Herald-ry in Middle Earth

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Achilles, armour, Battle of Bannockburn, Eurybates, flailing and winnowing, Heraldry, Heralds, Hermes, kerykeion, Lakedaimonia, lambda, Medieval, Mouth of Sauron, Robert de Septvans, Robert the Bruce, Roger de Trumpington, Sir Henry de Bohun, Spartans, tabard, Talthybius, The Black Gate, The Illiad, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, White Tree of Gondor

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

There is a moment in the film of The Return of the King which has always puzzled us. The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dur has appeared outside the Morannon with taunts and with what appears to be disconcerting news about Frodo.

In response, Aragorn kills him. Even if you had never seen a movie with knights in it so that you would know that this was a herald or messenger of some sort and that there are rules about such people, there are modern parallels—flags of truce, even the silent protection offered to diplomats—to make you think that this was hardly proper behavior for a king.

If we look at this scene in the chapter entitled “The Black Gate Opens”, we see that this is another of those disturbing—and seemingly arbitrary—changes made by the script writers, showing once more their disregard—or lack of proper understanding—of the author and his wishes.

“Aragorn said naught in answer, but he took the other’s eye and held it, and for a moment they strove thus; but soon, though Aragorn did not stir nor move hand to weapon, the other quailed and gave back as if menaced with a blow. ‘I am a herald and ambassador, and may not be assailed!’ he cried.”

There is a parallel in this, when we are told that Aragorn has used the Palantir and wrestled with Sauron.

“ ‘It was a bitter struggle, and the weariness is slow to pass. I spoke no word to him, and in the end I wrenched the Stone to my own will…Now in the very hour of his great designs the heir of Isildur and the Sword are revealed; for I showed the blade re-forged to him. He is not so mighty yet that he is above fear; nay, doubt ever gnaws him.’ ” (The Return of the King, Book 5, chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company”)

(This is misportrayed in the extended version of the film. For some reason, in return for being shown Anduril, Sauron shows Aragorn a lifeless—perhaps just napping? “she looks like she’s only sleeping!”—Arwen—which, as is so often the case with the clumsy script writers, completely misses the real point of the scene in the book.)

In both of these scenes, what the author clearly meant to show was that Aragorn’s power, now that he has chosen to reveal it, comes from within and is so great that it needs neither words nor violence to assert itself—more signs that he is the true returning king.

Thus, harming a herald, in fact, shows him as the very opposite: not only violent, but, instead of restoring and preserving—his proper task as king—he violates custom.

We note, by the way, that, in the book, he looks to be following custom. Under the direction of Gandalf, the army which marches to challenge Sauron formally declares its ownership of Ithilien with trumpet blasts

Black Trumpeterearly16thc.jpg

and its own heralds.

What is a herald, anyway? The Mouth of Sauron claims to be one and even claims immunity because of it—why?

In fact, heralds, in the western world, have an ancient lineage, first appearing in literature in The Iliad, where they act both as messengers

and as referees.

You’ll notice, in the first of these two pictures, that the two heralds, Talthybius and Eurybates, have the badge of a herald: a special curved wand, called a kerykeion. Hermes carries one, to indicate that he is the patron god of heralds (and therefore their protector).

At some point in their early history, the convention appeared that heralds were considered, in their role as messengers, to be somehow neutral and therefore were not to be harmed. (It’s not clear, however, during their first appearance, in Iliad 1, that this was so then—or at least when dealing with Achilles–but perhaps that’s just Achilles, who is not necessarily always the most balanced individual.)

Heralds in the western medieval world continued with these functions, but added another.

We have a little evidence that some ancient Greek warriors and states may have used specific designs as badges. Spartan shields, for example, sometimes carried a lambda—a tentlike shape which stands for the sound of L in English and was short for “Lakedaimonia”, which is where Sparta was located.

A much more elaborate system of designs gradually developed during the Middle Ages, in part because of the increasingly-elaborate armor, which, from a long shirt of chain mail, came to cover the whole knight, making him, potentially unidentifiable.

So, both to make himself distinguishable on the battlefield and probably because it was macho, and therefore sexy, a knight would devise a distinctive design for his shield, possibly his clothing, and maybe even his horse, as well.

This could be pretty spectacular—just look at Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland in the early 14^th century.

