[cooperadymas]

That's fascinating and I'll have to read it.

The thing that stood out to me in my most recent reread of LOTR is the complete and utter lack of farms. Outside of Farmer Maggot in the shire, the main characters almost never encounter random, normal people living outside of the main city centers. It feels like an empty world waiting to be explored, not one that has been heavily populated for thousands of years.

[DoughnutHole]

To be fair most of the books take place in either total wastelands or areas ravaged by war once you leave the Shire.

- The civilisation of men east of Isengard apart from the Shire was more or less destroyed by the Witch King of Angmar before the books.

- Frodo and Sam spend books 2 and 3 wandering swamps, desolate mountains, and eventually Mordor (specifically avoiding roads and civilisation to avoid being caught).

- The rest of the fellowship spends book 2 in Rohan - most of their economy seems to be rearing horses on pasture rather than growing crops (not an uncommon situation in the pre-modern past)

- They then spend book 3 in and around the front lines of the war between Gondor and Mordor. Gondor is also explicitly depopulated - it had been ravaged by plague in the years beforehand. That’s why Gondor is so weak.

Tolkien’s world probably could have contained more of a realistic agricultural economy, but it does seem that the reason the world outside of the Shire feels so desolate is that Middle Earth is more or less in the process of total societal collapse.

Also Elves are weird and it’s not entirely clear what they eat or how they maintain their civilisation in the forests…

[OscarCunningham]

The ones who's food source is a real mystery are the goblins in the Misty Mountains.

[GolfPopper]

The late Third Age Middle-Earth of Lord of the Rings is largely post-apocalyptic. It was heavily populated a thousand-plus years ago, but it isn't anymore.

This isn't casually obvious from the text, as The Shire and Bree are near pastoral paradises within their borders, and Gondor is a functioning kingdom (the farms surrounding Minas Tirith are mentioned briefly in the book), and we all remember the Lonely Mountain, Laketown, and Dale from The Hobbit. But the vast majority of Eriador used to be inhabited, but no longer is, at least not with any density.

Arnor and its successor kingdoms are gone, the great dwarf-Kingdoms are gone (with the Lonely Mountain as a very local and very recent successor-state), the Elves have dwindled to the level where the Havens and Rivendell have no military capability, roads have crumbled, and almost all the cities and towns of Men outside of Gondor (and its allied state of Rohan) have been in ruins for centuries.

[Tyr42]

So, interesting you would say that.

Acoup does point out that the pelenore (sp? The ones outside Minis Tirith) fields in the book has farms and small towns, but the movies just make them flat nothings.

Though true, the characters don't I retract with said farmers, who have mostly evacuated at this point.

[mhink]

Although the main characters tend not to encounter farmers, they're noted in a few places, as Devereaux (from ACOUP) points out:

> "the townlands [of the Pelennor] were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to the Anduin.” (Rotk 23)

[tnecniv]

This is something that bugged me for a while. Characters rarely seem to encounter hamlets or small towns as well.