Q: How Large was the Long Lake?
ANSWER: A reader wants to know if the Long Lake was “big enough to support commercial fishing”. Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean by “commercial fishing”. Obviously we’re talking about on scales that would have been appropriate in the Classical or Medieval European civilizations. But I don’t know enough about the history of commercial fishing to say much.
Based on what I could find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, true commercial fishing (based on fisheries) may have been developed in the late Renaissance or early Modern period in Europe. The ancient Egyptians used boats and nets to catch fish on the Nile river but regardless of what scale they achieved modern fisheries are somehow distinguished from more ancient boat-and-net fishing. A modern fishery consist of the people, equipment, waters, and species of fish that are being harvested.
All that aside, I think it’s fair to say that there was plenty of fishing on the Long Lake. The Hobbit tells us that the Men of the Long Lake had once maintained a war fleet that fought with other peoples living south of the Lake-town. And, frankly, if you’re living in a town built out over the water why would you not include fish in your diet. But we cannot say with certainty that Tolkien only imagined subsistence fishing.
As for how large the Long Lake was, Tolkien does not provide much information. In The Hobbit he writes:
The sun had set when turning with another sweep towards the East the forest-river rushed into the Long Lake. There it had a wide mouth with stony clifflike gates at either side whose feet were piled with shingles. The Long Lake! Bilbo had never imagined that any water that was not the sea could look so big. It was so wide that the opposite shores looked small and far, but it was so long that its northerly end, which pointed towards the Mountain, could not be seen at all. Only from the map did Bilbo know that away up there, where the stars of the Wain were already twinkling, the Running River came down into the lake from Dale and with the Forest River filled with deep waters what must once have been a great deep rocky valley. At the southern end the doubled waters poured out again over high waterfalls and ran away hurriedly to unknown lands. In the still evening air the noise of the falls could be heard like a distant roar.
If Bilbo could see the far side of the lake it must have been less than 26 miles wide at that point. Lake Town was situated near the mouth of the Forest River, which fed into the Long Lake in the northern half. Bilbo could not see the northern shore which must have been more than 26 miles away. So maybe the lake was approximately 60 miles long and 25 miles wide, give or take. That is about 1500 square miles, in which I think there would be plenty of fish for the men of Lake Town to live on. I should note here that if you use the map published in The Lord of the Rings the scale does not match my estimate. I would trust the narrative of The Hobbit more than the map, which grew by accretion.
When the Men of Lake Town saw the first sign of Smaug’s approach Bard’s companions accused him of foreboding poisoned fish, which clearly implies the people of the town had an interest in fish. But this is really all we know of Lake Town’s connection to fish. In the “Hobbit” movies there are plenty of references to fishing on the lake and I think these are reasonable.
I would say that a fair extrapolation might be this: when Lake Town was in its heyday and more powerful it probably harvested enough fish from the lake to support its population. Because the River Running would have supported many fish along its length I doubt that Lake Town would have found many opportunities to trade fish with other people living to the south. The Elves would have been able to fish the Forest River, too.
But maybe the Dwarves of the Iron Hills would have traded for fish from the Long Lake.
In any event, with a town built over the lake it would be almost impossible for anyone to not be able to fish. Commercial fishing might have existed only to the extent that specialized tradesmen (such as carpenters) would have needed to buy the fish from local fisherman. I imagine a small fleet of boats and nets would have been used to catch enough fish to support the town but probably no more than that when Bilbo arrived.
If the Dwarves of the Iron Hills really needed fish the Carnen flowed south of the Iron Hills. Presumably they could have gotten fish from those waters more easily.
# # #
Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
1500 square miles, wow that’s big but I like this speculation much more than Karen Fonstad Atlas which is…93 square miles if I am not mistaken. I really like the whole legendary backstory of Esgaroth, the ancient wars and fleets of boats and riches flowing down the river 🙂 and the fact that Long Lake is in fact an ancient valley flooded by confluence of two rivers. Certainly the lake is big enough to sustain a large population of fishers. I think it’s a safe bet that much of the ESgaroth’s economy was based on fishing industry so to speak :). But of course there are mentioned fields, pastures and woods and huts and buildings on the shore to provide agricultural background and of course the trade. Lake-town is after all closest thing to a mercantile republic hehe and if even during The Hobbit a Master of Lake-town had “great gilded boat” then it must be really profitable trade even in hard times.