[A footnote here– at the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, there is a famous equestrian statue of the Bruce in which the head and facial features have been reconstructed from the Bruce’s actual skull.

Just before this same battle, the Bruce had shown his knightly skills by splitting, with his battle axe, the helmet and head of the English knight, Sir Henry de Bohun.]

Sometimes these designs could include puns on their owners’ names. Here’s Roger de Trumpington, with trumpets.

And Robert de Septvans (Septvans = “seven (winnowing) fans”).

The fan here looks actually like a basket, but was used for helping the wind to carry off the outer husk of the grain ear, a process called winnowing. (To the left is the previous process, flailing, where the beard of grain is being broken off the stalk before it is winnowed.)

As the number and complexity of patterns on armor developed, it appears that specialists took over the job of identifying them and keeping track of them, the heralds. And, from their name, we get our general name for the designs used on armor and clothing, heraldry. Because they worked in the world of heraldry, they decorated themselves, as well, and, in England, still do.

Heralds-at-the-Garter-Service-Julian-Calder-1024x681.jpg

Thus, we can imagine that, when Aragorn, Gandalf, and their companions reached the crossroads in Ithilien,

after the trumpets sounded, heralds wearing a special coat, called a tabard,

which would have been embroidered with the tree and seven stars,

would have stepped forward and reclaimed the land for the king. Specially marked, they would have been very visible, and as the lieutenant of the tower tells us, protected by custom from harm. So why is Aragorn, the one man capable of returning order to Middle Earth, scripted to kill one? What do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

And now you know what the White Rabbit is wearing and is supposed to be doing in Alice

De_Alice's_Abenteuer_im_Wunderland_Carroll_pic_37.jpg

Lamentable

23 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Poetry

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Adventure, Ballads, Boromir, Child Ballad, Doune Castle, Earl of Huntly, Eglinton Tournament, Ewan MacColl, Francis James Child, James Stewart, Lallands, Lament for Boromir, Laments, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Outlander, Scots, The Earl of Morray, The Lady of Mondegreen, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

“Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands,

O, whaur hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,

And laid him on the green.”

So begins a version of Child Ballad #181. As we are lucky enough to have readers from around the world (and thank you, every one of you, for visiting!), we might explain that a Child Ballad is not a nursery rhyme, but a distinctive type of traditional song from the massive collection of 305 such songs made by Francis James Child, a professor at Harvard, and published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898 under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Ballads are verse narratives, sometimes based upon folk tales, sometimes based upon actual historical events. This particular ballad is historically-based and concerns a murder in 16^th-century Scotland. For our purposes, its actual historicity doesn’t matter, however, because what we’re really interested in is the fact that this is a lament for the murdered man, James Stewart, the Earl of Moray (pronounced “Murray”). We also have this posthumous painting, commissioned by his mother, to draw attention to the crime, but it doesn’t appear to have made much difference.

There are a number of different versions of this ballad, but the one which we heard first and with which we are most familiar (and from which we originally learned a tune—there’s more than one) was recorded by the famous Scots folksinger, Ewan MacColl, and is still available on the Smithsonian/Folkways CD FW03509/FG3509, “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol.1”.

As we said, it’s a lament—just like that for Boromir in the chapter entitled “The Departure of Boromir”–and that’s really where we began to think about laments, especially a lament for a prominent person. And, as ever, we looked for a useful parallel between our world and that of Middle Earth. In this case, the murdered man in the ballad was an earl—a high-level nobleman—but he was also the son of the Regent (the temporary ruler) of Scotland and so we might see him as on about the same social level as Boromir the son of the Steward of Gondor.

Here’s how the lament for Boromir begins.

“Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows

The West Wind comes walking, and about the walls it goes.

‘What news from the West, O wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?

Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?’ ”

You can see a similarity between this and the ballad already. The ballad begins by addressing all of Scotland. The lament begins by addressing the West Wind. Both appeal to something more than a listener, or even a group of listeners, as if speaking to simple mourners wouldn’t be enough: bigger forces must be involved. In the case of the ballad, the speaker (unknown—but clearly well aware of the facts) asks where the country has been. In the lament, Aragorn (as he is the initial mourner) has a more specific addressee and a more specific question: West Wind, have you seen Boromir?

