something people bring up here and there is how technology doesn’t seem to advance in middle-earth? the legendarium covers a longer period than irl humans have had civilisation, and yet throughout all the ages of arda society and all that seems to function pretty much the same. even with all the immortals and extended lifespans and magic, there’s something weird about that, right? with all the time that passes, why doesn’t tolkien’s world change?
my solution to this paradox is: how do we know that it doesn’t?
see, if they’re not given a reason not to, humans tend to assume that things have always been the way they are now. you get these late medieval/early modern paintings and stuff that depict events from the classical past where everyone’s dressed like they would in the artist’s time. the fact that it seems counterintuitive to us in the modern world - as far i can tell, that’s actually kind of an aberration, the result of a world where technology changes drastically within a human lifetime and way more people than usual get school. throughout human history, it seems, people not only haven’t asked the question ‘how was the past different?' they haven’t known it was a question they could ask. they default to assuming that the world always fundamentally works the same, because why wouldn’t it?
put that in middle-earth. bilbo - not trying to slight his editing skills, but does he know to ask that question? does he know about historical time? or does he just assume the world’s always functioned the way it does at the end of the third age, with horses and kings and stuff? does he paint his assumptions about the way things are over the material he compiles, not out of any malice, but because he naturally assumes that these things have never changed? does he translate complicated elvish concepts it would take too long to explain into terms hobbits could understand, even if they are kind of inaccurate?
i honestly think that arda is way less medieval-stasis-y than it looks at first glance. things don’t automatically get better over time, after all, and the recorded history of arda chronicles a whole lot of apocalypses. the lord of the rings is set in the ruins of many greater ages - why do those ages have to be medieval? magic is a thing, or at least used to be, as are the palantíri - what other kinds of crazy magitek did they have in the old days? what fantastical devices did the númenóreans use on a daily basis? what kind of ludicrous superweapons were commonplace in the first age?
like, people call tolkien ‘generic fantasy,’ and while that’s not entirely true for his world’s present, i like to think it’s really not true for its past. the world of the lord of the rings is the world of medieval european imagining spun into reality - why wouldn’t its history be an equally exaggerated embellishment of that period’s lost classical past? i bet they had all kinds of impossible technology so artful it’s indistinguishable from magic. i bet they had plumbing
just. people usually invoke the in-universe text unreliable narrator stuff to cast doubt on the events tolkien’s narrators describe, but i think it could also apply to the world they imply. it’s certainly not our world, no, but it’s also not the boilerplate medieval setting we tend to automatically assume it is. there are so many things in arda’s past that are so far beyond what the people living among its ashes could possibly imagine, things that bilbo baggins reads about in rivendell’s library, goes ‘pfff yeah right’ and quietly edits out of his translations. there’s so much potential, i think, for a first and second and early third age that are magitechnological, wild, and weird
