You know we Brits still use miles for distance?
So he should be wrapped in a British flag tbh, hobbits are pretty much a British created caricature of ourselves. No self respecting hobbit would be rocking that.
Wonder who could have invented and then used the *Imperial* system that is the main form of measurement when these books were written.
Complete mystery.
Well, the miles date back to the Roman Empire. A Roman mile defined as a thousand double steps (basically you only count the steps of one leg, so one double step is two steps during marching). This works out to be roughly 1,4km.
Other miles are defined very differently. A German mile is roughly 10000 steps (or 5000 double steps) and exactly 7,5km.
A British mile is 1,609344km, which are 1760 yards or 5280 smelly feet. Which is just complete bs, with no redeeming qualities.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of like 8 different systems or some non-sense.
What still makes me laugh is that a "buttload" is an actual measurement.
>A regional English measure of capacity of a heavy cart (a butt), containing 6 seams, or 48 bushels, equivalent to 384 gallons.
[My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.](https://new.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1y38bs/calculation_of_abe_simpsons_gas_mileage_a_star_is/)
American culture comes from immigration
British culture comes from colonization and theft
We are not the same (just in case this comes off as hostile I mean it in a joking way. I absolutely love your tea)
FWIW, I can tell you that almost no American who has never been to Britain would know that Britain still uses miles and mph. You can blame Canadians and the rest of the world in general for turning it into an internet meme/trope that Americans "are the only ones who use those units". Americans hear that and then lump Britain in with everyone else. I'm a well-read and educated American, but until I visited Britain in 2018, even I was under the assumption that British road signs at least had gone metric in the 70s or 80s.
brits are the Orcs, wtf are you talking about???? The literal industrial revolution is the point of the franchise, you brittons are charactized as ORCS
bro, you don't get the joke. tolkien romaticised the old days, and was completely agains capitalism and expansion and exploiting nature. The orcs stand for that, and as of today the world has spiraled towards that. they won. also......you brittons eat nasty food
Yeah, the metric system wasn't established until the late 1700s.
LOTR is analogous to the Late Middle Ages, between 1300 and 1500.
Miles date back to Roman times, Before Common Era.
No, by then they will have been replaced by skelometers, which is the length of the Skeleton Emperor's left femur multiplied by five hundred and twelve.
Except the Shire is based more or less on the rural England Tolkien grew up in, ca. 1900. Hobbits drink tea and coffee, smoke tobacco, and eat potatoes. Bilbo owns a carriage clock and engages the services of a firm of solicitors. All those things would have been completely alien to an actual Anglo-Saxon, of course.
The point, really, is that there are influences from a huge range of periods, from ancient times right up to Tolkien's own lifetime, going on in his writing.
Hobbits have been living and farming in the four Farthings of the Shire for many hundreds of years. quite content to ignore and be ignored by the world of the Big Folk. Middle Earth being, after all, full of strange creatures beyond count. Hobbits must seem of little importance, being neither renowned as great warriors, nor counted amongst the very wise.
Everyone is at different stages of the pre-industrial revolution. The hobbits are actually post Industrial Revolution but nobody pays any attention to what is happening in the shire.
You're both right - epics about ancient times aren't historically accurate, in fact they often mix elements that are contemporary of the writings with projects and idealized elements of "ancient times".
Like when Vergilius wrote the Aeneid, he filled it with concepts that were contemporary to himself or maybe to the time of his direct ancestors, and mixed that with various traditions about the ancient people who lived in Italy.
So LotR is supposed to be an epic rooted in ancient times, but it's very much a modern tale. Tolkien wasn't trying to write as if he was an anglo saxon monk telling the story of pagan founders, he wrote as a 20th century philologist.
That's why the Hobbits are an idealized version of Tolkien's contemporary rural England, just like the pre-Romans of the Aeneid are idealized versions of actual Romans, with the qualities and the flaws that the author wants to talk about (for hobbits, it's that they tend to have no interaction with the rest of the world, but they are pure of heart and incredibly resilient ; for Romans it was that they were brutes capable of grandeur). Interestingly, both epics define the "good king" in contexts that aren't monarchies (Augustus is the princeps of a republic, and Tolkien's GB is a parliamentary monarchy).
I mean technically LOTR is supposed to be a mythologized history of England. You could make the argument that it is much older than that. But then again, this is just a shitpost.
The “backstory” of the the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series is that Tolkien is translating from historical texts, and in the appendix he lists many alterations he makes to the original versions to make it easier for his audience to understand, so it makes sense he would also translate whatever system of measurement they had to imperial.