The ballad then goes right to the point:

“They hae slain the Earl of Moray

And laid him on the green.”

[A footnote here. That last line became famous because of an essay by Sylvia Wright in the November, 1954 issue of the American publication, Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”. In the essay, Wright explains that, as a child, she misheard “and laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” and imagined that Stewart had been murdered along with a female companion. The word “mondegreen” has become a technical term in language studies for a misheard word which produces a new meaning.]

The next part of Aragorn’s lament is unspecific: Boromir is simply missing.

“ ‘I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey;

I saw him walk in empty lands, until he passed away

Into the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more.

The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor.’

‘O Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar,

But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.’”

The ballad then tells us something about the quality of the dead man.

“He was a braw gallant,

And he rade at the ring,

And the bonny Earl o’ Moray,

He might have been a king.”

This might need a little translation. The ballad is written in Lallans, the English—and we might really say the wonderfully rich English—originally of southern Scotland (Lallans= “Lowlands”). In general, the grammar and syntax are recognizably English, but the expressions and vocabulary are sometimes different—and sometimes very different!

So, here (so far):

Braw = “fine/splendid”

Gallant = “young man” (can also be spelled “callant”)

But the next expression is actually from medieval jousting. This was a game in which a knight would be required to ride at a ring, suspended in mid-air, and spear it on the end of his lance. Here’s an illustration from the 1839 Victorian tournament revival at Eglinton, in Scotland.

Although we might normally imagine that tournaments died out with the Middle Ages,

Elizabethans and their successors, the Jacobeans, still jousted, as a kind of expensive archaic sport. Here’s Nicholas Hilliard’s c1590 portrait of George Clifford, 3^rd Earl of Cumberland, dressed for a tournament as the Queen’s Champion.

So, we know that the speaker believes that James Stewart was a fine young man, and able at tournaments. We also know that Stewart was able enough—as far as the speaker is concerned—to be a king. As his father had been the Regent for the infant James VI, perhaps this is a quiet suggestion that James junior might have done better on the throne than James.

In contrast, all we know at the moment about Boromir was that he was tall and that his father’s name was Denethor, with the suggestion that he was on an errand or quest in some deserted land.

But then we find out more about James Stewart.

“O lang will his lady

Lok frae the Castle Doune

Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

Come soundin’ through the toun.”

He had a wife or mistress and we see something about where he lived: in a castle. If you just heard this ballad, rather than reading it, and you came to the next word, “Doune”, you might be confused, since you can hear “doune”, meaning “down” in Lallans. This gives you a picture of a lady standing on the castle wall, waiting for Stewart to return, which is fine, but Doune is also the name of a castle owned by James Stewart.

If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you will recognize this place.

Or, if you watch Outlander.

As for the last line, we imagine that the Earl has a trumpeter ride in front of him, to clear the way.

Will we learn more about Boromir from the second stanza, which Legolas sings?

“From the mouths of the Sea the South Wind flies, from the sandhills and the stones;

The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans.

‘What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?

Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.’ “

With the idea that the speaker is appealing to nature for answers, we see Legolas address a second wind, but, so far, all we have added to our store of knowledge is that Boromir was good-looking (“the Fair”—and, in English, this can also mean “light-skinned/light-haired”)—and the anxiety at his absence continues.

In the ballad, we move farther into the crime, the actual murderer being spoken to.

“Now wae be to ye, Huntly,

And wherefore did ye sae?

I bade ye bring him wi’ ye,

And forbade ye him to slay.”

A little glossing first.

Wae be to ye= “may you be sad/sorrowful” (wae is Lallans for “woe”)

Bade= “ordered”

Forbade= “forbid/prohibited” (and should be pronounced “for-BAHD”)

Here we are presented—a bit obliquely—with the identity of the speaker of the ballad. He is one who gives order to lords—hence, he’s the king, meaning, historically, James VI of Scotland (soon—1603—to be James I of England, as well).

If we only go by the verse, he has ordered “Huntly” (historically, the Earl of Huntly, ordered by James VI to arrest Stewart) to bring the Earl of Moray to the king’s court. In real life, he murdered Stewart when Stewart tried to escape, and here we see that, literarily, the same thing is suggested.

At this point, we have three characters: king, Huntly, Moray, and a murder, supposedly against the king’s orders. What more does Legolas’ lament have to tell us?

