A Long Stretch

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

Tags

Agincourt, Archery, arrow bag, arrows, Bard the Bowman, Battle of Poitiers, Casula Mellita, Crecy, Edinburgh, English Longbowmen, Esgaroth, Greco-Roman, gunpowder, harpoon, Hundred Years War, Laketown, longbows, Medieval-Renaissance, Napoleonic Wars, Naval Warfare, Pinkie Cleugh, Roman, sailing, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Mary Rose, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In the past, we had a posting on Bard the bowman

who rescued Esgaroth (Laketown)

from the attack by Smaug.

(We especially like this Jeff Chan Bard not only because Bard is depicted as he is in the book, as an archer, but also because it includes the thrush who tells him where he is to strike.)

In that previous posting, we suggested that JRRT pictured Bard as looking and acting like one of the English longbowmen of the Hundred Years War

rather than as a harpooner, as in the film.

Since that posting, we did a second which included bowmen, just a few weeks ago, about Mogul-knife and arrow wound, and now we would like to add a third.

As we’ve mentioned before, one of us is preparing a new university course to be taught in the autumn on the history of warfare. As you can imagine, this is a big subject, but, in the process of shaping it, we want to include a week on developments in naval warfare over the centuries. So far, we’ve divided it into several parts:

a. Greco-Roman

b. medieval-renaissance

c. the age of sail

d. ironclads

e. dreadnoughts

While working on the Medieval/Renaissance section, we were reminded of what might be the most famous Renaissance shipwreck: the sinking of The Mary Rose, 19 July, 1545.

Medieval naval battles had been primarily infantry battles transferred to the sea, as had been Roman practice. That practice was a story in itself—the traditional Roman explanation was that they were land-fighters and so had invented a device, called a “corvus”–that’s “crow” in English—probably because the point at the enemy’s end was a bit like a pecking beak. This was a kind of gangplank which, dropped onto the enemy’s ship, stuck in place and allowed Roman marines to rush across and deal with their opposite numbers.

Things began to change with the invention of cannon in western Europe. (The history of gunpowder in the Far East is its own subject—and one we urge those interested to have a look at. Here’s a LINK to get you started.) Used first on land perhaps by the 13^th century, the first recorded use of cannon on a ship dates from 1338 (and here’s a LINK to naval artillery, in case you want to know more).

With cannon, you could stand off from an enemy ship and—your choice—cripple it by destroying its sails and rigging—or sink it with holes below the waterline.

Boarding, as the Romans had, was still a possibility, of course, and provided the extra benefit, if the boarding was successful, of allowing for the acquisition of an extra ship. This could be added to your fleet or sold and the profits shared among the sailors—or, actually, if we go by Napoleonic British standards, the profits went to everybody at the top, including admirals who weren’t even present at the capture, with a teeny amount remaining for the seamen who’d actually taken the prize.

To do that boarding, Romans—and medievals—had loaded their ships with soldiers, and the Mary Rose was no exception, its surviving records suggesting that there were about 200 soldiers in a crew of approximately 400-450.

As a number of longbows have been recovered from the wreck,

this would suggest that many of those soldiers were archers.

These, along with the artillery (and perhaps a small number of arquebuses? To our current knowledge, none has been recovered from the ship, but, certainly, by 1545, they were in common use—at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, east of Edinburgh, in 1547, the English army had several hundred German mercenary arquebusiers),

would have supplied the missile weapons of the ship.

Not only were large numbers of artifacts discovered in the Mary Rose, but the skeletons of perhaps half its crew and about 90 of those were intact enough to warrant further study. For our purpose, one, in particular is very interesting.

Discovered in the hold, he was a large man for his time, about 6 feet (about 183cm). As well as revealing that he would have had a powerful build, his skeleton displayed repetitive stress injuries to his upper body. There is discussion as to the pull-weight (how much muscle power it takes) of the longbow of the medieval/Renaissance period, estimates ranging from 90 to about 150 pounds (we’re sorry that we can’t readily convert this, as it isn’t pounds of weight, but pounds of force—the general idea is that it would have taken huge muscle power in either case), but, for a bow as tall as a bowman, this would have demanded great muscular strength—which would then have, over time, put huge stress upon an archer’s body. This has then led archaeologists to suggest that he was a bowman.

And this brings us back to Bard, the actual archer, and a suggestion as to what he might have looked like.

JRRT only says:

“But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard, grim-voiced and grim-faced…Now he shot with a great yew bow, till all his arrows but one were spent.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

“a great yew bow” makes us think of the English bowmen we’ve mentioned before, and those we believe were in Tolkien’s mind, the victors at the battles of Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415).

To produce archers who could pull such powerful bows (and fire up to 10 arrows a minute, as we’ve mentioned in a previous posting), English archers began training as boys and continued throughout the years—as athletes of the bow, they had to keep in shape. Such training and exercise would then have produced men like that discovered on the Mary Rose—big-shouldered, strong-armed—and given to the subsequent damage inflicted on the body by archery wear-and-tear.

So, might we then see Bard as not only “grim-voiced and grim-faced”, but “broad-shouldered and imposing”? To which we can add this from The Hobbit:

“In the very midst of their talk, a tall figure stepped from the shadows. He was drenched with water, his black hair hung wet over his face and shoulders, and a fierce light was in his eyes.” (Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

All of which gives us: “tall, black-haired, fierce, grim-voiced and grim-faced”—and, at our suggestion, “broad-shouldered and imposing”—a worthy portrait of Bard the Dragon-slayer.

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

It’s not known what our Mary Rose archer was doing in the hold at the time the ship went down, but perhaps he was seeking to transfer extra ammunition to the main deck? That ammunition would probably have been in the form of coarse linen bags carrying 24 arrows each—here’s a modern reconstruction

and here’s the LINK to the site from which it comes. This belongs to an amazing woman whose website is full of her life on the edge of the Great Plains, in Kansas, USA—home of Dorothy of the OZ books, of course– as well as her photos of things like the reconstructed bag in the photo above. Below is a picture of the Kansas tall grass prairie.

Oh, Come, Let Us Adore…

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

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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1984, Adolf Hitler, altar, Ar-Pharazon, Armenelos, Artemis, Aulis, Avebury, Aztec, Benito Mussolini, Big Brother, France, Gallic Celts, George Orwell, Germany, Gondor, Greek temple, Hera, Herodotus, human sacrifice, Iphigenia, Melkor, Nazis, nemeton, Numenor, occupation, Olympia, Pantheon, Rome, sacrifice, Sauron, shrine, Soviet Union, Stalin, Stonehenge, Tenochtitlan, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The War of the Ring, Tolkien, Valar, World War II, worship

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Some time ago, we posted a piece on what Sauron wanted out of the War of the Ring. Our evidence was this, spoken to Aragorn and Gandalf and the allied army which had marched to the Morannon as a distraction, by the Lieutenant of the Tower:

“The rabble of Gondor and its deluded allies shall withdraw at once beyond the Anduin, first taking oaths never again to assail Sauron the Great in arms, open or secret. All lands east of the Anduin shall be Sauron’s for ever, solely. West of the Anduin as far as the Misty Mountains and the Gap of Rohan shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs. But they shall help to rebuild Isengard which they have wantonly destroyed, and that shall be Sauron’s, and there his lieutenant shall dwell: not Saruman, but one more worthy of trust.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”)

These are political conditions: Sauron is demanding territory, just as any conqueror in our world would. When France was occupied by the Nazis in 1940–something with which JRRT would have been quite familiar while writing The Lord of the Rings—here’s a map of what Hitler demanded—and got.

France-occupation

The last sentence of Sauron’s conditions even reminds us of the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini—although not how Mussolini would have viewed it.

Hitler-and-Mussolini

Hitler had another dictator-partner for a short time, however, Stalin, whom he distrusted even more than Mussolini.

STALIN-HITLER-2-676x450

And Stalin, unlike Sauron, won his war and swallowed all of central Europe, as well as eastern Germany.

post-war-soviet-influence

It’s clear that George Orwell had this dictator in mind when he was creating his “Big Brother”, in 1984, even to his physical description (from a poster—it appears that no one has actually seen Big Brother in the flesh): “an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features…”

stalin

These posters were so constructed that, “It was one of those pictures…which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.”

