As ever, dear readers, welcome.

As Gondor musters to defend itself, we can see that Gondor is a feudal state: 

“And so the companies came and were hailed and cheered and passed through the Gate…The men of Ringlo Vale behind the son of their lord…a long line of men of many sorts…scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord…Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth…and a company of knights in full harness…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

In the early feudal system, a lord got his land from a king and, in return, he owed that king military service, meaning that, not only did he have to show up upon royal command, but he had to bring his own men with him.

In the 20^th century, such a system was long gone, replaced in most of Europe in the mid-19^th century by a system called conscription.  In this system, laws were passed so that men from about 18 and at least into their early 30s were to be graded as to their suitability to become soldiers, the youngest being selected to serve a certain number of years of active duty

before going into various stages of reserves, who could then be called up in case of war.

The purpose of this was to swell armies, as each increasingly-industrialized state sought to keep its position of power and influence in pre-Great War Europe.

The exception was Britain, which relied entirely upon willing recruits to fill the ranks of its much smaller regular army.

(You can see, by the way, by the wording of this poster, that, even though their army was much smaller, the plan was still to build up reserves.)

Thus, when war actually came in August, 1914, although the other European countries involved called in masses of reservists,

the British government had to depend initially upon volunteers.

This worked surprisingly well in 1914 and into 1915, in part because of native patriotism, but also because of a view of the German enemy projected in popular literature and the popular press.  Here’s the Kaiser, the German emperor Wilhelm II, about to take a big bite out of the world, for example.

Unfortunately, the Germans themselves provided a good deal of ammunition for such a view with their march through neutral Belgium in 1914

and their subsequent occupation.  During their last war with France, in 1870-71, Prussian and their allied troops had occasionally found themselves the victims of what we would call “partisans” or guerrillas, but the French—and the Germans—called them “francs tireurs”, meaning armed men not belonging to a recognized military unit who would try to sabotage Prussian war efforts by everything from train derailments to ambushing individual soldiers.

In 1914, the Germans were convinced that they would face the same thing in Belgium and northern France, and so behaved mercilessly to civilians of those two countries, murdering, by some reports, over 7000 of them as well as destroying public buildings, including the priceless medieval library in Louvain/Leuven.

The destruction of Louvain/Leuven is well documented, but some of the stories about atrocities were undoubtedly simply exaggerations or even complete fictions, but, as we’ve seen in the internet age, rumors are sometimes more powerful than truth and Britain, in need of soldiers, was certainly willing to use any reports, as distorted as they might be, as a recruiting stimulus.  And so the Germans became everything from uniformed, bloated vampires  (the caption reads: “The ferocious beast feels hunger coming on”)

to maddened gorillas,

the Kaiser an ally of the Devil,

and all civilians and their homes everywhere would be endangered by them.

Although the British themselves instituted conscription in early 1916,

the grotesque propaganda continued, as the war ground into 1917 and then through most of 1918.

And the Germans, from the war’s start, projected their own image of the enemy.  A favorite was Britain as a blood-sucking spider, planning to bring all of Europe—

and perhaps beyond–

into its web.  Often in posters and on postcards, German soldiers are depicted as bigger than their enemies, as if they were adults and their adversaries were only little boys in uniform.

(The verses read:  “Strike, Michael/strike strongly/so that the sparks fly/so they have dread and gloom before the German blows”—it’s catchier auf deutsch)

I can never look at such artwork without thinking just how much at least of the English variety Tolkien must have seen.  It’s clear that, although he would have been 21 and over in 1914,

he wasn’t one to rush to a recruiting station as so many did,

so that I can imagine he would have had a skeptical reaction to such stuff, at best.

But, in a “what if” moment, I imagine a Gondor much more like 1914 Britain, where the feudal system has gone and there is general literacy:  can we imagine the posters Denethor’s administration would have turned out?  Orcs looting Osgiliath, Orcs burning the Pelennor, a mounted  Nazgul in the ruined gateway of Minas Tirith with the words,  “Will You Wait Till You See This?”

