Orc Looks

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Villains

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Alan Lee, Angus McBride, Count Orlok, Denis Gordeev, Description, Frank Frazetta, Hal Foster, Hildebrandts, Illustration, John Howe, Nosferatu, Orcs, Peter Jackson, Prince Valiant, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Two postings ago, we were discussing henchmen and, of course, orcs were among them.

While we were discussing, we began to wonder about orcs. They appear numerous times in The Lord of the Rings, from pursuing the Fellowship in the mines of Moria

to attacking Boromir and capturing Merry and Pippin

to forming the initial assault team on Minas Tirith.

But what do they really look like?

Here’s the first description we’re given, a second-hand one, spoken by Gandalf:

“There are Orcs, very many of them…And some are large and evil: black Uruks of Mordor.”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”)

Our first real view of them comes just paragraphs later:

“…a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber…His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red.”

If this orc-chieftain is representative, then, orcs are smaller than men, with dark skin and broad flat faces. But is this a consistent description?

We next meet the orcs as casualties after the death of Boromir:

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

As we know from other references to “goblins”, Tolkien came to blur the words “goblin” and “orc”, where the earlier Hobbit has only the former. Thus, that compound “goblin-soldiers” really means “orcs” and we see that word “swart”—“dark/black” (like German schwarz)—again. To which is added “slant-eyed” and the detail “of greater stature” (than the surrounding dead orcs), emphasizing a second time that many, if not most, orcs are apparently normally small creatures.

So far, then, orcs, in general, seem to be dark-skinned and little, with broad, flat faces. And their next appearance may add a little more:

“In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground. Round them were many smaller goblins. Pippin supposed that these were ones from the North…

Ugluk shouted, and a number of other Orcs of nearly his own size ran up.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-Hai”)

This suggests that there, in fact, at least two subspecies of orcs: smaller ones (possibly from the north) in the service of Sauron, and larger ones, who are the followers of Saruman.

(There are also large orcs in Sauron’s pay, however, as we saw above in Moria.)

And we might add one more detail—at least one has rather menacing teeth:

“He stooped over Pippin, bringing his yellow fangs close to his face.”

With this much information from the text, we turned to illustrations: how close are they to these bits of description? There are many images of orcs on the internet and we ourselves have used a certain number of those images over the years, beginning with this from the Hildebrandts, which we believe must be one of the earliest.

These are mostly very piglike, reminding us both of a wild boar (with a close shave)

and of a connection which we suggested some time ago with Jabba the Hutt’s Gammorean Guard—

That green skin color, both on the Hildebrandt orcs and the Gammorean Guard, will follow orcs through the work of many artists, like Angus McBride,

and Ted Nasmith–

although not in this image of the wounding of Boromir–

and sometimes in the work of Alan Lee,

as well as that of John Howe.

In place of the piggyness, we see a kind of apelike quality in this illustration by Frank Frazetta

or this, by Alan Lee.

In the Jackson films, the orcs can range from what we think of as rather batlike

to resembling Count Orlok in Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu,

to being grossly human.

And then there’s an outlier in the illustrations of Denis Gordeev, who seems to have read a different version of The Lord of the Rings, as his orcs, whose faces are in the ape category, but who appear to be as shaggy as bears, though definitely “swart”.

Thus, we mostly see images which don’t really match the descriptions in the books, the short (or almost man-height), black-skinned, flat-faced creatures of The Lord of the Rings, have mostly turned green, come in all sizes, and have faces which range from piglike to batlike.

But does JRRT have any more to say about the look of orcs? In an undated letter from 1958 to Forrest J. Ackerman, he says of them:

“The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) less lovely Mongol-types.” (Letters, 274)

The skin color has changed from “swart” to “sallow”, often meaning a kind of yellowish tint, rather like this image of Snape from the Harry Potter films.

Much of this description, however, seems to match, at least roughly, the earlier ones—except for the potentially racist tone of “less lovely Mongol-types”. (We should always remember, though, that Tolkien was born in 1892, grew up in a world in which Britain controlled 2/5s of the earth’s land mass in colonies, and where a national poet like Kipling could refer to those colonized as “lesser breeds”. This might at least explain something of his approach to non-Caucasian people, if not excuse it.)

Putting aside that tone for the moment, to try to understand what he had in mind in this description, what we come up with is something like this, from illustrations done for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant Fights Attila the Hun (1952)—

We admit that this is only a rough guess—Tolkien’s orcs, though supposedly derived from elves and therefore more humanoid than most illustrators make them, are probably smaller and perhaps more caricatured or exaggerated, but, at the same time, these figures suggest, to us, something of the barbaric look we believe that JRRT had in mind.

As we’ve seen, however, Tolkien himself seems to have changed his mind over time, turning his orcs from “swart” to “sallow”, although the general impression of smaller, broad creatures with flat faces remained pretty much the same throughout The Lord of the Rings. So many of his illustrators, however, appear to have had anything from a slightly different to a very different view, making us wish that we could read their letters to find out just where their ideas came from.

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

We do have an idea of where that green skin color came from—perhaps from a misreading of the text, in fact. In “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”, Gandalf, in the brief initial description of orcs we quoted above, adds “…but there is something else there. A great cave-troll, I think, or more than one.”

Shortly after that, the Fellowship is attacked and:

“A huge arm and shoulder, with a dark skin of greenish scales, was thrust through the widening gap. Then a great, flat, toeless foot was forced through below.”

This appears to be one of those “great cave-troll[s]” and perhaps that “skin of greenish scales” has been accidentally transferred to the orcs?

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!

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

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