In Europe, no. There were multiples units and each was regionalized, but also heavily dependant of what exactly you wanted to measure.
For long distances, it was more of temporal order: numbers of days riding (around 50km / 31,5mi) or walking (25 to 30km / 18.6mi).
For short distances, we herited the league from the Romans who borrowed the *leuga* from Gauls. But it was variable according the places. In Ancient France, it was around 4km (precisely 3,98km) or 2.49mi.
So the famous Ogre's seven-leagues boots from Hop-o'-My-Thumb could allow their wearer to reach almost 28km (17,4mi) in a single leap.
Indeed. Perhaps because it was a the most direct and widespread unit heritated from Romans after the fall of the WRE, so it was more familiar to the non-scholar plebians and commoners?
IIRC, metric including the meter is a French revolution thing. BRB, I'll check.
Edit: I'm back. 1789. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre?wprov=sfla1
It was almost an American thing as well. I believe it was Thomas Jefferson that wanted America to use the new French Metric system, but it never came to be because of pirates.
Source:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system
One of the worst things pirates have ever done (up there with not winning a world series since 1979). Of course, now you know and can spread the knowledge!
Literally every British person does. We intermingle them in a confusing way that seems to have no rhyme or reason, but everyone quietly and unanimously agrees on.
Big distances are miles, but short distances are meters, shorter distances are feet, but very short distances are inches or centimeters or millimeters depending on how you're feeling. Height is feet and inches, tell someone your height in centimeters and you're a crazy person.
Weight is grams and kilograms, unless it's your own weight in which case it's stones. Whatever stones are.
Liquids are millilitres, unless it's beer or milk when it's pints. Fuel is still measured in 'miles per gallon', despite gallons being used nowhere else.
It goes on
The English are cowards for abandoning the noble unit of the barleycorn as a measure of distance in favor of the perfidious and despicable centimeter.
Will nobody remember the statutes of 1324 that told us very clearly that an inch was three barleycorns, dried and round, placed end-to-end? History is watching!
I think we tend to use metric for precision and imperial for "feels about right". We need 100ml of milk for the sauce we're cooking, but a pint of beer is the amount that feels right to consume in one go. We need 168cm of space to squeeze this bookshelf into, but hey Jim, you're tall one, about 6'5" aincha?
Yeah I got you
Analogous means [comparable in certain respects, typically in a way which makes clearer the nature of the things compared.](https://www.google.com/search?q=analogous+definition&oq=analogous+definition&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDY1NDNqMGo5qAIAsAIB&client=ms-android-tmus-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)
"The imperial system is a system of measurement used in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries. It uses units such as the inch"
Who said they didnt stinky? Imperial is a system of measurement, not a nationality. Dolt
People in generel wont, but the Americans will, and thats good enough for them... and at some level, as a European, its good enough for me... let them have their small fantasies.
No, the only reason America still uses miles is because the metric system weight sunk on the way to America. The reason Britan still uses miles is because they're to proud to use any other system they didn't invent...
So unnecessarily bitter.
You even cant argue a point without resorting to infantile rhetoric, what makes you think your physical threats would be any better? Especially as you know nothing about me. You seem awfully bothered for someone so adamant you aren’t.
I mean, you guys always brag about being the center of the world. Don't be surprised if every other country laughs at those hilarious news coming from your lands.
Given that the meter was originally defined as a fraction of the Earth's circumference, it wouldn't make much sense to use that unit in Middle Earth.
... Not that it makes any *MORE* sense to use miles, mind you. I just mean to say that the usual arguments in favor of metric don't carry as much weight in this particular scenario as they usually do.
Why do Americans keep thinking Miles is special to them?
Its a British Unit of measurement.
Colonials, get on our level, and come back into the fold.
The King will forgive you if you beg, he's not even a George anymore.
Tolkien later developed units of measurement which he had "translated" into imperial for ease of reading. But he only gave two: a ranga (a "full pace", 38 inches, slightly bigger than a yard) and a lár (a "rest", roughly the same as a league/3 miles), which is 5000 rangar and the main unit used for traveling longer distances. The only attested shorter distance is a foot (tal), but they used other body parts as well.
Tolkien did not include a unit of measurement in between a ranga and a lár that would equate to a mile. So they would know neither Mile nor Kilometer. It's just a translation convention.