Big-Brother-Is-Watching-You-Poster

In fact, as we think about the image, its slogan, “Big Brother is Watching” might be applied to the All-Seeing Eye.

sauron-eye

That all-seeing eye, however, has another meaning, we believe, and it has to do with a goal which the Lieutenant doesn’t mention, but JRRT does:

“Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants. If he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all the rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.” (Letters, 244)

Thus, like various gods through the history of the world, by showing himself not a full physical form, but only as an eye, we can imagine that Sauron was claiming divine omniscience.

This set us to thinking: there is virtually no trace of religion in the latter part of the Third Age and certainly no religious structures. What might Sauron build as a shrine—to himself? And, as a corollary, what would he demand for worship?

In Western Europe, some the earliest shrines were not actual buildings, but sites claimed to be somehow invested with divinity, such as groves of trees, something which the Gallic Celts called a nemeton, perhaps related to the Old Irish word nemed, meaning, according to the on-line OI/Middle Irish dictionary, “(small) sacred place”.

DollTorWest0801

It’s easy to see how this could lead to the idea of a stone circle (perhaps beginning with a ditch of the sort which could ring settlements?), like that at Avebury.

Avebury

Or its more concentrated version, Stonehenge.

stonehenge-copy1

Another possibility might be to organize that grove into lines of pillars—using the trunks of the trees—and adding a roof—and you get a Greek temple.

templeofhera

Herodotus tells us that, in his time, this temple, devoted to Hera at Olympia, still had a couple of wooden columns, showing just how old it was. (There are also building elements, like pegs—all in stone in later time—which mirror earlier wooden construction.)

In the Greek world (and the Roman, as well), worship was done outside the building, at an altar in front.

snake-altar-from-mausoleum-of-halicarnassus-in-bodrum

That worship would consist of prayers and sacrifices. As the majority of the gods were believed to live in a place above humans (Olympus—an actual mountain, but also, seemingly, an imaginary location in the sky), sacrifices were conveyed in smoke. These could be as simple as incense

elt200810220812093544851-142058F954A638F8693

or as complicated as the barbecue after a multiple animal-slaughter, like the Roman suovetaurilia (“pigsheepbullactivity”). (Guess who got to consume the actual meat?)

multipleanimalsacrifice

Classical people did not practice human sacrifice, considering it abominable, but it may have existed, at least in desperate circumstances in the far past, as has been preserved in the Greek story of Iphigenia, murdered at the altar of Artemis at Aulis to propitiate the goddess, who had blocked the Greeks from sailing to attack Troy.

Black-figured Tyrrhenian amphora (wine-jar) attributed to the Timiades Painter

Of course, when it comes to wholesale, regular human sacrifice, we immediately think of Aztec devotion to their god, Huitzilopochtli, who was fed on the blood of human hearts at the top of his temple in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.

huitzilopochtli

ThinkstockPhotos-98193978

sacrifice-2

And this brings us back to Sauron, his temple, his worship. Because there is so much wonderful material to work from in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in general, we confine ourselves to those and the Letters, but a little wider research gave us a clue—a horrible but not surprising clue—to answer our original question. In the Silmarillion, we found this:

“But Sauron caused to be built upon the hill in the midst of the city of the Numenoreans, Armenelos the Golden, a mighty temple; and it was in the form of a circle at the base, and there the walls were fifty feet in thickness, and the width of the base was five hundred feet across the center, and the walls rose from the ground five hundred feet, and they were crowned with a mighty dome. And that dome was roofed all with silver, and rose glittering in the sun, so that the light of it could be seen afar off; but soon the light was darkened and the silver became black.” (The Silmarillion, “Akallabeth”, 273)

As people who are much involved with the Greco-Roman world, this description immediately brings to our minds the Pantheon, in Rome, whose dome was sheathed in copper, until that was stolen by the eastern emperor Constans II in 663AD, only to be stolen from him en route by Saracen pirates. It’s not 500 feet by 500 feet (152.4m.), of course, being only about 140 (42.67m.), but it’s certainly large and impressive—and circular, with a mighty dome.

aerial-view-pantheon

26.pantheon

Pantheon_Rome_(1)

But why did the “silver become black”? Do we have a bad feeling about this?

“For there was an altar of fire in the midst of the temple, and in the topmost of the dome there was a louver, whence there issued a great smoke…Thereafter the fire and smoke went up without ceasing; for the power of Sauron daily increased, and in that temple, with the spilling of blood and torment and great wickedness, men made sacrifice to Melkor that he should release them from Death. And most often from among the Faithful they chose their victims…”

Sauron, once Melkor’s servant, had gained great power over the Numenorean king, Ar-Pharazon, using it to persuade the king to attack the Valar—and thus bring about the destruction of Numenor. Sauron’s spirit survived that destruction, and perhaps his memory of Melkor’s temple and its worship would have, as well?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

We can’t resist adding this wonderful John Howe impression of the drowning of the city of Armenelos…

John_Howe_-_The_Drowning_of_Numenor

What If…

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Tolkien

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Alamo, Andelkrag, Anduin, Caernarfon, Carcassonne, Duc de Berry, fortresses, Hal Foster, Harry Turtledove, Howard Pyle, Huns, Minas Tirith, moat, Mont Saint Michel, Mordor, Numenor, Peter Jackson, Portchester, Prince Valiant, Rohirrim, S.M. Stirling, Santa Anna, Segontium, Siege Warfare, Texas War for Independence, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, Tiryns, Tolkien, Tower of Orthanc, Tres Riches Heures

Welcome, readers, as always.

If you are among our excellent regulars, you know that we’re fascinated by history (one of us has taught it for years). One subset of our interest is “what ifs”, two of our favorite scifi/fantasy authors being Harry Turtledove and S.M. Stirling, who have written numerous books exploring all sorts of alternative places and times.

In this posting, we’d like to try a “what if” ourselves: what would happen to Minas Tirith if the Rohirrim and Aragorn had failed to arrive?

Walls collapsing under a rain of boulders, soldiers fleeing from the defenses, the main gate broken in by a giant battering ram—

how was this the place of which its creator had written:

“A strong citadel it was indeed, and not to be taken by a host of enemies, if there were any within that could hold weapons…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

In an earlier posting, we talked about Sauron’s attack on Minas Tirith

and even suggested that one inspiration might have been an episode of the comic strip Prince Valiant and the siege of Andelkrag by the Huns (published in May, 1939). (Footnote: there is a rumor that the writer/illustrator, Hal Foster, intended the Huns to equal the Nazis and therefore annoyed Hitler—a would-be Sauron to Saruman’s Mussolini, as we once also suggested?)

That castle is splendid, but not quite what one would have seen in the 5^th century AD, when Attila led the Huns to invade central and western Europe. Andelkrag appears to be a very elaborate late-medieval castle, c.1400 or so, rather like the ones you might see in the Duc de Berry’s Tres Riches Heures (c.1412-16; 1440s; 1485-1489).

More likely, if Andelkrag had been a real fortress, it would have been a repurposed Roman army installation, like this at Caernarfon, called by the Romans, Segontium.

Such forts might then be converted into castles, as at Portchester

62790_8d3686244501897

but that would hardly have provided the gallant medieval look which Foster gave his comic strip and which, in turn, came from the illustrations of people like Howard Pyle (1853-1911), in the previous generation (and which, we have previously argued, had a strong influence on what JRRT imagined his Middle-earth to look like).

We are told in one of the extra features in the extended film version of The Lord of the Rings that an inspiration for P. Jackson’s Minas Tirith

was the ancient island fort/religious site of Mont Saint Michel, on the western coast of France.

As you can see from the photo and the map, this isn’t just a fort, however, but a little fortified town, reminding us that Minas Tirith isn’t a castle, but a walled city, like the restored medieval town of Carcassonne, in southern France.

Like Mont St. Michel, Minas Tirith is built up a slope.

(This, by the way, is Tolkien’s first sketch.)

But, unlike Mont St. Michel and Carcassonne, it has not one wall, but many:

“For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.”

