Thought for the Evening: Dwarven Economies
How does one have an underground -- as in literally underground -- economy? This is a question that is often raised with regard to Dwarves in fantasy fiction, and Rings of Power has had an entire plotline, to the extent that it has plotlines, tied up with the economy of Khazad-dum, so it has been on my mind.
The puzzles of the question are largely tied to the fact that fantasy readers have tended to be fascinated by great underground Dwarven cities. These are not the only kinds of Dwarven dwelling that we find in fantasy fiction, however. For instance, in The Silmarillion, Turin Turambar and his band of outlaws make an agreement to share the halls of a 'Petty Dwarf' named Mim. It's pretty clear that while the halls of Mim are spacious, taking up much of a large hill or small mountain, that they are not a huge city; it basically supports Mim, his dwindling family, and the outlaws. Their food is primarily from hunting and foraging. And this is, despite what one might think, scalable. It's not common to have big cities based on hunting and foraging, and it obviously requires the right location, but such cities have existed. The earliest urban settlements were almost certainly still heavily grounded in hunting and foraging practices, supplemented by the slow rise of animal domestication and farming, which it is tempting to see as regularized and systematized versions of hunting and foraging themselves. (In fact, if you look at sophisticated foraging practices, they start blurring into something like horticulture, as foragers start encouraging the growth of the kinds of plants they forage.) One would expect there to be lots of cases like this in a population of Dwarves.
Of course, there's more of a puzzle with large Dwarven cities, because of their sheer size. But this is not a distinctively Dwarven problem; urban settlements are by their nature not self-sustaining. This tends to be blurred with the English word 'city', which talks about urban settlements as if they were their own distinctive things. The ancient Greek term, polis, was more honest; 'polis' is often translated as 'city' or 'city-state', and so it was, but it was the relatively self-sufficient unit, not just the urban center. The polis of Athens included not only Athens proper, but its silver mines to the north, its harbors to the south, and all of the farmlands around the city walls. During the Peloponnesian War, faced with regular Spartan raid and pillaging, the Athenians passed an unusual law requiring pretty much all Athenian citizens to live within the Long Walls. But when it was safe, the farmers would go out to their farms outside the city. It seems odd to us, perhaps, for farmers not to live permanently on their own farms, but it's not unheard of; Socrates's friend, Crito, was a farmer who lived in Athens and did very well as a farmer. Xenophon's dialogue, Oikonomikos, has a character, Ischomachus, who lives in the city and goes out every morning to his farms; to be sure, he has servants who take care of things, and presumably they sometimes have to stay the night to look after things, but it seems plausible (although we do not know) that they took turns rather than all staying at the farm all the time. One could well imagine a Dwarven polity that worked much like this; there might be lots of Dwarven farmers, but they live in the underground city and just regularly go out to take care of their mountain farms and gardens. This is actually a potential advantage of an underground city -- you could have terrace farming right above the cave system, so it might not be a long distance at all. Terrace farming is usually thought of as labor-intensive, but much of the labor is the engineering and maintenance, for which Dwarves seem ideally suited. The Incans lived in mountain cities (above ground, of course) that were sustained almost entirely by terrace farming on extremely steep mountainsides. For security reasons the Dwarves would want to control the land above their heads, and that's a land, even in mountainous country, that can be used to farm.
Of course, one would expect a great Dwarven urban settlement not to be sustained entirely by its own farming at all. Large urban centers are the ideal places for two things that provide another option entirely: big markets and hard-to-get goods. Cohokia Mounds is an ancient North American city (in modern-day Illinois, near St. Louis) that existed from about the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries; it was an urban settlement that might have had around 20,000 people or so, perhaps up to 40,000 at its height, largely due to a handicraft monopoly or near-monopoly on stone implements which were trading far and wide through the river system. Dwarves in fantasy are always famous for their craftsmanship and aristanship; at the lower end, they are major suppliers of necessary tools, and at the higher end they have a near-monopoly on many kinds of luxury goods that few others, if anyone, can make. Even setting that aside, they control high-demand raw materials like gold, silver, and gems. Thus over time they grow fantastically wealthy, every Dwarven city becoming a major hub in a large trading network. In the Peloponnesian War, there were significant periods, in which almost all the food in Athens was shipped in; it was a central feature of why the Spartans couldn't choke Athens into submission despite regularly destroying its farmlands. It was immensely expensive; in Athens's case, it was funded by the city's notorious appropriation of the Delian League treasury and tribute system for its own use. But if you have the money, you can do it -- as indeed, all major modern cities mostly do. You wouldn't want to rely only on it, unless you can always guarantee your far-flung supply lines, but most of the time Dwarves could easily trade for anything they want, in any quantity they want.
You can imagine features that Dwarven cities in particular might have to make themselves more sustainable. Plants need some form of sunlight, and the kinds of plants that can rely on very dim light near cave openings or from lantern-like light sources are not robust enough to sustain many people. Rings of Power shows the Dwarves constructing large underground gardens by bringing the sunlight down with mirrors -- a neat idea, and one suitable to the Dwarves, but also one that could not conceivably maintain a city on its own. But there is an important source of food that does not require photosynthesis at all: fungi. It would not be difficult to have mushroom gardens in Dwarven cities. Les Caves Champignonnières des Roches, in the Loire Valley, is a cave system that is used to grow mushrooms. It's a mixture of caves and old linked mines. There is something like 75 miles worth of caves and tunnels there, used mostly for mushroom growing. There is even an underground 'village' -- actually a sculpture of a village by the original miners (it's worth seeing pictures) -- but one could imagine Dwarves actually having little underground villages that oversee mushroom farming on the outskirts of their cities. They can also have fish from underground rivers and lakes.
And of course, Dwarves are not Men. Dwarves in fantasy usually seem to eat quite heartily, but they also tend to be a hardy folk that can easily endure deprivations that would be hard for us. They might not have anything like the food requirements we do, being more efficiently built, or they may live on a much less consistent schedule of eating than we do, most of the time alternating long periods of fast with small meals, but occasionally making up for it with huge feasts. One suspects that Dwarves are the sort of people who get so caught up in their work that they forget to eat, then impatiently chomp on a handful of something before getting back to what they were doing.
Various Links of Interest
* William Vallicella, Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?, at "Philosophy in Progress"
* Helen De Cruz, Friendship with the ancients (PDF)
* E. J. Green, Newly Sighted Perceivers and the Relation between Sight and Touch (PDF)
* James Chastek, We have met the human non-person, and..., at "Just Thomism"
* Camilla Kronqvist, A Personal Love of the Good (PDF)
Currently Reading
The Saga of the Jomsvikings
Wolfram Kinzig, A History of Early Christian Creeds
In Audiobook
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (narrated by Rob Inglis)
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (narrated by Douglas Gresham)
C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (narrated by Ralph Cosham)
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (narrated by Simon Vance)
Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches (narrated by Jennifer Ikeda)
