I Love a Parade

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Terra Australis

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Agincourt, Bayeux Tapestry, Dol Amroth, Forlong, Great Gate, Harold Godwinson, hauberk, Hirluin the Fair, Howard Pyle, huscarls, Imrahil, Langstrand, Lincoln Cathedral, livery, Lossarnach, Medieval, Minas Tirith, Morthond, N.C. Wyeth, Palermo, parade, Ringlo Vale, Robin Hood, spangenhelm, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tower of Gondor

“I love a parade, the tramping of feet,

I love every beat I hear of a drum.”

–Koehler/Arlen Rhythmania (1931)

Welcome, dear readers, as always. In the past, we’ve spent a posting or two discussing military aspects of The Lord of the Rings, from the look of the Rohirrim to the attack on Minas Tirith. In this posting, we would like to go back one step from that attack to consider what is a rather melancholy moment in the lead up to that assault.

Pippin and his newfound friend, Bergil, have come down to the Great Gate of Minas Tirith.

Here’s the gate from the films.

This immediately reminded us of places like the west door of Lincoln Cathedral.

Or the main door of the cathedral of Palermo.

Because he is now a member of the Guard of the Tower of Gondor, Pippin is allowed to pass through the Gate—and to take Bergil with him out to see and hear the following:

“Beyond the Gate there was a crowd of men along the verge of the road and of the great paved space into which all the ways to Minas Tirith ran. All eyes were turned southwards, and soon a murmur rose: ‘There is dust away there! They are coming!’

Pippin and Bergil edged their way forward to the front of the crowd and waited. Horns sounded at some distance, and the noise of cheering rolled towards them like a gathering wind. There was a loud trumpet-blast, and all about them people were shouting.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

What happens then is a kind of parade.

When we see the defenders of Minas Tirith in the films, they are all uniformly clad.

In our medieval world, this was highly unlikely, the best being that soldiers and servants might wear the colors/crest of the lord they served. This was called “livery”. Uniformity in clothing, weapons, and armor would be some time in the future.

What is coming up the road from the south are reinforcements, marching in a long column of units, and those units differ greatly in look. First are the men of Lossarnach, led by their lord, Forlong:

“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 Pippin had yet seen in Gondor.”

To us, those axes make the men of Lossarnach sound like the huscarls, the bodyguard of an Anglo-Saxon king, like Harold Godwinson, whom we see depicted on the “Bayeux Tapestry”.

Their leader, Forlong, might be similar in appearance, wearing a type of helmet called a spangenhelm,

and protected by an early form of mail shirt called a hauberk.

After these, we see more units, but with little description—the men of Ringlo Vale “striding on foot”, so infantry of some sort, five hundred bowmen from Morthond, from the Langstrand, “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”. After them, “a few grim hillmen without a captain”, and “fisher-folk of the Ethir”, all of which we imagine in their workaday clothes of hunters and shepherds and farmers and sailors, as depicted in medieval English and French manuscripts.

Next comes a unit which is perhaps wearing livery: “Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men.” We aren’t told how they’re armed, but that they may be in livery suggests that they may be better armed than some of the earlier contingents. (In fact, “gallant green-clad men” makes us think of Robin Hood—perhaps more archers?)

And, finally, folk we’ve discussed before:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, 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.”

“knight in full harness”, as we talked about in an earlier post, probably meant, to JRRT, something from Howard Pyle or NC Wyeth, like this—

As for those “men at arms”, if they appear to be “tall as lords”, we assume that they’re on foot, which puzzles us a bit. “Men at arms” usually means “armored soldiers on horseback” in our world—perhaps with less armor than knights, but still cavalry (unless dismounted, to fight on foot, as the French did at Agincourt in 1415, for example). We see them, then, as looking like those dismounted cavalry, like these—

However they are armed and clothed, however, they are thought to be too few by those watching and, considering what Mordor eventually sends against them, they would not have been enough, if the brave Rohirrim and Aragorn’s reinforcement from the south hadn’t arrived in time. What would have happened if they hadn’t? A subject for very grim fan-fiction!