Because the city was built on a series of levels, this would mean that each wall would overlook the next lower one, so that the defenders on the upper wall could rain down missiles on attackers below.

poi_img_town_defences_1

This is an ancient practice. The Bronze Age Greek city of Tiryns (yes, there is a bit of a similarity in the name, isn’t there?) is so constructed, for example, that its entryway forces attackers to move to the left, thereby potentially exposing an unshielded side, as well as undergoing a barrage of arrows and rocks from those on the wall above.

Tiryns Reconstruction

tiryns-walls

In the case of Minas Tirith, there is an added obstacle:

“But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned this way and then that across the face of the hill.”

image13mtzigzag

Attackers, then, would not only be at the mercy of those above them, but would, should they break through one gate, be forced to zigzag back and forth as they fought their way upwards, taking more and more casualties as they advanced.

minas-tirith3

Added to this, at the lowest level, was the main wall:

“…of great height and marvellous thickness, built ere the power and craft of Numenor waned in exile; and its outward face was like to the Tower of Orthanc, hard and dark and smooth, unconquerable by steel or fire, unbreakable except by some convulsion that would rend the very earth on which it stood.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

Unlike so many fortresses—going back at least to Neolithic times—Minas Tirith had no moat. Not only does such a watery ditch slow down attackers by giving them one more puzzle to solve, but it also makes a standard siege practice, undermining, much more difficult. Basically, what undermining does is to hollow out an area underneath a wall and replace the original foundation with a flammable wooden one. Then the miners fill the hollow with burnables, torch them, and wait to see if the new wooden foundation collapses, bringing down the wall on top of it. You can see miners at work in this medieval manuscript illustration.

A wet moat would have forced the miners to dig much deeper, to avoid being flooded out.

For Minas Tirith, the nearest water source for a wet moat would have been the Anduin, some miles away, but dry moats were useful as well. This diorama of the final attack by the British at the siege of Badajoz in 1812 shows how effective such a thing might be. Although the besiegers have managed, through prolonged bombardment, to create a breach in the main wall, they have to struggle through the deep dry moat to reach it—and took large numbers of casualties in doing so.

image18badajoz

Against all of these defenses, the head of the Nazgul, as Sauron’s general in the field, has the usual siege weapons: stone throwers, siege towers, even a massive battering ram. He also has a more subtle tool:

“But soon there were few left in Minas Tirith who had the heart to stand up and defy the hosts of Mordor. For yet another weapon, swifter than hunger, the Lord of the Dark Tower had: dread and despair.”

Even so, under the command of Gandalf, there was still resistance and we can imagine that that resistance would have persisted through all the circles, but the ultimate difficulty, which would have caused the fall of the city, had not the Rohirrim—and then Aragorn—come, was the lack of reserves.

Gondor was, at the time of the siege, in decline, as Pippin noticed when he and Gandalf arrived there:

“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.”

When reenforcements came from the south, they were “less than three thousands full told.”

When a city or castle is under siege, it needs not only a force to man its walls, but also a second force, to be sent quickly to any place where an enemy breakthrough is threatened. The force on the walls has two main jobs: 1. to keep the enemy at a distance with missile fire—or, failing that, to cut down the attacking force as it approaches the walls, trimming its numbers and thereby possibly demoralizing it; 2. to fend off the enemy if it actually manages to gain the walls. This illustration from the Prince Valiant Andelkrag siege provides a good image of this double job.

image19defenseofandelkrag

It might be possible, if the enemy made an assault upon a single point, to siphon off men from other parts of the defenses to act as a temporary second force, but, if the enemy attacks more than one place at the same time, this is not a safe thing to do. In the case of the assault on the first wall of Minas Tirith, the enemy commander seems to have had such numbers—and didn’t care in the least about his losses– that he could attack the entire wall:

“Ever since the middle night the great assault had gone on. The drums rolled. To the north and to the south company upon company of the enemy pressed to the walls. There came great beasts, like moving houses in the red and fitful light, the mumakil of the Harad dragging through the lanes amid the fires huge towers and engines. Yet their Captain cared not greatly what they did or how many might be slain: their purpose was only to test the strength of the defence and to keep the men of Gondor busy in many places.”

The weakest place in any strong wall is a gate and that knowledge has guided Sauron’s Captain:

“It was against the Gate that he would throw his heaviest weight. Very strong it might be, wrought of steel and iron, and guarded with towers and bastions of indomitable stone, yet it was the key, the weakest point in all that high and impenetrable wall.”

Thus, with everyone pinned in position by a general assault, and there being no other possible reserve, once the gate is down—but then a cock crows and there are horns and, well, you know what happens next.

But, continuing our “what if”, we look to a different model, the Alamo, a ruined mission turned into a fortress in the so-called “Texas War for Independence” of 1835-36.

alamo-map-3

Within this mission, some 180plus defenders faced a Mexican army of several thousand, staving them off for a week-and-a-half before finally being overwhelmed by a series of nearly-simultaneous pre-dawn assaults from several directions at once. image21alamoassault

The survivors drew back, still fighting, and made a series of last stands in the rooms of the surviving mission buildings, dying almost to a man because the Mexican general, Santa Anna, had declared that there would be no mercy for any survivors. (There were a handful of prisoners, however, perhaps including the famous American frontiersman, Davy Crockett, but under Santa Anna’s direction, they were then murdered.)

In our grim “what if”, the survivors of the outer wall, led in retreat by Gandalf, are gradually driven back, like the Alamo defenders, until they reach the Citadel—and then—but, can we go on? Are the Rohirrim and Aragorn simply delayed and then appear? Are there eagle-rescues, as in The Hobbit?

What do you think, dear readers?

And thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

We saw this Lego attack on Minas Tirith and it was just too wonderful not to include!

PPS

As we were finishing this, we happened upon a really great website–

https://middleeartharchitectures.wordpress.com/ –wonderful visuals!

Bordering (.1: The Landscape)

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

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Anglo-Scots border, Black Middens Bastle, blackmail, Border Marches, Border Reivers, Border Wardens, Charlemagne, Debatable Lands, Emyn Beraid, Fairbairns, Hadrian's Wall, Hermitage Castle, hot trod, John Philip Sousa, Marca Hispanica, Marches, Monty Python, Offa's Dyke, Robert Carey, Scots Dike, Smailholm Tower, Ted Nasmith, The Liberty Bell, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, Tower Hills, West March

Welcome once more, dear readers.

In this posting, we want to return to a recent one about “marches”—that is, not pieces for military bands (although we are partial to those of John Philip Sousa—1854-1932–

especially “The Liberty Bell”—1893—

digital.gonzaga.edu.jpeg

mostly because it was used by Monty Python. We provide a link here for what might have been its first recording, by the “Edison Grand Concert Band” in 1896. Watch out for the big foot!)

but border areas, usually sensitive ones, which might have been militarized, like that at the southern edge of Charlemagne’s empire.

This, the Marca Hispanica, existed as a buffer state between the Moorish Caliphate to its south and the Holy Roman Empire to the north.

In contrast, we have the West March, to the west of the Shire, as we’ve discussed before.

At its far western edge are the Tower Hills (here illustrated by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith)

on which are perched three white towers, described in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“Three Elf-towers of immemorial age were still to be seen on the Tower Hills beyond the western marches. They shone far off in the moonlight. The tallest was furthest away, standing alone upon a green mound. The Hobbits of the Westfarthing said that one could see the Sea from the top of that tower; but no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it.” (Gandalf adds to this that there was a palantir, Elendil’s Stone, located there—The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 11, “The Palantir”.)

The difference is, those towers don’t seem defensive and the West March is not a military zone—although it is the site of Hobbit-expansion, as Appendix B tells us:

“1452 The Westmarch, from the Far Downs to the Tower Hills (Emyn Beraid) is added to the Shire by the gift of the King. Many hobbits remove to it.

1462 …the Thain makes Fastred Warden of Westmarch. Fastred and Elanor make their dwelling at Undertowers on the Tower Hills, where their descendants, the Fairbairns of the Towers, dwelt for many generations.”

Talk of marches and wardens and towers, however, immediately brought to mind for us something from our world (doesn’t it always?).

This is the border area between England and Scotland, an area of conflict for several centuries, but culminating in the struggles of the 16^th century.

