Posted: December 28, 1999 at 04:07:40: by Michael Martinez
:
: I think there may be two, even simpler answers to the question.
: The first is that ME IS sparesely populated. There are two
: pieces of supporting evidence that I can think of without
: having to do any actual research. First is that, when Bilbo
: had his birthday party, he pretty much invited everybody who
: was anybody and still only had 144 Hobbits. That is not a very
: large upper-middle and upper class...Well, actually, the 144 were just close relatives invited to a special function at the Party. There were hundreds more if not actually thousands of other Hobbits outside the pavilion having dinner (or after-dinner) at Bilbo's expense. Only a very few non-relatives (like Gandalf) were invited to the special dinner in the pavilion. : Also, if one remebers the battle at the end of RotK,
: reinforcements in the amounts of 20-25 people were sent in
: hopes that they would turn the tide of battle in an area. The
: battle was not that large. I would estimate only around
: 3-4,000 total. That's what bugs me about Peter Jackson using
: that new technology to film battle scenes with thousands of
: extras. I'm not sure of what you're referring to here. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields involved tens of thousands of soldiers (although not the hundreds of thousands that Jackson may use). The Battle outside the Morannon involved around 6,000 soldiers under Aragorn and the Lords of the West against more than 50,000 Easterlings, Orcs, Trolls, Haradrim, and whatnot under Sauron. : The second postulation is that the estrangement could actually
: have been the result of world that did not have access to fast
: communication. Without telephones, telegraphs, semafores,
: etc., until recently the entire world had no concept of what
: people were like just a few hundred miles away. The French
: were convinced that the Moors demonspawn, and even eastern
: Europeans believed in an Empire ruled by Prester John not too
: far away in India. I think slow communication and transportation had something to do with it, but then, I wonder just how many people fans think should have been wandering around the planet 6,000 years ago. Europe actually WAS sparsely populated then (probably no more than a few million people altogether lived there at the time). Today we live in a world with something like 6,000,000,000 people, but only a few hundred years ago there were about 500,000,000 people, and about 2,000 years ago there were probably no more than 120,000,000 people (nearly half of whom lived under the rule of the Roman emperors -- I believe they had, proportionately according to population estimates, the largest empire in human history). I'm pretty sure Tolkien understood that there were relatively few people in Europe around the time he was setting his stories.
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