The Ecology of Eriador

[Tar-Surion]

One of Professor Tolkien's most appealing qualities was his love of trees and forests, acquired from a childhood in the rural loveliness of outer Birmingham.

He laments the fall of the wild woods and seems to have regarded them, and most other aspects of Middle Earth, to be in irreversible decline from a Golden Age in the far past; and of all the regions of Middle Earth none had declined so far as Eriador, the region where the Hobbits lived. By Frodo's time it was virutally empty of Men and Elves: earlier it had been the site of the Noldorian kingdom of Hollin and the Numenorean realm of Arnor.

While it is enough that he was an accomplished stylist, a deep language scholar and a lover of myth, had he investigated the reality of forest eco-systems he would have realized that all was not as bleak as he supposed.

Forests, it seems are resilient, even voracious, survivors. If human beings and their animals leave them alone they can regenerate in about 50 years and turn into a mature forest in about 200. We know this because there have been examples in history of this sort of thing. The Black Death of the 1300's saw the abandonment of vast amounts of land as the population crashed. The trees had their revenge and all the surviving forests of Europe date from this time.

A similar thing happened in the Americas when Spanish-imported European plagues killed 90% of the Native American population, Aztecs and Incas included. So complete was the return of the forests that it it only very recently that archaeologists have realized just how much of the Amazon was inhabited by farmers.

So vigorous was the regrowth that it drained enough CO2 from the air to cause a mini-Ice Age across much of Eurasia. The period 1550-1700 was one of the coldest ever recorded.

The depopulation of Eriador in the 3rd Age began with the Great Plague in the early 1600's by the common reckoning. The Kingdom of Arnor was exterminated by the 1970's and the Witch-Realm of Angmar soon after. The events of LoTR occurred nearly one and a half thousand years later. During this time there was no one in Eriador except Hobbits, Rangers and the odd wandering Troll; plenty of time for the forests to regrow.

If LoTR was a ecologically as it was ethically, linguistically and emotionally correct the Shire and its cute inhabitants would have been surrounded by dense forests.

Somehow I think the Professor would not have minded in the least.

 

[HLGStrider]

I have no doubt that you are right, after all, Tolkien was a Philologist, not a Ecologist, but I wanted to put forward a theory based on my own high school level knowledge of the subject as well as point some other things out:

Starting with the points.
A. The Old Forest was somewhat as you describe but tamed by Tom and by occasional incursions by the Hobbit's themselves.
B. A lot of the area surrounding Bree seems to be Swampland. Would this provide the right sort of soil for a great forest as you speak of?
C. Fangorn and Mirkwood also have a wild-unkept-untouched feel to them.
D. Lothlorien is what I would consider a tamed forest due to the magic of the Elves who I think, by their presence, calm trees and encourage them into a less tangled growth (just a thought, no real proof of this). Entwives probably would have similar talents, and I've always speculated that they settled somewhere around the Shire, at least temporarily.

Now for my own personal speculation.

I remember learning in high school that there is an ecological cycle that goes something like rocky soil is broken down by lichen makes way for trees such as pines that thrive on open spaces and more light before being replaced, as the forests grow thicker, by other species that thrive on being close together and then block out the light and then somehow it all circles back to grass land before starting over again.

My family owns about 150 acres of land in Central Oregon, not a huge amount, but it's an interesting sample. Of that able ten acres are cultivated (ie we have houses and out buildings and fields that we regularly clear and water in order to support around fifteen cows). The rest is basically left to itself though the cows do wander the upper acres from time to time and we occasionally cut firewood especially from fallen growth (in an attempt to keep our lands from going up in smoke every summer). Even the most untouched areas are lightly treed. A lot of scrub oak and buck brush. Of course, central Oregon is a different place from the Shire . . . I think. But still, even without intervention from man, natural forest fires have a way of clearing forests every so often. I know a man who works for the forest service who claims that the natural cycle would be for forests to burn down every so often in Oregon due to lightening in dry years but humans prevent this from happening which is why forest fires have more fuel when they do occur in Oregon.

To sum up my rambling, there are a lot of different sorts of forests and a lot of ways forests come and go, and I don't think Tolkien gave us a clear enough picture of the existing forests to totally dismiss his view of them.

 

[nodnarb]

maybe it was naturaly plainish???i only remember reading about big forest being in the southern part of eriador where the numenorians chopped em down for their boats

 

[Tar-Surion]

If you read Suzuki's "Tree--A biography" about the life of a Douglas fir tree in Washington State you will learn that forest fires are are part of the natural cycle of a forest. Within a mere twenty years or so the forest shows few signs of damage.

Fires can't obliterate forests permanently unless human beings are adding to the damage in their various ways. If humans were removed from the picture then Oregon and all of the US would soon revert to its primordial tree-scape; that at least is my understanding.

 

[HLGStrider]

Well, I guess I remember the St. Helens area is quickly reforesting itself and you can't get much more complete a disaster than that.

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/Effects/MSHsurge_effects.html

 

[Tar-Surion]

Very true: and there are other examples of this kind. The celebrated island of Krakatoa in the Indonesian archipelago was even more obliterated than Mt St Helens and yet within fifty years it was under dense tropical forest: the trees were young but it was still forest.

