Feudal Array 2

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

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

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14th century, 15th century, Adventure, Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, feudalism, Fyrd, Gerry Embleton, Huscarl, Luttrell Psalter, Middle-earth, N.C. Wyeth, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to conclude what has turned out to be a kind of mini-series on Feudalism in Middle Earth. Two postings ago, we used the 14^th-century Luttrell Psalter to illustrate what working the plowland behind the Rammas Echor might have looked like. In our last, we used the Bayeux Tapestry to offer another possible visual influence on Tolkien’s depiction of the Rohirrim: the conquering Normans. In this final posting, we will look at the forces of Rohan’s ally, Gondor and will use a number of sources, both medieval and modern.

In the Jackson movies, there is a kind of regularity, from Osgiliath to Minas Tirith in what we are shown.

This is not surprising if the cue for costuming has come primarily from one description:

“The Guards of the gate were robed in black, and their helms were of strange shape, high-crowned, with long cheek-guards close-fitting to the face, and above the cheek-guards were set the white wings of sea-birds; but the helms gleamed with a flame of silver, for they were indeed wrought of mithril, heirlooms from the glory of old days. Upon the black surcoats were embroidered in white a tree blossoming like snow beneath a silver crown and many-pointed stars. This was the livery of the heirs of Elendil, and none wore it now in all Gondor, save the Guards of the Citadel before the Court of the Fountain where the White Tree once had grown.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

We have no wish to criticize—in this respect, at least—the creators of the films for taking what might appear to be an easy out: uniformity being cheaper than individuality, since it’s clear that, when it came to dramatic effects in the films in general, the old theatrical advertising line, “No Expense Was Spared To…” is really true. Instead, we want employ our former method of consulting medieval manuscripts, as well as another passage from the same chapter, to offer another possible view, one which might have influenced the author in his depiction of the defenders of Gondor.

We’ll begin with the passage:

“Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men that Pippin had yet seen in Gondor…

And so the companies came…The men of Ringlo Vale…from the uplands of Morthond…five hundred bowmen…From the Anfalas…a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen…Fisher-folk of the Ethir…Hirluin the Fair…with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. Imrahil…with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.”

There is actually not a lot of detail here, but there are a few hints. First off, there are those “great battle-axes”. Here are two images from the Bayeux Tapestry of the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold’s, bodyguards, his huscarl, armed with their characteristic long-handled axes.

And here is a modern reconstruction.

Next, we have those five hundred bowmen from Morthond. The Tapestry can provide a useful image of those,

but perhaps what JRRT really was thinking of were the famous longbowmen of Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt, whose skill and courage knocked down whole waves of equally brave French knights. Here are a pair of modern images by the brilliant historical illustrator, Gerry Embleton, himself a medieval reenactor.

Besides the huscarl, King Harold’s army was made up of the fyrd, a kind of militia drawn from the freemen of the countryside, who had to provide their own weapons and equipment and were only required to serve for limited periods—they would have been farmers, most of them, after all, and couldn’t be off the farm for too long without threatening their own livelihoods. Perhaps these could suggest that “long line of men of many sorts”. Here’s an image from the Tapestry of what appears to be the fyrd fending off a mounted Norman attack. You’ll notice the lack of defensive armor.

“gallant, green-clad men” is rather vague, but, suddenly, all we could see is Robin Hood and his Merry Men. And so we can’t resist including some of our favorite N.C. Wyeth illustrations.

rhood1 rhood2

And these could easily provide the model for the rangers in South Ithilien, couldn’t they?

Last, there is that “company of knights in full harness”. This presents a real problem. Knights from which period? The armor available at the time of the Bayeux Tapestry in the mid-11^th century

and which, we suggested in our last, might be good for the Rohirrim, was very different from that of later times. Here’s the armor of the days of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell,

in the early 14^th century—

and here’s what the English archers would have faced as worn by their valiant French opponents at Agincourt, in 1415.