And, of course, there would be the other side’s propaganda, too—big red, staring eyes everywhere,

like that painted on the replacement for the fallen head of the unnamed king at the crossroads in South Ithilien,

and perhaps posters (to be read aloud by the few literate among the Orcs to the masses of others) like this,

with a slight revision of the words:  “If You Were a Horse Boy Aged 18-50, YOU Would Be Fighting for Theoden!   What Are You Doing for the Eye!”

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Don’t believe all you read,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Since Grima attempted to brain Gandalf with something he seems to have randomly picked up in Orthanc,

things have not gone well for Pippin.  Tempted to examine the makeshift weapon, he has suffered an interrogation from Sauron

and now is flying south at great speed on Shadowfax with Gandalf as his companion.

(a drawing by Anna Kulisz)

As they ride, Pippin:

“…heard Gandalf singing softly to himself, murmuring brief snatches  of rhyme in many tongues, as the miles ran under them.  At last the wizard passed into a song of which the hobbit caught the words:  a few lines came clear to his ears through the rushing of the wind:

‘Tall ships and tall kings

Three times three,

What brought they from the foundered land

Over the flowing sea?

Seven stars and seven stones

And one white tree.’

‘What are you saying, Gandalf?’ asked Pippin.

‘I was just running over some of the Rhymes of Lore in my mind,’ answered the wizard.  ‘Hobbits, I suppose, have forgotten them, even those that they ever knew.’

‘No, not all,’ said Pippin.  ‘And we have many of our own, which wouldn’t interest you, perhaps.’ “

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 11, “The Palantir”)

It’s not only wizards and hobbits who have such lore, however.   Treebeard

also has a stock, as we can see in his conversation with Merry and Pippin:

“  ‘What are you, I wonder?  I cannot place you.  You do not seem to come in the old lists that I learned when I was young.  But that was a long, long time ago, and they may have made new lists.  Let me see!  Let me see!  How did it go?

“Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!

First name the four, the free peoples:

Eldest of all, the elf-children;

Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;

Ent, the earthborn, old as mountains;

Man the mortal, master of horses;”

Hm, hm, hm.

“Beaver the builder, buck the leaper,

Bear, bee-hunter, boar the fighter;

Hound is hungry, hare is fearful…”

hm, hm.

“Eagle in eyrie, ox in pasture,

Hart horn-crowned; hawk is swiftest,

Swan the whitest, serpent coldest…”

Hoom, hm; hoom, hm, how did it go?  Room tum, room tum, roomty toom tum.  It was a long list.’ “

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

It’s interesting to note that both Gandalf and Treebeard’s lore is patterned in verse forms, Gandalf’s in a 6-line stanza of a/b/c/b/d/b and Treebeard’s, which has the suggestion of the common Old English four-stress, alliterative line which we see in poems like Beowulf.

Hwaet!  We Gardena    in geardagum

Theodcyninga    thrym gefrunon…

 Silence!  We Spear-Danes    in the so-long past time

Heard of the heroics    of high kings of the people…

(My translation—not strictly accurate, but I want to give the feel of the form.  For the original, as well as a more literal translation, please see one of my favorite Old English sites:  https://heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html   For more on the form, see:   http://oe.langeslag.org/docs/s01c_verse.pdf  )

There’s a telling detail, by the way, in Treebeard’s “ Room tum, room tum, roomty toom tum”.   If we emphasize certain syllables, we can see that he’s trying to stir his memory of the next lines by doing the stresses of the poem:   ROOM tum  ROOM tum   ROOM-ty TOOM tum, as in DWARF the DEL-ver   DARK are his HOUS-es .

Keeping things in your memory is an ancient concern in Western culture, going back to the Greco-Roman world, particularly for public speakers—politicians and lawyers–and the Greeks even had a goddess for memory, Mnemosyne (Mnay-MAH-sih-nee, in modern—American—English pronunciation).

There were various ingenious methods created both for remembering and for developing the memory, some of them quite elaborate, such as that cited in our earliest-surviving Latin rhetorical text, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (c.80BC), in which the author explains a complex association system based upon loci, “places” and imagines, “figures/images”.

(Here’s the Latin with an English translation, if you’d like to learn more:  https://archive.org/details/adcherenniumdera00capluoft  You’ll want to turn to Book III, Section XVI and beyond, beginning on page 205.)

