Ways of Calculating the Population of the Woodland Realm

[Eldacar]

I am currently writing on somewhat of a Thesis concerning Populations in late 3rd Age Middle-Earth, which I am most definitely going to share in this Forum, once it is done. My goal is to try some new approaches and use army sizes only as some sort of sanity check, but the main way of calculation usually is different. This worked so far for humans, orcs and dwarves, but I struggle with the elves. Especially the Woodland Realm, since I basically only have a lower bound of population. I tried to approach the problem by way of nutrition, but as I found out, even a rather conservative estimate on the population able being supplied by ways of food forests on the area of the Woodland Realm, comes to an upper bound of just shy of a Million. Which is definitely too many elves.

Since I am all out of ideas, I would like to ask you if you see some sort of "realistic" bottleneck concerning the living conditions in the Greenwood that could lower the upper bound of Woodland Elves to a more reasonable number.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

There have been a number of threads on the subject of populations in Middle-earth, over the years; here's one old one touching on that of Mirkwood:

Armies of Middle Earth

It has long been an interest of mine to determine the approximate size of the armies of Middle Earth aournd the time of the War of the Ring. I would like to run my conclusions past the readers and participants of the forum to see if anyone has any additional information to add or suggestions to...

thetolkien.forum

 

[Eldacar]

Thanks, I am familiar with a lot of these estimations, but they mostly argue on basis of army sizes, such as the linked thread. I want to avoid this method as it has been done before a lot and I want to contribute another possible way or ways of thinking or estimating population in Middle-Earth in particular or maybe fantasy worlds in general. For example, when calculating the possible populations of Rohan, I made a model on the basis of the hunt by Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, which assumed them as particles in a two-dimensional 'gas' of villages and the distance covered in their hunt as the mean free path through this area. (Yeah, I know, I study physics, and it shows 😅) Sounds absolutely mad, it maybe is, but even though it didn't get me to a reasonable number directly, it was still a useful result, since it helped my narrow down my range of possible population densities.

This all seems very vague right now, and I promise, I will post the end results in a much more detailed fashion in a few weeks time. The current document is already 45 pages long. But what I tried to say is, that I need a way to narrow down population densities, other than extrapolating from army size. I just use the latter as some sort of checking mechanism.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Yes, I'm afraid most discussion of population does tend to revolve around armies, which is understandable, given those are about the only places where Tolkien provides anything like hard numbers. He does give hints of unspecified "populations", for example his comments in "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony" about the many more "outsiders" roaming the Wild than the Shire hobbits realized, though we meet none.

As far as Rohan goes, I'd think army numbers useful, since they can be used to extrapolate family demographics. My impression was always that most of the population was centered in the West Emnet, particularly in the Westfold and around Edoras; Aragorn does say the East Emnet is mostly deserted. A higher concentration of farms in the Westfold area would help explain Erkenbrand leading "a thousand men on foot".

None of this helps with Thranduril's realm, unfortunately. I'd just say that Tolkien repeatedly emphasizes the relatively smaller numbers of elves by the Third Age, compared to Men.

By the way, do you have Fonstad's Atlas of Middle-earth? She's very useful on pathways and distances.

 

[Eldacar]

Fonstad is one of my more frequently used sources and her work is really useful.

I think I may have a solution for my woodland problem. As I have reason to assume most of the population to live in or around Thranduils Halls. When calculating via nutrition for a smaller area around the stronghold, as well as with a lower density, as calculated for the parts of Lórien outside Caras Galadhon, for the rest of the Woodland Realm, the projected population drops to around 90.000 inhabitants with 2/3 of them concentrating near the Halls. Which seems reasonable lorewise and in comparison with other estimations, even though mine is at the upper end and about 3 times higher than what Wigmore concluded.