The world we see in the LotR and The Hobbit is what’s left over after a cataclysm wiped out the advanced civilizations. There are hardly any maintained roads but there are plenty of ruins suggesting a more advanced civilization once occupied and developed the land.
I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed.
What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.
The other thing I think worth remembering is that Middle Earth is still full of an awful lot of physical, relatively intelligent evil that has no real-world analog, even without significant activity by Sauron. Intelligent spiders prevent expansion into Mirkwood. Real wights and ghosts exist and have real killing power. Actual dragons exist in some places and they could make settlement impractical a hundred square miles at a time. You can read between the lines to believe that most outposts of civilization are still dedicating an awful lot of resources to defense (preventing expansion) and perhaps attacks that significantly impair entire towns are so commonplace as to not be mentioned.
Mind you, in the end, I still think the balance favors some very simple expansion over the course of thousands of years, but there really are an awful lot of forces inhibiting it.
Also, the movies made this solitude vastly worse. The books reveal that JRR Tolkien was aware that all the cities would be surrounded by farms and villages and be nations. The nations may be disconnected, harried by the aforementioned evil, and find it very difficult to expand, but he understood there would be infrastructure there. Movie Gondor is ludicrous nonsense; able to field a significant army and sustain a civilian population, but apparently the army and civilian population do not ever need to eat anything. Or the food just beams into their granaries from space. Or maybe their Numenorean background or Rohan's affinity with horses means they can eat grass. Because they don't have any farms or any other infrastructure. It's city, and then literally 100 feet outside of the city walls, you're in the wilderness, effectively as untamed as 100 miles away from the city. You might justify it on stylistic grounds, but it has no other justification.
In the end you have to grant all authors grace. Nobody can run a full world simulation in their head accurately. If this is all we have to grant to JRR Tolkien, he asks for less than many other authors. Net-net I still think the wildernesses in his world are unrealistically sparsely populated, but it's far from the worst idea I've swallowed to read a book.
Shelob and other descendants of Ungoliant are certainly evil.
"But still she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness."
Now if you're interested in non-evil spiders I highly recommend deepness in the sky by Vernor Vinge.
The fact that it's what makes it not evil is a huge philosophical debate.
Also we did enslaved our own, raped them, and killed them, pretending they were not intelligent and didn't have a soul.
We do eat octopus, which have demonstrated level of intelligence close to a human child.
Also, suffering is not proportional to intelligence, are you evil because you make life suffers, or because it understands how you do it ?
I don't think it's that clear cut. And I'm not sure we would stop to eat beef if tomorrow somebody proved they are quite smart.
The orgies of meat we bath into based on factories that turn chickens and cows existences into support to grow protein and nothing else does remind me of the spider.
It isn't defense. They target non-aggressive travelers. Furthermore, Intelligent spiders in the Tolkien universe are canonically descended from primordial evil, and are characterized by a predatory hunger and lack of compassion.
I didn't present any personal opinions, just additional facts and context from the books. If you want to ignore it and latch onto some misguided moral relativist notion about the spiders being good an defensive, fine. However, the books and author literally says the opposite. The spiders are Tolkien equivalent of demon spawn, have invaded the forest, and now pretty on travelers.
They're violating the rule: "Food that talks is not food." [0]
You can use a framework of moral relativism where intelligent spiders have no need to adhere to human-centric rules, and all, but I prefer the moral absolutism that no one who can understand I don't want to be eaten is morally permitted to eat me.
I'll note that Aragog in Harry Potter, an intelligent spider who wanted to feed Harry and Ron to her spawn, isn't likely evil. She isn't exactly good either of course.
I think the "evil" concept is baked into the themes of the books. While men are capable of evil, Shelob, Morgoth, Sauron etc are basically the embodiment of sin and incapable of good. So the only way you can say they aren't evil is if you ignore the prose and judge them by their actions against the worst humanity can accomplish.
It's kind of ignoring the history of cannibalism within the human race. It's tempting to say that we're past that, but most stuff comes back into vogue at some point in time.
There is not a single animal that wants to be eaten, what are you talking about?
We just draw a line saying: this is ok, this is not, arbitrarily. Nobody, nothing, wants to suffer. That's one of the rare things life universally agrees on.
There is no need for words to express that.
And I think it's ok to do so, but if we can eat whales, octopus, and take cows and chickens and make their existence hell until we consume them, labeling a spider as "evil" because it likes eating humans is far fetched.
I mean, my moral framework may be simple, but it's consistent, and more importantly, it makes it morally impermissible to kill and eat me.
If the giant spiders were unintelligent, they'd not be moral actors, and then eating people might be a bad thing, but it wouldn't be a morally bad (evil) thing.
If their prey weren't intelligent, my moral framework doesn't (currently) include an absolute prohibition on killing and eating animals, so that would be morally acceptable.
But because both the spider and their prey were intelligent, my rules kick in and it is immoral for the spiders to eat people, or vice versa.
(Now, there may be a loophole in that killing people for the purposes of eating them is always unacceptable, but there are circumstances where it is at least forgivable to kill [eg, self defense], and also circumstances where it is likewise acceptable to eat already dead intelligent creatures, but you have to be careful not to create a moral hazard where the killing is done on a pretext.)
This is Tolkien, not a nihilistic modern fantasy series. The spiders are evil almost by definition. See the Silmarillion as to the details within the universe.
If you have a problem with that, feel free to headcanon it away. I don't care. But in terms of understanding the world of JRR Tolkien at least as written, they're evil. Not just misunderstood, but actively in the service of the outright destruction of the world, lacking only the agency to do so.