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

In Shining Armo(u)r

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim, Tolkien

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Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, chain-mail, Crecy, Dark Ages, Embroidery, Howard Pyle, knights of Dol Amroth, Medieval books, medieval manuscript drawings, N.C. Wyeth, Norman knight, Pauline Baynes, Romans, sub-Roman period, Sutton Hoo, The Lord of the Rings, The Rohirrim, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a letter to Miss [Rhona] Beare, of 14 October, 1958, JRRT wrote to answer what was clearly a question about dress in The Lord of the Rings:

“Question 4. I do not know the detail of clothing. I visualize with great clarity and detail scenery and ‘natural’ objects, but not artefacts. Pauline Baynes drew her inspiration for F. Giles largely from medieval MS drawings—except for the knights (who are a bit ‘King-Arthurish’)* the style seems to fit well enough.” (Letters, 280)

To which he adds this footnote:

“*Sc. [= “Know/understand”] belong to our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages which blends unhistorically styles and details ranging over 500 years, and most of which did not of course exist in the Dark Ages of c. 500 A.D.”

In the next paragraph he adds:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’, in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (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.” (Letters, 280-281)

The Bayeux Tapestry (which should really be called the “Bayeux Embroidery”, since it’s actually a long piece of cloth with hundreds of figures and details stitched on to it, rather than woven into it) presents us with a detailed history of the invasion of England in 1066AD. The soldiers Tolkien is talking about look like this:

You can see what he means by “tennis-nets”—which should really look like this:

That chain-mail, then, looks like this:

And, at the bottom of this next illustration, you can see how it’s made:

We know, then, how JRRT envisaged the Rohirrim in its eoreds, marching towards Minas Tirith, but how did he imagine other soldiers, we’ve asked ourselves, and, in particular, the knights of Dol Amroth—the only soldiers specifically described as such in The Lord of the Rings?

JRRT writes of them as they enter Minas Tirith:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses…”(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

“Full harness” means “complete armor”. When we think of the term, we think of something later than the Normans, who are, after all, just wearing a kind of very long ringed shirt. Here’s a useful chart to give you of an idea of what we mean.

So, since “full harness” doesn’t look like the Rohirrim, how might it look?

In Jackson’s films, we don’t believe that we ever see those knights singled out, as we see the Rohirrim. The best we could find was this picture of Faramir’s men about to mount a cavalry charge against what appears to be Osgiliath. (We’ve talked about this in a much earlier posting—one of the most unbelievable moments in the whole of Jackson’s work.)

This is a big picture, but the details, unfortunately, aren’t very clear. There are a few things, however, which we found rather odd:

although there appear to be a few lances with penons among them, most seem to be armed only with swords—a close-up weapon—which is why actual knights also carried lances—heavy cavalry came crashing down on infantry or slamming into enemy mounted men—or intended to—spearing right and left and then drawing swords (or using maces or battle axes)
a minor detail, but everyone seems to be wearing his sword on the right-hand side, which would have made it very hard to draw, unless all were left-handed men!
the helmets and armor seem very standardized, and we would believe that budgetary considerations probably influenced this uniformity—50 identical helmets were probably cheaper to make than 50 different ones—but such sameness reminds us more of Roman imperial troops than of any western medieval army we can think of.

We assume, then, that this is the film’s view of soldiers at least like Imrahil’s men, but when Tolkien wrote “a company of knights in full harness”: what might he have had in mind? We think there is a clue in that adjective “King-Arthurish”, which he uses of Pauline Bayne’s illustrations and in his footnote, where he refers to “our ‘mythological Middle-Ages”. What does he mean?

JRRT would have been about ten when Howard Pyle published his The Story of King Arthur and His Knights in 1903.

Here is how Pyle saw Arthur’s knights.

image9aknight image10asknights

Could this have inspired Tolkien’s view of Imrahil’s men? (Judge for yourself by following this LINK.)

Tolkien would have been nearly 30 when The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, was published in 1922,

but, if this were in among his children’s books, perhaps these illustrations might have given him ideas. (And here’s a LINK to your own copy, from the Internet Archive.)

These are two well-known sets of illustrations of Arthurian figures, both available in Tolkien’s early lifetime. If Arthur was real, of course, he would have lived, as JRRT was well aware, in what is called the “sub-Roman period”, c.500AD—at the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages”– and he and his men would actually have looked like this:

But this is where “our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages” comes in—little would have been known, when JRRT was writing The Lord of the Rings, of what such warriors would have looked like, although the spectacular Sutton Hoo find of 1939, with its splendid helmet, would have given an inkling, once restored.