“ ‘Ask not of me where he doth dwell—so many bones there lie

On the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky;

So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.

Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!’

‘O Boromir! Beyond the gate the seaward road runs south,

But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey sea’s mouth.’ ”

Nothing is said directly here, but that first line’s mention of “so many bones” might be seen to reveal what has happened to Boromir. The South Wind tells the speaker to ask the North Wind, but will that make a difference?

[Another footnote, this one about verse structure. Did JRRT have W.B. Yeats’ early (1888) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in the back of his mind with that last line?

Here’s the last stanza of Yeats’ poem:

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

In this poem, Yeats weights the end of each stanza both by using a shorter line and by ending with a series of one-syllable words, which slow things to a stop: deep…heart’s…core. JRRT does the same thing with one-syllable words here: grey…sea’s…mouth.]

The next part of the ballad stanza repeats, in a variation, the earlier motif: what a wonderful person the murdered earl was.

“He was a braw gallant,

And he played at the glove;

And the bonny Earl of Murray,

He was the Queen’s true love.”

A final piece of glossing. Elizabethans used gloves as a love-present,

suggesting that the last two lines have more than a rhetorical meaning. Historically, James VI’s queen was Anne of Denmark—

was this the real reason why the historical James didn’t seem to be interested in punishing Huntly?

We then have a repetition of the earlier lines:

“O lang will his lady

Lok frae the Castle Doune

Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

Come soundin’ through the toun.”

And, with these, the ballad ends, our last image being that of the lady on the castle wall, looking for someone who will never return. This same image, in the form of an inanimate object, waits for Boromir.

“From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides, and past the roaring falls;

And clear and cold about the tower its loud horn calls.

‘What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me today?

What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.’

‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought,

His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.

His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest;

And Rauros, golden Rauros, bore him upon its breast.’

‘O Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gaze

To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.’ “

Putting the various elements together, we might see this kind of lament as going something like this:

a speaker appeals to a mass audience of some sort (Scotland/Winds)
that speaker reveals that something is wrong (Stewart is dead/Boromir is missing)
he/she can then describe what that is in some way (Stewart was murdered/Boromir has died fighting)
speaker may describe the fine qualities of the person lamented (Stewart as jouster, lover, kingly/Boromir as tall, fair, died fighting)
those who lament cannot be consoled—or perhaps refuse to be (lady on wall of Doune/Tower of Guard=Minas Tirith)

Using this suggested model, can you think of other laments, both in Tolkien or otherwhere which match it?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Beacons or Wills of the Wisp?

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Adventure, Agamemnon, Beacons, British Royal Government, Byzantines, film changes, Lays of Ancient Rome, Minas Tirith, Mulan, Peter Jackson, Spanish Armada, The Great Wall, The Lord of the Rings, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. We begin this posting with something which puzzled us when we last read The Lord of the Rings.

Gandalf and Pippin are on their nonstop ride to Minas Tirith.

Then—

“There was silence again for a while. Then, ‘What is that? Cried Pippin suddenly, clutching at Gandalf’s cloak. ‘Look! Fire, red fire! Are there dragons in this land? Look, there is another!’

For an answer Gandalf cried aloud to his horse. ‘On, Shadowfax! We must hasten. Time is short. See the beacons of Gondor are alight, called for aid. War is kindled. See, there is the fire on Amon Din, and flame on Eilenach; and there they go speeding west: Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad, and the Halifirien on the borders of Rohan.’ ” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

Beacons as a means of rapid communication occurs often, both in western literature and in history.

In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458BC), for example, Clytemnestra has a famous (and rather lengthy) speech in which she describes the beacons which alert Mycenae that Troy has been captured—alerting her to begin her plot to kill her husband and take over with her BF, Aegisthus.

The towers along the Great Wall in China were used as beacon stations, as in Mulan.

mulan-wall-of-china

In the 9^th century AD, the Byzantines had developed a system of beacons to warn them of invasion by their neighbors to the east.

If you read the Tolkien sites, you see a fair amount more on beacons, in particular, those set up by the British royal government along the southern shore of England in the 1580s to act as an early warning system to alert the country to the Spanish armada.

Tolkien would have known the story of these either from studying English history in his early schooling, or from reading “The Armada”, a well-known poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay first published in his Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).

