In my last posting, I returned to an old favorite, the Rohirrim,
(Bogi389)
whom Tolkien had described to Rhona Beare as “…not ‘medieval’ in our sense.” (letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 401.
I presumed, as he was referring to their armor, that “not medieval” meant not something like this—
(Graham Turner—see my last posting for more on him.)
but more like this—
(Gerry Embleton)
as his reference point was the Bayeux Tapestry—
In an earlier letter, to Milton Waldman, Tolkien had used another interesting phrase for describing the Rohirrim, “heroic ‘Homeric’ horsemen”. (letter to Milton Waldman, “late 1951”, Letters, 221)
Although horsemen are briefly mentioned in The Iliad, (and one of the major Greeks, Nestor, is even regularly called “the “Gerenian horseman”) the standard equine involvement is by chariot,
(This is Achilles dragging the body of the dead Hector around Troy, as described in Iliad Book 22, from line 395 on),
warriors sometimes leaping to the ground to confront their opponents, but, at other times, battling from their chariots, as we see Celtic warriors doing, both in their Irish mythological versions as well as in their real-life confrontations with the Romans in Britain.
(Peter Connolly)
JRRT says of himself:
“I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.” (letter to Robert Murray, SJ, 2 December, 1953, Letters, 257)
Thus, as someone who was a late-Victorian/Edwardian schoolboy, raised in the Classics, and who almost made a career in them himself, JRRT would have been well aware of this earlier warfare as reported by Julius Caesar, but, if “Homeric” doesn’t mean “horsemen”, what does it imply?
In that same earlier letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien uses the word again, describing certain people of the Second Age:
“In the West—actually the North-West is the only part clearly envisaged in these tales—lie the precarious refuges of the Elves, while Men in those parts remain more or less uncorrupted if ignorant. The better and nobler son [should this be “sort”?] of Men are in fact the kin of those that had departed to Numenor, but remain in a simple ‘Homeric’ state of patriarchal and tribal life.” (Letters, 214)
So here “Homeric” is associated not with a military but with a social system: “patriarchal and tribal”.
I’m presuming here that the operative word is “simple”—and, if we consider the Rohirrim as a horse people, rather like the Mongols in our Middle-earth’s history, who moved westwards from the Great Steppe–
but, unlike the Mongols, were not set upon destruction and conquest,
and, instead, helped to defeat the Wain-riders and became allies of Gondor,
then we might imagine them as remaining more like the horse-pasturing Mongols, even as they spread across Rohan and settled into permanent lodgings, like Edoras.
(Alan Lee)
As such, they have a king,
(the Hildebrandts)
whose power is passed down through his family—through male heirs—at the time of The Lord of the Rings through Theoden’s nephew, Eomer, as Theoden’s son, Theodred, is killed in the initial fighting against Saruman—and this is where “patriarchal”, might come in.
“Tribal”, however, puzzles me. The Rohirrim appear to retain something of their horse-people origins, but Tolkien never gives us much of the further social structure of the Rohirrim, to suggest where this might be evident.
The Rohirrim don’t appear to be a feudal culture, however, of the sort which the Normans brought to England and imposed upon the Anglo-Saxons—that is, the pyramidal method of land-holding and population-controlling you can see in this illustration—
and which Tolkien might have thought of as “medieval” and, along with plate armor, might have distinguished for him the difference between the Rohirrim, with their Tapestry look, and the later Middle Ages. (In case you’re not familiar with the term, there’s a useful article on feudalism here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism )
One more of his words might help us better to understand what he meant when he described the Rohirrim: “heroic”.
In contemporary terms, “hero” is often used as the equivalent of “protagonist”, but the older Greek concept is of someone almost supernatural in his powers (possibly the child of a god and human, like Herakles or Achilles or even Aeneas) and, after death, might be given his own shrine—an heroon (he-RO-on) and honored there.
Although JRRT would not have wanted to suggest a religious element in his use of the word, we can imagine that what he intended was something more like “people given to bold, dramatic actions, even at the risk of death”, which would fit Achilles, for example, perfectly.
This is Achilles, binding a wound for his companion, Patroklos. Against Achilles’ warning, Patroklos attempts to confront the Trojan hero, Hektor, but is killed and Achilles, although he himself is cautioned by his mother, Thetis, that, if he fights and kills Hektor, will soon die himself, does so anyway.
This brings us back to that image earlier in this posting, of Achilles dragging Hektor’s body around the walls of Troy
and also leads to a further image: Achilles, in turn, being killed by an arrow shot by the Trojan prince, Paris.
(In this scene, depicting the battle over Achilles’ body, you can see Achilles fallen, an arrow through the back of his leg.)
And, for the Rohirrim, the term would then fit Theoden perfectly, as well, as he says to Aragorn at Helm’s Deep:
“The end will not be long…But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. Snowmane and Hasufel and the horses of my guard are in the inner court. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me the, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song—if any be left to sing of us hereafter.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “Helm’s Deep”)
(Alan Lee)
Potentially, an heroic—and Homeric—end.
Thanks for reading, as always.
Stay well,
If possible, avoid fell beasts while attempting heroic endeavors,
The title of this posting is based upon a scene in 1920-30s country house plays where someone known as a “bright young thing”–no, not one of those—
bounds onto the stage in his whites, cheerily chirping “Tennis, anyone?”
But, lest you think that you’ve stumbled into the wrong blog, I’m actually not going to talk about tennis—except as Tolkien uses it analogically—in this quotation:
“The Rohirrim were not ‘medieval’, 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.” (letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 401)
Here’s a tennis net, in the unlikely event that you’ve never seen one—
and here’s a segment of the “Bayeux Tapestry” (actually a massive embroidery) with some warriors wearing what JRRT is talking about—
What’s going on in this scene is that a rumor during the battle of Hastings was spreading through the Norman army that William had been killed, so the Duke rode among his men with his helmet raised, and therefore anyone who knew him, at least by sight, would realize that the rumor was false (note also, in case you didn’t know about this event, the Latin caption—“Hic est Dux Will[helm”—“here is Duke William”, as well as the mounted Norman to the right who is pointing—and doubtless shouting “Iloc!”—“There [he is]!” –for something about Norman French, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_language )
Although he doesn’t explain “medieval”, I expect that what Tolkien means is that the Rohirrim shouldn’t look like this—
(Graham Turner—who has made a specialty of the 15th-century military—with a wonderful illustrated history of the Wars of the Roses, which I recommend highly.)
but rather like this—
If you read this blog regularly, you know that my favorite part of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films is the depiction of the Rohirrim—with the exception of Rohan, which should be a great, grassy plain,
but, as New Zealand doesn’t possess such, the best that could be done was this rather withered- looking landscape—
(For more on this, see “Plain and Grassy”, 24 September, 2025)
Now, however, I begin to think that, though the Rohirrim are still my favorite part, I want to add a second exception: how the Rohirrim look.
