Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26149161-20160212211558/@comment-26172435-20160214180928

I've just been reading some more in-depth analysis on the state of Eriador at the end of the 3rd age. What strikes me is that most scholars only focus on what Tolkien did say, and seem to have some blind spot on what Tolkien did not say, and for the logic of fertile lands, climate, demography & population dynamics, etcetera. Eriador is the size of France (!) ... populations tend to recover from disease and intense war over the period of time and resettle lands that weren't scorched and lost to vegetation (and habitation) for eternity. The history of the last centuries preceding the LOTR trilogy does not seem to indicate the peoples of Eriador would not have been able to recover and resettle major parts of the former realms of Arthedain and Cardolan. Lore mentions no larger villages or towns other than the specifically mentioned few remained ... but it doesn't specify how large large is. Common sense whispers in my ear that there must have been dozens of smaller villages around mills, inns and crossroads, and hundreds of hamlets spread across the countryside. My guess is that Mevans and his team realize this and they have set the spawning rates of Rangers of the North in the Eriador biome accordingly.

Note that the Shire, estimated to have some tens of thousands of inhabitants only covers a region as big as present day Ile-de-France. It may very well have been the most densely populated area of Eriador ... but that doesn't mean it had more inhabitants than the surrounding 'free lands'. The area between the Shire, the Emyn Uial and the Blue Mountains may have hosted several tens of thousands of people from former Arthedain clans, who may not have pledged allegiance to the descendants of Aranarth and the Dunedain, but would likely have been just as hostile to the forces of Angmar and their allies in the Rhudaur and the Misties.

Concluding: I think the notion of Dunedain as elite + 'militia' or local defense groups as main forces in Eriador still holds. The ratio between local presence ('spawns') of both types of forces may likely have been somewhere between 1:1 and 1:10, where the lowest ratio will hold for the east and the higest ratio for the west and the North Downs.