You'd have to go to his source to decipher this. He was inspired by Beowulf, and the dragon in that story is based in general dragon mythology of its times. These could be read (in a non-Christian, pagan frame, which is where Tolkien was working) as allegories of environmental/ecological dangers - deadly wildlife, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.
The original dragons were fought to release the rain. The hero who fought the dragon was always named "Third" in the local language; he came after King and Priest, who got actual names. In later versions, the dragon had rustled cattle and the hero retrieved them. Those became princesses only very, very recently.
Also, the intentionality of it being a designed world. Some implicit features are intentionally designed to be messages themselves.
For example, the point of there being close to no technological advance in thousand of years is intentional:
1. Saruman's plan consists on mass industrialization. Beginning in Isengard, but at the end of the books projected even further: globalized. And he is one of the villains!
2. During the millenia that technology hasn't advanced, the elves did rule. Other than the disaster caused by the villains of the story, Tolkien intentionally made the elves not need such technological advance. They had no incentives to, they had enough. Same with the rest of the races.
Those are two are messages Tolkien is telling to the reader. Shallowly described by me, of course.
I also understand this as the reason for the worldbuilding to be so limited and sparse. The world that we find is enough for his vision and messages to get across, and adding anything more would make it repetitive or distracting.
Oh definitely, indeed. "The Machine," as he describes it in his letters, is the real villain... one you cannot even fight in any real way; it's always present and within all of us.
We only get a hint in the stories that Middle-Earth is only one slice of the world at large. Mordor only seems to have diplomatic access to the states and countries outside of Middle-Earth. And he invites their armies to join with his to plunder this resource-rich and relatively undefended realm.
But there is scarcely any mention of these other countries even in the Silmarillion and the other short stories since. They didn't need much detail because the story takes place around the small people standing against the forces arrayed around them.
It's very intentional. Painfully so sometimes, which makes it a bit of a challenging work to enjoy.
When it comes to world-building for telling stories, it seems like "simulating," is a time consuming and possibly fruitless endeavour. Fiction is fiction. Coming up with the salient histories and facts to give your story a sense of time and place is an intentional, designed artifact... and you only need enough to get the point across!
It's also worth remembering that the world of LotR has people in it who were there for the advanced civilization. It's not beyond living memory. A number of those people are important minor characters, and the sense of loss helps form the backdrop for the ever-present grief of much of elven culture.
The past cataclysm was very much a part of the current world in LotR in many ways.
"Middle-earth’s population seems to be living in random towns scattered throughout that terra nullius, with barely any roads or any sort of economic network between them"
The situation in the novel is basically analogous to western Europe in the dark ages. Which is not surprising since that was an era of Tolkien's interest and study. Western Europe after the fall of the (western) Roman empire was economically and politically very much "shrunken" from what it had been, and a bit of a backwater intellectually and economically. Infrastructure became poorly maintained for a couple centuries.
Tolkien just extended that out over a thousand years or so, and extended the lifespan of the characters involved and added multiple "falls" -- 2nd age Gondor, Numenor, 1st age Beleriand, and beyond even to the time of the Noldor in Valinor before the kin slaying.
Now, obviously, Tolkien loved his characters and his stories and his world.
But everyone always gets this wrong:
> It’s the most awe-inspiring work of worldbuilding ever done! He invented entire languages!
People have spent the last 70 years making snippets of conlang to add flavor to their fantasy worlds in emulation of Tolkien, but for Tolkien the conlangs were the whole damn point!
Tolkien was a language nerd first. Middle Earth exists primarily to add context to the evolution of his conlangs and to create subjects to write his conlang poetry about. He may have loved the story for itself, but his goal wasn't to create a coherent, fleshed out world as complex as our own. It was to make sweet conlangs and write epic conlang poems.
It's fair to judge the master craftsman on the quality of the jig he makes to craft his cabinets, but you shouldn't confuse the jig with the cabinets.
I think this is one of the central ways to really enjoy the work. He was trying to create a linguistic tradition in English that was as strong and rooted as those found in Finnish, Saxon, etc cultures. Hence the use of language to “fill in the details,” of the world building.
A lot of people, through no fault of theirs, miss the significance of Aragorn and the return of the king. They don’t understand the significance of the stories that are only mentioned by characters in passing. But I think some of that passes on unconsciously which gives the story and it’s world the lasting impact it has had.
If you study the Wanderer, the Arthurian epics, Finnish-Ugric mythology, Beowulf, etc you can see where he pulled a lot of his inspiration for the world he built from.
But you were right: it was all a con. He wanted a solid, mythological grounding for Divine Right of Kings that would endure in the modern world. He largely succeeded at that.
> It's fair to judge the master craftsman on the quality of the jig he makes to craft his cabinets, but you shouldn't confuse the jig with the cabinets
That’s a nice little turn of phrase, I’ll have to remember that.
I am not sure I get the point of the article. It spends forever saying how Tolkien's world is "simple" as compared to reality (which is "infinitely complex and still growing"), and seems to conclude on "reality is too simple, we need to go to Mars if we want to add complexity to story-telling".
Then, to me, complaining about the world (as described) not being complex enough is a bit like complaining that "You see, there are tens of thousands of people in the books, participating to wars and all. But the story-telling is very simplistic because it only follows a handful of characters, instead of describing the life of everybody in the world".
I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
Tolkien hides much of the complexity. For example, what happened to the Entwives? What happened that created the Brown Lands, and where did the Entwives go? That could be a whole book, but it's only referred to in a comment by Treebeard, the meat of which is less than a paragraph.