Tolkien, after all, has given us a definite picture of what he wanted. The Rohirrim were to be imagined as looking like the Normans (and Anglo-Saxons) we can see on the Tapestry: wearing rather simple helmets, either hammered from one sheet of metal,
or made of a series of plates attached to a frame—called a “spangenhelm”,
and a long coat of chain mail,
which was pulled over the head, like some sweaters (“pullovers”), as you can see at the bottom of this scene from the Bayeux Tapestry–
The top part of this scene is labeled, “Harold Rex interfectus est”—“King Harold has been killed”, but there is some confusion here as to which figure is Harold. There is an early account which says that he had been hit in the eye with a Norman arrow, so that would suggest the figure in the middle, but the arrow seems to have been a replacement for something else, so perhaps it’s the figure being struck down on the right? (For more on this, see: https://historiamag.com/harold-death-truth/ ) In any event, we can see those same “tennis nets” on both the mounted Norman (winning) and the Anglo-Saxons on foot (losing).
In contrast, here’s Theoden, as portrayed in the Jackson films—
and add in his helmet.
What in the world is all of this? Certainly not anything like the Bayeux Tapestry which JRRT suggested as a model and yet not the “medieval” I’m assuming he intended to steer Rhona Beare away from. Instead, it seems like something patched together, with a leather coat underneath (?), lamellar (scale) armor below,
and other things attached—a very odd-looking breastplate in several sections, pauldrons (shoulder pieces), and vambraces (arm pieces). There is also that helmet—
(This image comes from an amazing site: https://www.blindsquirrelprops.com/theoden-helmet/ The Squirrel seems to be able to make/reproduce anything and, in this posting, he/she demonstrates how he/she made a reproduction of Theoden’s helmet, based upon a couple of screen captures.)
The Anglo-Saxon king, Harold,
and the Norman-king-to-be, William,
seem content with simple conical helmets—does Theoden really need more? I’m also puzzled as to where Theoden is wearing his sword—on the right. Soldiers on the Tapestry wear theirs on the left
and this is true for mounted men over the centuries in general, who then use the left as their bridle hand and their right to draw and use their swords (or spears as is often the case on the Tapestry). Was Bernard Hill, who played Theoden in the films, left-handed and the director wanted him to feel comfortable?
The mass of the Rohirrim, we mostly never see closely—
but, blowing up this image, it’s possible to determine that some attempt has been made to provide the extras with conical helmets, although what little armor one can see appears to be lamellar, rather than chain—probably for the budget’s sake—chain mail taking longer to make and the man-hours making it more expensive—for more on chain mail, here’s a very useful article—and site in general: https://www.ironskin.com/faq-chainmail-weight-and-cost/
Tolkien was very clear as to what he intended—you have only to read his sometimes outraged comments about a proposed film to be made of The Lord of the Rings to see just how seriously he took his work and its interpretation—letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, June, 1958, Letters, 389-397—and this is an abbreviated form before he appears to have given up in frustration.
And yet, although Tolkien’s letter to Rhona Beare was certainly available to them, with its description, the director and designers of the films clearly paid little attention to his intentions when it came to the look of the Rohirrim.
So, will I still find the Rohirrim my favorite part of the films? Well, there is that moment when we see them sweep against Sauron’s Orcs from behind—
and that would be hard to give up, because, even if they don’t look like Tolkien’s idea of the Rohirrim, certainly the charge is as stirring as he described it.
At the same time, however, I’ll offer you this image, by “Bogi380”, of a very different view of the Rohirrim, much closer to Tolkien’s model—
Given the choice of what I would want the Rohirrim to look like, I know what I would choose, but, as the films are not about to be remade, I guess that I’ll stick with my favorites and, as in the case of the ungrassy Rohan, be glad for all that I do enjoy.
Thanks for reading, as always.
Stay well,
Imagine, however, what that scene might have looked like if they’d followed Tolkien’s model–
In a colleague’s office, I once saw this on his wall—
“Proletariat, to horse!”
It’s a recruiting poster from the Russian civil war (1918-1922), showing the Reds trying to raise cavalry for their armies, but, at the time this call came, the military world was changing and, although horsemen would still appear, very sporadically, on battlefields, for some years to come, the day of events like this—
was rapidly coming to a close.
It didn’t happen all at once, however. As you can imagine, traditional cavalrymen—those who believed that swinging a sword in a valiant charge was the point of cavalry—
fought back. The evidence was against them, however, in two ways.
First, in the case of the British, there had been the Boers,
with whom the British had fought a war, from 1899-1902. The Boers (Dutch for “farmers”) had been militia—men obliged by law to defend the state upon demand. Across the wide open spaces of so much of South Africa, they had fought as mounted infantry, using horses as a means of moving from place to place, then dismounting for combat and, if things didn’t go their way, mounting up and escaping.
To counter this, especially in the later phases of the war, the British were forced to develop their own mounted infantry,
which suggested to some military theorists at the time that the wave of the future was not in sword-swingers, but in riflemen, who could rapidly move to where they were needed, but employ horses for transport, not for gallant charges. (This also led to the rise of units mounted entirely on bicycles,
but we can imagine the off-road difficulties for early machines and, although there were bicycle units as late as WW2, they never had the popularity—or the dash—of horsemen.)
The second piece of evidence lies in technological change.
With the coming of the 20th century, machine guns, sometimes firing as many as 600 rounds (shots) per minute,
appeared in increasing numbers and artillery was developed to become more accurate at greater distances.
In self-defense, soldiers would be forced to take cover wherever they could,
at first in holes simply scraped out of the ground, but, in time, in very sophisticated lines, shored up with wood and metal and sandbags.
On the Western Front, where everyone was dug into the ground, and being in the open could mean instant destruction, there simply wasn’t a place for old-fashioned cavalry, for all that there were still lots of old-fashioned cavalrymen in the army—like the first commander of the British in France in 1914, Sir John French.
Imagine, then, that this was all happening when Tolkien was very young—when the Boer War ended, in 1902, for instance, he would have been only 10.
(JRRT and his brother, Hillary, in 1905)
His own military career had begun at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, when he entered the new Cadet Corps in 1907.
