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Tag Archives: Mammoth

Seeing the Elephant– Oliphaunt

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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

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Tags

Adventure, Alps, ATAT, Elephants, Greeks, Hannibal, Hoth, Mammoth, Mumak of Harad, Napoleon, Oliphaunt, Peter Jackson, Pyrrhus of Epirus, Romans, Sam Gamgee, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, war

Grey as a mouse,
Big as a house,
Nose like a snake,
I make the earth shake,
As I tramp through the grass;
Trees crack as I pass.
With horns in my mouth
I walk in the South,
Flapping big ears.
Beyond count of years
I stump round and round,
Never lie on the ground,
Not even to die.
Oliphaunt am I,
Biggest of all,
Huge, old, and tall.
If ever you’d met me
You wouldn’t forget me.
If you never do,
You won’t think I’m true;
But old Oliphaunt am I,
And I never lie.

(“The Black Gate is Closed”, LOTR 646)

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

Sam dearly wants to see an oliphaunt– and he will get his chance. Were he able to see the third part of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, he would see many more than one.

Screen_Shot_2013-03-12_at_6.17.47_PM

Sam does see one, however:

To his astonishment and terror, and lasting delight, Sam saw a vast shape crash out of the trees and come careering down the slope. Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to him, a grey-clad moving hill” (“Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”, LOTR 661).

Here’s how the film shows two of them:

oliphaunts_small

These are, of course, based upon real war elephants.

Carthaginian-War-Elephant-yellow-shrink

The west– our west– first saw such elephants in the 280s BC, in the army which Pyrrhus of Epirus brought from Greece to fight the Romans.

herculaneum_villa_papiri_pyrrhus_naples4elephant_dish

Such elephants were thought to be useful against great blocks of infantry.

phalanx phalanx1legion_in_battle_formation

They could be used like tanks to knock holes in the formations.

Pyrhus_elephants2

To most people, the most familiar images, however, would be from Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 218 BC.

Hannibal-2

And, most famous of all, is his taking of the elephants across the Alps.

lal299613 lal319314

In fact, this did not end well for the elephants. Ancient accounts suggest that out of forty elephants, only one survived.

Crossing the Alps reminded us of Napoleon doing this in 1800. Here’s the heroic version:

Napoleon_at_the_Great_St._Bernard_-_Jacques-Louis_David_-_Google_Cultural_Institute

And this is what really happened (a little like Hannibal’s elephants):

Paul_Delaroche_-_Napoleon_Crossing_the_Alps_-_Google_Art_Project_2

JRRT says of the oliphaunt Sam saw that “…the Mûmak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth” (“Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”, LOTR 661).

It’s unclear what he means by this, except perhaps that an oliphaunt was more like a mammoth

Mammoths_Man-1200x756.jpg format=1500w

Even so, we can only contrast an ancient war elephant (reconstructed)

dced00480c58b85786bee4bf212eb30d

with those in the film

01IYPfe

and which reminded us strongly of ATATs from the assault upon Hoth,

atat

and think how disappointed Sam would be in what he would see in our world versus his!

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

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