Because such knowledge was lacking, however, the historical Arthur (if there was one) had been moved to the Middle-Ages and re-equipped as a military figure of a much later era, and we believe that, when Tolkien wrote “Arthurish” and “knights”, this is what he meant—and how we’ve always seen Arthur, not only from books (and lots of films) but also from the armor galleries in a number of museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

to the Higgins Armory in Massachusetts

to the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts

to the Tower of London.

And, as we’ve discussed before, Prince Valiant, has been an influence from childhood (talk about ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages!).

And so, in turn, we imagine—and we think that JRRT did, too–the “company of knights in full harness” to have been individuals, brightly clothed in heraldic colors, their armor that, perhaps, of Crecy, in 1346—

or Agincourt, in 1415.

And you, dear readers, what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Accuracy? Well, Yes, But…

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim

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American Civil War, American Revolution, Concord, Don Troiani, Germantown, grenadiers, H. Charles McBarron, Harper's Monthly, Howard Pyle, Illustration, John Trumbull, Joseph Warren, King Arthur, Lexington, Pirates, Richard Simkin, The Battle of Bunker Hill, The Battle of Nashville, The Lord of the Rings, The Rohirrim, The Salem Wolf, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Today’s post takes us to the question of what we like and why and how such likes may push us—who, we realize, are a little stiff on the subject of accuracy—to accept things which, if our feelings weren’t engaged, we would briskly reject.

We begin by looking at a painting by one of our favorite late Victorian/Edwardian illustrators, Howard Pyle (1853-1911).

If you’re a regular reader (and we hope you are—or will be!), you’ll have seen his work on our pages any number of times, from his King Arthur illustrations (and here’s a LINK to a free 1922 reprint at the Internet Archive)

to his pirates (and here’s a LINK to a later—c.1921—collection of Pyle’s pictures and writings on pirates at Internet Archive).

Pyle also wrote and illustrated original fiction—just look at this haunting picture from a short story, “The Salem Wolf”, which was published in the December, 1909, issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine.

(And here’s a LINK to the story at Internet Archive)

Pyle also painted stand-alone historical pictures, such as this of “The Battle of Nashville” (1907).

MN 60

And we’re lucky to have a photograph of the artist at work on this very picture.

image6hppainting

Besides American Civil War pictures, Pyle painted several based upon incidents of the American Revolution, such as this, of the assault on the Chew House, at the Battle of Germantown (4 October, 1777).

image7pylegermantown

Another of his pictures of the Revolution is the subject of this post, “The Battle of Bunker Hill” (1897).

image8pylebunkerhill

We’re not sure when one of us first saw this picture—childhood, we’d guess—but we were immediately bowled over by it. It’s the adventure of it: those long ranks of redcoats stoically marching up the hill, drums beating behind. It’s not a sanitized picture—just look up the hill and all around you can see the wreck of the earlier British attacks—but its emphasis is upon the courage it must take to do what those soldiers did.

This was, in fact, the third battle of the American Revolution. The war had begun in mid-April, 1775, when a raiding party of British troops, ordered to disrupt local preparations for defense, fought two skirmishes with local militia, at Lexington

and Concord,

two rural settlements some twenty miles or so west of Boston.

When the British withdrew into Boston itself, those locals, who had grown in numbers to about 15,000, drawn from all over New England, blockaded the town and there was a period of stalemate, while both sides were reinforced. When it was clear that the locals had seized a nearby hill and were planning to plant artillery there which would then be capable of bombarding Boston, the British were forced to move. Their choice was to attack that hill, which was named “Breed’s Hill” but, through an historical mix-up, the battle was named for the hill to its rear, “Bunker Hill”.

Initially, the British plan was to have part of its force make a feint—a fake attack—against the main part of the hill, where the locals had built an open-backed fortification, called a redoubt, while the real attack was to push through the weaker local left and curve around to hit the locals from the rear.

By underestimating the defense, the British soon suffered over a thousand casualties to the local 450. As the assaults were driven back, the British plan changed and the main attack was to be uphill, straight at the redoubt and this is what is depicted in Pyle’s painting, specifically the advance of the 52^nd Foot (“Foot” is 18^th-century shorthand for “regiment of infantry”).

This is not the first well-known painting of the battle, however. In the first third of the 19^th century, John Trumbull (1756-1843), a prominent American artist, painted several versions of a work entitled, “The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775”.

This picture belongs to what we might call both the “heroic school” and the “portrait school”, the former because of a certain flashy quality (look at the way the wind seems to be whipping everything—and where are those flames on the right coming from?), the latter because, not only is the local officer, Joseph Warren depicted, but so are a number of other figures—two of the British generals, two British majors, and a number of more minor participants.