That kind of thing happens all over the place. Who were the Ringwraiths before they became wraiths? (Yeah, they were human kings, but who were they?) How did things go down in the war that destroyed Eregion? How did Arwen's mother escape from being held captive by the orcs? What's the detailed backstory on hobbits? And on and on and on. There's all this stuff that is briefly referred to, but never fleshed out in detail.
This is useful for authors, by the way. You can be creating a fractal, and you have to cut off detail somewhere. But if you leave hints that there's more detail, the world feels bigger. It doesn't feel amputated or limited.
I'd believe Tolkien deliberately chose a "small" world precisely so that he could make things coherent and consistent to _some_ aspects of reality (some because it is, after all, a world with magic). It is apparent that Tolkien focused on the aspects he cared for and understood best - language and military stuff^1;
And because he quite literally wanted to described how the world started and how it got there, he had a few options: he could either make a small world, or hand-waive a lot, 99.99% of detail of a larger world, or just don't finish writing the equivalent of a 1-year period in his fiction's timeline during his lifetime, I guess?
Another thing - as the author points out, George Martin strives actively to make the world in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones 'larger'. He doesn't care that much about realistic coherence, though, and that is why he can copy-paste and mash historical elements.
I think the silliest part of complaining Middle Earth is based on Earth, is the fact that Middle Earth IS Earth, explicitly. Tolkien states that LoTR is a "prequel" of real world history of sorts.
Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. It is obvious it will be based on RL cultures, because... it is.
Ditto for people that complained that Fremen in Dune are too much like middle eastern people. Seriously, their religion is literally called "Zensunni" and they are settlers that explicitly came from middle east cultures of Earth.
I don't think that's really relevant. It doesn't matter if, diagetically, the world is rooted in Earth or not.
Fundamentally, all cultures are going to be based on real-world human culture, because that is all we know. Even if we try to imagine what a non-human culture looks like, we still construct it with the composite elements we know are common to human cultures. Even the most alien and inhuman cultures any author has ever imagined are still defined by how not like human culture they are. They're a negation of what human culture is, which is to say they're still a reflection of it.
We cannot do otherwise. We have never seen a non-human culture equivalent to human culture.
Further, all aliens and all fantasy creatures are analogs for humans or analogs for animals. Because that's all we know.
Even if we could create a truly alien culture, we could only understand it in terms and concepts that we already have because we do not understand concepts and ideas that we cannot conceive ourselves. Because those are the only concepts and ideas we have ever had exposure to.
It's like asking what color infrared or ultraviolet would be. We don't know. We don't have that experience. Or like asking what oranges tastes like if you've only ever had apples, cherries, grapes, and so on. How can we conceptualize something we have no conception for?
While you are not wrong, you can derive a lot of human culture from first principals based on constraints that are universal. We have to eat for energy: a lot of culture is really built around meals. We grew denser than hunter gathers could find food so we had to start farming, and that density forces a lot of culture on us (you can't just kill each other when someone makes you mad). We expanded to places where we cannot live nude: we have to make and wear clothing - a lot of culture is around clothing (dance and music is different in places where clothing makes movement uncomfortable).
Of course there is a lot of variety possible within those, and that is not an exhaustive list. However just those constraints force a lot of culture and while the result for aliens can be different, they will face those same constraints and thus you can develop a lot of similar culture around them.
Eating is essential to life (as we know it) but I don't think that really creates a significant indicator for whether or not you will develop culture. After all, all creatures have a need for the energy required to survive. Not all of them develop a culture, even if they live in communal groups. Bacteria, I suppose, if you don't mind some equivocation.
The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated. I'm not clear that it was simply a solution to population density. It came after animal husbandry. We know that. But the reasons that have been claimed have been anything from "population pressure" to "we discovered how to make alcohol" to "it was the only way to make enough food for our animals" to "climate changes." It's almost certainly more complex than any one factor because you need a lot of knowledge and technology to make settlment a feasible means of surviving year over year. Food preservation is a major hurdle. It doesn't really matter if you can grow more food than you can eat if you only have that food for six weeks during the fall and then it all rots.
Clothing however? There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess. Why would every sapient creature do so?
The truth is that we don't know how another culture might develop into a civilization because we've only ever seen ours. The number of unknown priors that might allow the creation of a different way of advancement is the core problem. Ours is fundamentally built on working together. Is that necessary? Ours is built around the temporal nature of human life. Is that universal to all life? The only reason we assume so in our literature is because there's no real way to tell a story about something unknown, unimaginable, or incomprehensible. Until we experience it, it will simply lack verisimilitude.
> The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated.
True, but that doesn't change the point that it is a great influence on culture. And also you are unlikely to reach an advanced stage without the productivity improvements it provides at scale. (People who have to get their own food every day don't have time to think about physics)
> There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess.
Again, only in the specific climate their body is "designed" for. All of them need some form of shelter (which could be AC) to survive elsewhere.
Note that we are really only interested in advanced civilization. Lions have an interesting culture, but they don't make for interesting stories.
> Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future.
Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel".
(If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.)
In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.
> which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us
That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.
Who said we live in the real universe? Maybe Mosk really was a giant with a spear of fire, and a capital city armed with missiles was as close as we could come.
One of Brandon Sanderson's recent books invoked the concept of alternate realities in which it could be objectively determined that some were more real than others. (None could be found that were more real than "our" world, but also, it was impossible for objects from less-real worlds to move into, or presumably perceive, more-real worlds, so no conclusion could be drawn.)