As well, just as appears to be the case in Middle-earth, the use of rhythm and/or rhyme is common in Western wisdom literature, even for remembering the most basic things.  In English, for example, with what can sometimes seem like a completely arbitrary spelling system, how do we remember which comes first, I or E in a word?

“I before E,

except after C—

Or, when sounded like AY,

As in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’.

Or the Julio-Gregorian calendar—which months have how many days?

“Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November.”

This, unfortunately, leaves out 28-day February, with its extra day, every four years, and so there is a little more:

“All the rest have thirty-one

Save February at twenty-eight,

But leap year, coming once in four,

February then has one day more.”

This starts out with a bounce, but stumbles, doesn’t it, at “Save February at twenty-eight”?  Perhaps if we rewrote it as something like

“Thirty-one the rest—but wait—

February’s twenty-eight

Except in leap year—one in four—

And then that month has one day more.”

(For an article which covers a good deal of ground on the subject of this little useful rhyme see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Days_Hath_September

Mnemosyne was said to have been seduced by Zeus, who appeared to her disguised as a shepherd.

He slept with her over nine days and the fruit of that seduction was the 9 Muses,

who inspired all of the arts, which, although they require creativity to bring into being, also require their mother’s gift of memory to retain what is created.  Several goddesses are involved in the creation of poetry—Calliope,

Thalia,

and Erato–

so I wonder who may have inspired Merry and Pippin to suggest adding to Treebeard’s lore:

“ ‘We always seem to have got left out of the old lists, and the old stories,’ said Merry.  ‘Yet we’ve been about for quite a long time.  We’re hobbits.’

‘Why not make a new line?’ said Pippin.

Half-grown hobbits, the hole-dwellers.

Put us in amongst the four, next to Man (the Big People) and you’ve got it.’ “

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Keep your thoughts in order,

And know that there will always be

MTCIDC

O

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

We’ve seen this scene not long ago—

Merry and Pippin in the hands of the Orcs, both of them a bit roughed up in their capture.  And now things have gotten worse, as a scout for the Rohirrim has spotted them and pursuit will soon begin.  Ugluk, the leader of Saruman’s Uruk-hai—whom, if you read last week’s posting, you know that I can see as the equivalent of a tough old British sergeant—

now has to move his men along at a faster rate:  “Now we’ll have to leg it double quick.” 

He has two burdens, however, in Merry and Pippin, whom the Orcs have been carrying, as he says to Pippin:

“ ‘My lads are tired of lugging you about.  We have got to climb down and you must use your legs…’

He cut the thongs around Pippin’s legs and ankles, picked him up by the hair and stood him on his feet.  Pippin fell down, and Ugluk dragged him up by his hair again.  Several Orcs laughed.  Ugluk thrust a flask between his teeth and poured some burning liquid down his throat:  he felt a hot fierce glow flow through him.  The pain in his legs and ankles vanished.  He could stand.”

If we continue with the idea that behind the Orcs is the British Army of 1916, then we might imagine that what Sergeant Ugluk has just done is what was done on a daily basis:  he’s issued a rum ration, which came in large ceramic containers, like this one—

(SRD stood for “Supply Reserve Depot”, but soldiers had more creative—and sometimes bitter—translations, like “Service Rum—Diluted” or “Seldom Reaches Destination”.)

Rations were handed out

in very small portions—1/16^th of a pint—in the older system an ounce—roughly 30ml—here’s what that looks like.

(And here’s a useful article which will tell you more:  https://pointshistory.com/2014/05/29/world-war-i-part-2-the-british-rum-ration/ )

Having gotten Pippin onto his feet, Ugluk moves on to Merry.

“ ‘Now for the other!’ said Ugluk.  Pippin saw him go to Merry, who was lying close by, and kick him.  Merry groaned.  Seizing him roughly, Ugluk pulled him into a sitting position, and tore the bandage from his head.  Then he smeared the wound with some dark stuff out of a small wooden box.  Merry cried out and struggled wildly.

The Orcs clapped and hooted.  ‘Can’t take his medicine,’ they jeered.  ‘Doesn’t know what’s good for him.  Ai!  We shall have good fun later.’