Bunker Hill remained—and remains—a popular subject for historical painters, most of them depicting events from the local side. Here is one version, by the distinguished 20^th-century American military artist, H. Charles McBarron (1902-1992).

And here are two by one of our favorite contemporary American Civil War artists, Don Troiani (1949-).

All pictures are not from the viewpoint of the colonists, however. The late-Victorian/Edwardian British military artist, Richard Simkin (1850-1926), gave us this view.

Of all of these images, the Trumbull has drawn upon his memory and upon his sketchbooks, too, we bet, to give a general impression of the look of the soldiers, but, although he was part of the colonial force besieging Boston, he only saw the battle through a telescope. McBarron was a collector of uniforms and equipment, as is Troiani, and their works are painstakingly accurate. Simkin, although he, too, was a collector, came from an earlier time, just at the beginning of serious research on weapons and uniforms of the past, and, therefore, certain elements in his picture—the plumes and cords on his men’s bearskins and those packs (left behind in Boston, in reality), for instance—are not correct. Even so, his picture is far more accurate than Pyle’s, which is full of mistakes, in everything from the uniforms and equipment to those grenadiers (those guys in the fuzzy hats in the center), who shouldn’t be there at all, having been detached to form part of the right wing assault force.

And yet the Pyle is still our favorite depiction of the battle. Why? Because it feels right: it’s a 19^th-century image of courage and discipline, and appeals to our romantic souls, even though there are casualties strewn about, which, to us, only serves to emphasize the bravery and stick-to-it-iveness of those solid infantry.

And this is where JRRT comes in. We’ve said before: our favorite part of P. Jackson’s films is anything to do with the Rohirrim.

The fact that, in the books, they live in wide, grassy plains (unavailable in New Zealand) and that their capital, Edoras, does not have “a dike and mighty wall and thorny fence” in the films, along with any other details it would be easy to extract from The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t matter to us in the least. The depiction in the films feels right and we’re content with that, even when there are other parts of the films where we have other reactions. Simple (and perhaps surprising to us) as that.

So, dear readers, do you have similar reactions? And to what? We’d love to hear!

And thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

What If…

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 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!

Killer Monks (and Friars)

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Baze Malbus, Bo staff, Canterbury Tales, Chirrut Imwe, Cluny, Dauntless, Friar Tuck, Friars, Geoffery Chaucer, Guardians of the Whills, Howard Pyle, Jahng Bong, Jedha, Little John, monastery, monks, N.C. Wyeth, Nijedha, quarter-staff, religion, Robin Hood, Rogue One, Scarif, Star Destroyer, Star Wars, stormtroopers, Tae Kwon-Do, Temple of the Kyber, the Force, The Force Awakens, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Today, for the first time in some time, we are not visiting Middle-earth. Instead, we are visiting our earth, as well as another planet or two.

Recently, we saw Rogue One,

which, in our opinion, was a bit more coherent than The Force Awakens, but which still—again, our opinion—like Force, had too many players and too many planets. For us, this has always been the danger of fantasy fiction, when plot overwhelms character, as—and aren’t we opinionated in this posting?—in the Harry Potter series.

The first volume was a pleasant twist on the traditional school story, a genre which dates at least as far back as Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).

by Thomas Hughes.

We thought that that first book had a number of potentially interesting characters—Hermione, the Weasley twins, Snape, Hagrid—but, as the books piled up and the plot became more complex and more and more characters appeared, there was less and less, it seemed to us, of those interesting original figures. And many of the characters who were there, seemed much sketchier.

In the case of Rogue One, we thought that two of the most interesting were the two Guardians of the Whills, rather like monks

Chirrut Imwe

and Baze Malbus.

These two had been attached to the Temple of the Kyber in the city of Nijedha on the desert moon Jedha.

The Empire has arrived, however (hard to miss the Star Destroyer Dauntless in this picture, isn’t it?), to seize all of the kyber crystals on Jedha (used originally to power Jedi light sabers) to fuel the superlaser on the new terror weapon, the Death Star.

In the process, the two monks have been driven from the Temple, which has been pillaged, and now appear to be living on the street. Chirrut believes in the Force, while Baze seems to believe in his very large gun. Chirrut, who is blind, first shows his skills in an amazing scene where, surrounded by stormtroopers, he makes short work of them with his fighting staff, which resembles the Jahng Bong or Bo Staff used in Tae Kwon-do, among other Eastern weapons and martial arts.