The book is set in a world where magic and gods exist. The gods are the same ones we know from our own, realer world, except that they exist and have the powers attributed to them in our own myths. The end of the book gives us a divine point of view, and we learn that the gods are moving "upstream", in the direction of reality, but that this is difficult or painful for them.
This seems to conflict with the premise that the characteristics of less-real worlds are derived from the more-real worlds on which they are based. The possibilities are that our (real) mythology derives from the gods approaching us, which is the wrong direction of causality (but of course, they are moving upstream, which is also supposed to be impossible), or that the gods take on the characteristics that are attributed to them in whatever world they enter (but... who is who?).
The "real" world of the book is set in the cyberpunk future, which I think is unfortunate - I'd be all over a series showing the progression of the gods into the real present or past, but a cyberpunk future is less interesting to me. (There's still room to show them progressing through the past, though!)
> (spelled it first try!)
I believe that tel'aran'rhiod is required to be set in italics, subject to the normal rules of things that are italicized. ;p
Also, it might be expected for technological change to happen extremely slowly when you have such disconnected states and small communities. He recognizes there are very poor transport and communication networks. How exactly would he expect information to flourish and where would he expect innovation to come from?
I think in the real world, the hunter-gatherer culture lasted about 2 million years. Obviously middle-earth isn't hunter-gatherer but its some point of reference. From some very quick searching it seems like the start of agrarian society through the middle ages was about 6000 years. And again, as the author notes, there was a much high population density and network of people in the europe/middle east/western asia in the real world. The 12000 years without significant technological advancement seems entirely plausible even in real terms.
With the low apparent population though, most of Middle Earth probably should have been hunter gatherers. Cities don't really make sense at all, but if you want to add them they can be 100 miles of farms and villages to support the city (the cities being on a river or sea port for trade, thus justifying building them at all), but gradually tapering off to hunter gathers who sometimes get something from the distant city that they couldn't make themselves. As population gets denser farming and cities make sense, but at low density hunter gathers have an easier life.
> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
Best avoid Malazan Book of the Fallen, then. It's a fantasy series written by an anthropologist and archeologist that's also based on the events in a GURPS tabletop roleplaying campaign. It's a replay (at least in part) written like it's a history. It's got over 600 named characters.
Malazan is great. It burnt me out a bit because it's often difficult reading, so I'm struggling to get up the energy to finish the last two books, but damn is it good. For anyone seeing this who might read it, don't let the fact that it's based off a tabletop campaign scare you off, I honestly couldn't tell whatsoever. It really doesn't feel like your standard tabletop role-playing game campaign at all, it feels like something very unique and different and it has an incredible amount of artistic merit. In fact, if you like the kind of books where there's always some deeper secret to be unveiled that entirely recontextualizes all of the previous World building in some flash of horrifying revelation, definitely check the series out, because that kind of thing happens a lot. Also, if you want a fantasy series that has a very active Pantheon of gods that feel like real old school mythology, not even the sort of Bowdlerized Percy Jackson version, also check it out. It also does an incredible job doing very interesting and unique things with its fantasy races and cultures. The Jaghut are my favorite.
- Fictional worlds have are shallow compared to reality. They have to be, because an author or a collective of authors can never get to a depth comparable to reality.
- The only world with a deep "worldbuilding" is the real one we inhabit – Earth.
- Once we colonize space and let millenia of history go by, we will be able to take a look back and read about many complex "deep" worlds - because all of them will be real.
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I think the argument is already falling apart today thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep. We might also eventually simulate entire complex fictional worlds.
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As for whether it's even worthwhile:
> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
I believe the author is not talking about writing a fiction book with millions of boring pages that you would read in parallel. It is more about having access to Wikipedia on deep, complex and internally consistent alternative history/fictional world. I think it sounds fun. It's also fun to read about the actual world history, after all.
> thanks to AI writing, that could perhaps generate the blanks to make any fictional world feel arbitrarily deep.
You may find "Chirper" interesting, some people making a twitter-like website where AI agents interact. I do find however that our clever clever human brains can atm anticipate quite easily how most things will turn out after a short amount of time, and people quickly become bored by it. Then again, a lot of history is very boring, its only interesting paired with a great storyteller who picks up the pieces. Right now AIs aren't really there yet (i've tried, with very deliberate prompting you can get somewhere but each story follows predictable tropes no matter how you prompt it, the tropes themselves change but its hard to get the AI to surprise you), but I can see it happening someday
War and Peace has roughly 600 characters and that's already famous for its length, now I'm trying to imagine if Tolstoy tried to describe every single Russian participant in the Napoleonic Wars.
> I wouldn't want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of fictional people and what they do in their life.
A lot of people would want to read an encyclopedia listing millions of historical people and what happened in their lives, if the information was somehow correct. They wouldn't read all of it -- that would be impossible -- but they'd read some of it.
You can imagine pi for one trivial example. It has infinite details but it's not infinitely interesting. You can map it to infinite boring story (let's say John moves west/east depending on the next binary digit :) ).
Kolmogorov complexity is the formalism around that distinction.
EDIT now that I think about it - if you take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere :) And there are algorithm to calculate PI to arbitrary digit that are pretty simple.
> take PI in binary and interprete it as utf-8 - every single book every written (or that will ever be written) is in there somewhere
It isn’t proven that pi is normal. Also, even if you were to find a book in the sequence of pi, the index of where it starts would (generally) be vastly larger than the book itself.
Imagination is the tool, not the storage space. The tool has boundless potential to create things in your mind. In other words, the tool is boundless or "infinite" in its ability. Given a mind that lasts forever there's no reason to believe there's a cap on what is possible for a mind to imagine and there are biological creatures that are immortal (e.g. hammerhead worms) so there's at least some reason to believe our minds could one day become immortal (at least in the sense of immune to decay).