Then, in the summer of 1912, he was briefly a member of a territorial (a sort of national guard unit) cavalry regiment, King Edward’s Horse. (The reference here is to Carpenter’s J.R.R.Tolkien, 66. John Garth later added detail to this, but subsequently qualified it, saying that his evidence was faulty. See: https://oxfordinklings.blogspot.com/2009/06/tolkien-and-horses.html )
(Officers of the regiment about 1916)
It was clearly an indication of the drop in the use of cavalry, however, when JRRT began his second enlistment not in a cavalry, but an infantry regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, in which he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1915.
In his brief battlefield career, he was the signals officer for his battalion, the 11th. In the advance into the Somme in July, 1916, Tolkien, although armed with a revolver,
would have been too busy to do any fighting as his work involved
“More code, flag and disc signaling, the transmission of messages by heliograph and lamp, the use of signal rockets and field-telephones, even how to handle carrier pigeons…” (Carpenter, 86)
To ask for reinforcements, as well as to avoid artillery fire which could be called in to fend off German counterattacks, but which might hit friendly troops instead, it was extremely necessary for attacking units to let their positions and situations be known as often as possible, so JRRT would have been more than a little occupied during the months (1 July-18 November, 1916) of the very costly (nearly 58,000 British casualties the first day alone) offensive. Fortunately for him—and for us—he fell ill with so-called “trench fever” and left France for good early in November, going home to England and, ultimately, to Middle-earth.
Although his military service in the field was relatively brief, and his career with cavalry even briefer (he resigned from King Edward’s Horse in January, 1913), we see horses everywhere in Middle-earth, from the ponies of the dwarves in The Hobbit
(from Painting Valley—no artist listed)
to the horses of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings.
(with the Gaffer, one of my favorite illustrations by Denis Gordeev)
But, although cavalry might have been only a brief flirtation for Tolkien, horses had been part of his life since its beginnings. Part of this would have been mundane—it was only after the Great War that the internal combustion engine really began to dominate the streets. When JRRT was young, Birmingham and London, as well as Berlin, Paris, and New York, would have looked like this—
His early reading would have given him Bellerophon on Pegasus,
and further medieval reading would have filled his mind with mythic and magic horses, like Cu Chulainn, the Irish hero’s, chariot pair, water horses named Liath Macha and Dub Sainglend (although he wasn’t very enthusiastic about Old Irish literature which, I suspect, he found much wilder and stranger and more disturbing than, say, the Welsh Mabinogion, which you can read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabinogion )
(a rather over-the-top image by the usually dependable Angus McBride—someone should have mentioned to him that, although “Dub” means “black”, Liath means “grey”. Cu Chulainn is one of my favorite ancient berserkers—to mix cultures—and, if you don’t know him, you can begin to read about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%BA_Chulainn )
And while we’re speaking of Middle-earth and horses, we need to mention the Normans, who, combined with the Anglo-Saxons for language, were the basis of the Rohirrim–
“The Rohirrim were not ‘medieval’ in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry…fit them well enough…” (letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 401)
The Rohirrim, in turn, lead us back to the opening of this posting. Although, in Tolkien’s day, cavalry and glorious charges,
like that of the British Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854, commemorated in Tennyson’s poem, were almost at the end of their military usefulness, for a Romantic, like Tolkien, the idea of such a charge was still a powerful image and one he couldn’t resist, depicting the heroic Rohirrim assembling
(from the Jackson film)
and roaring down on the unsuspecting orcs.
(Abe Papakhian)
JRRT was writing medieval fantasy, however, but, as I’m always interested in “what if’s”, here I’m remembering what actually happened to that Light Brigade charge, an attack made in the teeth of Russia artillery.
The consequence was that, out of 609 men who rode towards the Russians, only 198 returned, and Lady Butler’s picture, “Balaclava the Return 25 October 1854” (1911) sums up the actual aftermath of that charge.
There’s evidence in the destruction of the Causeway Forts that Sauron’s army had some sort of blasting powder—suppose, instead of using it just as a siege tool, it had been employed with some sort of projectile propelled by it out of a tube—what might that have done to the Rohirrim’s valiant attack?
Or even using the technique of the English army against the French at Agincourt, in our medieval world of 1415AD: pointed stakes to threaten horses, behind which stood massed bowmen: what would have been the outcome of that?
(Angus Mcbride)
475 horses were lost in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Military progress so often just means more killing, but the replacement of horses with machines seems to me, who loves horses, a turn for the better. At the same time, with Tolkien, I can feel the attraction for wild charges with swords at top speed (although cavalry did better when, at most, it went in at the canter—galloping causes loss of formation which can blunt the effect of such an attack), but, as in the charge of the Rohirrim, I’m glad if they only appear in fiction—and far from modern weaponry.
Thanks, as ever, for reading,
Stay well,
Remember that there’s a special spot, just behind the poll (top of the head), which, if scratched in the right place, makes many horses happy,
And remember, as well, that there’s always
MTCIDC
O
PS
One of those little “what if” quirks of history–Tolkien’s immediate family had been in the Orange Free State at the time of his birth, in 1892. Tolkien’s father, Arthur, was manager of the Bloemfontein branch there of the Bank of Africa. The Orange Free State was one of the Boer republics attacked by Britain in the Boer War of 1899-1902. If Tolkien’s mother hadn’t brought JRRT and his brother, Hilary, back to England, in 1895, and Arthur hadn’t died of the effects of rheumatic fever in 1896,
Tolkien might have been in the Orange Free State when Bloemfontein was occupied by the British on 13 March, 1900. (You can see early film of the Scots Guards marching in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHy2cEFwlIo )
PPS
In last week’s posting, I mentioned the story of the wonderfully bloodthirsty Frankish queen Fredegunda, as she appears in Gregory of Tours Historia Francorum. I wrote there that you might read about her assassination of Bishop Praetextatus and her cold-blooded visit to him on his deathbed afterwards—but it required reading Gregory’s 6th-century Latin, as I didn’t provide a translation. It seemed lazy of me not to include one of that scene, however, so here it is with the original Latin. As always, I could smooth this out, but I prefer to stick as close as I can to the text, to give you a better feel for what’s actually been written.
