How Many Hobbits? Middle Earth Population by People Group
In my prior post, I laid out some population estimates for Middle Earth’s Free Peoples by region. Here, I’m going to break it down by people: Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and Men.
Update 1: As described in the main post, figures here have been revised to account for excessive population estimates in Minhiriath and some other regions.
Update 2: Part 3, giving 3,000 years of population history, is here.
Update 3: As described in Part 1, I’ve made major revisions to a bunch of stuff based on changes in judgments of land area and density.
Hobbits
So, of all these 6.7 million people I said are in Middle Earth, what are they all? Using some assumptions about small unreported populations vaguely hinted at in various books and lore, here are my guesses for Hobbit and Hobbit-like populations:
Hobbit populations are overwhelmingly in the Shire (~180,000), with a a few thousand in Arthedain, and a few others maybe spilling over into the borders of West Eriador and Cardolan. East of the Misty Mountain, I also assume a few groups of halflings remain — and Tolkien says as much in Peoples of Middle Earth when he says there are some halflings along the fringes of Mirkwood. Likewise, the Rohirrim clearly have some ancestral familiarity with hobbits given their names for them, implying halflings were still living in the Anduin vale around TA 2000–2500. Consistent with that, Smeagol’s ancestral population of halflings was still a meaningful population in TA 2430–2500, fully 1400 years after the beginning of the Hobbit migrations over the Misty Mountains. I’m accepting some “Amazon canon” as well which locates wandering halfling populations in the east. But these are very small groups: 91% of halflings live in the shire, and 98% live within the boundaries of the former kingdom of Arnor. On the whole, I estimate just under 200,000 Hobbits and halflings around Middle Earth.
Next, we turn to Elves.
Elves
The major Elven population clusters are obvious: North Mirkwood (Thranduil’s realm) with about 130,000 Elves, Lindon with 100,000 (75,000 in Forlindon, 20,000 in Harlindon, and 5,000 in wandering companies eastward), and Lothlorien with 41,000.
Many readers objected to my previously higher populations for Lindon, especially since Lothlorien is repeatedly described as the heart of elven culture in Middle Earth. This has always been weird to me since the last High King of elves was Gil-Galad, who ruled in Lindon; and his successor Cirdan had been governing the Sindar without break since the early days of the First Age. Cirdan is 200–300 years older than Galadriel, also had a ring of power, and governs an Elven realm with multiple known urban centers. Moreover, by TA 3019, Cirdan had been exercising unbroken political authority over a substantial community of Sindarin (and even Noldorin perhaps!) elves for over 7,500 years. By comparison, Galadriel’s rule in Lothlorien for about 3,000 years. Now, Elven urbanicity may be unusual; we needn’t assume Harlond, Forlond, and the Grey Havens are huge cities, but there’s just no escaping the conclusion that Lindon remains home to a large number of Elves. They have three marked settlements and they have active, functional shipyards. There’s just no way the realm of Lindon is a tiny polity. Rather, it seems evident that Lothlorien is held up as the heartland of Middle Earth elves because it is the last kingdom ruled by the Noldor.
You may wonder: Lyman, if Lindon has 100,000 Elves, why didn’t they march out to aid Gondor? There are three answers I think are credible. First, Cirdan has a job given by the Valar to him specifically: to help Elves leave Middle Earth. Squandering his resources fighting Man’s battles doesn’t advance that mission. Almost every case of Cirdan’s folk joining battle against Sauron is a case where Sauron’s forces had already marched to the borders of Lindon. Apparently, Cirdan sees his vocation as keeping Lindon impregnable and ready to ship elves across the sea to Valinor, and nothing else. Second, Cirdan has the power of clairvoyance. It may be that he was able to see into the future and recognize that the War of the Ring could and would be won without Lindon’s aid. In either case, the lack of a major army from Lindon tells us little about the population of that most expansive Elven domain in Middle Earth. Third, maybe he would have! Sauron moved faster than anybody expected; maybe Cirdan would eventually have mobilized! He gave the Ring of Fire to Gandalf so he was definitely interested in helping out.
Thranduil’s realm has already been discussed in a prior post, but note that I ultimately have estimated a larger population than was implied. Thranduil fields an army of at least 2,000, and plausibly as many as 5,000 soldiers, and after the War of the Ring they expand their domains and colonize new lands. That means they’ve got people. So I adopt a high count for the Mirkwood elves.
Other readers may raise questions about the small Elven populations I have dappled all around the map. My working theory here is that Tolkien provides us hints of wider Elven settlement: once there were Elves at Edhellond, Eol lived alone and separate from other Elves, and, of course, we have the Avari. Then of course are the various wandering companies. I have declined to accept that the named Elven settlements of Middle Earth are actually a complete census of elves, and I have also leveraged a unique fact of Elven demography: they don’t die. Small populations of Elves can persist forever, whereas for humans they eventually die out. So the idea that there might be a hidden refuge of 20 or 30 Elves deep in the Swanfleet, or that the ruins of Eregion might be home to a handful of Avari who moved in, etc, is not implausible. Likewise, it’s totally reasonable to suppose a few of Thranduil’s more adventurous people might still be living a bit further afield than the strict borders of his kingdom.
On the whole, I estimate about 284,000 Elves in northwest Middle Earth. This is pretty consistent with a dramatic decline in Elven populations: Wigmore estimates something like 2 million Elves in Middle Earth in the First Age, and other observers agree. So between the First Age and TA 3019, the population of elves declined by 85%, even though they were having babies and have no natural death. Across 30 Elven women for which details about fertility are known, Elven women seem to average about 1.6 children each, even though Tolkien at one point suggests fertility of 4 children per woman is pretty typical for Elves. Elven fertility seems to rise a bit over time: Elven women born in the first age average around 1.3–1.5 kids, whereas those born Second Age or later average more like 2–3. Using this and assuming a small rate of deaths from violence, we can guess what Elven population trends would have looked like if nobody left for Valinor and there were no weird mass death events (like e.g. the sack of Eregion perhaps or the War of the Last Alliance).
