Timeline for What is the mechanism behind the continuous decline in Middle Earth?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 19 at 5:15 | vote | accept | Allure | ||
| Apr 19 at 3:20 | vote | accept | Allure | ||
| Apr 19 at 3:20 | |||||
| Jan 15 at 20:23 | comment | added | Andres F. | I'm siding with those that argue that this is both the trope Older Is Better and also Tolkien's worldview (and specifically, his catholicism and the notion of the "corruption" of the world, original sin, etc). I think it's more this than the alternative explanation of "Elves don't exist now, therefore they must have vanished", because there's a lot of urban fantasy works where Elves or faeries still exist, only hidden or in a parallel world or somesuch -- Tolkien chose this specific worldview that everything decays, with a heavy dose of "the world is marred now". But that's just my opinion. | |
| Jan 15 at 15:02 | answer | added | Shamshiel | timeline score: 6 | |
| Jan 4 at 4:09 | comment | added | Buzz | Since this is a question about something I wrote (although the substance is certainly not a deduction unique to me), I will provide an answer with my own thoughts. However, this is a very busy week for me, so it will be a few days. | |
| Jan 3 at 19:31 | comment | added | Ethan | It's a world-view, maybe even Tolkien's own world-view. That is to say, it's a way of interpreting history. Things always change; if you start with the proposition that things were perfect in the beginning then it follows that any change is a worsening. But that prefect beginning, whether Eden or Eru's original concept of Aman, is a specific philosophical ideal. The "mechanism" is that Tolkien's fiction presents this ideal as a historical fact. | |
| Jan 3 at 16:39 | comment | added | chepner | Predators are not the only way to suppress a population. In ecological terms, you can simply say the other races were outcompeted by Men. | |
| Jan 3 at 14:31 | comment | added | Michael Foster | Entropy always increases. | |
| Jan 3 at 11:41 | comment | added | Shamshiel | I can write something up later if nobody else does but this is a fairly long answer: there's a lot of different things going on, not any one singular process: the fading of the Elves, Eru's specific design for the Elves, the morgoth-element in much magic, the idea Elves and others "put themselves" in their works (you can't get that back again), normal demographic decline among Dwarves and Elves, in Men the increasing distance from Elvishness, etc. E.g., the Ring could not be made again because Sauron put (say) 95% of "Sauron" into the Ring, which is why destroying it killed him. | |
| Jan 3 at 11:26 | comment | added | Shamshiel | It's not the case in our world that without predators, prey always flourish. See, for example, the famous "rat utopia" experiments. Or consider humans: there's a distinct lack of predators, but TFR in many/most developed countries is negative. | |
| Jan 3 at 11:11 | comment | added | AakashM | There's no mechanism as such - it's simply the essential nature of Tolkien's world that Older is Better (warning: tvtropes). See more in-depth posts, with sources, here and here | |
| Jan 3 at 10:57 | comment | added | OrangeDog | The answer is in the quote -> the world had been corrupted by Morgoth | |
| Jan 3 at 6:35 | comment | added | Valorum | Since Middle-earth is fundamentally an earlier age of our (mundane) Earth, if follows that a magic world must have stopped being magical at some point. Tolkien is imagining a halfway stage where magic has ebbed away, but not quite left. There's still room for the last of the wizards, the last of the tree people, the last of the elves, etc etc | |
| Jan 3 at 5:16 | history | asked | Allure | CC BY-SA 4.0 |