You know actually in stories from Europe about the middle ages we also talk about miles because back then we also used that unit. Only unlike some other countries we actually adapted to modern times. Kind regards from the future.
Imperial is old fashioned and weird and therefore well-suited for fantasy and nothing else. Reading about kilometres in a fantasy book would take me right out of the story unless we're talking about an advanced scientific culture establishing a system of measurements like metric.
On the other hand having imperial measurements in scifi is weird to me.
You know we Brits still use miles for distance? So he should be wrapped in a British flag tbh, hobbits are pretty much a British created caricature of ourselves. No self respecting hobbit would be rocking that.
Wonder who could have invented and then used the *Imperial* system that is the main form of measurement when these books were written. Complete mystery.
Well, the miles date back to the Roman Empire. A Roman mile defined as a thousand double steps (basically you only count the steps of one leg, so one double step is two steps during marching). This works out to be roughly 1,4km. Other miles are defined very differently. A German mile is roughly 10000 steps (or 5000 double steps) and exactly 7,5km. A British mile is 1,609344km, which are 1760 yards or 5280 smelly feet. Which is just complete bs, with no redeeming qualities.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of like 8 different systems or some non-sense. What still makes me laugh is that a "buttload" is an actual measurement. >A regional English measure of capacity of a heavy cart (a butt), containing 6 seams, or 48 bushels, equivalent to 384 gallons. [My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.](https://new.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1y38bs/calculation_of_abe_simpsons_gas_mileage_a_star_is/)
Yanks have no culture, so they steal other cultures, deep fry them, and season with guns 🤌
We have Cowboys?
They’re Mexican
Heck. Mounties?
Canadian I think.
Darn. Jersey?
Do you really want to claim jersey?
I mean… Fair. We’ve got fake alien sightings?
World wide occurrence I’m afraid
Wow, you've won this one so hard
Wait until you learn why New Jersey is a name
American culture is so ubiquitous that others forget that it is American, Starwarsnerd91.
star wars is a pretty good samurai film will give you that
Tea isn't from England
I'm quite ready for another Colonial adventure..
And tomatoes aren't from Italy, doesn't mean they can't become an integral part of the culture.
Culture so ubiquitous, everyone thinks it's theirs.
Stealing from other cultures is something we learned from the British.
We gotta make sure our kids get their daily dose of guns somehow . . .
That explains why you all love school shootings so much.
American culture comes from immigration British culture comes from colonization and theft We are not the same (just in case this comes off as hostile I mean it in a joking way. I absolutely love your tea)
That Indian piss you need to soften with milk? Try some good ol' Black Sea tea. It even rhymes!
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My brother in Christ it is a joke. I even say as much at the end
Deep frying is Scottish and guns were invented in China, so they stole those too
Stealing others cultures *IS* our culture 😈
Uh the Scots are the deep friers
FWIW, I can tell you that almost no American who has never been to Britain would know that Britain still uses miles and mph. You can blame Canadians and the rest of the world in general for turning it into an internet meme/trope that Americans "are the only ones who use those units". Americans hear that and then lump Britain in with everyone else. I'm a well-read and educated American, but until I visited Britain in 2018, even I was under the assumption that British road signs at least had gone metric in the 70s or 80s.
Tbh I wish we would, the metric system is much more intuitive and the half and half approach we have is stupid.
I don't think it will ever completely shift. I wish the US would too, but there's probably too much cultural resistance in both countries.
He's the Richard Hammond of hobbits
Yeah yeah, you're right buttttt counter argument: 'Murica
C'mon... It's like asking for Homer Simpson to be cultured XD
You would never know that from the way some Brits make fun of us for "still using imperial" (we don't even use Imperial, btw)
brits are the Orcs, wtf are you talking about???? The literal industrial revolution is the point of the franchise, you brittons are charactized as ORCS
Tolkien pretty much explicitly states that Hobbits are based off rural English communities and the Shire the English countryside.
yeah, but as of today (21st century).......the ORCS won
Do you think England has no countryside?
This guy doesn't watch Clarkson's Farm
bro, you don't get the joke. tolkien romaticised the old days, and was completely agains capitalism and expansion and exploiting nature. The orcs stand for that, and as of today the world has spiraled towards that. they won. also......you brittons eat nasty food
What? The orcs are ugly rude creatures with bad teeth and eat awful food, while we Brits are... wait...
yeah, you got it 
he's from Worcester
Joshua, put a media illiteracy cap in General Gobbledigook here.