The border area had been divided, on both sides, into three marches, with a subset for that area on the southwest side called the “Debatable Lands”, because both England and Scotland claimed it. In 1552, the decision was mutually made to put up an earthen barrier, the so-called “Scots Dike”, to split it.

Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, farther to the south, with its system of walls and towers and gates and little forts and big army camps, this was never an elaborate military structure, or even like Offa’s Dike between England and Wales,

but simply a boundary marker in low-lying land (and only 3.5 miles long– 5.6km).

When it came to the border towards the east, and the center of the region and beyond, however, the land rises into the characteristic twisty hills with long, narrow valleys.

14.PennineWay-CNN2NJ-1680x1050

In this wild world, there are no long walls, of stone, wood, or earth to protect anyone, but castles, towers, and fortified farmhouses called bastles (possibly from the same root as “Bastille”?). Here we see Hermitage Castle, Smailholm Tower, and Black Middens Bastle.

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Smailholm-tower1

Although we see these now as gaunt ruins, we should always imagine them—as in this reconstruction of Smailholm—as living spaces, as well as refuges in an often lawless land.

One has only to see the thick walls of a bastle and, originally, no door at ground level (stairs appear to be a later convenience for a more peaceable time), to imagine the danger from reivers, raiders from either side of the Anglo-Scots border and sometimes, as there was a certain amount of intermarriage, from both.

As can be seen in this reconstruction, these walls might be all that would stand between the inhabitants and destitution or even death, should the reivers come raiding.

There was also the possibility of buying them off, by paying them blackmail, a word whose origin is contested, but whose purpose is clear: protection money. If you paid them, in coin or cattle, you were safe—at least until the price went up.

Curbing such behavior was the job of the Border Wardens, there being six, one for each March on each side of the border. Theirs was a difficult job: too much territory, too few men, and too few resources to back them up. Wonderfully, one of these Wardens, Robert Carey, has left us a memoir, which is available on-line: memoirsrobertca00orregoog.

If you were attacked and you survived, you might send word to the Warden or one of his officers, who could organize a posse to pursue the raiders. By law, all able-bodied locals were supposed to turn out to help when the organizer—Warden or officer—rode by with trumpeter and a rider who carried a flaming bit of peat on his “staff” (local word for “lance”).

This was called the “hot trod” and, under its conditions, the pursuers were allowed to cross the border. Such occasions could be very dangerous, however, as those raiders would be chased back across their own territory, giving them the chance to delay or destroy those in pursuit in an ambush on familiar ground.

We were originally drawn to this part of the world and of Anglo-Scottish history because of our interest in the musical literature of the region, the so-called “border ballads”, and, in our next, “Bordering (.2 Blackmail, Battle, and Song”) we’ll talk a bit about them—and perhaps a bit more about borders and heroic behavior, as well.

Thanks as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (5b): Hostile Takeover

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

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Baggins, Chief, Der Fuehrer, Gestapo, Hitler, Lotho, SA, Sackville-Bagginses, Saruman, Sharkey, Shire, Shirriffs, Southfarthing, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, to the second part of our last (for the moment?) posting on the Shire. This is actually a two-part posting and is devoted to the takeover of the Shire by “Sharkey” and his followers and how it might have happened, based upon evidence from the texts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

We decided upon a two-part posting because we saw the takeover as a two-step process. Initially, we believe that Saruman looked for someone within the Shire to act as his agent there and, as a local agent, both to foment the kind of discontent which would provoke a demand for change, and to act as the leader of that change.

Because the Shire had so little government and most problems were dealt with within families, we wondered if that discontent wouldn’t begin as something Shire-wide, but be found within one or more families, instead.

With this in mind, we immediately thought of the Sackville-Bagginses. From the final chapter of The Hobbit, it was clear that the S-Bs (as they’re called) had grievances against their cousins, the Bagginses, mostly because they wanted Bag End and its contents.

How this led to leaguing with Saruman is not explained, but merely suggested, by Pippin, who says, of reported disturbance in the Southfarthing:

“ ‘Whatever it is…Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.” The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

This is then confirmed when the hobbits reach the bridge over the Brandywine and one of the hobbit guards (Hob Hayward), mentions “the Chief…up at Bag End.”

Frodo, who has sold his house at Bag End (see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 3, “Three is Company”) to the S-Bs, immediately asks Hob, “ ‘Chief? Chief? Do you mean Mr. Lotho?’ said Frodo.” The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”

Otho and Lobelia had been Bilbo’s enemies long ago, but, whereas Lobelia is still alive, Otho is long dead and Lotho (and yes, the word “loathe” must lie just below the surface here, though this is probably not his name in the Common Tongue, just as Pippin’s name isn’t Pippin), his son, has somehow become not the Mayor of the Shire (who is actually Will Whitfoot), but the much vaguer (and more menacing) “the Chief”. (We also note that “Mr. Lotho” is a courtesy title and one for established land-owners, really, and not for Lotho.)

The family theme is underlined when Hob replies that “we have to say ‘the Chief’ nowadays” and Frodo says, in turn:

“ ‘Do you indeed!’ said Frodo. ‘Well, I am glad he has dropped the Baggins at any rate. But it is evidently high time that the family dealt with him and put him in his place.’ ”

If Frodo’s remark suggests the familial aspect of justice in the Shire, the reply of an anonymous hobbit to it suggests the second or external step of the takeover:

“A hush fell on the hobbits beyond the gate. ‘It won’t do no good talking that way,’ said one. ‘He’ll get to hear of it. And if you make so much noise, you’ll wake the Chief’s Big Man.’ ”

As JRRT began The Lord of the Rings in 1937, just four years after the Nazis took control of Germany, “The Chief” surely has echoes of “Der Fuehrer”, which simply means “The Leader”.

In which case, should we associate the threat of “the Chief’s Big Man” with everything from the SA

to the Gestapo?

Merry, at least, certainly makes a connection with something which Butterbur had said earlier:

“It all comes of those newcomers and gangrels that began coming up the Greenway last year, as you may remember; but more came later. Some were just poor bodies running away from trouble; but most were bad men, full o’ thievery and mischief.” The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

Answering the anonymous voice, Merry says:

“If you mean that your precious Chief has been hiring ruffians out of the wild, then we’ve not come back too soon!”

When the Big Man appears, Merry’s conclusion is confirmed: it’s Bill Ferny, who, Butterbur believes, who had been involved in a minor battle in Bree, in which five hobbits had been killed:

“ ‘And Harry Goatleaf that used to be on the West-gate, and that Bill Ferny, they came in on the strangers’ side, and they’ve gone off with them; and it’s my belief they let them in. On the night of the fight I mean.’ “

If some of these “Big Men” were criminal drifters from the east, almost randomly recruited, there were others who were sent.

“ ‘It all began with Pimple, as we call him,’ said Farmer Cotton; ‘and it began as soon as you’d gone off, Mr. Frodo. He’d funny ideas, had Pimple. Seems he wanted to own everything himself, and then order other folk about. It soon came out that he already did own a sight more than was good for him; and he was always grabbing more, though where he got the money was a mystery: mills and malt-houses and inns, and farms, and leaf-plantations. He’d already bought Sandyman’s mill before he came to Bag End, seemingly.

Of course he started with a lot of property in the Southfarthing which he had from his dad; and it seems he’d been selling a lot o’ the best leaf, and sending it away quietly for a year or two. But at the end o’ last year he began sending away loads of stuff, not only leaf. Things began to get short, and winter coming on, too. Folk got angry, but he had an answer. A lot of Men, ruffians mostly, came with great wagons, some to carry off the goods south-away, and others to stay. And more came. And before we knew where we were they were planted here and there all over the Shire, and were felling trees and digging and building themselves sheds and houses just as they liked…”

There is a bit more to add to this. The “Big Men” were not alone. As in our own historical world of Nazi occupiers, there were those willing to collaborate, as Robin Smallburrow tells Sam:

“There’s hundreds of Shirriffs all told, and they want more, with all these new rules. Most of them are in it against their will, but not all. Even in the Shire there are some as like minding other folk’s business and talking big. And there’s worse than that: there’s a few as do spy-work for the Chief and his Men.”