Advenientem autem dominicae resurrectionis diae, cum sacerdos ad implenda aeclesiastica officia ad aeclesiam maturius properasset, antefanas iuxta consuetudinem incipere per ordinem coepit. Cumque inter psallendum formolae decumberet, crudelis adfuit homicida, qui episcopum super formolam quiescentem, extracto baltei cultro, sub ascella percutit. Ille vero vocem emittens, ut clerici qui aderant adiuvarent, nullius ope de tantis adstantibus est adiutus. At ille plenas sanguine manus super altarium extendens, orationem fundens et Deo gratias agens, in cubiculo suo inter manus fidelium deportatus et in suo lectulo collocatus est. Statimque Fredegundis cum Beppoleno duce et Ansovaldo adfuit, dicens: ‘Non oportuerat haec nobis ac reliquae plebi tuae, o sancte sacerdos, ut ista tuo cultui evenirent. Sed utinam indicaretur, qui talia ausus est perpetrare, ut digna pro hoc scelere supplicia susteneret’. Sciens autem ea sacerdos haec dolose proferre, ait: ‘Et quis haec fecit nisi his, qui reges interemit, qui saepius sanguinem innocentem effudit, qui diversa in hoc regno mala commisit?’ Respondit mulier: ‘Sunt aput nos peritissimi medici, qui hunc vulnere medere possint. Permitte, ut accedant ad te’. Et ille: ‘Iam’, inquid, ‘me Deus praecepit de hoc mundo vocare. Nam tu, qui his sceleribus princeps inventa es, eris maledicta in saeculo, et erit Deus ultur sanguinis mei de capite tuo’. Cumque illa discederit, pontifex, ordinata domo sua, spiritum exalavit.
“However, with the coming of the day of [Our] Lord’s resurrection, when the priest [Praetextatus] had hurried early to the church to fulfill [his] ecclesiastical duties, he started to begin [the] antiphons according to custom [in their proper] order. And when, between the psalms, he was lying on a bench, a cruel murderer appeared, who, when a knife had been pulled from [his] belt, struck the bishop, resting on the bench, under the armpit. He [the bishop], however, [although] shouting so that the clergy who were present might help him, was aided with help of none from so many being present. Yet he, stretching his hands, full of blood, above the altar, pouring [out] a prayer and thanking God, was carried off into his bedchamber by the hands of [his] faithful [followers] and placed on his bed. And straightaway Fredegunda, with the Duke Beppolenus and Ansovaldus, appeared, saying, ‘Oh holy priest, this was not right for us and for the rest of your people that such things should happen in your worshipping. But would that it would be revealed who had dared to carry out such things that he should suffer punishment worthy of this crime.’ The priest, knowing, however, that she was speaking of these things deceptively, said, ‘And who has done these things if not [the one] who has killed kings, who very often has poured out innocent blood, who has committed many evil deeds in this kingdom’ The woman replied: ‘There are in our household highly experienced doctors who would be able to heal this wound. Allow [it] that they may come to you.’ And he [said]: ‘God has decreed to call me from this world. On the other hand, you who have been exposed as chief in these crimes, you will be cursed in the future and God will be the avenger of my blood on your head.’ And when she had left, the bishop, affairs arranged in his house, breathed out his spirit.”
And how could I not include Alma-Tadema’s illustration?
If nothing else would tell us that Tolkien had a fine ear for rhythm and rhyme, just take this stanza from “Errantry”, first published in The Oxford Magazine, Vol.52, No.5–
“Of crystal was his habergeon, His scabbard of chalcedony; With silver tipped at plenilune His spear was hewn of ebony. His javelins were of malachite And stalactite – he brandished them And went and fought the dragon flies Of Paradise, and vanquished them.”
In his rhyming, JRRT has used some rather specialized words:
habergeon an (often-half-sleeved) chain mail shirt—usually made of steel, not something as fragile as crystal might be
chalcedony a kind of silica which comes in a number of varieties and colors—here’s one—
plenilune full moon—the idea being that his spear was given its tip/blade at the full moon, suggesting perhaps a magical making?
ebony a dark hardwood which can be turned into a glossy black
malachite another stone, which is copper-bearing
stalactite this isn’t a stone, but a stone deposit which hangs down in caves
and is probably there for the internal rhyme with malachite, although malachite can be discovered in stalactites, so possibly JRRT is using two different possibilities at once
brandish to wave—something heroic warriors sometimes do with their weapons, in a boasting or threatening manner
(I haven’t been able to find an artist for this one, alas.)
For the “dragon flies of Paradise”, you’re on your own—although–
So, when it came to the soundscape of The Lord of the Rings (a subject which could use a lot of exploring—there are cues everywhere), I wasn’t surprised to see him play a little game with an unlikely toy, a drum.
(a traditional Turkish drum—with two sticks, the larger for the top, the smaller for the underside, which gives it a distinctive double sound—you can hear—and see—some here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eaxzv6obf8 These musicians are dressed as Janissaries, members of the Sultan’s elite troops
and you can see why such bands then influenced later 18th-century-early-19th-century composers like Mozart and Beethoven—and frightened defenders when they heard this music coming. Here’s Beethoven’s impression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd0OjCO9x5Y )
Here’s a passage of that scape which recently caught my eye:
“Gandalf had hardly spoken these words, when there came a great noise: a rolling Boom that seemed to come from depths far below, and to tremble in the stone at their feet. They sprang towards the door in alarm. Doom, doom it rolled again, as if huge hands were turning the very caverns of Moria into a vast drum. Then there came an echoing blast: a great horn was blown in the hall, and answering horns and harsh cries were heard further off. There was a hurrying sound of many feet.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”)
You see what I mean about soundscape: everything described, except the movement of the Fellowship, is a sound—and notice that even the place name in the chapter title, which has, in the original, a circumflex over the –u- in “dum” , lengthening the sound of the word, echoes that drum and its message: doom!
And “doom” is an interesting word.
A quick look at its past can take us as far back as Gothic, the ancestral cousin of the Germanic languages and our oldest surviving sample of such ancestors. Etymonline has “Gothic doms, ‘discernment, distinction’”– https://www.etymonline.com/word/doom but, using my on-line Gothic dictionary, we find domjan and afdomjan, where the basic sense seems to be “to establish”, from which comes the meaning “to judge” and possibly even “to condemn”. (Here’s the page: http://www.wulfila.be/gothic/browse/search/?find=domjan&mode=1 at the very helpful “Wulfila” site—Wulfila was the 4th-century AD translator of the Judeo-Christian Bible from Greek into Gothic. It’s interesting that, often the original Greek word is a form of krino, which probably original meant to “separate”, but came, in time to be used to mean “to judge, decide”, and even “to condemn”—see the Perseus page here: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=kri%2Fnw&la=greek&can=kri%2Fnw0#lexicon )
This brings us to what, I imagine, was a strong influence on Tolkien whenever he wrote that word: that oppressor of the conquered Anglo-Saxons, the so-called “Domesday Book”.
After the defeat of Harold Godwinson and his army at Hastings, in October, 1066,
Duke William of Normandy drove a ruthless campaign of conquest throughout England, giving out land to his chief followers, who then built early castles, which we call “motte and bailey”, to protect themselves and to dominate the landscape.