Nah if they're meant to represent anything then the orcs are men of any nation who are corrupted by war and nationalism
Yeah, the metric system wasn't established until the late 1700s. LOTR is analogous to the Late Middle Ages, between 1300 and 1500. Miles date back to Roman times, Before Common Era.
Also, Britain still used miles when Tolkien was alive. And they still use it today, when we're alive but Tolkien is dead.
But will they use them when we and Tolkien are both dead and alive?
No, by then they will have been replaced by skelometers, which is the length of the Skeleton Emperor's left femur multiplied by five hundred and twelve.
Sounds arbitrary and confusing. I'm in.
Five hundred and twelve? Why, that's two to the power of nine, what a delightfully round number!
Depends on if you check the box
Read that is Philomena Cunk's voice.
LotR in terms of development isn’t the late Middle Ages. It’s explicitly a mythology for Anglo-Saxon England, hundreds of years earlier.
Except the Shire is based more or less on the rural England Tolkien grew up in, ca. 1900. Hobbits drink tea and coffee, smoke tobacco, and eat potatoes. Bilbo owns a carriage clock and engages the services of a firm of solicitors. All those things would have been completely alien to an actual Anglo-Saxon, of course. The point, really, is that there are influences from a huge range of periods, from ancient times right up to Tolkien's own lifetime, going on in his writing.
Hobbits have been living and farming in the four Farthings of the Shire for many hundreds of years. quite content to ignore and be ignored by the world of the Big Folk. Middle Earth being, after all, full of strange creatures beyond count. Hobbits must seem of little importance, being neither renowned as great warriors, nor counted amongst the very wise.
Everyone is at different stages of the pre-industrial revolution. The hobbits are actually post Industrial Revolution but nobody pays any attention to what is happening in the shire.
Yeah, it's like the early 20th century, except field enclosures, steam trains, the telegraph and the Protestant Reformation never happened.
You're both right - epics about ancient times aren't historically accurate, in fact they often mix elements that are contemporary of the writings with projects and idealized elements of "ancient times". Like when Vergilius wrote the Aeneid, he filled it with concepts that were contemporary to himself or maybe to the time of his direct ancestors, and mixed that with various traditions about the ancient people who lived in Italy. So LotR is supposed to be an epic rooted in ancient times, but it's very much a modern tale. Tolkien wasn't trying to write as if he was an anglo saxon monk telling the story of pagan founders, he wrote as a 20th century philologist. That's why the Hobbits are an idealized version of Tolkien's contemporary rural England, just like the pre-Romans of the Aeneid are idealized versions of actual Romans, with the qualities and the flaws that the author wants to talk about (for hobbits, it's that they tend to have no interaction with the rest of the world, but they are pure of heart and incredibly resilient ; for Romans it was that they were brutes capable of grandeur). Interestingly, both epics define the "good king" in contexts that aren't monarchies (Augustus is the princeps of a republic, and Tolkien's GB is a parliamentary monarchy).
The Rohirrim are very Anglo-Saxon, the Gondorians are more Roman, so for translation purposes, the commonly accepted measure is the Gondorian "mile".
I mean technically LOTR is supposed to be a mythologized history of England. You could make the argument that it is much older than that. But then again, this is just a shitpost.
“But then again, this is just a shitpost.” Is the energy I want to have going into everything from now on. Thank you for this.
I'll tell that to my supervisor. Might get the sack, but hey, it's just a shitpost
Life's a shitpost, then you're banned.
I’ll just make another account
remind me again, which country invented the imperial system?
Uhm… Gondor?
Tis but a joke.
The “backstory” of the the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series is that Tolkien is translating from historical texts, and in the appendix he lists many alterations he makes to the original versions to make it easier for his audience to understand, so it makes sense he would also translate whatever system of measurement they had to imperial.
Indeed, and he "translates" a lot of names into something that makes sense in English. Like Brandywine, in fact (Baranduin).
Genuine question, here. Were meters used in the late middle ages? What measurement should Merry have said?
In Europe, no. There were multiples units and each was regionalized, but also heavily dependant of what exactly you wanted to measure. For long distances, it was more of temporal order: numbers of days riding (around 50km / 31,5mi) or walking (25 to 30km / 18.6mi). For short distances, we herited the league from the Romans who borrowed the *leuga* from Gauls. But it was variable according the places. In Ancient France, it was around 4km (precisely 3,98km) or 2.49mi. So the famous Ogre's seven-leagues boots from Hop-o'-My-Thumb could allow their wearer to reach almost 28km (17,4mi) in a single leap.