With Farmer Cotton’s narrative, however, the two steps come together: the local was, indeed, as Pippin has suspected, Lotho. The external was a combination of opportunists, like Bill Ferny, and agents dispatched from an unnamed southern source, but we know that it was “Sharkey” who sent them, just as we know that “Sharkey” was Saruman, who was still capable of mischief—but not “in a small mean way”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (3b)

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

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

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24Hr Trench, Andrew Robertshaw, architecture, Birmingham, Brandywine, crop rotation, Diamond Jubilee, dugouts, Dunedain, feudal system, German lawn chairs, Hornblotton, Inns, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lavenham, manor, Marish, Medieval, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Sarehole, Sarehole's mill, Somerset, Suffolk, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, village, Western Front, WWI Trenches

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In this post, we’re continuing our series on the Shire. So far, we’ve looked at its government and organization (1), its economy (2), and its geography (3a). Now we want to look at Shire architecture.

Our initial inspiration for this was from a line in a letter from JRRT to Allen & Unwin, 12/12/55. Speaking of the Shire, he says: “It is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village about the period of the Diamond Jubilee… (Letters, 230)

The “Diamond Jubilee” was the 60^th anniversary of the reign of Queen Victoria (she came to the throne in 1837–Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee just five years ago).

The Jubilee was a huge celebration, bringing in people from all over Britain’s empire, who converged on London in the summer of 1897.

2adiam 2bdiam 2cdiam

JRRT was born in 1892 and had been brought to England in 1895, for a visit which became permanent when his father died back in South Africa. He and his brother

lived with their mother for a time in the village of Sarehole, just south of the huge industrial city of Birmingham. Sarehole’s mill

still stands. It has been said that this mill is the model for the one by The Water in The Hobbit, as drawn by JRRT.

Thus, when we think about Shire architecture, we can have a double picture:

bits of description in JRRT’s works
actual late Victorian rural villages of the sort in which Tolkien spent part of his childhood

If we begin with historical villages, there isn’t anything to see in the actual Sarehole, except for the mill, which, though built upon the site of a mill which can be dated to 1542, is a building from 1771, just before the industrial revolution, an event with which Tolkien certainly had problems. If we look at other such villages, however, we can get a general picture. Basing our image upon a schematic medieval village plan, we find a double line of houses strung out along a single road.

Spreading back from the houses are the fields, as villages in this world were self-sustaining. You can see these in JRRT’s illustration of the mill and the Hill. You’ll notice that these are in strips. In the feudal world, they illustrated both the use of crop rotation (different plants in different fields, with some fields allowed to rest), plus fields of the lord of the manor, which the tenants were obliged to tend. In Tolkien’s Shire, as there is no feudal system, we presume the stripping is for rotation.

4hob

Missing, however, from Hobbiton, would be two features you can see in the medieval illustration: a manor house and a church.

In the feudalism mentioned above, this ideal village is part of the social/governmental system in which it is attached to the smallest unit of that system, the manor.

As the chart explains, in the early medieval world, land was power and kings used their claim to control their lands (supposedly given to them by God) as a way to control the state in general. They deeded certain sections of land to their nobles, in return for taxes and military service. Those nobles, in turn, deeded out land to lesser nobles, all the way down to individual knights, who might hold no more than one parcel, or manor, with its house, church, and village of freemen (literally, free men, who could own land but paid taxes to the lord for it), peasants (who were also free, but held no land), and serfs (who were landless as well as being the property of the local lord).

Although Tolkien once described the Shire as “granted as a fief” (Letters, 158) and “half republic half aristocracy” (Letters, 241), it is not a feudal property and therefore lacks those marks of that system, those manor houses.

As well, it is also missing churches, or, for that matter, any form of religious shrine. A real English medieval village, depending on its size and wealth, could have had a very modest building, such as this at Hornblotton, in Somerset.

Or, if your village had become a prosperous town, like Lavenham, in Suffolk, you could even have a mini-cathedral. (Lavenham’s money had come from the international trade in woolen cloth.)

Although Tolkien insisted that there was a monotheistic underlay to Middle-earth in the Third Age, he also says of the folk of the Shire: “I do not think Hobbits practiced any form of worship or prayer (unless through exceptional contact with Elves).” (Letters, 193)

Without manors and churches, the Shire consists of private dwellings and inns. Inns seem to be like their parallels in our medieval world.

And, of course, there are the inns of the Shire and the Prancing Pony in Bree.

Private houses, including farms, however, fall into two categories: traditional hobbit (that is, built into hillsides) and what we might call outside-influence houses. As Tolkien says in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“All Hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground, or so they believed…Actually in the Shire of Bilbo’s days it was, as a rule, only the richest and the poorest Hobbits that maintained the old custom. The poorest went on living in burrows of the most primitive kind…while the well-to-do still constructed more luxurious versions of the simple diggings of old…in the hilly regions and the older villages, such as Hobbiton and Tuckborough, or in the chief township of the Shire, Michel Delving on the White Downs, there were now many houses of wood, brick, or stone…Hobbits had long accustomed to build sheds and workshops…

The habit of building farmhouses and barns was said to have begun among the inhabitants of the Marish down by the Brandywine.

It is probable that the craft of building, as many other crafts beside, was derived from the Dunedain. But the Hobbits may have learned it direct from the Elves… “

Our Tolkien illustration of The Hill

shows us both styles. In the background, burrows; in the foreground, outside-influence houses. The traditional style reminds us of something from US western history: the use of “dugouts” as (at least temporary) dwellings as settlers moved west across the plains.

As fans of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books will remember, her family lived in one of these along the banks of Plum Creek in the 1870s.

On a more sinister note, we’ve always wondered whether JRRT’s inspiration for hobbit holes may have come from his time on the Western Front, where, from late 1914, soldiers had burrowed into the earth to protect themselves from enemy attack and from the increasingly inclement weather. The shelters could be simply cutouts in the earth

or very elaborate cottages. The Germans were especially admired for their creativity in building the more elaborate ones.

We can’t mention the Great War and trenches without also mentioning the brilliant Andrew Robertshaw, the English military historian, who actually reconstructed sixty feet of a trench line in his backyard.

He shares his experience in doing this in his book, 24Hr Trench.

511PnAeovzL._SX342_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Continuing our medieval parallel, we imagine the outside-influence houses to look something like these:

medhouse1 medhouse2

And, for outbuildings, there are a few surviving medieval barns, like this one:

whose roofs are often held up by the most beautiful woodwork, always reminding us of cathedrals, on the one hand, and sailing ships on the other.

Imagine that this is what Farmer Cotton’s farm might have looked like.

And, with this image, we conclude this posting. In our next, we’re going to move to the edge of the Shire, to discuss marches—geographical ones, that is.

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (I)

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

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

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British Museum, culture, elections, farthing, feudalism, Government, Hobbitry-in-arms, Hobbits, Louvre, Maps, Mathom-house, Mayor, Michel Delving, Middle-earth, museums, police, Postmen, Sharkey, Shire, Shire-moot, Shire-muster, Shirriffs, Thain, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Scouring of the Shire, thegn, Tolkien, vassal, Vatican, voting, White Downs, Witch-King of Angmar

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last post (well, next-to-last–the last was on circuses), we talked about museums and Mathom-houses and, thinking that the Shire had a museum, made us wonder about what we might call “Shire culture” in general. What is it which makes the Shire the Shire?

To go about answering that, we tried to think of a model. Could we imagine ourselves doing a tourist brochure? A wiki article? And where would we begin?

Suppose, we thought, we begin with the outermost shell, rather as in our world: the government.

The first ten pages of the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings contain a good deal of information about hobbits and their homeland, with many other details to be gleaned from the main body of the text and the appendices and some from The Hobbit. There is undoubtedly more yet to be found in several of the subsidiary volumes, but we decided that, to make this a series of readable posts and not a small encyclopedia, we would stick to the two main works.

With all of that material to help us, all we needed was an entry point—and, almost immediately, we decided that we could begin where we left off, with that very museum, which originally attracted us because it stood out as something one would expect from a much more organized state, rather than from what, on the whole, appears to be such a rural and decentralized place.