I'm confused why the technology level that is being compared with is medieval europe. To me it seems like lord of the rings fits much more into post-roman empire collapsing europe.
There are remenants of what were once powerful states floating around, but clearly much decayed.
The land is not so much terra nullius so much as the big states only recognize the other big states and the rest of the land mostly escapes their notice so to them it is not described as "owned"
People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?
> People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?
Walk. Seriously, people walk in general, not ride horses. You use the horse to carry cargo, or haul a wagon (oxen would be better for pulling a wagon - they eat less so despite being slower they are more economical, plus the anatomy of oxen make a harness easier). The people though don't ride in the wagon they walk behind. Wagons without modern suspension are rough rides and you can walk farther than the horse or oxen can in a day, and just as fast. Thus horses were only rarely used for human transport through most of history.
The only time horse transport makes sense is when you have a regular system of change points and so the horses "run" (probably at a trot not a run, but I'm not an expert on horses so if details matters do your own research) faster than you can for an hour or two then you trade horses while the first horses rest until tomorrow. In this way you can travel a lot faster than you could by walking, but it depends on the whole system which is very expensive to setup/run. Anyone who needed to save money would walk even when that system existed. Thus such systems - where they even existed - were often used for mail where spread across thousands of letters the cost was cheap enough that you could afford the speed.
Right —- I find it interesting that Hollywood and modern life (horse racing and our own sedentary existence) has skewed our perception of this.
An averagely fit horse can travel maybe ten miles further than an averagely fit person in a day. But not as far if you expect them to maintain a pace faster than a person, with a person and belongings on their back.
At the limits of our endurance, human ultra-runners perform about as well as horses over very long distances in terms of simple endurance — carrying our own weight without stopping. It’s only over short distances that horses have such obvious advantages.
If you had a horse and you needed to cover great distance, you spent as much of that time as you could doing your own walking.
I think a lot of that comes from the perception where the horse was replaced by the automobile for casual travel.
Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot.
There's also the image of the most famous start/stop horse network of all: the Pony Express, which probably played a part in setting up this imagery - for an onlooker, postal workers would travel from one side to the other on a single horse, permitting (for the time) very fast deliveries. In reality it was a series of well maintained stables and lots of start-stop segments to keep a horse in good condition, but that's not something you're going to notice if you're not a mailman.
(The Pony Express also wasn't sustainable and went bankrupt rather quickly, but it's legacy is pretty lasting.)
The car took over from the horse plus train if you were rural (most of the population was farmers), or only the train (calling the streetcar a type of train as both ran on tracks) if you were urban.
Horses work well for trips to town. When it isn't far to town a a horse really is faster, then the horse rests in town all day while you do your shopping. Town is also where the train station was, so if you were going on a long trip you would take the train which was faster than a horse, but you had to get to the train station.
That's actually an important point which gets skipped over frequently. Often these time/distance comparisons are done as if commoners are traveling across entire continents frequently. Except your normal commoner is maybe a couple miles from where they want to go. That leaving your local area makes you "unusual" at the very least.
Fantasy and recreationism often have that issue, where they're still looking at the situation from the prospective of humans who can "relatively" easily travel from America to Europe in a day, and where large portions of the population regularly travel 100's, perhaps 1000's of miles for Holidays or similar reasons.
> where large portions of the population regularly travel 100's, perhaps 1000's of miles for Holidays
Pilgrimage for 'holy-days' was moderately common in the Christian middle ages, and would frequently involve journeys of more than 100 miles (e.g. the Pilgrims Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrims'_Way from Winchester to Canterbury) and be undertaken by a good cross section of society including commoners (see the Canterbury Tales). Less commonly, but still not unknown, a pilgrimage might involve journeys from England to Rome (maybe 1000 miles) or Jerusalem (more than 2500 miles, e.g. Margery Kempe).
> Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot.
This is very well put. It's a sort of category error with an associated conceptual leakage.
I've heard this before, and it seems reasonable enough (and also that a horse must be rested at least one day a week to recover from the march). Does it also hold true when the human is also carrying camping gear, food, extra clothes, etc? Or is the more realistic comparison human + pack animal vs human on horse?
I don't know. I suspect they are proportionately as well as absolutely better at carrying large loads at slow speeds than we are; momentum is in our favour as we're on two legs.
But I do know there's a guy currently training to run the London Marathon with a refrigerator (OK a British one, but a refrigerator) on his back.
Loggers hired humans to haul 200-400lbs packs over rough ground that horses could not handle. Those humans were able to go all day with that much weight. If you have the proper way to carry it (on your head not your back!) humans use surprisingly little energy to move heavy loads. It is hard work though. Overall a horse can move more mass in a day if that is the goal, but humans are probably more economical just because humans eat so much less than a horse. (it wears on the body though)
It's not easy to find single events or dates that define a change of historical period, that don't happen overnight and uniformly globally. The arts were indeed more advanced.
But 1492 has a number of interesting events. It's the year that Spain got unified as the first modern state, with a centralized court. That's a crucial event to get over feudalism. Coincidentally it's the same year Columbus reached the Americas, so it's an event relevant to globalization.
Erasmus, also a central figure, was ordained that year.
It's weird to think that the Eastern Roman Empire only fell 39 years before Columbus discovered America. (At least, it's weird for me. I expect that the Roman Empire - even the eastern version - was a long time earlier.)
