A Pirate’s Life…

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

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

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Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Algiers, Anduin, Barbary Coast, buccaneer, corsair barbary, Corsairs, draught, dromon, dromunds, galley, Harad, Haradrim, Harlond, Helm's Deep, Legatus Regis Barbariae, Pelennor, Pirates, Ramas Echor, Southrons, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Turkish galley, Umbar, US Navy WW2 fighter

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In a previous posting, we mentioned the Corsairs of Umbar.

If you google “corsair” in images, the first thing which appears is this:

It’s a US Navy WW2 fighter—but hardly what was sweeping to attack the south coast of Gondor in Sauron’s massive campaign.

Change that to “corsair pirate” and you see things like

image2piratecostume

which is definitely a bit better, but he looks so 18^th-century. As we have discussed in many of our postings, Middle-earth is Middle Ages (more or less), even if it mixes High Medieval (things like the plate armor of the Prince of Dol Amroth) with Anglo-Saxon (the Rohirrim). So “corsair pirate” is too late in time. Another word (with a much-discussed origin) for “pirate” is “buccaneer”, so, how about “corsair buccaneer”?

image3trailer

Ooops! Okay—clearly that doesn’t work!

So what will—and what are we really looking for? Well, what do these corsairs look like according to JRRT?

They have black sails:

For Anduin, from the bend at the Harlond, so flowed that[,]from the City[,] men could look down it lengthwise for some leagues, and the far-sighted could see any ships that approached. And looking thither they cried in dismay; for black against the glittering stream they beheld a fleet borne up on the wind: dromunds, and ships of great draught with many oars, and with black sails bellying in the breeze.

‘The Corsairs of Umbar!’ men shouted. (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

Anything more?

In The Lord of the Rings, unfortunately not.

Umbar is in Harad,

however, and there is a little about the Haradrim. Our first view of them is Sam’s:

Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corselet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword. (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

Other details?

Just before Sam speaks, Gollum has reported seeing:

‘Dark faces. We have not seen Men like these before, no, Smeagol has not. They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold. And some have red paint on their cheeks, and red cloaks; and their flags are red, and the tips of their spears; and they have found shields, yellow and black with big spikes. Not nice; very cruel wicked Men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs, and much bigger.’ (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed.”)

“cruel and tall” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

They have cavalry and they are armed with scimitars. (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

These would seem to be people from Near Harad (that is, near to Gondor). The men to the south of them differ:

“…Southrons [men from Near Harad] in scarlet and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

But all of this to us suggested a model from our own world (as always): the Barbary Pirates. So how about the search terms “corsair barbary”?

Ah. That’s a bit more like it, we think. He has to lose his gunpowder weapons, though—the only gunpowder in Middle-earth appears to be something in the hands of Saruman and Sauron’s orcs, as we see at Helm’s Deep

and the wall of the Pelennor, the Ramas Echor.

We would imagine those corsairs, then, as looking like the infamous “Barbary Pirates”.

They certainly fill the bill geographically—they’re southern (at least in relation to JRRT’s England)–their hangouts being on the coast of North Africa

and, if you wanted a big port city, as Umbar was supposed to be, here’s Algiers.

What about ships—that is, “dromunds and ships of great draught with many oars”?

“Dromund” is a medieval form of the Byzantine Greek dromon, literally a “runner”—a word you’d recognize from the English word “hippodrome”—the “place where horses run”. This was the common larger Byzantine warship.

Here’s a Renaissance-era engraving of a Turkish galley.

There’s a difficulty with “ships of great draft with many oars”, however. Draught (also spelled “draft”) is the distance between the waterline and the bottom of the keel, as in this diagram.

Ships with many oars are, commonly, galleys,

and galleys commonly have a shallow draft—both to allow for maneuver in shallow waters and to allow for the oars to do their job most efficiently. So, we presume that all of the Corsairs’ vessels were actually galleys of various sizes.

Jackson’s Corsair ships have something of the look of JRRT’s description, but his

depiction of the Corsairs, unlike that of Rohan and the Rohirrim, is not even close to the little we have learned so far from the text.

The Barbary Pirates, to us, not only match point of origin and vessels, but are much more exotic and colorful, whereas those in the film look to us more like dingy Vikings.