As well, perhaps helped by previous Anglo-Saxon tax records (easily accessible to the Norman officials because both they and their predecessors would have written in Latin), the Normans created a massive census, both of people and places, detailed practically down to the last chicken, asking, basically, “who is the owner? what does he own? what’s it worth? how much tax does he pay?” It had no name, originally, as such, being called Liber de Wintonia—“the Winchester Book”—because that’s where the manuscript was originally stored. (There were originally two volumes and you can read much more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book And you can see the work itself here: https://opendomesday.org/
The name by which we know it seems to have been a grim local joke, first known reference being in the 12th-century Dialogus de Scaccario, “Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer” (“scaccarium” being a chess board, because the table used for accounting was gridded like one—it’s explained, in fact, in the “Dialogue”, but you can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchequer ).
In the text, the author (thought to have been Richard FitzNeal, the bishop of Ely, c.1130-1198), wrote:
“Hic liber ab indigenis ‘Domesdei’ nuncupatur id est dies iudicii per metaphoram.”
“This book is called by the locals ‘Doomsday’” : that is, as a metaphor, the Day of Judgment.”
(Dialogus de Scaccario, Book 1, Section 16B, which you can read here: https://archive.org/details/cu31924021674365/page/n119/mode/2up in Latin, or here, in English: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/excheq.asp#b1p16 This is a wonderfully practical text, explaining in enormous detail things like the vocabulary of the exchequer. As is so often the case with medieval Latin, it’s a very pleasant read, written in plain, straightforward language and being just what it says it is, a dialogue between a “magister” and a “discipulus” .)
Considering the choice of phrase, it isn’t surprising that that it was the choice of the “indigeni” . One part of William’s master plan of conquest was to take the land away from its original Anglo-Saxon (indigenous) land-holders
and hand it over to his own followers, thus dispossessing most of the former—and, because those owners had no recourse, it must have seemed very like the Last Judgment—the original Doomsday.
Thus, when the members of the Fellowship hear “boom” turn into “doom”, it can suggest not only a play with sound, but the same kind of catastrophic event, trapped, as they seem to be, in the record room of Mazarbul—
(Angus McBride)
And we can take this one step farther. As Tolkien’s income grew from the sale of his books, his frustration at the amount which disappeared into tax-paying grew, as he writes:
“A Socialist government will pretty well reduce me to penury on retirement! As it is socialist legislation is robbing me of probably ¾ of the fruits of my labors, and my ‘royalties’ are merely waiting in the bank until the Tax Collectors walk in and bag them. Do you wonder that anyone who can gets out of this island? Though soon there will be nowhere to go to escape the rising tide of ‘orquerie’.” (letter to Michael Tolkien, 6 November, 1956, Letters, 367)
So, when JRRT thought of “doom”, as a medievalist, might he also have been equating himself with those Anglo-Saxons, not only losing their homes, but forced to hand over their hard-earned cash
to those grim Normans, as well?
Thanks for reading, as always.
Stay well,
We’re only a month away, here in the US, from 15 April, our own “Domesday” for taxes owed,
If you’re a Game of Thrones fan (and I include myself here), you’ll immediately think of Khal Drogo, the leader of a tribe of the nomadic Dothraki,
whether you’ve seen the films,
or read the books,
or both.
I’m presuming that “Khal” is modeled on “khan”, a word of disputed origin among scholars, but which signifies someone above “king”—imagine something more like “high king”—and is used as the title for the ruler of an “ulus”, a “horde” in English. (For more about the name, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_(title) ) When you hear that word, you may think of Temujin, c.1162-1227AD, aka Chinggiz/Genghis Khan,
who founded the Mongol Empire and began the great wave of conquest from China to Russia. (More about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan I’ll add here that, so far, I’ve been unable to locate an artist for the illustration below.)
But he’s not the Drogo who is the subject of this posting.
Instead, it’s a much more humble Drogo, but, without him, Sauron’s Ring
would, barring that near disaster,
(Ted Nasmith)
never have been destroyed and, with it, Sauron.
(another Nasmith—and you can see why he’s one of my favorite Tolkien illustrators: no scene too big and also no scene less known will stop him)
JRRT has reported to us the Hobbits’ passion for genealogy:
“All Hobbits were, in any case, clannish and reckoned up their relationships with great care. They drew long and elaborate family-trees with innumerable branches.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue I, “Concerning Hobbits”)
And here we see that name in the Appendices, C “Family Trees (Hobbits)”
I I I
Dora Drogo Dudo
1302-1406 1308-1380 1311-1409
= Primula I
Brandybuck I
I I
Frodo Daisy
1368 1350
= Griffo
Boffin
It is, of course, Frodo’s father, drowned in a boating accident thought suspicious by some. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party)
I don’t have either the Hobbits’—or Tolkien’s—enthusiasm for genealogy, but I was curious, as I always am, about JRRT’s sources: just where did this name come from? It could be entirely from his fertile imagination, of course, but, as so much good scholarship has pointed to medieval sources for certain details in his works—think about those dwarvish names, right out of Icelandic saga material—the 13th-century Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (whose own name has a dwarvish ring and whose work you can read here: https://archive.org/details/proseedda01brodgoog/page/n54/mode/2up The dwarf name list is to be found on page 26)—I thought that a medieval influence might be possible.
At the moment, I have a short list of possible medieval candidates:
1. Drogo, the short-lived Duke of Brittany (reigned 952-958AD)—who may have been murdered by the connivance of his step-father, Fulk II, the Count of Anjou. (This is from the 11th-century Chronicle of Nantes, of which only fragments survive, but the murder plot does—Fulk threatens and persuades Drogo’s nurse to do away with him in his bath—see pages 109-110 in the 1896 edition of the fragments by Rene Merlet here: https://archive.org/details/lachroniquedenan00merl/page/108/mode/2up )
2. Drogo de la Beuvriere (? 11th century)—a companion of William the Conqueror, best known for poisoning his wife (these Normans and their allies seem to specialize in violence, don’t they?)—this information is in little bits of gossip, with the added fact that Drogo then borrowed travel money from William to enable his escape–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drogo_de_la_Beuvri%C3%A8re
3. Drogo d’Hauteville, the Norman count of Apulia (died 1051AD)—the Normans had gradually conquered whole sections of Italy and Sicily in the 11th century
and this Drogo succeeded his brother, William, as count, only to be murdered!
