The White Council

Re: Time and Dwarfpower required to build Moria.

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: 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.

I just know that you are waiting for someone to mention the Pyramids, so here goes...

...What about the Pyramids?

Despite their vast appearance ([start of bitch] and the fad of ludicrous suggestions about their construction that science has had to suffer for many years know [end of bitch]) even the largest of the Pyramids could have been built in about 20 years by a number of people under 300. So there may have been more cutting the rock etc, so lets double it to 600.

No what did the dwarves do...well mainly just excavate rock and reinforce the corridors and halls, which made up their underground cities. How much bigger than the Giza Pyramid was Moria. A damn site bigger I'd say, but how much? Twice? Ten times? A hundred times?

Ok lets take it at 100 times. Now thats a lot of rock - approximatey. Therefore in a very basic way we can calculate that for the dwarves to construct Moria within 20 years there would have to be 60,000 of them. That's not much, is it. Not for one seventh (Moria - Durin's House) the population of an entire race. But would they have completed it with 20 years? Nah they would have taken longer about it. After all they lived much longer and therefore probably would not have had the urgency of human mortals. So lets say they do the majority of it over 100 years. That would mean that only 12,000 dwarves would be needed.

But doesn't it mention somewhere that dwarves are better at mining than men? OK so lets say they are twice as good and can therefore excavate rock at twice the speed. Now there only needs to be 6,000 dwarven artisans. But is Moria a mere 100 times the size of the Giza Pyramid? Well if it was, that would mean that it represented an excavation of around 575 million tonnes of rock. That's a lot of rock. Anyone know the volume in cubic meters?

Now of course Moria did not tak up the whole of the mountains under which it was built. Only a faction I would say, with the gates of east to west mainly linked by long boring passages. therefore can it really be much bigger?

Cheers

Padster