 

[Tar-Surion]

Apart from the forests the other ecological anomaly is the Hobbits themselves.

As skilled agriculturalists who like having large families they would soon spill out of the lands granted them by the Kings of Arnor.

With the extermination of other inhabitants in the wars that brought the North Kingdom to an end, there would be nothing to stop them and everything to impel them onwards.

All animals and plants will breed swiftly if assured a good supply of food and living-space. One the Hobbits could provide themselves, the other was theirs for the taking.

The lands formerly occupied by the Dunedain would be first on the list as they could be brought back into production quickly--no need to clear forests or grub rocks out of the soil.

But the Brandywine valley sounds like ideal agricultural land with water and soil carried down from the Misty Mountains once a year. Hobbit communities would thrive all the way along its banks.

Further afield they could inhabit the lands between the Brandywine and the Greyflood and finally the vale of the Greyflood itself.

While we are not talking about a Hobbit Kingdom, still less an Empire, a loosely connected collection of communities, "Hobbitdom", is very much on the cards.

In short, the Shire should be very much larger, taking up most of the territories of the former North Kingdom.

Once again, the Professor's obvious love for his most famous creations means that he wouldn't have minded at all.

 

[YayGollum]

Hm. When I think nasssty hobbit expansion, I don't see them getting so far. The elves are supposed to fade into fairies, and the nasssty hobbitses, in addition to their timidity, have a bit of magic in them. They'd also start to fade, in some way, as far as I can tell. I would think that humans would be a lot more aggressive. The nasssty hobbitses, with their aversion to such things and ability to adapt, would make themselves scarce. They die out (or are just really good at hiding their numbers) somehow. I figure fading. Or mayhaps they just get dropped back in the human gene pool, since they're supposed to have come from it.

 

[Tar-Surion]

It is interesting and a little strange that, alone of the people's of Middle-Earth, Hobbits have no creation story. They sound like the work of Yavanna to me, with all that agriculture and family life.

The other gift they received, from whoever wrought them in the deeps of time, was stealth and skill with missile weapons. They would have made formidable adversaries, if they ever had to fight for their survival.

It was such skills that probably did as much as the Ranger-Guard that kept them safe. Any persistent or threatening intruder would come to the attention of the Bounders and end up with an arrow in the back from someone he didn't even know was there. Thus the Hobbit "Defence Budget" was negligible.

Whether or not Hobbits were biologically human is unknown and perhaps unknowable. The test is the ability to interbreed and no Human/Hobbit love-matches are recorded; even in Bree where the two races lived together: indeed, given the difference in size, the whole thought is rather absurd.

 

[Turgon]

Despite all this though - Hobbits do fade and become less numerous. Which might be considered strange considering the advantages they had. Maybe this was just their destined lot though - with Mankind being granted the earth to do with as they would? Same with dwarves I guess. I do see the Hobbits as sharing a distant past with Humanity though - perhaps being some kind of offshoot of a forgotten branch.

 

[Alcuin]

In Unfinished Tales, Tolkien says that the Númenóreans deforested Eriador during the Second Age, cutting the immense forest to build their armadas of ships. In addition, Sauron and the Elves fought a devastating war across that part of Middle-earth when Sauron seized the Rings from the Noldor of Eregion; Sauron’s marauding army apparently burned and destroyed as it went.

In the real world, Hannibal of Carthage burned and destroyed Calabria in southern Italy. The Byzantines gave the region its name: kalos-bruo or “fertile earth”; but the forests never regrew.

Finally, the Rings and the presence of the Eldar seem to have slowed the effects of Time in Middle-earth: while Men came and went, and kingdoms of Men rose and fell during the Third Age, technology and information were little changed over the period: indeed, after the decline of the Dúnedain kingdoms, things seem to have gone backwards.

 

[Tar-Surion]

Thanks for getting this going again, Alcuin. I thought everyone must have died.

The depredations of the Numenoreans are well-known, as are those of Sauron, but that was in the Second Age. By the Third Age, thousands of years later, the trees should have come back.

I have not heard this story of Hannibal deforesting Calabria. It sounds interesting but my feeling is that there must have been more going on. Perhaps settlers displaced from depredations elsewhere put the land under the plow, preventing regrowth. Unless you could give some more detail, I can't really say more.

The lack of any technological progress in the long millenia of Tolkien's mythology is one of the most puzzling and, at the same time, enchanting things about it. They fought the Pellenor Fields in the Third Age with exactly the same weapons they used in the Dagor-gilith-nuin in the First; and even Ar-Pharazon's Armada was powered by 'strong slaves rowing beneath the lash' rather than steam engines.

An yes the tendency with technology, as with population, was decline: no Elf could forge like Feanor, no Dwarf like Narvi or Telchar and the secrets of building places like Minas Tirith and Orthanc had been lost.

This was what the European Dark Ages were like: political chaos, loss of knowledge, population decline and living in the shadows of a world that could never come again: it was Tolkien's world by temperament, religion and profession and it permeates his whole mythology.