Posted: May 14, 2000 at 17:34:23: by David Freitag
: As a toal guesstimate, I would say between 50 and 100 million sentient beings in Middle-Earth all told at the end of the Third Age, more towards 100 million, but thats guess work.
: Guesstimates I would say are (at WotR)
: Rohan - 400,000
: Dunland - 300,000
: Eriador incl. Shire - 500,000
: Gondor - 5,000,000
: Lindon/Grey Havens - 20,000
: Rivendell - 1,000
: Anduin Vales (northmen/beornings) - 50,000
: Woodmen - 20,000
: Mirkwood Elves - 50,000
: Lorien - 25,000
: Dale/Esgaroth - 250,000
: Dwarves (Durins Tribe) - 100,000
: Umbar(and territories) - 500,000 to 1,000,000
: Mordor (and Nurn/Khand etc.) - 2 or 3 Million
: With the rest spread out over Middle Earth - based around river valleys, mountain vales, and steppes.
: Don QuixoteThese figures seem to be right (or in the right range), but I'd dispute your totals: I added up your figures, which represent the populations of the best known and most habitable regions of M-e, and came up with 10,716,000. Where are the other 40-90 million. (Do you mean to inply that your figure for Umbar includes all of the Harad (minus Khand, which you lump in with Mordor). If so, maybe 5-10 million each for Harad and Rhun altogether, these are big areas, stretching well off the map, and I doubt if even Sauron could mobilize all their manpower: what he seems to have done is set-up a "conveyor belt" so that groups push each other westwards over the centuries, to wear Gondor down..
You also don't give figures for Orc populations, except those lumped in for Mordor. Maybe 2-3 million at most for the "free bands" of the Misty/Grey Mountains.
We don't know too much of the non-Durin Dwarves: in the appendecies, it is mentioned that Bifur, Bofur and Bombur were not of Durin's folk, though they lived with them, so many from the other lineages can be included with the 100,000 you give for Durin's folk. Maybe another 2-300,000 out there somewhere.
Ents and Huorns? Who knows? There seem to have been quite a few Huorns at Isengard/Deeping Coombe.
So we can approach 30-40 million, but 100 million I can't see. Tolkien liked to use such terms as "hosts" and "companies" to describe the populations of peoples: he didn't have our modern thing for precise numbering. But I wonder how imprecise he really was. Hosts and companies are traditional terms. There probably was a range of numbers for a host during the times that term was in use to describe organized (more or less) groups of warriors. Tolkien, always careful in his use of words, wouldn't grossly violate such a range, and from that we can get an idea of how amny elves were in the hosts of the first age and so forth.
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