After all, museums, as we have discussed, are a relatively recent invention in the west and public museums are even newer (the first state-sponsored museum in Britain, for example, only dates from the 1750s). Since our last posting, we’ve done a bit more research and, with one or two possible exceptions, it seems that public museums only begin to appear at all from the second half of the 17^th century. (A quick and useful reference may be found at: https://museu.ms) Even so, such places have a good deal to say about a culture:

that it values elements of its past, both historical and artistic, enough that it is willing to collect and preserve them
that it believes that such elements should then be put upon public display (the why of that might include: to use for educational purposes—which assumes that the past has things to teach the present; to provide aesthetic pleasure; even to show the wealth and power of a state which has such a history and such artists)
that it is willing to provide space, at the public expense, to house and display such things

The Mathom-house is hardly, from JRRT’s description, the equivalent of the British Museum

or the Louvre

or the Vatican

or any of the other thousand wonderful museums around the world, big or small. And yet it is there and in the closest thing to a capital which the Shire has to offer, Michel Delving. It is only the closest thing because the Shire has almost no formal governing structure.

As the Prologue says:

“The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government’. Families for the most part managed their own affairs…”

Originally, as the Prologue tells us, the Hobbits had moved into the land which would become the Shire with the permission of the high king of the North Kingdom, at Fornost. When the last king and his kingdom had fallen to the Witch King of Angmar, the Hobbits replaced him with a “Thain” (actually an Old English word for, among other things, a “vassal”—that is, one who acts as a subordinate—in a feudal system, this might imply that the person has received land from someone higher on the social scale in return for taxes and/or military service). Here’s a thegn (Old English spelling) as a warrior.

By the time of The Hobbit, this office had dwindled, but not quite disappeared:

“The Thain was the master of the Shire-moot, and captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms, but as muster and moot were only held in times of emergency, which no longer occurred, the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity.”

In fact,

“The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving (or of the Shire), who was elected every seven years at the Free Fair on the White Downs at the Lithe, that is at Mid-summer. As mayor almost his only duty was to preside at banquets, given on the Shire-holidays, which occurred at frequent intervals. But the offices of Postmaster and First Shirriff were attached to the mayoralty, so that he managed both the Messenger Service and the Watch. These were the only Shire-services, and the Messengers were the most numerous, and much the busier of the two. By no means all Hobbits were lettered, but those who were wrote constantly to all their friends (and a selection of their relations) who lived further off than an afternoon’s walk.

The Shirriffs was the name that the Hobbits gave to their police, or the nearest equivalent that they possessed…they were in practice rather haywards than policemen, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than of people. There were in all the Shire only twelve of them, three in each Farthing, for Inside Work. A rather large body, varying at need, was employed to ‘beat the bounds’, and to see that Outsiders of any kind, great or small, did not make themselves a nuisance.”

This gives us the whole of the top level of Shire culture, the public face: a vestigial Thain (representative of the long-gone King), a figurehead Mayor, a postal service, and a tiny police force/border guard.

And how does any of these hold office?

The Thain, as we know, is hereditary.

The Mayor is, as quoted above, elected—although we have no idea of the process. Does one vote by town? By Farthing? Or is there simply a kind of country-wide method? We also have no idea of suffrage: who has the vote in the Shire? Is it general (England had general suffrage by the time JRRT was writing The Hobbit, all men over 21 by 1918, some women—householders over the age of 30—having been included in elections in 1918, women in general over 21 in 1928)? Or is it the older “only property-holders” method? Or are there “hereditary electors” who do the choosing? (As CD have just gone through an election here in the US, all of these questions, as you can imagine, are fresh in our minds!)

The “postmen” (our word) are, so far as we can tell, a mystery, both as to who they are or how they gain their employment.

Shirriffs appear to be volunteers, as we learn in “The Scouring of the Shire”, when Sam talks to Robin Smallburrow, who says “You know how I went for a Shirriff seven years ago, before any of this began.”

There being so little in the way of government, are there any public buildings except for the Mathom-house? If there are, we have yet to locate them. It’s striking that, when “Sharkey” takes over the Shire, he sets up a number of such places, but neither government buildings nor museums, instead, they are tokens of a police state: barracks and watch houses, dens reminding us of something which JRRT would have seen all too much of in newspapers and magazines, as well as newsreels as he worked on the early stages of The Lord of Rings:

(More on Sharkey and the takeover in a future posting!)

Considering that there is a small policing force, as well as a kind of postal institution, we looked for another government department: the Internal Revenue Service. After all, we pay for our police and used to pay for postage stamps, back in pre-internet days, and we pay for public museums, too: how does it work in the Shire? The simple answer is, we don’t know. In fact, we don’t really know much about how the economy works in general. And that will be the subject of our next posting.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Bridges and Battles

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Anglo-Saxon, Arnhem, Belisarius, Boromir, bridges, Constantine I, Constantinople, David, Diocletian, Dionysius, Gros, Hal Foster, Harold Godwinson, Horace Vernet, Horatius, Horatius at the Bridge, Justinian, Livy, Marcus Aurelius, Maxentius, Maximianus, Milvian Bridge, Napoleon, Ostrogoths, Pass of Roncevalles, Pegasus Bridge, Pliny the Elder, Pons Sublicius, Prince Valiant, Ravenna, Remagen, River Adige, River Derwent, Roland, Salarian Bridge, San Vitale, Sherlock Holmes, Stamford Bridge, Tacitus, The Council of Elrond, The Lays of Ancient Rome, The Lord of the Rings, The Oath of the Horatii, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Tiber, Tolkien, vikings

Welcome, dear readers, to our first posting for 2017—and a Happy New Year.

In our last, we discussed water-crossings in The Lord of the Rings, but said that our next would be on a more specialized subject, something we thought to call “Battle Bridges”.

This was inspired by this quotation (it’s Boromir speaking, at the Council of Elrond):

“I was in the company that held the bridge, until it was cast down behind us. For only four were saved by swimming: my brother and myself and two others.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Broken bridges and swimming soldiers made us think of a story told by a number of early historians, including Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus, in which three Roman officers stand as a rearguard at the first bridge over the river Tiber, the Pons Sublicius, and, when two are wounded, the third, Horatius, sends them off, telling them to have the bridge destroyed so that the enemy can’t pursue the defeated Roman army into Rome. When the bridge is gone, Horatius, in his armor and with his arms, leaps into the river and swims to the Roman shore to great acclaim.

In the nineteenth century, this story was turned into a poem (a very long ballad) by the historian Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859),

entitled “Horatius at the Bridge” (from his 1842 collection, The Lays of Ancient Rome).

Once upon a time, it was a standard assignment for schoolboys to memorize its approximately 600 lines and we wonder if this might once have been Tolkien’s task, which is why we have Boromir’s remark.

Once we embarked upon the subject of fights at bridges, we found, beginning with the late classical world, that there were lots more out there (our short mental list roared through time to take us as far as the seizing of Pegasus Bridge in the Normandy invasion and the subsequent bridges at Arnhem and Remagen). There was a difficulty, however: we began with an heroic action—one man or a handful against masses. What mostly came to mind was not Horatian one-man stands. Instead, they were only depicted as parts of larger military maneuvers to gain or block a crossing and individuals disappeared. Take, for example the famous battle at the Milvian Bridge, in 312AD, which led not only towards a reconstituted Roman world based upon the east, but also towards the eventual Christianization of the Roman world.

In the civil wars which wracked the late Roman empire, after its division post-284AD by Diocletian,

Constantine, the western Augustus (senior emperor)

defeated his rival, Maxentius (who was also his brother-in-law),

at a bridge outside Rome to become, in time, the sole emperor. Maxentius, who had control of Rome, had planned to block Constantine on the far side of the Tiber, keeping a pontoon bridge available for a retreat, if necessary, since it appears that the actual stone bridge was in the process of being dismantled.

(The Romans were extremely able at producing pontoon bridges—here’s a good illustration from the column of Marcus Aurelius—completed 193AD–)

When that retreat did become necessary, Maxentius was drowned in its midst, the bridge collapsed, and his troops who remained either died on the field or surrendered to Constantine.

