# making a living in ME



## greypilgrim (Jan 15, 2003)

What do you think people (Elves and Dwarves also) through the ages did for living? There was trade between the Elves of Beleriand and Dwarves, but what might they have traded? And also, tied in w/this question, what was the form of commerce between the peoples of each race? Gold?
Name some jobs that anyone in ME might hold. We know farming was one profession, as evidenced by the Shirefolk. Also mining, by the Dwarves. But where would they take their goods? A Trading Post or something like that? I think this should be debated. Any Ideas?


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## Aulë (Jan 16, 2003)

Probably the same sorts of jobs that were aailable on Earth during the middle ages....

blacksmiths
carpenters
cooks
servents
gardeners
inventors
etc etc...


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## Beleg (Oct 3, 2003)

Tolkien wrote in _Letter No 154_ to *Naomi Mitchison*



> Yours is the only comment that I have seen that, besides treating the book as 'literature', at least in intent, and even taking it seriously (and praising or ridiculing it accordingly), also sees it as an elaborate form of the game of inventing a country – an endless one, because even a committee of experts in different branches could not complete the overall picture.* I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archaeology and realien than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like. Not to mention music and its apparatus. I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the 'mortals' go. Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out: Gondor has sufficient 'townlands' and fiefs with a good water and road approach to provide for its population; and clearly has many industries though these are hardly alluded to. The Shire is placed in a water and mountain situation and a distance from the sea and a latitude that would give it a natural fertility, quite apart from the stated fact that it was a well-tended region when they took it over (no doubt with a good deal of older ans and crafts). The Shire-hobbits have no very great need of metals, but the Dwarfs are agents; and in the east of the Mountains of Lune are some of their mines (as shown in the earlier legends) : no doubt, the reason, or one of them, for their often crossing the Shire.*


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## Inderjit S (Oct 3, 2003)

*Relations Between Men and Dwarves*

As well as the description in _The Hobbit_ about trade relations between the men of Dale and Laketown and the Dwarves of Erebor there were other alliances in the S.A between the two.

These are described in _Of Dwarves and Men_ (HoME 12) in which Men supplied the Dwarves with food, (herdsmen, Shepard’s and land-tillers) and the Dwarves supplied them with work as builders, roadmakers, miners and makers of things of craft.

Hobbit's would have had varying professions. The 'Gamgees' are very much a working-class Hobbit family. It seems gardening was in their blood, they have had at least one accomplished gardner in each generation from Holman 'The greenhanded' to Sam. They also had a strain of roping within them, seemingly introduced when Rowan Gamgee (Eldest child of Holman) married Hob Gammidge. Sam's eldest brother, Hamson joined his Uncle Andy in Tighfield as a roper. There were also smithies in the Shire.


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## Kahmûl (Oct 12, 2003)

Some Hobbits would have jobs in inns.


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