In Jackson’s The Return of the King, Denethor has been stubborn about not lighting the beacons to alert Rohan that Gondor has need of it. Pippin climbs up the outside of the rock face where the beacon is and, while the guards are distracted, he lights the beacon which, in turn, sets off the whole series.

This is not the first or last time one sees changes made in the story—what, for example, are Merry and Pippin doing in a cornfield (that is, a field of maize—do we know that maize even grows in Middle Earth) when Pippin has actually been with Frodo and Sam from the time they left Hobbiton?

In past postings, we have sometimes commented upon the changes made to the story by the scriptwriters—especially the changes to The Hobbit, which have done so much to take the story away from the author’s intent entirely, to the point where, in the third film, Bilbo, the main character, is reduced to something like Third Spear-Carrier from the Left, when the story becomes something like The Tragical Historie of Thorin, Sometime King Under the Mountain. When questioned about this, the scriptwriters, in general, have always made the same reply: “film is different from print” (although, in interviews, they sometimes become more aggressive, once even suggesting that those who disagree with their approach don’t understand the books).

In this posting, however, we intend to follow a different path, trying to understand why the change was made and how it might or might not benefit the narrative.

To a degree, the film has followed its source, in that Gandalf has taken Pippin with him on the ride to Minas Tirith, but Pippin’s role, from that point on in the book, becomes more that of observer than active participant. This is in contrast to Merry, who rides into the battle on the Pelennor and helps Eowyn destroy the Chief Nazgul.

We can imagine, then, that the scriptwriters, who have brought the two Hobbits so far, have decided to give Pippin another moment of action, as a kind of balance: if Merry fights a Nazgul, Pippin can do a little rock-climbing and alert the Rohirrim.

If you, readers, don’t know it, there is very useful area on the site www.theonering.com, called “Film Changes”. This particular change does not appear there, one presumes because, as the site says, their text was based upon a scripts still in the midst of production, but the structure of the area is very useful. It provides a summary title for each change, then there is this:

Film:

Book:

Pro:

Con:

It’s interesting to see how more-or-less neutral in tone this is. The writer shows the contrasts, suggests why the change, and then explains why this is not necessarily a change for the better, but there is none of the hostility we sometimes see on-line, one way or the other, and, if you’re a regular reader of blogs and websites, we’re sure you’ve seen that hostility. It’s one of the least attractive, but widespread features of the internet and it’s a pity that certain of these commentators couldn’t be delayed till dawn would overtake them and send them the way of Tom, Bert, and William in The Hobbit!

img__Art-The_Three_Trolls_are_Turned_to_Stone,_by_JRRT.jpg

[Tolkien’s trees, by the way, always remind us of the work of the Danish illustrator, Kay Nielsen (1886-1957), which we presume JRRT had seen–at least his illustrations for East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1914).

We have already provided you with the first two sections: the film has Pippin touch off a beacon after reaching Minas Tirith; in the book, Pippin sees the beacons alight, one after the other, as he and Gandalf ride towards Minas Tirith.

We presume that the Pro would be something like:

provides a balance between the two Hobbits who are so closely linked throughout the story
adds to the drama and underlines Denethor’s less-than-full-commitment—as depicted in the films—to defending Gondor to the end
adds a bit of visual spectacle, seeing the beacons light up, one after another

And the Con?

not in the original—and, as we always wonder, how far can you change things before you forfeit your claim that it’s “JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” you’ve filmed?
Denethor is actually much more active and aggressive in his stance in the original, not being willing to give up anything without a fight until the near-fatal wounding of Faramir (and a late-night séance with the palantir)—the beacons have already been lit because he’s attempting to gather all of the forces he can to defend Gondor
in fact, the beacons are not on snowy mountain peaks in the original, but on reachable hilltops, just as are the sites for the beacons used to alert southern England of the approach of the Spanish armada in 1588, as in this fine photo by David Bellamy.

So, it might be a striking visual effect, but, as in #1, this isn’t quite what JRRT had in mind.

What do you think, dear readers? A justifiable change?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

The Fall of Two Cities?