As everyone who has seen Rogue One (and, by now, many who haven’t, we’d guess) knows, the two don’t survive the attack on Scarif

and this made us wish we had seen more of them, not only in this movie (perhaps them ejected from the Temple—which wouldn’t have been easy!), but in another Star Wars story, in which they were the main characters. So many questions: how did they meet? Why does the one believe so fervently in the Force and the other does not? What did they do before Nijedha? Were they always monks? If not, how did they become so? How and where did they train?

Seeing fighting with that Bo Staff immediately prompted us to think of much earlier figures with a similar weapon: Robin Hood, who fights, on a log over a stream, his soon-to-be-lieutenant, Little John, with quarter-staves.

This is an illustration by N.C. Wyeth from the 1917 Robin Hood,

but there is an earlier edition of the stories of Robin Hood by Wyeth’s teacher, Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883).

And here is a version of the aftermath of that scene on the log with Little John.

Robin has another encounter with water and a fighter when he meets a friar beside a stream. A monk is a man who enters a religious community called a monastery and spends his life working (and praying) within its walls.

Western medieval Europe was full of monasteries, like this, at Cluny, in France.

Friars, on the other hand, traveled within their appointed district, called a “province”. Here is a friar from an early (beginning of the 15^th century) illustrated version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Because friars were much less strictly governed, they gained a folk reputation as tricksters and high-livers, and the trickster shows through when Robin Hood forces a friar (he will become Robin’s friend, Friar Tuck) to carry him across a stream—and the friar dumps him before proving that he’s also an expert swordsman. Here’s an illustration from the 1883 Pyle version.

As we thought about it, by combining Little John’s skill with the quarterstaff with Friar Tuck’s wits and courage and holy orders, we could see a possible inspiration for Chirrut Imwe.

If you know the old Robin Hood stories and you’re seen Rogue One, what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

A Pirate’s Life

24 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Villains

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Barbary Coast, Captain Blood, Captain Hook, Corsairs, Errol Flynn, Gilbert and Sullivan, Howard Pyle, Jack Sparrow, Jolly Roger, mariners, Napoleonic Wars, Narnia, Peter Jackson, Pirates, Scharb, shipbuilding, Tamora Pierce, The Black Pearl, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tortall, Treasure Island, Umbar, USS Philadelphia, xebec

“Oh, a pirate’s life is a wonderful life,

A-rovin’ over the sea,

Give me a career as a buccaneer

It’s the life of a pirate for me…”

Wallace/Penner, Peter Pan (1953)

Dear readers, welcome, as ever.

Being clever, you can tell immediately where this posting is going to go. Yep, the corsairs of Umbar.

A corsair is another word for pirate. And, when we think “pirate”, first there’s the late-19^th-early-20^th-century work of Howard Pyle.

And the silly pirates from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

And Long John Silver, from Treasure Island.

And then there is Captain Hook and the Jolly Roger.

And Errol Flynn in the 1935 movie, Captain Blood.

And who could forget Jack Sparrow and The Black Pearl?

We think that Tolkien has something rather different in mind, however. Let’s start with a little history.

Umbar’s past in relation to Gondor is summed up by Damrod in “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”:

“ ‘Aye, curse the Southrons!’ said Damrod. ‘Tis said that there were dealing of old between Gondor and the kingdoms of the Harad to the Far South; though there was never friendship. In those days our bounds were away south beyond the mouths of Anduin, and Umbar, the nearest of their realms, acknowledged our sway. But that is long since. ‘Tis many lives of Men since any passed to and fro . Now of late we have learned that the Enemy has been among them, and they are gone over to Him, or back to Him—they were ever ready to his Will—“ (The Two Towers, Book 4, Chapter 4,“Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

Damrod’s mistrust is confirmed by what Beregond says to Pippin in “Minas Tirith”:

“…There is a great fleet drawing near to the mouths of Anduin, manned by the corsairs of Umbar in the South. They have long ceased to fear the might of Gondor, and they have allied them with the Enemy, and now make a heavy stroke in his cause. For this attack will draw off much of the help that we looked to have from Lebennin and Belfalas, where folk are hardy and numerous.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

As Damrod has said, Umbar is to the far south.

Here is a view of it as imagined by the Czech artist, Scharb.