But at the moment Ugluk was not engaged in sport.  He needed speed and had to humour unwilling followers.  He was healing Merry in orc-fashion; and his treatment worked swiftly.  When he had forced a drink from his flask down the hobbit’s throat, cut his leg-bonds, and dragged him to his feet, Merry stood up, looking pale but grim and defiant, and very much alive.  The gash in his forehead gave him no more trouble, but he bore a brown scar to the end of his days.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

This is Orc first aid and it made me think about the medical system which JRRT would have encountered in those bloody days at the Somme, in the summer of 1916.

The obstacles facing the British soldiers once they’d climbed out of their trenches

 are almost unbelievable.

First, there was the landscape itself, ruined by endless shell fire from both sides.

Then, as the Germans recovered from the initial British artillery bombardment, their guns might start up again, lobbing high explosives and shrapnel (metal balls spread by shells which were timed to explode overhead) at the oncoming troops.

In front of the advancing troops would be miles of barbed wire

which, it was hoped, had been cut by that initial bombardment, but was not always the case. 

And beyond the wire were the many German machine guns, each firing about 600 rounds (shots) a minute,

and sited so that each gun’s fire would cross that of at least one other, doubling the danger of being hit.  This would be combined with rifle fire from the enemy infantry

and hand grenades if the British soldiers managed to get close enough.

It is no wonder, then, that casualties were so high.  On the first day of the Somme, 1 July, 1916, the British lost nearly 60,000 men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. 

If a soldier was wounded close to his own trenches, he might be able to limp or drag himself back, or he might be helped by another soldier, wounded or not,

although there was a certain suspicion among the higher command that this would be an easy way for unwounded men to slip away from the fighting and could be frowned upon.  Sometimes captured Germans might be pressed into service to help with the wounded.

(It was a fairly common fact that, once soldiers were wounded, they could be considered as somehow out of the war and both sides could be very gentle with the other side’s casualties.)  There were also military stretcher-bearers, whose job was to go out onto the battlefield behind the advancing troops to pick up casualties—which could be a very dangerous job if they got too close to the fighting.

Once back behind their own lines, the wounded came—or were brought—to a first aid station, for immediate treatment and a look-over, to see how badly wounded someone was.

If further treatment was required, wounded men would be conveyed by ambulance—either horse-drawn

or motorized

to the next medical stop, the casualty clearing station.

A very serious wound would necessitate further attention at a base hospital

(which could be in a converted hotel or chateau, as here) or even a transfer to Britain.

Here’s the whole process done wonderfully in silhouette.

It’s a blessing for those of us who love Tolkien’s work that, although he was involved in the Somme battle and subsequently went through the medical system, he wasn’t wounded by shrapnel

or a German sniper’s bullet,

but by an attacker who favored neither side and whose effects, if rarely fatal, could be long-lasting:  a human body louse.

In October, 1916, he was invalided out of his unit, suffering from a number of complaints linked to something called “trench fever”, and eventually shipped back to England, never to return to France.  The cause was that louse, which had crawled into the lining of his clothing

to lay eggs.

Within the louse or its eggs was a bacterium which could enter the body through a break in the skin and, once in, produced a wide series of symptoms very nicely depicted here—

With huge numbers of soldiers living so close together and very few chances until your unit was pulled back from the trenches to wash thoroughly and have your uniform properly cleaned, the best the men could do was to try to pick or burn the lice out of the seams, which, considering the huge numbers and persistence of lice, was never very successful.

Ugluk could treat exhaustion and surface head wounds with his rough medicine, but, in 1916, there was no cure for trench fever—in fact, it was only late in the War that lice were firmly identified as a major factor (here’s a copy of a major medical work of the period which seeks to understand what’s going on:   https://archive.org/details/medicaldiseaseso00hursuoft  see page 180 and following).  Mild cases—CS Lewis had one—seemed to cure themselves, but for severe cases, like Tolkien’s, the best that could be done was to send the patient home—which saved him from the bloodbaths to come and gave us The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Avoid the trenches at all costs,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

As always, dear readers, welcome.

It has been discussed, both elsewhere in print and on this blog, what an Orc is.