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Agincourt, Anadoluhisari, Anatolia, Asia Minor, Bayezid I, Bosphorus, Byzantium, Constantine I, Constantinople, Crecy, English Civil Wars, Eowyn, Gondor, map, Mehmet II, Minas Tirith, motte and bailey, Newark, Normans, Osgiliath, Ottoman Empire, Poitiers, Rumelihisari, siege, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Witch-King of Angmar

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. A little while ago, we talked about the “siege of Gondor”, which really wasn’t a siege in the formal sense, at all, but rather an assault. (We suspect that JRRT liked the sound of “siege” and so used it, not caring if it were strictly accurate or not.) In this posting, we want to look at a real siege and examine what might be parallels with events in Middle Earth.

Before we do, we want to take a moment to talk about the word “siege”. It comes into English through Old French asegier, which comes from Latin ad + sedeo > adsideo, adsidere , literally, “to sit down at”. The northern French who passed the word on to England must have liked to say what’s called a y-glide when certain consonants came before e, so, though it was spelled asegier, it would have been said “ah-see-YED-jier”. And that’s why English today has what can be a confusing spelling. (In our experience, lots of native speakers have trouble distinguishing between the ie of “siege” and the ei of “seize”). The stress on the word in English would have been away from the initial a, and so that would have disappeared from the word as it moved from being a borrowing.

[As what we think is a cool footnote, Latin also has the verb obsideo “to sit down right before=to besiege” and we can see that used in English in the word “obsession”, with the idea that something bothers you so much that it’s like you’re being besieged by it. You can also see it on this wonderful bit of 17^th-c. English history.

Although it doesn’t look like a modern coin, this is a form which used to be called “half-a-crown”—that is, 30 pennies (that’s what those three xses mean), or two shillings, sixpence. This coin was struck in the town of Newark-upon-Trent, when it was besieged during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651).

And that’s where obsideo comes in. The back (the “reverse” in coin language—the front is called the “obverse”) says:

OBS: Newark (with a date, either 1645 or 1646, depending on when the coin was struck)

OBS = Obsessa Newark = “Newark Besieged”

There were a lot of coin-substitutes struck by various besieged towns, but, apparently, those from Newark are the most numerous.]

In the medieval western military world, sieges were more common, it seems, than pitched battles. As castles and towns were focal points for the possession and control of land—think of the hundreds of early castles, called “motte and bailey”, which the Normans built all across England in the first years after their conquest–it’s not surprising that they would have been a focus of attack.

As well, we can imagine that, ultimately, they would have been cheaper, in terms of the most irreplaceable manpower, sparing the highly-trained, hard-to-replace, knights and men-at-arms.

Battles like Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), cost the French dearly as their brave knights threw themselves at their English opponents, whose longbows shot them and their horses down.

In a siege, although there was the occasional combat, including the exploitation of a break in the enemy’s defenses,

most of a siege would be spent in using machinery of various sorts to aid you in breaking down the walls—and the resistance of the defenders, as well.

This brings us to the real, historical siege we want to examine: Constantinople, 1453.

Constantinople had begun life as a Greek colony, called Byzantium, on the European side of the narrow passageway between the Black Sea and the northeastern Mediterranean.

It had been refounded and greatly expanded by the Roman emperor, Constantine I, to be a new capital in the east.

Although it was supposed to be called “New Rome”, everyone in the east called it after its refounder, and so it was “Constantinople”, becoming the capital of an eastern empire which we call “Byzantine”. Even with setbacks and a number of unsuccessful attacks over the centuries, it was, for a long time, a very wealthy and powerful city.

But even the wealthiest and most powerful cities will fade—especially when faced with ambitious enemies. Constantinople had had a number of those, but, finally, in its last years, perhaps its most ambitious and most powerful arose in Asia Minor: that of the Ottoman Turks. As you can see from this map, its beginnings were modest: one Turkic-speaking group among many.

This was a period of instability, however. The Ottoman leaders quickly took advantage of that instability to grab power and territory, so that, by 1400, they had spread beyond the shrinking Byzantine world, into the Balkans, and, soon, Constantinople was surrounded.

This surrounding took place in an increasingly-methodical way. In 1393-4, the ruler of the Ottomans, the sultan Bayezid I

built a small fortress on the Asia Minor side of the Bosphorus, the name for the northern stretch of the passage which led from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. It was called Anadoluhisari, “the Anatolian fort”.

You can see from the map that this was the beginning of setting up a choke point upstream from Constantinople.