This handy chart can give you a diachronic (through-time) view of changes in medieval armor.

If we look at something produced through the workshop of William Morris, that strong influence upon JRRT, we find this group of knights from a set of tapestries produced in the 1890s.

Holy_Grail_Tapestry_-The_Arming_and_Departure_of_the_Kniights.jpg

The armor is pretty vague (the systematic study of the history of armor was still in its childhood then—if you’re interested in the early days, google Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick to learn about its first great scholar), but one of the helmets—the one to the far left in the background, looks like a visored sallet, which could date what we see in the tapestry to the later 15^th century.

Sallet_helmet,_Southern_Germany,_1480-1490_-_Higgins_Armory_Museum_-_DSC05461.JPG

(Sharp-eyed readers who are Star Wars fans—we are—will recognize this general pattern from the technical people on the Death Star—

We might add that Morris and his friends were strongly influenced by pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance painters, so perhaps this picture, one of a set of 3 by Paolo Uccello from the middle of the 15^th century, might also provide a possible model (and we’re glad to show you the whole set because we think that they’re just magical).

Öèôðîâàÿ ðåïðîäóêöèÿ íàõîäèòñÿ â èíòåðíåò-ìóçåå Gallerix.ru

Uccello_Battle_of_San_Romano_Uffizi

Taken all together, these produce a very different image from the films, don’t they? Much more individual, often much less well-equipped, more actual medieval, as we would imagine the author had had in mind. So—contrast this

with this:

Which do you prefer, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Feudal Array 1

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

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

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Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Embroidery, feudalism, Medieval, Middle-earth, Normandy, Peter Jackson, Rohirrim, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this posting, we would like to continue what we began in “Behind the Rammas Echor”. In that posting, we talked about using the illustrations from medieval English psalters (the wonderful 14^th-century Luttrell Psalter in particular) to try to visualize the feudal world suggested by certain aspects of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

In that posting, we said that feudalism could be broken down into two big categories, land and troops, and there we spent time looking at basic agricultural life, to imagine the look of the feudal world of Middle Earth.

Now we move on to troops. And, as much as we can, we would like to continue to use medieval images to help us.

In previous posts, we’ve praised Jackson’s depiction of the Rohirrim, both the architecture and the people. Edoras and Meduseld within it just look right—and, when you watch the material on constructing them in the extended version box set, we can only be absolutely bowled over by the care taken there, for all that we have difficulties with certain other parts of the films, both in look and in the changes to the text.

In one previous post, we suggested the kinds of models we both know and imagine Tolkien used to create the Rohirrim. These were primarily Anglo-Saxon, but combined with a horse people (which the Anglo-Saxons were not) of some sort, possibly Scythian (an Indo-European-speaking horse folk from north of the Black Sea).

As we’ve thought more about it (one, for us, of the great pleasures of solid adventure literature, new and old—is that you not only want to think more about it, but, as you do, you find more in it), we began to imagine that Tolkien might have had another visual source, based upon another famous set of medieval illustrations, the Bayeux Tapestry.

This is a roll of linen, some 230 feet (that’s about 70 metres) long and 20 inches (50 centimetres) high, into which are woven three bands of designs. The center is a long (very long!) series of adjoining panels covered in human figures, which have been stitched on with various colored woolen threads. Above and below the central band are two narrower ones which combine abstract figures (commonly on the upper panel) with human activities (on the lower one). Across the top of the central band are a series of captions in very simple Latin, describing what is happening below.

The caption here reads: “Here Harold the king has been killed.”

As it’s not through-woven, like this—

this isn’t really a tapestry, but an embroidery, in fact.

It’s linked to the cathedral at Bayeux, in Normandy, where it has been for at least 6 centuries. On the map, find Le Havre and look left and you’ll see Bayeux.