To us, this resembles cities along the southern Mediterranean coast, especially as seen in old engravings of the Barbary Coast.

Take, for example, this copperplate of Tunis, from 1778.

There are all kinds of ships depicted here, from three-masters to a galley, in the center, to a small xebec, to the far right.

The galley seemed once to be the characteristic ship of the pirates of the Barbary Coast, coming from earlier Turkish galleys.

What the Czech artist appears to have picked up upon, however, is something from P. Jackson’s third The Lord of the Rings film, in which the xebec

is the model for the corsairs’ vessels.

Jackson’s corsairs look like this (including Jackson himself, mugging to the left).

The crews of actual Barbary ships probably looked more like this:

This makes perfect sense, as these are North Africans, and very tough people, as European mariners came to know. Their swift, daring ships attacked any vessel which might bring them profit.

The young United States first paid them tribute to keep them away from US ships.

But, as the government somewhere found the money, it began a shipbuilding program to provide the country with its first national navy.

This particular ship was the ill-fated USS Philadelphia, which ran aground and was captured by the pirates.

It was destroyed, however,

in a daring raid by Stephen Decatur, seen in this miniature.

The United States fought two wars against the Barbary pirates, 1801-5 and 1815, doing a great deal of damage to the pirates.

Ultimately, however, it was a combination of governments and navies, including the US, the British, and the Dutch, which put a stop to piracy in the southern Mediterranean after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

So, like Scharb, we took the idea from JRRT that Umbar was in the far south and, influenced by our experience, not only of the Barbary pirates, but of Narnia and the country called Calormen

and of Tamora Pierce’s “Tortall” with its Carthaki southland,

we imagined the corsairs to look like this.

So, dear readers, what do you think?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

A (Self)-portrait of the Artist?

03 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators

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Adventure, Doubloon, Howard Pyle, Illustration, N.C. Wyeth, Pirates, Self-portrait, Spanish Galleon

Dear Readers,

We intend to continue our discussion of narrative in Tolkien in our next, but heavy with the baskets of jelly beans and peeps we’ve consumed pre-Easter, we thought we’d daydream with you a little this week. Our focus in this blog is a picture we have displayed once before. It is by N.C. Wyeth and was the cover of the March 1922 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Remembering all of N.C. Wyeth’s pictures of pirates, like this one:

we could certainly see this as one of that thematic family– a Spanish galleon being attacked by tiny pirate longboats.

Here’s a cutaway of one such galleon by the wonderfully talented Stephen Biesty. And here is what they are attacking the ship for (and who wouldn’t?):

It’s clearly a very powerful image: the boy daydreaming of adventure on the high seas. What interests us, however, beyond the evocative nature of the image, is to take a closer look at what the boy has in front of him, and to realize that the book is opened not to a picture, but to print. Thus, what so stirs the boy’s imagination is not a an illustration by, say, Wyeth’s teacher, Howard Pyle,

but the written text which such a picture would have accompanied during that golden era of book illustration, just at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries. And something else strikes us: is this a self-portrait of Wyeth himself as a boy, stirred, as we know he was, by stories of adventure? Compare these two pictures (the one on the right is the earliest picture we could find of Wyeth– dated 1903, so he’s about 21).

If it really is a retro self-portrait, then we have an extra level of narrative:

1. a boy, lost in the written word of an adventure story, day-dreaming of pirates

2. not just any boy, but Wyeth the painter–could we be looking at Wyeth depicting that moment when he decided that he would like to illustrate such stories himself?

What do you think, dear readers? The only thing we could wish was that there was a companion picture, in which a girl of 1922 was reading the same book and having the same daydream!

Happy Easter!

MTCIDC

And thanks, as always, for reading,

From Master to Pupil

13 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators

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Howard Pyle, Kidnapped, King Arthur, N.C. Wyeth, Robin Hood, Treasure Island

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

Last time, we looked at some works by Howard Pyle, the great 19th-century illustrator and painter. Today, we want to look at the work of one of his most prominent students, N.C. Wyeth.

To give you an idea of what captivates us, we could just show you this:

This sums it all up: the way in which reading allows you to step into imagination as if it were a country. It also suggests a certain propensity for romanic daydreaming on the part of certain people!

Here is an easy example of the difference between master and pupil. This is a Howard Pyle from his version of King Arthur. It’s beautifully detailed with a somewhat hard edge to it.

