[Rumil]

Hi Alatar,

interesting question!

I'm also familiar with the slag heaps, coal mines and steelworks from South Wales.

There's an old joke- Two blokes come out of the pub so drunk that they don't know what time of day it is 'Is that the moon Dai, or is that the Sun?' 'Dunno' says Dai, 'Lets ask this bloke by here'. The bloke answers - 'Dunno either, but I'm not drunk, I'm from Port Talbot'.

(Port Talbot being the big steelworks where it was believed you could never see the sun or moon due to the smoke).

Now I think JRRT was trying to emphasise the difference between industrial production and what you might call 'cottage industry'. Industrial production, ie Mordor, Isengard, Pennsylvania, S Wales etc was on such an enormous scale that the landscape itself is radically changed and scarred. Cottage-scale metalworking, a product of craft by one or a few men rather than a full industry, doesn't make the same scale of mess.

I suppose Rohan, Gondor, Rivendell and most big-ish communities had specialist swordsmiths and armourers, probably running their furnaces on charcoal from the forests. Not too different from the legendary Wayland and his forge. Surely the Shire would have had blacksmiths at least, and likely skilled metal-workers (for umbrellas, clocks etc). I guess the waste would have been disposed of 'somewhere round the back' - can't have metalworking spoiling the gleaming aspect of Minas Tirith after all!

Probably of the free peoples only the Dwarves had metalworking on a medium scale, but their forges were apparently hidden in caverns and fueled on coal (so as not to annoy Yavanna and the ents!) and the waste likewise hidden away presumably. Does make me wonder if Gondor had medium scale metalworking, but confined to an obscure corner of Minas Tirith or one of the outlands.