Fourth Age of Middle Earth gaming

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Yes and way to obvious. He should have used the Minbari name for the Rangers regularly. I think it is generally held that he borrowed from Lotr though.

I liked that he used the plain English name, in fact.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by whswhs

What, like Pelargir?

Bill Stoddard

That's how the map looks to me. It appears to be a port city downriver of Minas Tirith and Osgiliath.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

What, like Pelargir?

Bill Stoddard

I didn't see that remark. Yes maybe that would work.

It is common in history for Great Cities to have an out-town a few days journey away to catch the traffic. Athens had Piraeus from which we get the name for the Oldest Nautical Specialty. I forget what Rome's port was named.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

I didn't see that remark. Yes maybe that would work.

It is common in history for Great Cities to have an out-town a few days journey away to catch the traffic. Athens had Piraeus from which we get the name for the Oldest Nautical Specialty. I forget what Rome's port was named.

It was called Ostia.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I liked that he used the plain English name, in fact.

I thought it called to much attention. Besides Minbari were cool, despite their genocidal pretentiousness.

I would rather EarthGov be allowed to put up a better fight. That would have been less vicariously humiliating. Besides while Delenn was Supposed To Be That Way Anyway, somehow all here talk about "reconciliation" doesn't have the right ring. The description of the war makes it sound like queen vicky reconciling with the Mahdi.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

I didn't see that remark. Yes maybe that would work.

It is common in history for Great Cities to have an out-town a few days journey away to catch the traffic. Athens had Piraeus from which we get the name for the Oldest Nautical Specialty. I forget what Rome's port was named.

The Piraeus was not any few days away. It was just a couple of hours' walk downhill, along a path enclosed by parallel walls 4.5 miles long.

Bill Stoddard

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

LotR includes multiple references to towns, orchards, farmsteads, tilled land, fisher folk and husbandmen, etc. Outside of the Shire these things are mostly mentioned in passing because they are background details.

Also, there are various hints about the networks of trade and commerce that stitch the world together. The Elves of Mirkwood trade with the Men of Laketown, who act as middlemen for further trade with the Men of Dorwinion.

Thorin and his fellows had established themselves in the Blue Mountains and made themselves at least mildly prosperous, and it's like that the what metal the Shire and Bree use comes from trade with the Blue Mountain Dwarves.

Gandalf mentions pearls associaed with the Dwarves of Khazad-dum, that's not likely to be a mined product in the Misty Mountains, presumably they traded for them.

There was actual coinage in circulation, it wasn't just a barter economy. Merry and Pippen were surprised to find pipeweed from the Southfarthing in Isengard, one of them comments that he didn't know it went so far beyond the Shire. Note that he wasn't surprised that it left the Shire, just that he had found it so far away, so apparently there is a trade in tobacco from the Shire.

Tolkien also makes references to the economy of Numenor, in passing, when he describes it in the Unfinished Tales. The Dunedain grew large crops of grain in northeastern Numenor, the inhabitants of the southern coast fished, there were large vinyards mentioned for the southwestern peninsula, lumber plantations were established in the southeast to support the fleets, there were sheep pastures in the central region, I would imagine they had cattle as well, though it isn't specifically mentioned.

Tolkien, as you note, wasn't primarily interested in economics, but it was there, as part of the background, Middle-earth is not a magical fairyland.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Tolkien, as you note, wasn't primarily interested in economics, but it was there, as part of the background, Middle-earth is not a magical fairyland.

Right.


That's not to say I wouldn't enjoy a fantasy story with more economic stuff.

My first published (commerical) fantasy story actually does include a significant economic element.

[balzacq]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The biggest unhistorical element in Tolkien is probably that none of his good guys practice slavery in any form.

For me, the biggest unhistorical element in Tolkien is the extraordinarily static nature of human civilization.

Sure, the Elves are immortal, and there are literal second- or third-generation examples around as culture leaders, so I wouldn't expect a great deal of change from them. And we never learn much about the private culture of the secretive Dwarves.

But Men just don't change as much as they should. Specifically, even the long-lived Gondoreans and Dunedain seem to maintain their culture virtually unchanged over thousands of years. And the Rohirrim apparently don't evolve at all over five hundred years of living next to the most civilized place in Middle-Earth.

I've long thought that this has bled through to an awful lot of fantasy fiction and rpgs -- think of all the ten-thousand-year-old empires, thousand-year-old secret societies, etc. As a history major, this has always offended me to a degree.

Once, a friend gave me the opportunity to DM for a while in his world, in basically a crusader kingdom established eight hundred years before, where the crusading knightly order were still the rulers. I wrote an extended history detailing IIRC four separate evolutions in governmental structure and material culture, in which the order was still notionally on top but had no real power as such. He was appalled, until I pointed out that 800 years is the time span from roughly Alexander the Great to the Fall of Rome, or from the Fall of Rome to the invention of cannon.

We don't see anything like that degree of change over time in Tolkien.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by balzacq

For me, the biggest unhistorical element in Tolkien is the extraordinarily static nature of human civilization.

By F&SF standards, Tolkien's civilizations are positively dynamic. No EPT with its 100,000 year history for him.