4. and then there’s Saint Drogo (1105-1186AD)—a Flemish nobleman who, suffering from a disease that made it difficult for people to look at him (leprosy?), he became a hermit and, not surprisingly, is the patron saint of shepherds (feast day, April 16). As, unlike the other Drogos, he seems to have died of natural causes, after a long life, I think that we should end our catalogue here!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Stay well,
Be very suspicious of ambitious Normans,
And remember that there’s always
MTCIDC
O
PS
Perhaps the violence done to so many of those Drogos influenced Tolkien in that nasty rumor about his Drogo?
PPS
If you are Hobbitish or Tolkienean in your interest in genealogy, there’s another Drogo—Drogo de Teigne—whom you can read about here—with the warning: if there were a genealogical rabbit hole, you’ll be standing at the mouth of it when you begin to read this: https://www.carolbaxter.com/Drew-families-of-Devonshire-and-Ireland?r_done=1
The title of this piece might suggest electric cars, and it definitely will mention several different wheeled vehicles, but it is actually what I hope is a little study in something Tolkien does wonderfully well: taking different elements from different times and cultures and so blending them that they become believable new wholes.
Although I don’t always agree with elements in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, one thing has always given me pleasure: the Rohirrim, whether en masse
or a small grouping.
And this is true for Edoras
as well as for Meduseld.
And yet they appear to be a kind of combination of peoples: on the one hand, Tolkien imagined them to be Anglo-Saxons,
(Peter Dennis)
a people who primarily fought on foot, as at their last two major battles, Stamford Bridge,
(Victor Ambrus—who worked for years with the popular British archeology series, Time Team—which is available on YouTube and much recommended)
where they defeated another infantry force, the Vikings, and Hastings,
(Artist?)
in which they were overwhelmed at the battle’s conclusion by Norman cavalry.
On the other hand, the Rohirrim were mounted, more like those Normans who defeated the Anglo-Saxons,
although the language they speak is, basically, a form of Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Tolkien imagined them, in fact, as looking like the Normans, as well, describing them in a letter to Rhona Beare:
“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.” (letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 401)
That is, their armor actually can look like this—
(By Angus McBride—and ironic, as, for all that McBride must have painted dozens of figures in chain mail, he once confessed in an interview that it was his least favorite part of illustrating, as the mail took so long to do.)
It’s also interesting to think about them as a people. Anglo-Saxons were descended from a combination of locals (Romano-British) and various groups of west-Germanic tribesmen who had either been early post-Roman invaders of Britain or Germanic tribesmen brought to Britain to protect the locals from those invaders and who had become colonizers in turn.
But who were the Rohirrim and where did they come from?
“Eorl the Young was lord of the Men of Eotheod. That land lay near the sources of Anduin, between the furthest ranges of the Misty Mountains and the northernmost parts of Mirkwood.”
(JRRT)
They had not always lived there, however:
“The Eotheod [from Old English, “Horsefolk”] had moved to those regions in the days of King Earnil II [TA 1945-2043] from lands in the vales of Anduin between the Carrock and the Gladden, and they were in origin close akin to the Beornings and the men of the west-eaves of the forest. The forefathers of Eorl claimed descent from kings in Rhovanion, whose realm lay beyond Mirkwood before the invasions of the Wainriders…They loved best the plains and delighted in horses and in all feats of horsemanship…” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A II “The House of Eorl”)
The combination of “They loved best the plains and delighted in horses” makes perfect sense when one thinks about comparative history in our Middle-earth. Consider the Eurasian Steppe, stretching from western China all the way to the Hungarian puszta.
This is an immense belt of grassland,
some 5000 miles (8000km) wide,
and has been the homeland of numerous horsefolk throughout history, from the Scythians
to the Sarmatians
to the Huns
(Angus McBride)
to the Mongols.
(another McBride)
All of these peoples have used the Steppe to graze their herds of horses, sometimes moving west for grazing, sometimes moving west when pressured by others further east, and sometimes as predators, like the Huns, moving west to seek new plunder.
(I haven’t been able to identify an artist for this–it has the look of late-Victorian.)
In two of these cases, whole peoples might be on the move and this is perhaps where Tolkien has gotten part of his description of those Wainriders he mentions:
“The Wainriders were a people, or a confederacy of many peoples, that came from the East; but they were stronger and better armed than any that had appeared before. They journeyed in great wains, and their chieftains fought in chariots…”
So, we can imagine that the Eotheod, pressured by the Wainriders, were forced west, as one steppe people is pushed westward by another to the east.
But Tolkien gives us another—or perhaps additional–possibility:
“Stirred up, as was afterwards seen, by the emissaries of Sauron, they made a sudden assault on Gondor…The people of eastern and southern Rhovanion were enslaved; and the frontiers of Gondor were for that time withdrawn to the Anduin and the Emyn Muil.” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, IV “Gondor and the Heirs of Anarion”)
The Wainriders, then, might be both steppe peoples moving westwards, but also predators, like the Huns, or like the Mongols, who were both predators and empire-builders, and here we might see Mongols with their characteristic ger (a large round tent)—on a wagon—perhaps like the Wainriders?
(Wayne Reynolds)
Although there is no mention in our text of the Rohirrim migrating with wagons, it’s clear from parallels in our world that the peoples who crossed the Eurasian Steppe appear to have used them regularly. But here, like the Rohirrim, we have another odd juxtaposition. The Rohirrim are Anglo-Saxons on horseback: cavalry, which was true for all of those migrants across the Steppe in our world. Chariots, however, although Tolkien says that the Wainrider chiefs fought in them (of which fact this is the only mention) were not part of those other horsefolks’ arsenals. Where did they come from?
The answer, I think, lies in the period of British history before the Anglo-Saxons and almost before the Romans, among the earlier Celtic settlers of England. Julius Caesar encountered chariots there and described their use:
Genus hoc est ex essedis pugnae. Primo per omnes partes perequitant et tela coiciunt atque ipso terrore equorum et strepitu rotarum ordines plerumque perturbant, et cum se inter equitum turmas insinuaverunt, ex essedis desiliunt et pedibus proeliantur. 2 Aurigae interim paulatim ex proelio excedunt atque ita currus conlocant ut, si illi a multitudine hostium premantur, expeditum ad quos receptum habeant. 3 Ita mobilitatem equitum, stabilitatem peditum in proeliis praestant, ac tantum usu cotidiano et exercitatione efficiunt uti in declivi ac praecipiti loco incitatos equos sustinere et brevi moderari ac flectere et per temonem percurrere et in iugo insistere et se inde in currus citissime recipere consuerint.