Where it really came from and who made it are two of those mysteries that it’s been fun to follow the scholarship of, but, as of 2015, there are lots of theories, some of them more convincing than others, but that’s all there are: theories. If you’d like to know more about them, go to: www.bayeux-tapestry.org.uk/whomadethetapestry.htm.

The tapestry is housed in an impressive museum in Bayeux, where its entire length is ingeniously displayed in a sort of wrap-around way.

We’ve given you lots of facts, but the one thing we haven’t mentioned is the subject of such an immense work. It is, in fact, a lengthy piece of propaganda justifying the Norman invasion and conquest of England in 1066AD. We know, then, one definite thing about it: it certainly wasn’t embroidered for the Anglo-Saxons! (Although there is at least one theory that it was made by them.)

As much as we are interested in the subject, what has caught our attention now is the look—here are soldiers from the same period as the Anglo-Saxon model for the Rohirrim, after all, but, although archers are depicted on the Norman side, and a few infantry, the Normans are mainly shown as horsemen.

WebPage-ImageF.00070.jpeg

Here is our first sight of the Rohirrim in The Two Towers, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”:

“Their horses were of great stature, strong and clean-limbed; their grey coats glistened, their long tails flowed in the wind, their manes were braided on their proud necks. The Men that rode them matched them well: tall and long-limbed; their hair, flaxen-pale, flowed under their light helms, and streamed in long braids behind them; their faces were stern and keen. In their hands were tall spears of ash, painted shields were slung at their backs, long swords were at their belts, their burnished shirts of mail hung down upon their knees.”

Minus the grey horses and the braids, what do you think, dear readers?

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

That MTC will be Feudal Array.2, in which we consider the other forces opposing Mordor…

Feudal-Earth?

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

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

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Bayeux Tapestry, feudalism, Gondor, Medieval, Prince Valiant, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always!

In this posting, we want to think out loud about something which has puzzled us for some time. Regular readers must know by this time that, along with literature of various times and places, we’re also very much interested in world history, from its human beginnings all the way up to the present. As those of you who have read past postings know, we have sometimes tried to apply our interest (and, we hope our knowledge) to the works of one of our favorite fantasy authors, JRR Tolkien. In our last posting, for example, we have spent a little time considering the 20^th-century world of dictators and how they might have influenced JRRT’s depiction of Sauron and his plans.

In this posting, we want to look at something we’ve touched upon some time in the past, the economic/social structure of Middle Earth (or Middle-earth as it sometimes seems to appear). After all, kingdoms don’t just magically appear and survive: or, in Middle Earth, do they? For fun, we wondered what we might find in The Lord of the Rings which would remind us of our own Middle Ages.

In our world, particularly in western Europe , this is the period which appears physically similar to the end of the Third Age (minus Elves, etc), and, in this period, we find a social/economic structure called feudalism. There has been a great deal of scholarly discussion as to where the base word, feud comes from, but the structure is pretty basic and goes like this (with apologies to all actual medievalists for the gross simplification):

At base, it’s all about two things: land and soldiers.

At the top—the very top—is God, who owns everything. He chooses a king (this comes down to us under the heading of “the divine right of kings” and is similar to “the mandate of heaven” in Chinese history). The king then claims that, because of his position as the Chosen One, he owns all of the land in the country. This land, however, he divides, keeping some for himself, but giving large portions to his chief nobles (the Church also owns a large chunk, but, as religion is rather subterranean in Middle Earth, we’ll leave it at that). They, in turn, divide it among lesser nobles (family members and/or those loyal to them), who, in turn, divide it among the lowest level of nobility (often knights). The simplest parcel is a manor and a knight may hold just one or more than one and this is true all the way up the chain.

Each manor, in turn, has various grades of inhabitants, from freeholders, who own land but pay taxes on it, to peasants who are free, but are landless and have to work for others, and serfs, who are nothing more than slaves and considered part of the property. Even freemen might still owe an obligation in the form of labor to the lord of the manor.