And here is a work by his pupil from his King Arthur:

There is an almost dream-like cloudy quality to his work. In fact, that dream can even seem something like a nightmare in this Wyeth illustration from Kidnapped.

We’ve read that there are those who have criticized such works as “melodramatic”, but we think that that misses the point– they aren’t melodramatic, they are simply dramatic.

But, for us, it truly is the case of picture = words x 1000. And so, we’ll content ourselves with showing you a few more of our favorite pictures.

This last one, for us, may be as suggestive as the first one. We can feel ourselves deep in the beechwood behind the next tree, our bows creaking with the strain, waiting for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

And, for this time, we invite you, dear readers, to join us there.

Thanks, as always, for reading,

MTCIDC,

Pyle of Pirates

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Military History, Research, Writing as Collaborators

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Bunker Hill, Howard Pyle, Illustrating History, Jack Sparrow, Pirates

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In recent posts, we’ve talked about the wonderful Russian fairy/folktale illustrators of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. We thought it might be fun, as we work on the sequel to Across the Doubtful Sea (Empire of the Isles) while editing The Good King’s Daughter for our second series, to continue the conversation by looking at other illustrators, beginning with two Americans, teacher and pupil Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth.

We begin, however, with a familiar contemporary image:

We think it goes without saying who this is, don’t you? He’s a wonderful actor, but, for someone who’s supposed to be dressed as a mid-18th-century sailor, he owes more to Howard Pyle, who, as has been pointed out more than once before, has exerted a strong influence upon Hollywood’s view of such people, than to actual 18th-century sailor’s dress.

Pirates were, in fact, sailors with, shall we say, non-mercantile goals. They were workmen and wore very practical workmen’s clothes, like those in the following 18th-century illustrations.

(This is, in fact, a contemporary illustration of the casting adrift of the notorious Captain Bligh, a British naval officer, although you see him only in his shirtsleeves here, rather than in his blue officer’s coat. His men, however, did not wear uniforms at this period, and, as you can see, would have looked like any other sailor.)

Okay, it might be argued, he’s “Captain” Jack Sparrow–what about officers? Here’s a Hogarth painting of a more-or-less mid-century civilian captain.

As the illustration shows, he simply wears ordinary clothing– no uniform.

Now, here are a few Pyle pictures.

Typical Pyle touches: the bandanas and the huge sashes, not to be seen in period illustrations.

One might argue that Pyle lacked readily-available visual sources: someone in the 1890s certainly didn’t have Google Images. It has been said, that, like Detaille in France, Pyle collected period uniforms, etc., and sometimes dressed up students in them, but, one has only to look at his illustration of Bunker Hill, to make you wonder what he actually collected.

There are numerous errors here, from the cut of the coats, to the lace on the breast, to the packs and that’s only the beginning. The study of the history of uniforms was, of course, only in its infancy in this period and even serious military artists, like H.A. Ogden, could go very wrong.

And yet, there are also Pyle illustrations like these, in which he seems to have gotten things– at least, non-piratical things–right.

In these, you see a depiction of 18th century sailors which looks much more like those in actual period illustrations.

So what was Pyle up to? Let’s look at a much more modern depiction of Bunker Hill, by the American military artist, H. Charles McBarron.

McBarron was a member of the Company of Military Historians and Collectors. He was well-known not only as a skilled artist, but as a thorough researcher, and the owner of an extensive collection of militaria of the past. What you see in this picture (minus the graphic depiction of violence) would have been as accurate a depiction of the event as anyone might imagine.

Suppose, however, you were attempting to picture this event in dramatic terms from the British side. You would want long lines of red-coated, determined men, marching steadily uphill through their own casualties, as in Pyle’s illustration.

Imagine, then, that even if you had much more visual information about pirates than Pyle may have had, but you wanted people to see pirates painted broadly and dramatically, what better than flowing headscarves, and big, blood-red sashes?

And this is why people in the past–and we in the present– love Pyle. Strict accuracy certainly has its place, but we’re perfectly willing to let it walk the plank in favor of romantic strokes and bold depictions.

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

Next, Pyle’s pupil, N.C. Wyeth.

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

Tag Archives: Howard Pyle

I Love a Parade

In Shining Armo(u)r

Accuracy? Well, Yes, But…

What If…

Killer Monks (and Friars)

A Pirate’s Life

A (Self)-portrait of the Artist?

From Master to Pupil

Pyle of Pirates