Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6854440" data-attributes="member: 4937">Rivendell wasn't really a city though.  It was a large fortified manor house or castle.  Caras Galadhon and Mithlond were the last high elf cities in Middle Earth.  From what little we know of Caras Galadhon, the description I gave of an elf city in my earlier post would seem to largely apply, except that it also had a physical wall about it (and a river diverted to form a moat) and was perhaps larger in scale and slightly denser in its center.  The very great size of the city in the text doesn't seem to correspond to the sort of numbers of inhabitants that a similarly sized human city would have - which would have been 100's of thousands.   Caras Galadhon appears to have been something like a large number of ewok villages, somewhat loosely scattered until you reached the center of it where there were numbers of large communal buildings.  Even this density seems to have been something designed to provide for security against nearby enemies.  Typical paintings of Caras Galadhon don't provide for the economic and agricultural life of the city.  So that Caras Galadhon for a D&D inspired RPG setting would look more like an epic scale version of the wilderness seeming city I described seems perfectly appropriate to me, and for my large elven capitals that would be very much the case.   An elven capital might be a 20'x20' mile city with a population density of no more than 60-70 per square mile owing to large tracts of meandering parkland and orchards.  Only in communal centers, normally collections of temples and government buildings, would it look anything like a city to human eyes or have anything approaching urban density.Mithlond was a commercial center and a port, and as such probably had much greater density of buildings to provide for the labor needed to build large vessels and to handle cargo and so forth.  And likewise, being threatened, it probably was walled and otherwise fortified.  So it might well have looked something like a graceful version of a human city, and presumably cities like Minas Tirith were at least partially inspired by that sort of design.  Indeed, Minas Tirith appears to be made something like a miniature scale version of Gondolin, notably having a less elaborate system of gates.  But one trope that is common to paintings of elven cities that I don't think you'd ever see in a real one is lots of waterfalls incorporated into the buildings.  That's so clearly a human imagination of a city in a natural setting and not something they'd build.  They might build near a waterfall, but only in such a way that the very predictable erosion the waterfall would cause over the course of centuries would not interfere with the design.  A typical waterfall would erode back 10's of meters in the lifetime of an elf.   An elf doesn't see trees and rocks as being stable enduring things, but as transient like flowers.</blockquote>

Verification