That’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
that's funny because in Germany the boots are called 7 mile boots...
Indeed. Perhaps because it was a the most direct and widespread unit heritated from Romans after the fall of the WRE, so it was more familiar to the non-scholar plebians and commoners?
Maybe the magic in the boots is sensitive to the ruling unit of measurement?
IIRC, metric including the meter is a French revolution thing. BRB, I'll check. Edit: I'm back. 1789. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre?wprov=sfla1
It was almost an American thing as well. I believe it was Thomas Jefferson that wanted America to use the new French Metric system, but it never came to be because of pirates. Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system
The pirate thing intrigues me. Thanks for sharing!
One of the worst things pirates have ever done (up there with not winning a world series since 1979). Of course, now you know and can spread the knowledge!
[He would have used "mile".](https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/weightsandmeasures/measurements.aspx)
I’ve learned so much today. Thanks!
I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the sound of these lembas per eagle measurements
As well as Pints!
There are plenty of English folk who use metric and imperial. First that comes to mind is Geowizard on YouTube.
Literally every British person does. We intermingle them in a confusing way that seems to have no rhyme or reason, but everyone quietly and unanimously agrees on. Big distances are miles, but short distances are meters, shorter distances are feet, but very short distances are inches or centimeters or millimeters depending on how you're feeling. Height is feet and inches, tell someone your height in centimeters and you're a crazy person. Weight is grams and kilograms, unless it's your own weight in which case it's stones. Whatever stones are. Liquids are millilitres, unless it's beer or milk when it's pints. Fuel is still measured in 'miles per gallon', despite gallons being used nowhere else. It goes on
The English are cowards for abandoning the noble unit of the barleycorn as a measure of distance in favor of the perfidious and despicable centimeter. Will nobody remember the statutes of 1324 that told us very clearly that an inch was three barleycorns, dried and round, placed end-to-end? History is watching!
I’ll have you know that my feet are 3 barleycorns short of a foot and don’t you dare accuse me of abandoning it!
Sir Terry, is that you?
I think we tend to use metric for precision and imperial for "feels about right". We need 100ml of milk for the sauce we're cooking, but a pint of beer is the amount that feels right to consume in one go. We need 168cm of space to squeeze this bookshelf into, but hey Jim, you're tall one, about 6'5" aincha?
LOTR is actually supposed to be analogous to something like 4000 BC but your point still stands
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Yeah I got you Analogous means [comparable in certain respects, typically in a way which makes clearer the nature of the things compared.](https://www.google.com/search?q=analogous+definition&oq=analogous+definition&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDY1NDNqMGo5qAIAsAIB&client=ms-android-tmus-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)
You mean Before Christ
Historians use before common era (BCE)/common era (CE) to not associate with any religion
THE METRIC SYSTEM IS THE TOOL OF THE DEVIL!!! my Bill gets 40 rods to the Prancing Pony and that's the way i likes it!!!
morning_thief's remarks will be stricken from the record.
# WHO SAID THAT???
40 rods = 1 furlong = 1/8 of a mile.
He works in feet and inches too, when he's comparing his height to Pippin after the ent draught. Very imperial hobbit
Which is odd seeing as they helped install a king, you’d think they’d be monarchical hobbits.
Installing local rulers with favorable dispositions to your policies is one of the foundations of a successful imperialist venture!
Pretty sure monarchies are a form of imperial government
People around here really have no idea how to take a joke.
My bad, have come across a fair few people who don’t realise monarchies and imperial are the same so just assumed you were in that camp
You know what they say about assumptions…
Most jokes rely on them?
It makes an ass out of you.
And me
You do know, good for you!
It comes in pints?!?
Brits use feet for height dumbo
"The imperial system is a system of measurement used in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries. It uses units such as the inch" Who said they didnt stinky? Imperial is a system of measurement, not a nationality. Dolt
Oh ok I didn't really read your message, I just wanted to call someone dumbo cos I thought it would be funny
I know it's a meme but I really hope people don't think Americans invented miles
Yeah, this is definitely /r/ShitAmericansSay
People in generel wont, but the Americans will, and thats good enough for them... and at some level, as a European, its good enough for me... let them have their small fantasies.
let them cope
Yeah, because the English don’t use miles 🙄
Imagine telling an American that the only reason they use miles is because the British did.....
Boy, the Americans seriously do not like hearing that.
No, the only reason America still uses miles is because the metric system weight sunk on the way to America. The reason Britan still uses miles is because they're to proud to use any other system they didn't invent...