And here’s a portrait

of the Moroccan ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I (notice that, in the caption he’s called Legatus Regis Barbariae, “deputy of the King of Barbary”—a splendid figure with a splendid name: Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun—imagine him facing Aragorn from the deck of a galley—we think that the Oath-breakers would have had little fear for him, even as they overwhelmed him and his crew.

So, as always, we ask you, readers, what do you think?

And thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Just a thought, but, if Sauron, as one of the Maiar, was virtually immortal and had the kind of power which is displayed in the forging of the Ring, why did he need vast fortresses and armies and fleets? Something to think about in a future posting!

The Man Who Was Killed

30 Wednesday Dec 2015

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

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"The Man He Killed", Adventure, British Infantry, British Militia, Crimean War, Damrod, Fantasy, Faramir, Frodo, Haradrim, History, Lamellar, Mablung, Middle-earth, military history, Military recruiters, Napoleonic Wars, Sam Gamgee, Second Boer War, The Dynasts, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Thomas Hardy, Time's Laughingstocks, Tolkien, Waterloo, WWI

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. In this posting, we propose to suggest a connection—one, at the moment, at least, which we can’t prove—between Tolkien and the late-Victorian/Edwardian/Georgian (he was born in 1840 and died in 1928) poet/novelist, Thomas Hardy.

We begin with a quotation from The Two Towers, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Sam and Frodo have been taken by Faramir’s rangers and, with Damrod and Mablung as their minders, they are about to sit out the ambush staged by Faramir to destroy a column of Haradrim. Unthinkingly, Sam has become an eager spectator, and:

“Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.”

The Haradrim are from the far south, but, wherever this man was from, he was wearing a type of armor called “lamellar”, from the Latin word, “lamella”, meaning, “a little, thin plate”, it being a diminutive of “lamina”, “a thin piece of something/a plate, leaf”. It’s a kind of protection worn over many centuries in many parts of the world. Basically, it looks like this:

It can be made, as the one described, of lamellae of bronze, or of iron, which are sewn to an underlying fabric.

So, perhaps, this dead warrior looked a bit like this:

Sam’s curiosity was quickly dampened by the sight—and it makes us wonder if what we are also seeing here is Lieutenant Tolkien’s first glimpse of a dead enemy soldier.

tolkien-x deadgerman

“It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace—“

It was this brief meditation—abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a Mumak—which reminded us of this Thomas Hardy poem, “The Man He Killed”:

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.”

The language—“nipperkin”, “ ‘list”—and the social situation depicted: “was out of work—had sold his traps” (“traps” being slang of the time for “personal possessions”)—would suggest that the speaker is a working man. Such, along with farm boys, were prime material for military recruiters

in the Victorian world in which this poem was written (1902—published in Hardy’s Time’s Laughingstocks, 1909 ). The speaker is, in his own words, however, from an earlier day. When Hardy wrote the poem, the Second Boer War (1899-1902) was just ending, but it was hardly a war in which soldiers did as the speaker says, “but ranged as infantry,/and staring face to face,/I shot at him as he at me,/and killed him in his place.” The war had begun with British infantry attacking in spread-out lines, but still very visible on the landscape and it had cost them dearly.

Their enemy—mostly all militia—that is, part-time soldiers—had dug in from the start.

Colenso,_KwaZulu-Natal_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_16462.jpg

British losses had taught them to do the same.

What the speaker is describing sounds much more like earlier European wars, in which soldiers stood in long lines at a narrowing distance from each other and fired. The last of these, for Britain, had been the Crimean War (1854-56).

download-193789-The-23rd-Regiment-Royal-Welsh-Fusiliers-at-the-Battle-of-the-Alma-on-20th-September,-1854.jpg

Hardy, however, had a strong interest in the Napoleonic wars of the late-18^th-early 19^th-centuries, had published a massive dramatic piece, The Dynasts (1904-08), set in that period, and had even twice visited the battlefield of Waterloo (1876, 1896). Thus, we imagine that the poem’s speaker is actually describing something like this:

Had Tolkien read the Hardy poem and perhaps have even been inspired by it? Both scenes include a battlefield, a battle death, and a lingering sense of regret—although Sam hadn’t killed the man from Harad, he displays that same sense of “this was just a person, an ordinary person, once” which gives the Hardy poem its power.

As ever, we leave it to you, dear readers—what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Subsubcreations

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

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

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Chicken Run, Corsairs, Easterlings, Gorbag and Shagrat, Haradrim, Melkor, Minions, Morgoth, Nazgul, Nick and Fetcher, Orc, Robin Hood, Sauron, Star Wars, Storm Troopers, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Zorro

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

Two posts ago, we talked about how it might be possible to make Sauron –the- nearly-invisible slightly more visible by means of his minions.