“This is the kind of fighting from chariots. At first, they ride around in all directions and throw spears and often, by the very frightfulness of the horses and the roar of the wheels, they shake the ranks [of the enemy] and, when they have slipped themselves among the troops of [enemy] cavalry, they leap from the chariots and fight on foot. Meanwhile, the charioteers move out a little way from the fighting and so place their vehicles that, if they [the dismounted fighters] should be pressed by a large number of the enemy, they may have an easy retreat to them. Thus, they provide the mobility of cavalry [as well as] the steadiness of infantry in [their] battles and they accomplish so much by daily practice and exercise that they are accustomed to control their stirred-up horses on a sloping and steep place and rein [them] in quickly and to turn [them] and to run along the yoke pole and to stand on the yoke and from there to take themselves back into the vehicles extremely speedily.” (Caesar, De Bello Gallico, Book IV, Chapter 33—my translation)
(Angus McBride)
Tolkien may have remembered this from his schooldays, when he would first have encountered the text—and he might have found those wagons there, too, although slightly later. When, in 60-61AD, the Iceni queen, Boudica, led a revolt against Roman rule,
(Peter Dennis)
in the final battle, when the tribesmen advanced towards the Roman formation, as Tacitus (c.56-c.120AD) tells us, their families watched from their wagons, placed behind the battle line (De Vita et Moribus Iulii Agricolae, Chapter 34). And, as a prelude to the battle, Boudica had ridden among the ranks in a chariot (Chapter 35).
(another Peter Dennis—in fact, if you’d like to know more about this amazing woman, who, for a brief time, had been a real threat to the Romans, you might invest in:
And so, as in combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman to create the Rohirrim, Tolkien may have taken Steppe people, added Celtic Britons, and produced the Wainriders.
Thanks, as always for reading.
Stay well,
Remember that a horse will drink, on average, between 5 and 10 gallons (19-38 litres) of water a day,
In our last, we quoted JRRT on the subject of the Rohirrim:
“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, 281)
We’ve mentioned the so-called Bayeux Tapestry before and even shown an illustration or two, but we thought that it would be fun to delve a little deeper into the subject—beginning with its name and why Tolkien added “(made in England)” to his sentence.
The first known reference to this approximately 230-foot-long (70.1 meters) by 20 inch high (.5m) piece of fabric dates from the latter part of the 15th century AD, from an inventory at Our Lady of Bayeux Cathedral—commonly known in English as Bayeux Cathedral—in 1476. There has been much scholarly argument over its site of manufacture, but the evidence appears to us to identify the commissioner of the work as Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and half-brother to William, Duke of Normandy (where Bayeux is situated), aka, “William the Conqueror”. Odo is depicted and identified three times on the piece, twice in more peaceful settings—once blessing a meal,
once sitting with William and his half-brother, Robert,
and once in a decidedly not peaceful setting, encouraging the troops at the Battle of Hastings, wearing a mail shirt and helmet and brandishing a club. (The Latin inscription—called a titulus—says “Here Bishop Odo, holding a club, puts strength into the lads”.)
As well, several of the figures on the piece have been identified as vassals (feudal allies) of Odo. Finally, Odo was not only the Bishop of Bayeux, but also instrumental in rebuilding the cathedral in which the artefact was first known to have been housed, Bayeux Cathedral (elements of which are buried inside this later Gothic version).
It seems natural to us, then, that he, at one time William’s right-hand man, would have been responsible for the creation of the work. (We might also add that the Norman victory made Odo Earl of Kent—one more reason for commissioning a work which shows that victory in detail.)
We said that there was argument as to where the work was made, but we, ourselves, would agree with JRRT and the idea that it was made in England for, among other reasons, the depiction of people and scenery on it remind us strongly of the Anglo-Saxon artistic tradition—especially embodied in the mid-11th-century manuscript of the “Old English Hexateuch”, with its 394 colored illustrations, which is to be found in the British Library (Cotton MS Claudius B. iv.).
This is a depiction of the construction of the Tower of Babel. Below is a picture of Normans building ships for their invasion of England from the Bayeux work.
The Bayeux work is much sparer, but there’s that same interest in illustrating motion.
But, when we say that the Bayeux work is sparer, that is not to say that it lacks detail, as there are (at least) four visual levels throughout. If we take just one scene at random
and go from top to bottom we see:
a narrow band of single figures—in this case, animals
a broader band of action—in this case it’s Normans loading their equipment—and other things—for the attack on England (The titulus says: “These are carrying arms to the ships and here they are dragging a cart with wine and arms.”)
the captions—tituli—for every scene
a lower narrow band—again, here, animals, but there are other possibilities, as in this scene, where we see scavengers removing the arms and armor of the dead after the Battle of Hastings
The images in the “Old English Hexateuch” illustrate individual Bible stories. Those in the Bayeux work are scenes, all parts of a long historical narrative, which begins in 1064 (it is thought) with Edward the Confessor, the King of England,
sending the powerful nobleman, Harold Godwinson, on what appears (from subsequent panels) to be a mission to France.
The last scenes, at the far end, include the death of Harold on the battlefield of Hastings
and the flight of the English from the field, with Normans in hot pursuit in October, 1066.
Throughout our discussion, we have avoided calling this work by its traditional name because, in fact, the “Bayeux Tapestry” is not a tapestry. A tapestry is a solid piece of fabric, woven on a loom.
The Bayeux Tapestry is really the Bayeux Embroidery, in which various designs are stitched onto a cloth.
In this close-up, you can see how it’s done, with outlines giving the figures shape, as if they were drawn with a needle, then filled in. (For more on this, and on the work in general, try this LINK.)
For its size and detail and historical importance, there’s no embroidery like it from early medieval England, and perhaps from Europe, but there was one moment when it almost disappeared for good. During that period of the French Revolution when the Church (1% of the population which owned 10% of the land), was being nationalized (and plundered),
it was destined to be used for military wagon covers.
It was only saved at the last minute and shipped off to the Musee Napoleon (formerly—and subsequently—the Louvre).
Eventually, it was returned to Bayeux where, today, it can be seen in a museum there, cleverly displayed in a way which allows the entire length to be viewed.
Without a member of Bayeux’ city council, Lambert Leonard-Leforestier, and his quick thinking, however, the last anyone might have seen of it would have been more like this—
destroyed on wagons lost in Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Russia.
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD
PS
There is one more detail from the Bayeux Embroidery we’d like to mention. If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, you might remember a passing comet. In fact, a passing comet—Halley’s Comet—appears on the Embroidery and, for people of the time, portended something big to come…
Welcome, as always. A little while ago, we talked about the “siege of Gondor”, which really wasn’t a siege in the formal sense, at all, but rather an assault. (We suspect that JRRT liked the sound of “siege” and so used it, not caring if it were strictly accurate or not.) In this posting, we want to look at a real siege and examine what might be parallels with events in Middle Earth.
