Posted: March 21, 2000 at 22:10:43: by Jim Gregors
: Can any of the mediaevil experts out there give me an estimation of how much rock a person could cut in a single day/weel/year in the pre-industrial era to give some estimate of the number of dwarves and time that would hve been required to build Moria, and also of the number of people the supply chains would require to provide food etc for those cutting the rock. I would guess the effort must have been astronomical, and that no pre-industrial parallel exists in our world.Something which I have not seen addressed is the idea that the vast majority of the caves, caverns, vaults and tunnels composing the City of the Dwarves may have already existed as natural formations when Durin chose Moria as his home. In fact, I would assume that he chose it precisely for this reason (the legend of a crown appearing over his head being just that - a legend). An entire colony of Dwarves could have moved in and set up shop, expanding the natural formations over a period of millenia. [See Gimli's words to Legolas regarding the caves of Aglarond for parallels.] A more perplexing question IMO is how did they feed themselves for 5000+ years?
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