In time, Constantine, who believed that the empire’s main focus should actually be on the east, moved the capital to an old Greek colony, called Byzantium, but which he renamed “New Rome”—although it seems that everyone else called it Constantinople.

This would be the capital of the later Byzantine Empire, which, under the emperor Justinian,

(He’s the one with the bowl of communion bread—the only labeled figure, Maximianus, was the bishop of Ravenna, where this mosaic stands in the church of San Vitale.)

would attempt to reconquer the portions of the old western empire which had fallen into the hands of Germanic invaders.

Under Justinian’s general, Belisarius,

(this may or may not be a portrait—it’s a scholarly guess),

the Byzantines struggled for control of Rome against the Ostrogoths.

This struggle included a fight outside of Rome for control of the Salarian Bridge (537AD),

a fight which Belisarius lost, although, for a short time, Justinian’s world was enlarged, if not to the full size of the old empire, at least to include much of the western Mediterranean—quite an accomplishment for the later world of antiquity.

And, speaking of late antiquity, if you regularly read our blog, you know that we have a special affection for the work of Hal Foster, who created the late-antique, early-medieval world of Prince Valiant. The combination of bridge and heroic fighting reminded us of one of our favorite illustrations and so we have to include this scene (published 19 June, 1938), in which Val faces a band of Viking raiders.

This image, of course, brings us back to Horatius, the single warrior against the mass. As we’ve said, in the intervening centuries there are battles at bridges, but only as one element in larger campaigns and the heroic individual disappears into the ranks. We could think of one, somewhat later, figure, however. He appears, unfortunately nameless, in the other battle of the short reign of Harold Godwinson, at Stamford Bridge, 25 September, 1066. The Anglo-Saxon army raced north from London to oppose a Viking invasion, and defeated the Vikings on the near side of the bridge over the River Derwent, but, to complete their victory, the Anglo-Saxons needed to destroy the surviving force on the far side. in the way stood, in the middle of Stamford Bridge, a single Viking warrior, blocking their advance.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that he killed 40 of the enemy before an Anglo-Saxon floated underneath the bridge and stabbed him from beneath with his spear, but, well, as much as we believe in heroic tales…

His stand, however, brings us back to Boromir and his final battle, in which he faces two waves of orcs before he is finally mortally wounded.

No bridge, but this still follows the theme of the brave man standing alone, with no possible help nearby.

(And, of course, Boromir and his horn are meant to remind any good reader of heroic material—particularly medieval—of Roland at the Pass of Roncevalles…)

We would leave this theme here, back where it began, with Boromir, except we can’t resist (we’re afraid, when it comes to adventure and heroics, that we appear to have little or no willpower at all!) one final image and the idea behind it. There is no end of discussion about Napoleon, which, we’re sure, would please him no end. For us, however, there is a side of him which is endlessly interesting and that is as a Romantic Figure—a view of himself which he worked very hard, at least early in his life, to promote. The late 18^th-century very much looked back to the classical world and, we believe, it did so in part because it loved the dramatic gestures it saw as part of that world. We only have to point out paintings like David’s “The Oath of the Horatii”(those Horatii being the direct ancestor of the one in our post), with its operatic ensemble look, to illustrate this. (To us, this looks so much like the set-up for a stirring quartet, right out of Bellini or Meyerbeer.)

So, during Bonaparte’s brilliant 1796-7 campaign in Italy, there was clearly a classical/Romantic moment. When the French were stalled by their Austrian opponents in crossing the River Adige, Napoleon, to encourage his troops, seized a regimental color and raced alone to the bridge, as Gros (who was actually at the battle) depicted him in his 1797 painting.

Vernet, in his 1826 version, continues the heroic theme, but changes the focus a bit—Napoleon now has followers. (And you know, from its dash—and that’s Horace Vernet in general—who, according to Sherlock Holmes, may be a distant relation–that this is a favorite painting of ours.)

In fact, although Bonaparte did seize a color, he never made it to the bridge, either alone or in a crowd. His illustrators, however, influenced, no doubt, by the potential drama—and perhaps by a faint memory of Horatius?—depict a scene which should have happened, in their view of Napoleon as a Romantic Figure. What is most striking, however, is that, unlike Horatius—or Boromir—Bonaparte is not defending a bridge—he is attacking and his heroism comes from that gesture. This certainly fits in with Revolutionary ideology—France had been at war with much of the world since 1792—but it occurs to us that it may also suggest a shift in the approach to heroism. Horatius, given a bridge, is heroic, but passive. Give a bridge to Bonaparte and stand back (at least in iconography)! Is this the image of heroes in the Romantic world which was just coming into being?

But, as ever, we leave this to you, dear readers, to ponder, even as we thank you, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

One More River (2)

28 Wednesday Dec 2016

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

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Amon Hen, Anduin, Bilbo, Blondin, Bombur, Boromir, Brandywine, bridges, Bruinen, Bucklebury Ferry, Celebrant, Dwarves, Elrond, Elves, Enchanted river, Esgaroth, Fangorn, ferry, flight to the ford, Frodo, Gandalf, Gondorians, Hoarwell, Hobbiton, Isen, Khazad-dum, Niagara Falls, Nimrodel, Old Forest, Old Man Willow, Orcs, Prince Valiant, Rivendell, Rivers, Rohirrim, Sam, Tharbad, The Hobbit, The Long Lake, The Lord of the Rings, Theodred, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, Weathertop, Withywindle, Wraiths

Welcome, dear readers, as always. In our last post, we had turned our attention to water-crossings in The Hobbit. In this, we want to continue our study with The Lord of the Rings.

We were first prompted to look at such crossings by something Boromir said, almost in passing:

“Four hundred leagues I reckoned it, and it took me many months, for I lost my horse at Tharbad, at the fording of the Greyflood.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)

Tharbad had once been famous for its elaborate defenses and bridge, but, symbolic of so much of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age, it had fallen into decay and was abandoned, the water of the Gwathlo, the Greyflood, spreading wide—an easy place to lose a horse—or a man.

And perhaps Boromir’s loss is also symbolic of the higher level of stress involved in crossing water in the later work. The most Bilbo and the dwarves had to deal with was a water of forgetfulness, whose effect wore off in a relatively short time. There is much worse to come.

The first crossing (after The Water in Hobbiton)

has danger attached, but it’s a danger which pursues the hobbits at the Bucklebury ferry. Here, pursued by one—or more—wraiths,

they cross over by what is a kind of do-it-yourself ferry, where the ferry runs on a cable, which keeps it available and on course, while the passengers pole to add propulsion.

There is a puzzle at their next crossing—because the hobbits don’t appear to have crossed at all! This is the River Withywindle, on whose bank the hobbits meet up with Old Man Willow (not as in the film, where he’s been pulled violently out of context and replanted, for no good reason we can see, in Fangorn’s forest).

Until we began to study water-crossings, we had never really thought about what happens then. The hobbits come to the river, having become lost in the Old Forest. Pippin and Merry are swallowed by the tree. Tom Bombadil comes to the rescue: but how do they cross the Withywindle? We just couldn’t remember! So we went back to the text, saw Tom lead the four hobbits through the forest, where they almost lose him, then they hear: “Hop along, my little friends, up the Withywindle!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

And so they never actually ford across or are ferried across. Instead, they walk up its course to Tom’s house, which seems to be near the source.

The next crossing is many miles away—over the Barrow Downs, through Bree, past Weathertop, to the Last Bridge, over the Hoarwell. Although Aragorn is anxious that the Wraiths will have gotten there before them, they pass safely and keep moving southwards, towards Rivendell, until, near the ford over the Bruinen, the Nazgul catch up with them at last.

There is a bridge, of course, at Khazad-Dum, although, as far as we can tell, there is no water even in the depths far below it.

Escaping from Moria, the Fellowship reaches two streams in a row and, as far as we know, none of the prominent illustrators has given us pictures, either of the tributary Nimrodel or the main river, the Celebrant, so we provide a rather generic picture to offer a rather general idea.

The Nimrodel is shallow enough to wade across, but the Celebrant is wider and deeper and the Elves provide a rather iffy method of transport: a single line of rope to balance on, making us imagine something like the famous Blondin crossing Niagara Falls in 1859—well, a little!