The first czar was crowned in 1547 (104 years after the end of the Eastern Empire), so I'm not sure that it's a "continuation" in any real way. It may be a continuation in peoples' minds, but it's not a continuation in the way the Eastern Empire was.
The Early Medieval period, the immediate post-collapse centuries, are also referred to as the Dark Ages, distinct from the High Medieval Period and Renaissance Period.
Agree it's closer to early medieval than late medieval, but Post-Roman Europe contained 50m-ish people in countless villages and surviving towns that might not have written enough down to interest chroniclers, but would have been very much in evidence to anyone walking down from Northern Europe to Turkey to deliver a ring!
Whereas Tolkien makes a point of emphasising how depopulated areas are. It's not that he simply avoids mentioning settlements where nothing interesting happens, it's that he makes a point of the Fellowship being isolated for the majority of the journey, and mapping and naming settlements that were supposed to be tiny military outposts or a lone abandoned inn or completely irrelevant to the story.
This is a really meandering piece and the author seemingly never internalized the
distinction between the map and the territory.
Fiction is not meant to perfectly replicate the entire complexity of the real world - rather it takes a very particular subset of reality and distills into a story you can consume at your leisure. This is true for both fictional and non-fictional settings - no movie set during e.g. WW2 or the French Revolution actually conveys the whole complexity of the real world at the time. Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell?
The best worldbuilding is that which doesn't get into the way of telling a good story. This is why "remixing" is actually a storytelling virtue - GRR can point at Dorne and vaguely motion "bizarro Moorish Spain" and the reader will instantly get a better idea of what he's dealing with without having to read a 800-pager on Dornish culture and history.
Which makes GRRM's criticism of Tolkien's world-building even more bizarre. "Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?"
One reason I created Iron Arachne is because I'm fascinated with all of the aspects of worldbuilding. There are so many facets of this, though, that attempting to build One Generator to Rule Them All is impossible.
Instead, I take the approach of creating discrete generators that build a single aspect of Reality, and model, mock, or handwave related concepts. For example, the planet generator generates only a handful of statistics and a pretty neat image, rather than billions of years of history, tectonics, etc.
A game like Dwarf Fortress goes farther, in attempting to simulate the evolution of a world. This leads to all kinds of interesting and weird phenomena in the "final" version of the world that the player starts in.
One of the difficulties with this approach is that people often expect a coherent and familiar world with enough differences that it feels novel. A simulated universe that has evolved from a random initial state is going to feel alien and more difficult to resonate with.
So, worldbuilding is a balancing act between detail and narrative. Too much of one makes the other feel stale or wrong.
absolubtely. You can't have an entirely alien narrative, because reading it will feel like a slog. Thats exactly why people say that reading lotr or especially the silmarillion is a heavy read - all the digressions about poetry or ancient history are difficult to get through. You have to swing between worldbuilding and the familliar (often characters with familliar motivations experiencing the world)
> If we like fictional worlds but can’t make them complex enough to be believable, the obvious workaround — in fact the only workaround — is to “borrow” the real world’s complexity.... The most transparent way to do this is to make a world map that isn’t the actual Earth, but also kind of is the actual Earth.
Ursula K. Le Guin made the bulk of her characters brown, and it’s possible to read it thinking about (unwritten?) fantasy written from the perspective of the Austronesian expansion into the island belts of south-east Asia, or indeed of the Melanesian or Polynesian island societies, or even pre-Mycenaean-collapse Aegean peoples. Their world centred on their island towns and the sea. Magic as self-evident and critical for seafarers and farmers.
Reading now about the archeological analysis of the settlement of New Zealand from Hawaiki, how the colonisation effort spanned many islands, and how the failure of pandanus plants - in the cooler climate - for sailcloth, meant that for most of the colonists and all of their descendants until modern times, it was a one way journey. So many questions and so much fantastic world-building material there…
Tolkien's approach is common in fantasy, or perhaps is the model that so many have aspired to.
Written in the 1970s, "The Land" in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Coven...) shows no real advancement after modern-day Covenant returns (via portal) 4,000 years later. There is still a clear good/evil distinction, magic is manifested in different ways, and there is a new crisis that drives the plot:
Descending from the Watch, he also finds that a terrible change has transpired: four thousand years have passed, the Earthpower is gone, or nearly gone, and the people of the Land are out of touch with what remains of it. The Land is afflicted with the Sunbane, a disruption of the physical order which alternately causes rain, desert, pestilence and unnatural fertility to wreak havoc on humans, animals and nature.
> From the study of that single pebble you could see the laws of physics and all they imply. Thinking about those laws of physics, you can see that planets will form, and you can guess that the pebble came from such a planet. The internal crystals and molecular formations of the pebble developed under gravity, which tells you something about the planet’s mass; the mix of elements in the pebble tells you something about the planet’s formation.
> I am not a geologist, so I don’t know to which mysteries geologists are privy. But I find it very easy to imagine showing a geologist a pebble, and saying, “This pebble came from a beach at Half Moon Bay,” and the geologist immediately says, “I’m confused,” or even, “You liar.” Maybe it’s the wrong kind of rock, or the pebble isn’t worn enough to be from a beach—I don’t know pebbles well enough to guess the linkages and signatures by which I might be caught, which is the point.
First, I recently reread LotR after decades and was impressed by it. At the same time, I also felt like LotR was sort of a literary dollhouse for Tolkien: although there's a lot of complexity in certain things, other things seemed to be lacking in depth to the point of being comical at times. This is probably inevitable with a world that broad but the geospatial shallowness probably goes along with it.