As drawn on the LoTR maps Long Lake is a bit smaller than Nen Hithoel, the impoundment behind Rauros. I’ve always imagined northerly lands were drawn with foreshortened perspective (the inverse of Mercator projection distortions), so let’s give Long Lake credit for being somewhat larger than drawn.
Still, I’d have to take issue with your estimate of distances. Your reckoning of distance-to-horizon is off by a factor of 10 for a Hobbit-sized observer. Per this dandy web page, https://dizzib.github.io/earth/curve-calc/… assuming Bilbo’s eye level is 42″ above lake level, and that the diameter of Middle-earth is similar to that of modern Earth, the distance to the horizon would be about 2.3 miles (even for Treebeard, it’d be just 4.7 miles). As drawn, the lake’s length is about three times its maximum width, so something like 6-8 miles. That’s far too small to sustain much more than a good sport fishery, though certainly enough to push the northern shore below Bilbo’s horizon.
I prefer that legendary body of water to be worthy of legend (and small-scale commercial fishery), so let’s assume the lake was 4-5 times longer than it is wide, and that Bilbo scaled those “stony clifflike” banks to have a better look around. If the bluffs were 50 feet tall, that’d give him a 9-mile horizon. I’ve always equated Long Lake with Switzerland’s Lake Geneva (45 x 8.7 miles) or Lake Constance (39 x 8.7 miles), and there’s that unavoidable association with Swiss lake-dwellers…. The numbers may be fudged, but they have a satisfying ring to them.
Meanwhile, at a lake width of 26 miles, an object on the far shore would have to be 455 feet tall to break above Bilbo’s horizon. Certainly the Lonely Mountain would do it, and Gandalf would be visible (perhaps to Legolas), pacing atop Orthanc (allowing for the tower’s displacement in both time and space).
In a non-mechanized economy of that sort, commercial fishery and commercial agriculture was not far removed from subsistence, producing perhaps 5-10 times what one required for personal need. It doesn’t seem likely that Long Lake would have produced quantities sufficient for distant trade – a town the size of Esgaroth or Dale might consume it all.
Besides, fish as long-distance trade goods seems problematic. The transportation infrastructure didn’t lend itself to bulk transport beyond the river valleys. Air-dried fish, like lembas, would travel well, but I doubt, so far from the sea, there would have been sufficient salt for salt-curing/brine-pickling. Considering the availability of wine, vinegar-pickled fish might have been practical for trade with the Elves of Mirkwood, but if there was such trade, surely at least one of the book’s barrel-packed dwarves would have smelt fishy (they did in The Desolation of Smaug, of course, but that’s the movies for ya).
Then, there’s the question of whether anyone in Lake Town would fish from their open windows. Most likely, not. Like Venetians, Esgarothers were more likely to dump their chamber pots from those windows than reel anything in. Nearby waters would also be too fouled to fish. With the generous inflow and outflow from the lake, we can hope that the ecosystem as a whole would be adequately flushed, but as a cold-climate lake, there would be relatively low levels of biological cleansing. More or less, whatever happens in Lake Town stays in Lake Town.
Altogether, I’d suspect that fish was not quite a staple of the diet, but not quite a luxury, either.
This was my question, thank you for answering!
These conclusions match pretty closely with the research I had done. I had factored Long Lake much smaller- more along Fontad’s measurements, which I think was 24 miles long and 5 miles wide, if my memory serves. I looked into methods of estimating fish population- of course many variables, including climate, species present, etc. I concluded that Laketown probably could support some level of “commercial fishing”, certainly enough to feed the denizens. The movie’s scene of Bard with 10 or so barrels full of fish didn’t strike me as unreasonable. The Sea of Galilee fishing in classical times seemed to be a good comparison. Using the expanded measurements that this article speculates, the possibilities open up even wider.
The point Dave Marx brought up about the pollution is an excellent one though, too. It may well have been a poor fishery.