So this is consistent with the fading of the Elves. They should have been slowly growing through the ages, but instead they have shrunk dramatically as thousands leave for Valinor.
Next up, Dwarves!
Dwarves
Dwarves are the least numerous group, totaling just 121,000. In TA 3019, Erebor is their largest population hub, at 49,000 Dwarves. As I see it, the Dwarves are unlikely to have totally abandoned the Iron Hills or, even moreso, their 7,000-year-old fortresses in the Blue Mountains, so I still put 26,000 Dwarves in the Iron Hills and 22,000 in Forlindon.
Moreover, in TA 3019, Erebor has only been resettled a few decades after centuries of Dwarven dispersion. This burst of Dwarven activity furthermore isn’t entirely centralizing: Erebor tries to spin off a Morian colony under Balin. So I assume other small Dwarf populations are hanging around in small communities or as itinerants.
For reference, my figures imply that all Dwarven communities together in TA 3019 could at most field about 3,000 troops. This seems plausible to me: about 300 years prior, the disorganized Dwarves at Azanulzibar inflicted a near-total-destruction of an orc army, inflicting 10,000 casualties, implying perhaps an orcish army size of 12–20,000. The Dwarves lost half their army. So how many Dwarves would it take to kill 10,000 orcs? I think a reasonable guess is perhaps 6,000. At the Battle of Five Armies, perhaps 600 Dwarves, 2,000 Elves, 300 Men, Beorn, an invisible Hobbit, a wizard, and a few dozen eagles killed perhaps 5–10,000 orcs out of an enemy army of perhaps 9–15,000. So since we know about half of the ~6,000 person Dwarvish army at Azanulzibar was lost, that implies post-Azanulzibar Dwarves could field about 3,000 fighters, approximately what my data implies.
Men
And finally, we come to men. By far the most numerous group, primarily due to their precocious fertility rates, northwest Middle Earth is home to about 6.1 million of the Atani, mankind.
My estimates of populations of men in depopulated Arnor have been controversial. But I want to remind readers: my estimate of about 285,000 men in the former lands of Arnor may seem high, but it yields a density of only around 1 man per square mile, similar to medieval Mongolia. It is a great barren wasteland with only one meaningful “urban” center for men (Bree), a handful of other villages (fishers along the coast, woodmen in Eryn Vorn, the last vestiges of hillmen in Rhudaur, Dunedain in the Angle, maybe some outlying Breelanders, Lossoth who wandered south, maybe some squatters in the ruins of Annuminas or Fornost, a small village near Tharbad perhaps, etc), hermits and holdouts living on their own, and probably some pastoralists. Arnor is full of good land and the Dunedain keep the orcish threats mostly under control. A world where the Shire can exist is a world where there must be some villages along the Lune and some shepherds around Annuminas.
Moreover, when Aragorn re-establishes Arnor, while it’s totally plausible that he brings settlers from Gondor, he’s also simultaneously resettling Ithilien and fighting a series of costly wars. There’s just no way he rebuilds the cities of the north without some indigenous population outside of Bree. Not a big population! Not a settled one! But I just can’t accept the notion that nobody is exploiting the vacant lands of Arnor, especially since the Hobbits when they get the chance colonize Buckland readily enough. One imagines that if there were totally empty and easy lands available, somewhere besides the ominous fringes of the Old Forest would have been colonized first! Rather, we should assume Eriador has a thin, diffuse, unsettled, plausibly even pastoralist population. When they need metal goods they trade for them with the Dwarves in the Blue Mountains or at Bree (or even in the Shire), exchanging hides, wool, game, etc.
I suspect my assessment of human populations further south and east are fairly acceptable. For what it’s worth, my figures suggest the Easterlings in total could field between 12 and 35,000 men, which seems about right given their vague scale in the Siege of Gondor alongside their concurrent assault on Erebor.
What About Orcs?
Initially, I did not estimate orcs. But here, I have done so. My method was straightforward: first, I created population estimates of the other peoples. Then, I assessed how many people various states governed. From there I estimated their deployable army size. Then I looked for battles against orcs. Based on the description and outcome of the battle, if we know the size and composition of the armies of the goodguys, we can guess the size of the armies of orcs. From there, I assume that the deployable expeditionary capacity of orcs is around 1-to-4 or 1-to-6, meaning, whereas it might take 60 men to support 1 deployable combatant, it takes just 4–6 orcs. So we multiply army size by 4–6.
I think we can assume from Frodo and Sam’s journey through Mordor that Sauron’s mobilized army was supporting by a numerous host of non-frontline-orcs, orcs running manufacturing and logistics and other operations within Mordor. If we assume that Sauron sent approximately 50,000 orcs to the Siege of Gondor, lost 60% of them, then fielded 50,000 at the Battle of the Morannon, plus another 20,000 or so scattered around as garrisons, that gives him about 90–100,000 “soldier orcs.” That means at least 200,000 orcs in the heartland of Mordor, Gorgoroth and the Morgul Vale, and very plausibly 600,000. Adding in orcs at Dol Goldur and the goblins of the Misty Mountains, we can guess perhaps 500,000–1,500,000 orcs and goblins in Middle Earth. Here are my guesses for orcs in TA 3019:
With 810,000 orcs in total, that brings the population of Middle Earth including orcs to 7.6 million.