In 1451-2, the sultan Mehmet II finished the job with the Rumelihisari just opposite, on the European side (and that’s what its name means, “the Roman—that is, European—fort”).

Guns were mounted

and any help which might have come from the Black Sea was blocked.

And here we want to take a minute to look at our imaginary city and its danger—because we see some easy parallels here. First, of course, the Ottoman empire was an eastern threat—so was Mordor. Mordor had taken the east bank of the Anduin, just as the Ottomans had taken the Asian side of the Bosphorus. And, in the capture of the European side and the building of Rumelihisari, we might see the taking of Osgiliath and the west bank of the Anduin. Then there is the massive city of Minas Tirith and the attack upon it.

Constantinople was also a massive city.

It was, basically, on a triangular piece of land, with two sides protected by water. The original Greek town had had a wall, but it was long gone and almost all of Constantine’s land wall had long disappeared, as well. The latest walls are called the Theodosian, after their originator, the emperor Theodosius II (408-450AD), but the walls included bits of the Constantinian walls and many repairs, over the centuries. The main land defenses included three lines of wall and a moat.

This sounds very impressive until one considers two things: first, is there a garrison big enough to defend what are, in fact, a number of miles of wall? And, second, although the walls have withstood previous attacks, including one made by the Ottomans in 1422AD, how will they stand up to the threat of modern artillery?

At the height of its power and prosperity, it is estimated that Constantinople had had a population of anywhere from 500,000 to 750,000 (although scholars argue over this). At the time of the final siege, the population had fallen to as low as 40,000. Thus, large parts of the city were empty—just like Minas Tirith:

“Pippin gazed in growing wonder at the great stone city…Yet it was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there.” (The Return of the King, Book 5, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

The garrison of Constantinople was perhaps about 9,000, in all, which meant that they were very thinly stretched. We don’t know just how many troops were in Minas Tirith. Some reinforcements had come from South Gondor, as we noted in an earlier posting, but only a few thousand and the defenders were powerfully outnumbered, just as those of Constantinople were, when the forces of Mordor began to arrive. The Ottoman army is thought to have had between 50,000 and 80,000 men, but just how many Orcs and others marched down the causeway from Osgiliath isn’t known–they are just a horde—something which the Jackson film shows very well.

Then the assault begins, the Orcs having giant stone throwers, siege towers, and, finally, a giant, fire-breathing ram, Grond.

If you’ve been following our postings (and we hope you have!), then you know that we’ve discussed the use of what appears to be gunpowder, both at Helm’s Deep and at the Rammas Echor. The Orcs who attack the walls of Minas Tirith don’t appear to have such a weapon, but, unfortunately for the defenders of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks do, in the form of plentiful modern artillery.

Attacks wear down the small garrison and huge, stone-throwing weapons knock down the walls, so that, finally the city falls, on 29 May, 1453.

Its conqueror, Mehmet II, rides in—

which is something the witch king of Angmar never gets to do, perishing instead, at the hands of Eowyn and Merry.

And there the parallels end, as does our posting. Did JRRT have the fall of Constantinople somewhere in the back of his mind? What do you think?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

The Ring in Question

02 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Alan Lee, Allen and Unwin, Angus McBride, casting, forging, Home Alone, literary belief, literary theory, The Lord of the Rings, The One Ring, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Recently, one of us came up with an interesting question about our friend JRRT and the One Ring: how would such a small thing with such power have been made? In The Silmarillion, Tolkien, as he so often does, has an answer for this:

“And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring… and Sauron forged it in the Mountain of Fire in the Land of Shadow” (The Silmarillion, 287-288).

In the histories of Middle-earth, Sauron is said to have “made” and “forged” the One Ring—JRRT uses both words more than once in his letters, LOTR, and The Silmarillion, and this has led us to another question: how would the Ring have been forged? We did a little research, and found that the typical process of forging is (according to the ever-useful wiki page on the subject) a manufacturing process using compressive forces, such as a hammer, to shape metal in a particular way. If Sauron “forged” the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, it’s safe to assume that he used the process of “hot forging”, where the metal is heated in a forge (or in this case, very hot fires of a volcano). The last two items of wiki’s “commonly forged” list are weapons and jewelry—both on the list of Middle-earth’s most wanted Christmas gifts of 3018—and we’ve seen weapon-forging before:

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But rings are usually cast, using a mold and molten metal. Peter Jackson’s prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring acknowledges this, although the Ring is still said to have been “forged”:

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But, in the illustrations of Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee

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And Angus McBride

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This detail—perhaps even an error on Tolkien’s part—has been overlooked. Is it that the artists have made the same error, or are they simply letting it go in favor of the story?