In return for a manor or for many manors, the nobles at every level owed the king military service.

This was necessary, since, with the exception of a certain number of household troops or bodyguards, kings couldn’t afford to keep standing armies on their own.

When we began wondering if we could find traces of feudalism in Middle Earth, we thought first about titles. As we said, there are kings, so could we add to them “sirs”, “knights”, “lords”, and such? The densest patch of those would seem to be in The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”. Almost at the end of the chapter, Pippin and Beregond’s son, Bergil, watch reinforcements march into the city. Here we can list leaders, almost every one seeming to be a major landowner, judging by the number of his military followers, and all but one called “lord” : Forlong, Dervorin (“son of their lord”), Golasgil, and last and most feudal-like, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, who comes with “a company of knights in full harness”.

This last reminded us of an earlier posting, when we wondered whether JRRT had ever seen the Prince Valiant comic strip, which occasionally had scenes like this:

Our other thought was this sounded rather like a combination of men entering the Alamo and a gathering of the clans.

raising-the-standard-at-glenfinnan-1745-jacobite-rebellion.jpg

To gain a portion of land, all levels of nobles swore oaths of loyalty (called fealty, from Latin fidelitas, through Old French, the legal language of England after the Norman conquest) to those who gave them that land and that oath was commonly done publically and was legally binding.

There were different ways of confirming the earnestness of the person swearing. An altar or saint’s reliquary might be used, as seems to be the case from this scene on the “Bayeaux Tapestry”, in which Harold swears a sacramentum (a “sacred oath”, so Norman propaganda would afterwards claim) to be the vassal (sworn man) of Duke William of Normandy.

Bayeux_Tapestry_scene23_Harold_sacramentum_fecit_Willelmo_duci.jpg

Oaths might take the form of the receiver placing his hands between those of the giver and swearing.

1274514-miniature-depicting-a-knight-receiving-his-sword-from-the-king-guillaume-dorange.jpeg

An extremely useful site (www.dragonbear.com) provides a number of examples of the oath, which, while varying greatly through time and place, can be encapsulated in this version, from “The Laws of Alfred, Guthrum, and Edward the Elder”:

“Thus shall a man swear fealty oaths.

By the Lord, before whom this relic is holy, I will be to ____ faithful and true, and love all that he loves, and shun all that he shuns, according to God’s law, and according to the world’s principles, and never, by will nor by force, by word nor by work, do ought of what is loathful to him; on condition that he keep me as I am willing to deserve, and all that fulfil that our agreement was, when I to him submitted and chose his will.”

Compare this with Pippin’s oath to Denethor, after Pippin offers his sword to him:

“Here do I swear fealty and service to Gondor, and to the Lord and Steward of the realm, to speak and to be silent, to do and to let be, to come and to go, in need or plenty, in peace or war, in living or dying, from this hour henceforth, until my lord release me, or death take me, or the world end. So say I, Peregrin son of Paladin of the Shire of the Halflings.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

There is no transfer of land involved here, but certainly there is military service.

JRRT, for all of the amazing detail which he put into Middle Earth, was content, it would seem, to leave it at that: there are kings to whom oaths are sworn, and that idea comes from feudal oaths. There are knights and lords—who else would be in charge of this quasi-medieval world (except, of course, among the non-men—elves, dwarves, and hobbits)? At the same time, this is a huge and wonderfully entertaining adventure, not a disguised treatise on the economic and social substructure of a mirror of the western Middle Ages, as interesting as, if anyone, Tolkien, could have made even that. It is fun, however, to spend a moment imagining what, given another ten years and several more drafts, Middle Earth might have looked like… As always, we ask: what do you think?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Where From the Rohirrim?

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim

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Amazons, Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Burial mounds, Cavalry, Charge of the Light Brigade, descendants, Edoras, Eotheod, Horse people, Indo-European, Kurgan, language, Middle-earth, Normans, Rohan, Rohirric, Rohirrim, Scythians, The Lord of the Rings, The Mark, Tolkien, Tom Shippey

Dear Readers, welcome!