 Treebeard’s definition is often cited, saying of Saruman:

“ ‘He has taken up with foul folk, with the Orcs.  Brm, hoom!  Worse than that:  he has been doing something to them; something dangerous.  For these Isengarders are more like wicked Men.  It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it.  I wondered what he has done?  Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men?  That would be a black evil!’ ”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

When asked about Orcs, JRRT offered several clues, saying:

1. “Also the Orcs (goblins) and other monsters bred by the First Enemy…” (letter to Milton Waldman, late 1951? Letters, 151)—so, somehow created by Morgoth, Sauron’s master

2.  “But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions’.” (letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April, 1951, Letters, 178)

3. “Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Orcs.  He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing.  There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements…It is not true actually of the Orcs—who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted…” (draft of letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 190)—in this same letter, he also quotes Frodo:  “ ‘The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own.  I don’t think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 1, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”)

4. “I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodeling and corrupting them, not making them.”  (from the same draft to Peter Hastings)

5. “Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special pervasive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds.” (continuation of draft of letter sent to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 287)

As these are remarks by the creator (well, “sub-creator”, as JRRT would say), then they must be true, but I would offer another detail—not as to who or what Orcs are, but on whom they might be based.

Humphrey Carpenter, in his 1977 biography of Tolkien, quotes him as writing:

“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war…” (Carpenter, 89)

Such a soldier was called a “Tommy” (short for “Tommy Atkins”) in the Great War, and, although there is, as is often the case with nicknames (just try looking up the old name for a US soldier, “Doughboy”) controversy, it seems to have been a generic name for “infantryman” as early as the 1740s. 

JRRT’s Tommies in 1916 would have looked like this—

although very often more like this—

(A “batman”, by the way, isn’t what you might think

but an officer’s servant, called, it seems, after the pack saddle—in French “un bat”—on which rested an officer’s worldly goods in the field.)

Over the Tommies was a massive hierarchy, beginning with the army’s commander-in-chief—from late December, 1915, Douglas Haig,

down through a Tommy’s regimental commander, a colonel or lieutenant colonel,

to his company commander, a captain,

down to his platoon commander, a second lieutenant, like the one so often written about on this blog.

While a lieutenant might march at the head of the parade, however

the Tommy’s real boss was the man behind him, the sergeant, in the pre-Great War days, usually a senior soldier, with much experience, on battlefields and in barracks, who stood between the men and the officers, often as a kind of interpreter, and, to junior officers, as a kind of mentor.

At the beginning of the Great War, in 1914, senior officers were often men with long experience, many veterans of colonial wars across the globe,

and they commanded an all-volunteer army.

To meet the massive German army, swollen with reservists called up for active duty,

the British government initially relied upon patriotic calls for more volunteers, and got them.

So many soldiers needed many officers to control them and the government called in reservists and retired officers, but also depended upon boys who had been trained at their private schools in earlier student cadet organizations and then the OTC (Officer Training Corps), one such organization being formed at King Edward’s School, in Birmingham.

Such officers came from the middle and upper classes and therefore would have sounded very different from  their (mostly) lower class soldiers.  Officers were “gentlemen” and, even in the later years of the War, when replacements had to be found lower down the social scale, those promoted were coached in how to act as if they had come from much farther up that scale—hence the (really rather insulting) initials,“TG”, attached to them—“Temporary Gentlemen”.

Sergeants, however, were usually of the same social class as the men and would have sounded like them, as well as shared their values.

Which brings us to our Orcs.

Here is the sound of one of Sauron’s upper-class commanders—perhaps this is the Dark Lord’s Field Marshall Haig– on the field of battle:

“ ‘Come not between the Nazgul and his prey!  Or he will not slay thee in thy turn.  He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh will be devoured, and thy shriveled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

And here is what I would suggest is an Orc sergeant, Ugluk:

“ ‘You’ll run with me behind you…Run! Or you’ll never see your beloved holes again.  By the White Hand!  What’s the use of sending out mountain-maggots on a trip, only half trained.  Run, curse you!  Run while night lasts!’ “ (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

And, if that’s an Orc sergeant, then, although they carry swords, spears, and bows,

rather than modern magazine rifles and bayonets

mightn’t we see those whom Ugluk is driving before him, as Tolkien says of Sam Gamgee, a “reflexion of the British soldier”, but now corrupted and twisted, as the Orcs were by Morgoth and Sauron, into the infantry of the Dark Lord?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

And in your ranks,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O