Greetings from Moria

[truepenny]

So when Tolkien says the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep, how deep d'you suppose that actually was? In feet?

(Yes, this is for a story.)

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I've always felt that "too deep" was into Hell, given Tolkienian sensibilities.

How deep was Hell supposed to be?

Orpheus could walk up and down from Hades.

Several hundred feet, in any event. More than that I'm not willing to guess. Maybe you need a poll.

[carbonel]

According to June Tabor and the Oyster Band, Hell is dark and hell is deep, and Hell is full of mice. But it doesn't say anything about how deep it actually is.

I'd say as deep as 19th century coal mines went down, or maybe a bit more.

[alice_montrose]

Hmmm... as deep as the Balrog wanted them to, probably. :)

[woodrunner.livejournal.com]

Deeper than the deepest mine on earth, but not quite as deep as it takes to get to the earth's core?

Wiki claims 3.9km (as of 2008) as the deepest mine; in comparison, the mantle is about 3000 km thick, but that's variable depending on location and starting point (bottom of the ocean vs Everest).

The deeper you go, the hotter it gets and the less ventilation (or air) there is, but Dwarves being more robust than Men could easily tolerate more at greater depths?

[inamac.livejournal.com]

Is that Hobbit feet or dwarf feet? These things make a difference.

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

Pursuant to other comments RE: Hell and Hades, in Hesiod's Theogeny when the Titans are defeated by Zeus and cast down into Tartaros (which seems like the sort of place which would be Too Deep), it says that Tartaros is as far beneath the earth as the sky is above it, and that a bronze anvil falling from the earth would need nine full days to reach Tartaros.

Which, according to quick consultation of the laws of physics, if you let the acceleration of gravity be constant, would be 7,986,460 feet.

(I have no idea if this will be helpful. Really I only did the calculation because I was reading the Theogony last night for classwork and wondered myself how far down it would be.)

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

What does the bronze anvil squash when it reaches Tartaros?

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

--Actually, sorry, was remembering the physics wrong. 1.944*10^13 feet. (Which is completely meaningless as a physical quantity, since the Earth has nowhere near that diameter, but there you have it.)

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

Hesiod is unusually reticent on that particular matter.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

But Hellmouths go to other dimensions*, so the Earth's diameter is irrelevant.

*This I know/For the Ripper tells me so.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Suddenly I want the AU in which Giles is Jack the Ripper, and being Buffy's Watcher is his punishment. Because whoa.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

*applauds*

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh, sacred flaily WANT.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The terrible thing is that I immediately see how this could work as a Babylon 5 tie-in.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Unless the dwarves had magical pumps and the ability to construct pump chains, that is far deeper than they could actually dig. The first problem in digging a mine is keeping it from filling with water. Going down more than a hundred feet without any pumps is quite difficult and takes quite a bit of luck.

The ventilation problem is comparatively *much* easier, since you don't run into serious ventilation problems until you have pumps and the ability to chain them *and* the ability to keep them running... which is why we invented steam engines.

[woodrunner.livejournal.com]

Very good point. I'd forgotten about the water. You'd think I'd know that, growing up in a mining town.

[magpie49.livejournal.com]

My definition of "too greedily" is that they found a stratum where the stuff they wanted was very abundant, and they didn't leave enough stuff-bearing rock to for tunnel walls and support structure.

Maybe the "too deeply" was that they went down from one stuff-bearing stratum, through a layer of dross and found more layers of stuff-they-wanted atop one another like blueberry pancakes and executed the "too greedily" again.

As for the depth in feet, I was thinking the dwarves could go miles down into the earth. I asked google about the deepest existing mines and found this tidbit (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/YefimCavalier.shtml):

Many problems arise when digging so deep into the Earth. The most obvious is the heat. For example, at 5 km the temperature reaches 70 degrees Celsius and therefore massive cooling equipment is needed to allow workers to survive at such depths. Another problem is the weight of the rock. For example, at 3.5 km the pressure of rocks above you is 9,500 tones per meter squared, or about 920 times normal atmospheric pressure. When rock is removed through mining this pressure triples in the surrounding rock. This effect coupled with the cooling of the rock causes a phenomenon known as rock bursts, which accounts for many of the 250 deaths in South African mines every year.

Yefim Cavalier -- 2003

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Seconded!

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The reflexive answer I had was "beyond the ken of Man."

Thousands of feet it would seem to me - a league?

[aliseadae]

Heh.

[svalar-unnir.livejournal.com]

Is Arda spherical, though? I seem to remember it being flat, but I might be confusing it with Narnia.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

HELL, yeah!

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

"Magical" engineering was well within the demonstrated capabilities of the old races of Middle Earth. (Putting a major city up in trees has problems *too*.) The Dwarves obviously had their drainage and cooling problems under control -- more so than our civilization, in that Moria didn't drown when the engineers all called in absent on account of Balrog.

I would happily accept three-mile-deep Dwarven mines. (I may be influenced by the fact that I just replayed "Myst 5", some of which takes place in a three-mile-deep underground city.)

Didn't Gandalf's account of the fight wind up in a lake far below the mountain? If we're being vaguely realistic about geology, that has to still be within Dwarf-worked depths. Open spaces don't naturally occur that far down -- Verne notwithstanding. I don't remember if it was a *cold* lake, though.

[blue-underwing.livejournal.com]

It's actually half that, about 9.7*10^12, assuming no friction: distance = g(time^2)/2

That's still over two hundred THOUSAND Earth diameters, so it doesn't make that much difference.

[curuchamion.livejournal.com]

Arda was flat until the Fall of Numenor, then it was made round when Valinor was removed from the circles of the world.

The Tale of Years tells me the Balrog first started causing trouble in Moria in the year 1980, Third Age - so at that time, Arda was spherical.