The next crossing is almost inadvertent, or, at least happens sooner than expected: the Fellowship has been paddling down the Anduin, but, putting in at Amon Hen, things go disastrously wrong. Boromir tries to take the Ring, the orcs appear, Boromir is mortally wounded, and Merry and Pippin are carried off (in our edition—the 50^th Anniversary, One Volume Edition—this takes all of 12 pages—quite a narrative feat for JRRT!), before Frodo (and Sam) cross the river to the east and story begins its major split.

[We might insert here, although, in The Lord of the Rings, it’s only a footnote that at the crossing of the Isen, during this time, Theodred, son of Theoden, is killed.]

After this, there is only one more crossing of any significance, but it’s not by the main characters: rather, it’s by the orcs, who use boats to assault and capture west Osgiliath, which is the subject of one of our earlier postings.

To which we would add the return crossing, days later, of the Forlorn Hope of Gondor and Rohan, on their way to challenge Sauron (and to distract him from Frodo and Sam).

To finish up this posting, we provide a chart below (clearly now one of a series, after the earlier one on doorways and passages) of the water-crossings found in the two books.

Crossing	Characters	Outcome	Source
Tharbad	Boromir	Loses horse	The Lord of the Rings
The Water	Bilbo	Joins Dwarves	The Hobbit
An unnamed river	Bilbo, Dwarves, and Gandalf	Lose baggage	The Hobbit
Rivendell	Bilbo Dwarves, and Gandalf	Helped by Elves	The Hobbit
Anduin	Bilbo, Dwarves, and Gandalf	Transported by eagles	The Hobbit
Enchanted River	Bilbo and Dwarves	Bombur drugged	The Hobbit
Underground river	Bilbo and Dwarves	Using barrels, Bilbo and Dwarves escape	The Hobbit
The Long Lake	Bilbo and Dwarves	Gain help from Esgaroth	The Hobbit
The Brandywine (Bucklebury Ferry)	Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin	Escape Wraith	The Lord of the Rings
Withywindle	Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin	Reach Tom Bombadil’s house (never actually cross river)	The Lord of the Rings
The Bruinen	Frodo and Wraiths	Elrond causes river surge, Nazgul driven off	The Lord of the Rings
Khazad-Dum	Balrog and Gandalf	Gandalf defeats Balrog, but falls down with him	The Lord of the Rings
Nimrodel/ Celebrant	Fellowship and Elves	Fellowship brought into Lorien	The Lord of the Rings
Anduin	Frodo and Sam	Set out on journey to the east	The Lord of the Rings
Isen	Rohirrim and Orcs	Rohirrim driven back, Theodred, son of Theoden, killed	The Lord of the Rings
Anduin	Gondorians vs Orcs	Gondorians driven back from West Ogsiliath	The Lord of the Rings

This is our last posting for the year 2016 and we close the year with thanks to all who follow our blog or simply stop in for a visit. In 2017, we plan to continue our Tolkien travels, sometimes employing the Sortes Tolkienses, as well as to use Tolkien’s world to visit others, beginning with a posting on “Famous Bridge Battles”, from Boromir and Faramir jumping off one to escape the orcs, to Napoleon at Arcola, and beyond. Here’s a taste…

We also plan to explore other worlds and perhaps to add a review section for books and films we think you might enjoy.

In the meantime, thanks, as ever, for reading. Happy New Year!

MTCIDC

What sad and surprising news! Princess Leia is no more– but no– Princess Leia will always be with us, just like the Force.

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Further Thoughts

02 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Uncategorized

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Alexander of Macedon, Athenian Empire, Babylon, Cleopatra VII, Delian League, Mongol Empire, Mordor, Persians, Plataea, Ptolemy, Sauron, Tolkien, W.H. Auden

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

It is one of the pleasures—perhaps we should say even blessings—of JRRT that there is such a richness available within his work—and within him—that no subject can ever be discussed to a perfect conclusion. In an earlier posting, we talked about Sauron and his demands, but, as we watch our current world and certain powers who are maneuvering to gain increasing control over land and sea, we have come back once more to wondering about what it is that Sauron has planned to do and what he will have if he succeeds.

In an unpublished reply to a review by W.H. Auden, JRRT wrote:

“The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.” (Letters, 239)

Thus, we can feel justified, we think, in looking at a would-be world conqueror from an actual historical period to see if we can better understand the fictional Sauron.

If we consider Alexander of Macedon,

we see someone who began with a project which, in part, went back for a century and more before his own time: to take back the western shore of northern Asia Minor from its Persian overlords. This had been begun by the Delian League,

The Delian League - map.jpg

a group of Greek city-states who had been participants in the ultimate battle defeat of the invading Persians, at Plataea, in 479bc.

After he had defeated the southern Greeks at Chaeronea in 338bc with the aid of his son, Alexander, it had been Philip II of Macedon’s plan to do what the League had planned and take back Asia Minor from the Persian empire. Philip was murdered (by a “lone spearman”) in 336, but Alexander, took over the plan and, in 334, invaded the Persian empire and, within three years or so, had conquered it—

but then had kept moving eastward, besieging cities, winning battles, all the way into western India, where his army finally revolted and refused to go farther.

He returned to his new capital, Babylon, to die there in 323bc.

the_death_of_alexander_the_great_after_the_painting_by_karl_von_piloty_1886

Because Alexander had no grown male heirs, his new empire fell apart very quickly, his chief generals seizing big chunks and defending them against other generals. We can presume, we think, that he hadn’t been planning to die young (he was born in 356), so we assume that he was out to do something permanent. His generals—the successful ones—founded dynasties, the longest-lived of them being that of Ptolemy,

Coin (Ptolemy I) (Alexandria 305-285 BC).jpg

who grabbed Egypt, and whose last descendant to rule was Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra), who committed suicide in 30bc.

Kleopatra-VII.-Altes-Museum-Berlin1.jpg

If Alexander was planning to do something similar, only on a larger scale, how do we understand it? What was all of that conquest for and why was it never enough?

Part of the explanation may lie in the analogy of the folk-tradition about sharks: that they have to keep moving to breathe. This is apparently not true (google Discovery.com/tv-shows/shark-week).

great-white-shark-swimming-blue.jpg.adapt.945.1.jpg

It’s a good image, however, of how an expanding kingdom has to work: the more land you have, the more people you have, the more people you have, the more food you need, therefore you need an increased food supply, which means either buying it or taking it from outside, or making the land itself produce more or simply acquiring more land—and the cycle begins again. This may have been what caused the rapid expansion of the Mongol empire in the 13^th century ad, although, in their case, it may not have been expanding population so much as expanding flocks and herds which needed more pasture land.

We might see Sauron in the same light: he needed huge armies to conquer Middle-earth, his huge armies, both humans and orcs, would need feeding (even orcs ate, after all, although as to what they ate…) and therefore would have needed a huge amount of growing land to be fed from, and so on and so on. Certainly Mordor was not the place for gardens and grain fields.

JRRT says of Sauron:

“Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.” (Letters 243-244)

And perhaps this offers another view of Alexander, in turn. As Sauron would have needed land to feed his armies, perhaps Alexander was intent upon collecting worshippers? Certainly he allowed rumors to circulate that he was at least semi-divine—as we see in this coin portrait, where he is portrayed with the horns of Zeus/Ammon, a combination Greek and Egyptian god.

Alexander succeeded in gaining territory—although not so much as he wished—but died before founding the dynasty which might have given his kingdom stability. Sauron lost, not only his kingdom-in-the-making, but his corporeal form and the bulk of his power. JRRT has given us a hint as to one side of his plans—founding a religion with himself as the god, but perhaps Alexander has given us a clue as to another side, the need to support his means of conquest. In turn, Sauron may supply a clue to another side of Alexander’s plans: inserting himself into the religion of his Greek subjects, then expanding his cult throughout as much of the world as he could conquer.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Category Archives: Military History of Middle-earth

A Long Stretch

Oh, Come, Let Us Adore…

What If…

Bordering (.1: The Landscape)

Shire Portrait (5b): Hostile Takeover

Shire Portrait (3b)

Shire Portrait (I)

Bridges and Battles

One More River (2)

Further Thoughts