uncle Iorlas
Nargothrond
Mar 26 2025, 7:14pm
Views: 8292
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I’d hate to leave Bergil’s uncle out. Though whether he’s in the city proper or working the fields somewhere in the outlands is anybody’s guess.
It is certainly part of the tone of the chapter, though, that it’s not very many people really; on one level, because most everybody but the able-bodied men have been packed off to the hinterlands because an attack is expected, and on a deeper level, because the centuries of attrition, constant warfare with Mordor right next door, have worn the population down to a fraction of what it would have been in any of several possible heydays.
Military attraition and, I sometimes think, the cold hard fact of the empty throne. Tolkien often seems to treat a countryside as rapidly emptied of people if it doesn’t have its monarchic power structure set up correctly.
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