[oh yes—minions—from Middle French, “mignon”, meaning “little/darling” and coming to have a negative meaning in English, “lackey”]

These included the Nazgul

various humans—corsairs, Haradrim, Easterlings—

And, the real stars (as Nick and Fetcher, the two rats from Chicken Run, refer to themselves)

the Orcs.

Tolkien appears always to have had trouble placing them. We would suppose that this problem arose because Orcs were not the usual run-of-the-mill lackeys one usually sees in adventure, like the sheriff of Nottingham’s men

the soldiers of the evil commandante in the Zorro adventures

or the hordes of faceless stormtroopers in Star Wars

His first question—where do they come from? was immediately followed by a second—if they are created, do they have free will? That first question, any author might ask himself. The second, however, was pure Tolkien, fitting into the pattern which those who’ve only read The Lord of the Rings and not JRRT’s letters on the subject or the volumes produced by the admirable (a pale adjective!) Christopher Tolkien, would never see: the complex spiritual history which lies behind the creation of Middle Earth.

Not that the first question was simple. In The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn says of the Orcs:

“But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” L486

The author, however, had a very different opinion:

“Their nature and origin require more thought. They are not easy to work into the theory and system.”

(Morgoth’s Ring 409)

Not easy because of that second question. As he wrote in an unpublished essay entitled (not surprisingly) Orcs (Morgoth’s Ring 409-413),

“…only Eru [the central creative deity] could make creatures with independent wills, and with reasoning powers. But the Orcs seem to have both: they can try to cheat Morgoth/ Sauron, rebel against him, or criticize him.”

Morgoth (Sauron’s former master) made the Orcs in some way, but, because only the central deity, Eru, can give independent wills and reasoning powers—which Orcs display by cheating, rebelling, and criticizing– to created beings, what is to be made of Orcs? Bound by those seemingly contrary facts, the conclusion was obvious to him that “therefore they must be corruptions of something pre-existing.” (409)

But of what?

“But Men had not yet appeared, when the Orcs already existed. Aule constructed the Dwarves out of his memory of the Music; but Eru would not sanction the work of Melkor [i.e. Morgoth] so as to allow the independence of the Orcs.

It also seems clear…that though Melkor could utterly corrupt and ruin individuals, it is not possible to contemplate his absolute perversion of a whole people, or group of peoples, and his making that state heritable.

In that case Elves, as a source, are very unlikely.” (409)

Thus, logically, if the Orcs are created, not corrupted, and created by a power which hasn’t the ability to give his creations independence, then–

“The Orcs were beasts of humanized shape (to mock Men and Elves) deliberately perverted/converted into a more close resemblance to Men. Their ‘talking’ was really reeling off ‘records’ set in them by Melkor. Even their rebellious critical words—he knew about them. Melkor taught them speech and as they bred they inherited this; and they had just as much independence as have, say, dogs or horses of their human masters. This talking was largely echoic (cf. parrots). ..Also (n.b.) Morgoth not Sauron is the source of Orc-wills. Sauron is just another (if greater) agent. Orcs can rebel against him without losing their own irremediable allegiance to evil (Morgoth).” (410-411)

We don’t know about you, dear Readers, but we confess to a certain disappointment at the idea that the Orcs are only more complex puppets. Consider this piece of villainous dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat:

“I’d like to try somewhere where there’s none of ‘em. But the war’s on now, and when that’s over things may be easier.”

“It’s going well, they say.”

“They would,” grunted Gorbag. “We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. What d’you say?—if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.”

“Ah!” said Shagrat. “Like old times.” (LOTR 738)

The plans and reminiscences of demons—how wonderful! And what an interesting sidelight into their world and even their past: they used to be masterless marauders, in the “old times”—could this suggest that perhaps they weren’t such puppets after all? We would like to imagine so!

And what is your opinion, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Personae

15 Friday May 2015

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

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Alan Lee, Antagonists, Bosch, Bruegel, Christina Rossetti, Corsairs, Easterlings, Gorbag, Gruenewald, Haradrim, Minions, Nazgul, Orc, Sauron, Shagrat, The Wind, Tolkien

A man is known by the company he keeps.