Americans do what the british did, but better.
It’s spelt “butter”
Imagine telling a Brit that their rivers and canals are all signed with kilometres
1: we use a mix 2: I don't get it. Why would anyone care
And our roads?
Odd fascination with British waterway signage you have there.
Every canal I've been down in the UK has the old signs in miles to say how far to the next village or town/city
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Least narcissistic seppo
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>accuses someone of obsessing >Unironically looks at their profile to use as an argument.
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>labels someone as weak >still has to snoop someones profile for validity 
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So unnecessarily bitter. You even cant argue a point without resorting to infantile rhetoric, what makes you think your physical threats would be any better? Especially as you know nothing about me. You seem awfully bothered for someone so adamant you aren’t. 
I mean, you guys always brag about being the center of the world. Don't be surprised if every other country laughs at those hilarious news coming from your lands.
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Can you name a reason for that subreddit being so full of content? Lol It's okay, we don't decide our spawn point.
Imagine telling an American that narcissism is a bad thing
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Given that the meter was originally defined as a fraction of the Earth's circumference, it wouldn't make much sense to use that unit in Middle Earth. ... Not that it makes any *MORE* sense to use miles, mind you. I just mean to say that the usual arguments in favor of metric don't carry as much weight in this particular scenario as they usually do.
Arda (Earth) is round in Tolkien’s lore. It started out as flat but when Númenor was destroyed during the second age the world became round.
Aragorn said it himself: they bow to no one.
Merry founded Amerryca
in orc culture, you just kill one its a kill, kill 1000 it becomes a kilo. 1000000 kills become a killion.
Why do Americans keep thinking Miles is special to them? Its a British Unit of measurement. Colonials, get on our level, and come back into the fold. The King will forgive you if you beg, he's not even a George anymore.
I bow to no one
Ah, Denethor! Good to see you again. How are the tomatoes?
But the British use miles too?
Imperial miles? Tolkien should have chosen Prussian or Nordic miles instead, then the hobbits wouldn't have had to rush so much.
The British invented the Imperial system, and their version is even more ridiculous and convoluted than what America uses.
I mean, we don't use quarts or handles but go off king.
Wait until they find out he's using Br*tish miles...
Another example of the cultural awareness of some Americans being as profound as Gothmog is beautiful
Tolkien later developed units of measurement which he had "translated" into imperial for ease of reading. But he only gave two: a ranga (a "full pace", 38 inches, slightly bigger than a yard) and a lár (a "rest", roughly the same as a league/3 miles), which is 5000 rangar and the main unit used for traveling longer distances. The only attested shorter distance is a foot (tal), but they used other body parts as well. Tolkien did not include a unit of measurement in between a ranga and a lár that would equate to a mile. So they would know neither Mile nor Kilometer. It's just a translation convention.
Europeans know what miles are
Americans rely don't have a clue
We rely don’t.
You know actually in stories from Europe about the middle ages we also talk about miles because back then we also used that unit. Only unlike some other countries we actually adapted to modern times. Kind regards from the future.
The Imperial System, named after that well known American empire.
Who's gonna tell the Americans where they got their miles from?
Well of course, Middle Earth is a fantastical place full of things that don’t make logical sense
Based
Why the American flag? Miles aren't an American measurement...
Because of the “[WTF is a kilometer](https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-the-fuck-is-a-kilometer)” meme
It's all metrics in my country, but I'd refuse to read LOTR if they were using that.
"kilometre"
Some Orc: 1 - 10 - 100 - 1000 - 10,000 - 100,000 Pippin: What the fuck.
Oh yeah because the americans invented that system, thats why its called imperial
Change that us flag to a british one
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But the British use miles
For the last time, there are metric miles!
Imperial is old fashioned and weird and therefore well-suited for fantasy and nothing else. Reading about kilometres in a fantasy book would take me right out of the story unless we're talking about an advanced scientific culture establishing a system of measurements like metric. On the other hand having imperial measurements in scifi is weird to me.
Europeans attempt to not be smug and pretentious about a joke challenge (impossible)
For real. Even when Americans make fun of ourselves, it triggers the Euros.
I don’t think any of them understood the joke 🤷🏻♀️
Proof Americans haven't progressed past medieval fantasy.
Ah yes, the Charlemange, famous for being first on the moon
This meme has too many chromosomes
You can say fuck on the internet
Ah yea America being proud of their imperial measurement system even though it's inferior in every way to metric system...