In this post, we want to think out loud a bit about the Rohirrim.

Everyone knows where their language is from, as Tolkien says in a letter to “one Mr. Rang”:

“…’Anglo-Saxon’…is the sole field in which to look for the origins and meaning of words and names belonging to the speech of the Mark.” LT 381

And yet they are horse people (their own name for themselves, in fact, is Eotheod, “horse people”), which the Angles and Saxons who went to make up the Anglo-Saxons, were not. Tolkien was well aware of this difference, saying in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings:

“…this linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances…” L1136

Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, suggests that

“The Rohirrim are nothing if not cavalry. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons’ reluctance to have anything militarily to do with horses is notorious…How then can Anglo-Saxons and Rohirrim ever, culturally, be equated? A part of the answer is that the Rohirrim are not to be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend.” (112)

Or, could there have been other models?

Tolkien may have been suggesting one when, in a letter to Rhona Beare of 14 October, 1958:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’ in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Taptestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” Ltr 280-281.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts both Normans and their allies, on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons, on the other, but Tolkien doesn’t appear to distinguish between them. The Normans themselves are mounted, the Anglo-Saxons on foot, as was their custom (they did use horses to move rapidly from place to place, as in the race north to Stamford Bridge and then back south to face the Normans).

Here, to the left, we see those mounted Normans and, to the right, the Anglo-Saxons behind their shield wall. The “tennis-nets” are clearly visible and would actually have looked like this:

In this further illustration, by the way, it’s easy to see the consequences of having the shield wall crumble: men on horseback can have a significant advantage when their opponents lose cohesion.

This, however, is only their look . What about those horses and an entire culture based around them?

For a clue, we look to another element in the culture of the Rohirrim, the use of burial mounds. Here they are at Edoras.

(We can’t resist, by the way, saying that our absolute favorite part of the Jackson movies is anything to do with the Rohirrim—to us, absolutely inspired and we see the depiction of the charge of the Rohirrim against the army besieging Minas Tirith as being right up there with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 and the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917–

One might say, in reply, that there are Anglo-Saxon mounds—like the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial.

But that leaves us where we started, in the land of foot soldiers.

So, let’s go farther afield, to the north of the Black Sea.

Here, we see the so-called “Kurgan Culture”, with its burial mounds

[This, by the way, is not to be confused with The Kurgan from the first Highlander movie

The Kurgan]

These were a people who:

are believed by many linguists (and some archeologists) to be the direct ancestors of the Indo-Europeans who gradually invaded Asia Minor and western Europe (including, eventually, the Anglo-Saxons) as well as moving east, to India and beyond
buried their dead (at least what appear to be the high status ones) in mounds
were a horse culture

And, in fact, were seemingly the forerunners of the Scythians, a later well-known Indo-European horse people

And the Scythians, in turn, may have been the model for those mythical horse folk, the Amazons.

In the 19^th century, when the idea of Indo-Europeans began to circulate, there was a preference for a northern European origin (a theory no longer held), but the idea of an eastern home was also circulating and we would suggest that Tolkien would have known about this, as well as, from his early classical training, Scythians and Amazons, their actual and mythical descendants.

Imagine, then, that what we see in the Rohirrim is, in fact, an interesting mixture of people sprung from an earlier people (as Tolkien tells us, the Rohirrim were descended from the Edain of the First Age—see LOTR, Appendix F 1129), both in our world and in Middle Earth, who based their culture upon horses, and bury their dead in mounds, combined with people who may also bury their dead in mounds, who speak a version of Anglo-Saxon and who dress like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons of the 11^thcentury AD.

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks for reading, as always.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Bayeux Tapestry

Feudal Array 2

Feudal Array 1

Feudal-Earth?

Where From the Rohirrim?