Old Proverb

Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

Christina Rossetti from Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

In our last posting, we talked about villains visible and invisible and suggested that, in the case of Sauron, rather than showing him as a searchlight eye,

(This is from the LOTR Project— a great site, much recommended).

there were other and more potentially convincing ways to depict such a menacing figure.

One was seeing his reflection in his minions.

(Can you wait for this?)

Imagine that seeing him this way is like seeing the effect a strong wind has on trees.

Sauron’s minions fall into three main categories: the Nazgul, various humans, most from what appear to be the less-civilized peoples of the south—Corsairs of Umbar, Easterlings, and the Haradrim.

The Nazgul

are the most daunting, but we’re told only a limited amount about them, we see them very selectively, and their speech is recorded mainly as threats. We see the humans even less and we really don’t hear them at all. It’s the Orcs of whom we’re shown the most.

Sauron is described as once being “comely”, but his present condition (except perhaps for his eyes—make that eye) is hard to determine. Tolkien could never quite settle on the origin of the Orcs, but, they are definitely less than attractive.

Illustrators of Orcs tend, we think, to be strongly influenced by early-Renaissance northern German painters, like Bosch, who depicted devils and demons as hybrids between humans and birds and animals.

This does not, however, seem to be in line with Tolkien’s thinking. If as Fangorn says, they were created as a mockery of elves, one would presume that they would be much more human in look, but perhaps with exaggerated features, and this seems to be closer to what Tolkien had in mind, although physical description tends to be less detailed.

Here’s an Alan Lee which we think is more like what Tolkien imagined.

If they are northern Orcs—those whom Sauron employs—they tend to be smaller and paler. If Uruk-hai, primarily used by Saruman, larger and black. (Although a tracker for Sauron is described as small and black.) Here’s the contrast of the two types in the confrontation between Ugluk and Grishnakh:

“…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.”

As Orcs may be a mockery of Elves, their speech sounds like it’s derived from the conversations Tolkien heard among his nco’s in the trenches—foul-mouthed (in a modified form), cheerfully abusive, and full of casual threats.

It’s also instructive to note that there appear to be no Orcs in command positions beyond captain—the rank of Ugluk and Grishnakh, Gorbag and Shagrat. Beyond are the Nazgul, whom the Orcs both dread and envy. (“Those Nazgul give me the creeps…But He likes ‘em; they’re His favorites nowadays, so it’s no use grumbling.”) When we hear these Orcs talk, then, we are being given the mass of Sauron’s soldiery, as below them there is only a babel of cries, cheers, and curses, like a translation of the baying of a pack of hounds.

Throughout all of the Orc conversation, there runs a joint theme: criticism of superiors (no names—but even up to Sauron himself) and fear of being heard doing so, as when Gorbag says:

“They don’t tell us all they know, do they? Not by half. But they can make mistakes, even the Top Ones can.” “Sh, Gorbag!” Shagrat’s voice was lowered, so that even with his strangely sharpened hearing could only just catch what was said. “They may, but they’ve got eyes and ears everywhere; some among my lot, as like as not…”

This suggestion of internal spies reflects a basic uneasiness to be found everywhere under Sauron’s rule: no one trusts anyone else at any level in what Frodo calls “the spirit of Mordor”, leading to murder between rival bands of Orcs and even between individuals, as Sam and Frodo witness, when soldier and tracker trade threats and insults before tracker kills soldier with an arrow.

So what do Sauron’s minions mirror, which would provide us with any clearer image of the nearly-invisible villain?

Certainly, we might see that he is incapable of gaining any kind of following at all among the dominant peoples of western Middle Earth. First, his armies are led by the ancient undead, who frighten their own side as much as they do the enemy. Second, his human recruits are half-civilized people from the far south, plunderers, with no stake in things beyond gain. Third, the bulk of his armies are made up of creatures who are, in a sense, not genuine, but simply mockeries of actual living beings and whose loyalty to their maker is, at best, questionable, even as they fear him.

Thus, we might imagine that, for all that he is powerful enough to command magic ghosts and armies of primitive men and mutants, Sauron is, ultimately, fearful, suspicious, and divisive and so transparently a source of instability that he can neither convince nor menace any of the free peoples of Middle Earth into having anything to do with him.

So, as always, we end by asking you, dear readers, what you think? And, as always, we thank you for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Haradrim

A Pirate’s Life…

The Man Who Was Killed

Subsubcreations

Personae