts may confuse the readers. All being portrayed wearing highly advanced 15th century-ish plate armors instead of the scales and mails with some plate.
That's a valid observation - Tolkein generally describes even comparatively heavy armour in the setting as mail hauberks. This doesn't change from the Silmarillion to LOTR, though, and it mostly reinforces the technology level being somewhere around the 8th-12th century rather than towards the end.
Silly question, have you even investigated any of the analysis of Tolkien's writings and his own reasons for writing the tales? Technically, he was not writing "fantasy" as we understand it today, he was writing mythology for the Britons ... based somewhat on the mythologies of Finland and Scandinavia ... so pretty much in that hazy time between the first men and the end of mythological times ... whenever that was. Not stuck in Medieval times and not huge on the technological advancement thing. As someone else pointed out, Tolkien was not a huge fan of things destroying the idyllic countryside ... Thus horses and swords and myths rather than fire power and trains and things. Oh well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion ...
Yeah, the Middle-earth history is full of the great cycles...where the civilizations rise and fall, and indeed the tech level the knowledge and skill developed in it to then reach new periods of stagnation and then decline and often 'reset' back to the primitive by the next big disaster :). We are told even that at the beginning of Second Age some parts of the world regressed even. There are definitely influences using not only neolithic stage but also the classical antiquity to what we truly can view as 'medieval'. Tal-Elmar story presents these people that truly look like neolithic society, then there's the ancient powerful civilization of Numenor (with Tolkien at one point playing with idea of them developing into quasi industrious advanced society with metal ships and powerful missile weapons and so on or even flying ships hehe) well those may have been early drafts but there are definitely various weapon developements over the centuries and we see the Dark Lords using the explosives in the War of the Ring! Gondor is presented by Tolkien as this almost Byzantine like civilzation that is following up the older Roman in case of Middle-earth Numenor's civilization. Machinery and technology did change over time....but one has to remember that the progress as we know it is only a very recent thing...last several hundred years!!!
Or maybe, the Valar and the Elves conspire together and kills any Man who was on the verge of discovering technological advancements
Just so they can maintain the vision of a garden of eden like Arda at the end of time
Is there much difference between 2000 bc and 1000 ad?
Not really.
Huge. 2000BC was solidly Bronze Age, and not long after the period of pyramid building. Chariots were the height of war technology until the Bronze Age Collapse around 1000BC. Iron didn't come into widespread use until shortly after that, arguably because the trading networks needed to support bronze had broken down rather than because early iron was actually better. Iron smelting technologies would improve, but it wasn't until around the 3rd century BC that we have evidence of mail. You could say that there's relatively little advancement of military technology from outward appearances from then up to 1000AD (although the smelting processes and resulting alloys improved, the stirrup was introduced after the 3rd century AD that enabled cavalry to become much more potent, and armour styles and tactics changed quite a bit), but you could argue that mail was dominant in Europe, with iron swords, spears and bows being the dominant weapons, for about sixteen centuries from when the Romans adopted lorica hamata to when plate (and early guns!) started to appear on European battlefields
In Arda, that's stretched out to seventy centuries. From the Noldor landings in the Silmarillion to Sauron's downfall in Lord of the Rings is seven thousand years.
And that's just considering military technology, although Tolkein doesn't talk all that much about how agriculture is done (the Shire seems to be pretty much just intended to be familiar to the rural countryside in his own time, except that people lived in underground homes).
For the average peasant farmer (which is 90% of the human population before the rise of the Industrial Revolution) no.
No, cause we have little records of 2000 BC maybe legends such as Gilgamesh from sumeria etc but how people lived or their philosophy or wars or Travel is just theorizing. But we do know in 1000 ad People where very superstitious and religious. So much so that they would burn a human being on pyre if they think you are doing witchcraft or something. Maybe the magic in LOTR is just some type of Science. Its up to the reader to fantasize about.
🎉
The problem is not that technology is not advancing and even declining, but that religion and superstition are not blamed for this.
Don’t be silly
@@heofnorenown Says the religious moron.