From here, we can ask several questions: what material was the Ring made of? Where did he get the material? How did Sauron make it a magic ring? How did he get the Black Speech/Elvish inscription onto the Ring?

While there may be one or several answers to these questions, we wonder just how far into detail we’re meant to go—and how far JRRT means for us to go. He created a world so intricate that his work has been named a “legendarium”, and in several previous postings, we’ve discussed details of Middle-earth, such as trade and coinage. Could the man who took such care to design Middle-earth’s moon phases have answers to these questions—or should he?

(And here, for those who know the movie Home Alone, we hope not to sound like the little boy from across the street who asks the van driver endless, empty questions!)

The concept of the One Ring begins in Gollum’s cave in The Hobbit. At that point, it was only a magic ring, serving the purpose of a plot device: JRRT had not yet planned a sequel to The Hobbit. In fact, the magic ring was not yet the One Ring in Tolkien’s stories until after JRRT published the book.

Tolkien said himself of the matter in his Letters:

“The Hobbit… was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged.”(Letters, 145)

And, of the Ring:

“Rayner has, of course, spotted a weakness (inevitable): the linking. … But I don’t feel worried by the discovery that the ring was more serious than appeared… the weakness is Gollum, and his action in offering the ring as a present.” (Letters, 121)

This was a response to publishers Allen and Unwin; Rayner (Unwin’s son) had read the story and commented to the author:

“…. Converting the original Ring into this new and powerful instrument takes some explaining away and Gandalf is hard put to it to find reasons for many of the original Hobbit’s actions…” (letters, 120)

Nowhere in his criticism does Rayner ask what the Ring was made of, how Sauron had made the Elvish script, or how it would have been either forged or cast, and neither does JRRT in his answer; their focus is placed upon converting the magic ring into the One Ring, and using the Ring as a crucial plot element in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien writes in another letter:

“The magic ring was the one obvious thing in The Hobbit that could be connected with my mythology. To be the burden of a large story it had to be of supreme importance. I then linked it with the (originally) quite casual reference to the Necromancer…” (Letters, 346)

Although Tolkien’s work provides a great richness of material to discuss, question, and write about, we suppose that we can forgive JRRT for this small detail. Then again, when JRRT gives us so much, when should we stop asking questions or expecting answers? As we’ve found in writing these postings, JRRT seems to have an inexhaustible amount of material, although even he sets limits to the interpretation of his work; in fact, these “hidden meanings” annoyed him:

“I am honoured by the interest that many readers have taken in the nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings… But I remain puzzled, and indeed sometimes irritated, by many of the guesses at the ‘sources’ of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings… many of them seem to show ignorance or disregard of the clues and information which are provided in notes, renderings, and in the Appendices” (Letters, 379-380).

We don’t believe that this was meant to be a discouragement. Instead, it is a pointing by the author towards the extra material meant to help his readers to understand and study what Tolkien says he wishes he’s achieved: “the ‘literary belief’ in the story as historical” (Letters, 279).

But this leaves us at another crossroads.

If the answers aren’t to be found there, however, should we stop? We’ve said that we’re haunted by the image from Home Alone: if we persist, should we be cast in Home Alone 4 as two kids, pestering the English academic with “So how was this Ring really made, mister? Is it really made of gold? Is it really powerful? How powerful? For how long?”

Or should we leave those details about the Ring as they are, accepting that it’s a magic ring forged in the fires of Mount Doom by Sauron—without interrupting JRRT to ask too many questions about details which aren’t essential to the story, believing that it is more important that he masterfully took a simple plot element—a magic ring—and focused on converting it into the crucial element of Frodo’s quest in The Lord of the Rings.

As always, we ask: what do you think, Dear Readers?

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Monthly Archives: March 2016

Herald-ry in Middle Earth

Lamentable

Beacons or Wills of the Wisp?

The Fall of Two Cities?

The Ring in Question