Second, to his credit, a lot of writing in general is sort of topologically simplified, and this probably reflects a certain cognitive mapping that goes on in reality. My sense of the world, for example, is vastly oversimplified, focused on my local environment and social network, and very blurry as you go outward. This is true of everybody. Maybe Tolkien made a mistake in reifying that a bit too much, in trying to fill in details of the world too much where other authors would have left it as "diagetically out of attentional scope" rather than "diagetically nonexistent". But psychologically people flow with it because it probably reflects human perception — probably especially when you are living through conflict and the world becomes even more focused. The article points out how unrealistic it is but it might not bother people because their internal maps probably aren't a lot different.
I keep seeing "worldbuilding" like it's a new kind of hobby and Google Trends has the search query consistently growing over past two decades (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=worldbui...). Not sure what triggered it to became so popular in recent years.
That’s a very interesting observation and it would be nice to see people chiming in to speculate what could have been the trigger.
My take is that narratives are growing kind of exponentially. We see it in videogames, webtoons, fan fiction. Even literature has many more writers than twenty years ago (even if not “published authors”, but people writing on Wattpad, newsletters, creative writing workshops, etc).
More writers (amateur or professional), more fantasy writers in particular, means more interest in writing resources. And worldbuilding is a topic that it is not that much explored in other writing resources.
I would even guess that if Tolkien did not actually invent the concept itself, he was the one that made it a relevant discussion topic. So it is a relatively new topic.
Worldbuilding sits at the procrastination nexus of multiple hobbies. Fiction writers, RPG GM campaign designers, video game designers, etc.
For any of those activities, the need for doing coherent and good enough setting design becomes the tempting excuse to procrastinate on doing the actual thing (plot, character, gameplay design, whatever) and 'refine the worldbuilding', because while there is a necessary minimum of setting design, the line of when you have got enough setting design and are getting into diminishing returns is not bright.
Signed - I'd rather write the history of the steam dragons' colonization of the western marshes than finish my protagonist's character arc refinements today, don't worry, I'll get to him soon.
Readers are less interested in plots and more interested in settings in which they take place, so at some point plot becomes redundant. It's also much harder to have an interesting plot and everybody is thoroughly fed up with all the common ones.
Plot, setting, and characters all have to come together to make the story. Different readers have different preferences, and different authors have different strengths. There is no exact rule for how much of any one you need. However fail too much in any and the whole falls apart. Do very well in one and the others can fail a little more.
I disagree that a more intricate world means more entertainment. With Game of Thrones I hardly knew whatever was happening where. Even in Elden Ring, which I loved, I could not keep up with all the side character stories, I would have had to compile a series of notes.
> In a way that’s not s super surprising observation: obviously a world created through the work of a single author (or a few) will not be as complex as one created through the interaction of 8 billions of humans, plus billions of past humans, plus natural phenomena. Naïvely we might even expect a fictional world to be at least 8 billion times less complex than the real world, whatever that means. Maybe Tolkien got 0.000000000125% of the way there, and all other authors who tried got 0.0000000001% or less.
I'd imagine that an MMO with robust and numerous autonomous AI NPC's each with a sufficient context window could potentially achieve world building at a much higher resolution and fidelity.
I think you could tune things to generally settle into stable, repeatable "themes" if not deterministic input vs. final state. That way you can script parts of the story / experiences / themes / "canon-events" of a game while still allowing players' actions to have true natural effects on the world.
The issue with all the disconnected small habitations is it's completely unstable.
Before a few centuries ago, societies mostly lived in a state of Malthusian stasis. They were at the limits of what their environment could support, with excess population dying to disease and malnutrition.
But in Middle Earth, there's plenty of room for these kernels of civilization to expand. They're not exploiting their environment fully. Population growth will go into swelling populations; there's plenty of space for people to move into to farm more. And this can happen very rapidly.
> Whereas Middle-earth is fairly static: over about 12,000 years, civilization seems to have been stuck at the same level of development. (Maybe because the one guy who tries to industrialize, in addition to being the only one to use telecommunications, is swiftly defeated by an army of slow-moving talking trees.)
That's such an original take! I never thought of Saruman as the great builder that Middle Earth needed but didn't deserve.
its not as hard as the author thinks. Take a book set in real world, let' say a book written by an adventurer like marco polo, or like, any settler or historian. The goal of fantasy worldbuilding is to mimic the richness of that book, not mimic the richness of the actual place (you'll need so many books, and pictures, and videos).
> It is only later that I decided it was more interesting to write stories set in our good, old, complicated Earth than to try to reinvent it.
Wouldn't you basically run in to the same problem? If the world you want your story to be based in happens to be our own Earth, you still have to change it, simplify it for whatever you're writing.
Sort of, but that the setting is in a real place that means you can assume the culture. You don't have to invent it all. If you sit someone down to eat in China the readers will automatically know they are eating a rice based meal with chopsticks (rice based would not apply to all cultures, but most people don't know China that well) and so you can just allow that backdrop without having to say what they are eating or what utensils they are using yet it is assumed. By contrast if I write a book where someone is in the city "lanorami" country "hullima" you have no idea what they would eat there unless I spend time telling you. Eating is only part of culture (an important part). In China you have an idea what the dominate religion is, how relationships are handled, and all those other details that make a culture complex (you might be wrong, but you have an idea).
Thus a writer on earth doesn't need to simplify. Just referring to a location brings in a ton of complexity that doesn't need to be mentioned at all.
If I told you that Middle Earth Hobbits are hatched from eggs do you have enough evidence to say I'm wrong? Or I could say the dwarfs don't nurse their young and thus none of them have nipples (much less boobs), again there isn't enough evidence so say I'm wrong. That such evidence doesn't exist means the culture is less complex just because we cannot make assumptions. (Note, I haven't read the books in many years, so there might be evidence that I don't remember - however the larger point remains even if this detail is wrong)
While talking about world building, 1 pet peeve I have is that the villain is always described as comically villainous with spikes all over their body.
That simply took me away from my immersion. The villains should not look too different than the heroes. Is it so that it makes murdering the villains palatable?
Might and Magic has multiple planets. I think the humans and others have been scattered to different planets because of some cataclysmic events. So now they live in Medieval times. (With the occasional computer (oracle) and laser gun.) And sometimes a planet might blow up.
They're right about what the scale of Middle Earth is _supposed to be_, but really, it should be thought of as about the scale of England and Denmark. It's closer to a Norse Saga like Beowulf in scale than anything else.
Overly complicated world-building requires mountains of expository prose to expose the complexity. No one wants that. They want characters and drama and entertainment. If you want world-building over a good story, read an RPG manual.
The obvious advise of "show; don't tell" still applies. If you have a complicated world and try to show that off to the reader/viewer/player with lots of exposition most people will hate that. But many beloved works of fiction manage to have complex worlds that you naturally experience through the story.
On the other hand, if the author doesn't do world-building, that often leads to illogical situations and issues with internal consistency. For example if you have people living on floating islands they obviously will prefer bows over swords; or sniper rifles over pistols. If they don't, there better be a good reason (that makes sense in the world).
Yeah exactly. I wrote a rough draft of a several centuries post collapse great lakes area, after a writing prompt on Reddit. It was something like "tribal people find mount Rushmore", and I ran with it mentally for a few months. I adored removing as much "tell" as I could without making things incomprehensible.
Ann Arbor became Anaba, Michigan became Meshaga. Russymons are Rust Demons, automated hunter killer drones that sometimes come to life if disturbed.
Sorry, offtopic rambling. Cool to remember how much work I put in!
the article is critiquing Tolkien's world-building as too simple. I'm struggling to see how his vision of complexity would in any way not require exposition dumps constantly so as not to gloss over something and be too "simple" for him.
> Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.
The lack of detail and explanation here does work that no amount of exposition could do.
Mountains of expository prose are a crutch for an unskilled author. There are a number of storytelling techniques to build out a world as it becomes relevant that allow for hinting at greater depths. These allow for exposition, characterization, and drama while still hinting at greater depths without dedicating entire chapters to the socio-economics of grain production.
I think you need enough expository over time to build a good world. Just that it can be done badly or in a good way. Discworld is good example in my mind of mostly consistent world build by enough exposition done in various ways...
>requires mountains of expository prose to expose the complexity
Only if the world-building is done for a book or a movie.
Exploration-based videogames, RPG settings and fictional world Wikis are just as valid use cases. I suspect such formats are going to grow more popular.
And then marvel at how many people it took, to work on the RPG manual. I've been the DM for a Forgotten Realms campaign and wow, is that a lot of material.
There once was a slogan: There is no planet B. It was a clever pun, meant to drive home the message that we can't escape from whatever we afflict upon the Earth. And now it gets used as a joke, for clicks. How sad.
The author doesn't understand how to read maps also, apparently.
He compared a complex European map of 1444 showing a multitude of factions and proto-nation-states, and compared it to a 600 CE map...showing a rough distribution of ethnic groups?
These are not the same thing at all...It's like comparing a climate map to a topographic one.
Actually an interesting essay I liked, and not what I expected from the title.
I don't know if this is intentional, but the title led me to expect the opposite of the author's final sentance (kind of irrelevant to the rest of the piece) conclusion.
> Maybe that’s actually the most compelling reason to settle Mars and beyond. So that there is, actually, a planet B to draw inspiration from.
I hope everyone knows by now, the amount of investment it would take to make Mars at all liveable -- still far less comfortable than, say, antarctica -- by humans is enormous and would span generations, if it's possible at all which quite likely is not. Far far more resources, orders of magnitude, than the amount it would take to deal with climate change and keep the actual earth liveable, which we already seem to think is out of our means. Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars.
There really is no plan(et) B for earth. Which is the argumetn I associated the "there is no planet b" title with, which perhaps the author was intending to play on?
To the extent that people's fantasies of it take away any urgency at all to trying to keep earth from getting less liveable, it's pretty infuriating.
> Like even in our worst nightmares of climate change it's probably still easier to live on earth than on Mars no matter how much we put into Mars.
Yes, absolubtely. The idea that mars is a hedge against climate change is ridiculous in the short term.
I do however deeply believe that its worthwhile to go there. It is definately possible to sustain there, that i'm relatively sure of. Theres a definate appeal to me of all these places - antarctica, underwater living, the desert, the ocean. The idea of a regimented life against the elements appeals to me. I feel sometimes like im grasping at straws to justify why. I think its wanderlust. Why go to antarctica? why study the jungle? why not stay at home and grow rice and live a simple life?
I think Tolkien was deliberate in not revealing how complex his world was. He told the story… and even then people complain about the amount of exposition. If it were any more detailed you would be overwhelmed.
What’s interesting is how he relied on linguistics and metaphor in literature to add layers. How the story of Aragorn is much like the story of The Wanderer. The cultural differences between Rohan and Gondor is in their language and architecture. Tolkien could have spelled it out for us but he didn’t. It wasn’t until Christopher started releasing the Silmarillion and supplementary backlog of stories that we get to see how deep Tolkien went and how little we actually saw.