Before we do, we want to take a moment to talk about the word “siege”. It comes into English through Old French asegier, which comes from Latin ad + sedeo > adsideo, adsidere , literally, “to sit down at”. The northern French who passed the word on to England must have liked to say what’s called a y-glide when certain consonants came before e, so, though it was spelled asegier, it would have been said “ah-see-YED-jier”. And that’s why English today has what can be a confusing spelling. (In our experience, lots of native speakers have trouble distinguishing between the ie of “siege” and the ei of “seize”). The stress on the word in English would have been away from the initial a, and so that would have disappeared from the word as it moved from being a borrowing.
[As what we think is a cool footnote, Latin also has the verb obsideo “to sit down right before=to besiege” and we can see that used in English in the word “obsession”, with the idea that something bothers you so much that it’s like you’re being besieged by it. You can also see it on this wonderful bit of 17th-c. English history.
Although it doesn’t look like a modern coin, this is a form which used to be called “half-a-crown”—that is, 30 pennies (that’s what those three xses mean), or two shillings, sixpence. This coin was struck in the town of Newark-upon-Trent, when it was besieged during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651).
And that’s where obsideo comes in. The back (the “reverse” in coin language—the front is called the “obverse”) says:
OBS: Newark (with a date, either 1645 or 1646, depending on when the coin was struck)
OBS = Obsessa Newark = “Newark Besieged”
There were a lot of coin-substitutes struck by various besieged towns, but, apparently, those from Newark are the most numerous.]
In the medieval western military world, sieges were more common, it seems, than pitched battles. As castles and towns were focal points for the possession and control of land—think of the hundreds of early castles, called “motte and bailey”, which the Normans built all across England in the first years after their conquest–it’s not surprising that they would have been a focus of attack.
As well, we can imagine that, ultimately, they would have been cheaper, in terms of the most irreplaceable manpower, sparing the highly-trained, hard-to-replace, knights and men-at-arms.
Battles like Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), cost the French dearly as their brave knights threw themselves at their English opponents, whose longbows shot them and their horses down.
In a siege, although there was the occasional combat, including the exploitation of a break in the enemy’s defenses,
most of a siege would be spent in using machinery of various sorts to aid you in breaking down the walls—and the resistance of the defenders, as well.
This brings us to the real, historical siege we want to examine: Constantinople, 1453.
Constantinople had begun life as a Greek colony, called Byzantium, on the European side of the narrow passageway between the Black Sea and the northeastern Mediterranean.
It had been refounded and greatly expanded by the Roman emperor, Constantine I, to be a new capital in the east.
Although it was supposed to be called “New Rome”, everyone in the east called it after its refounder, and so it was “Constantinople”, becoming the capital of an eastern empire which we call “Byzantine”. Even with setbacks and a number of unsuccessful attacks over the centuries, it was, for a long time, a very wealthy and powerful city.
But even the wealthiest and most powerful cities will fade—especially when faced with ambitious enemies. Constantinople had had a number of those, but, finally, in its last years, perhaps its most ambitious and most powerful arose in Asia Minor: that of the Ottoman Turks. As you can see from this map, its beginnings were modest: one Turkic-speaking group among many.
This was a period of instability, however. The Ottoman leaders quickly took advantage of that instability to grab power and territory, so that, by 1400, they had spread beyond the shrinking Byzantine world, into the Balkans, and, soon, Constantinople was surrounded.
This surrounding took place in an increasingly-methodical way. In 1393-4, the ruler of the Ottomans, the sultan Bayezid I
built a small fortress on the Asia Minor side of the Bosphorus, the name for the northern stretch of the passage which led from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. It was called Anadoluhisari, “the Anatolian fort”.
You can see from the map that this was the beginning of setting up a choke point upstream from Constantinople.
In 1451-2, the sultan Mehmet II finished the job with the Rumelihisari just opposite, on the European side (and that’s what its name means, “the Roman—that is, European—fort”).
Guns were mounted
and any help which might have come from the Black Sea was blocked.
And here we want to take a minute to look at our imaginary city and its danger—because we see some easy parallels here. First, of course, the Ottoman empire was an eastern threat—so was Mordor. Mordor had taken the east bank of the Anduin, just as the Ottomans had taken the Asian side of the Bosphorus. And, in the capture of the European side and the building of Rumelihisari, we might see the taking of Osgiliath and the west bank of the Anduin. Then there is the massive city of Minas Tirith and the attack upon it.
Constantinople was also a massive city.
It was, basically, on a triangular piece of land, with two sides protected by water. The original Greek town had had a wall, but it was long gone and almost all of Constantine’s land wall had long disappeared, as well. The latest walls are called the Theodosian, after their originator, the emperor Theodosius II (408-450AD), but the walls included bits of the Constantinian walls and many repairs, over the centuries. The main land defenses included three lines of wall and a moat.
This sounds very impressive until one considers two things: first, is there a garrison big enough to defend what are, in fact, a number of miles of wall? And, second, although the walls have withstood previous attacks, including one made by the Ottomans in 1422AD, how will they stand up to the threat of modern artillery?
At the height of its power and prosperity, it is estimated that Constantinople had had a population of anywhere from 500,000 to 750,000 (although scholars argue over this). At the time of the final siege, the population had fallen to as low as 40,000. Thus, large parts of the city were empty—just like Minas Tirith:
“Pippin gazed in growing wonder at the great stone city…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.” (The Return of the King, Book 5, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)
The garrison of Constantinople was perhaps about 9,000, in all, which meant that they were very thinly stretched. We don’t know just how many troops were in Minas Tirith. Some reinforcements had come from South Gondor, as we noted in an earlier posting, but only a few thousand and the defenders were powerfully outnumbered, just as those of Constantinople were, when the forces of Mordor began to arrive. The Ottoman army is thought to have had between 50,000 and 80,000 men, but just how many Orcs and others marched down the causeway from Osgiliath isn’t known–they are just a horde—something which the Jackson film shows very well.
Then the assault begins, the Orcs having giant stone throwers, siege towers, and, finally, a giant, fire-breathing ram, Grond.
If you’ve been following our postings (and we hope you have!), then you know that we’ve discussed the use of what appears to be gunpowder, both at Helm’s Deep and at the Rammas Echor. The Orcs who attack the walls of Minas Tirith don’t appear to have such a weapon, but, unfortunately for the defenders of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks do, in the form of plentiful modern artillery.
Attacks wear down the small garrison and huge, stone-throwing weapons knock down the walls, so that, finally the city falls, on 29 May, 1453.
Its conqueror, Mehmet II, rides in—
which is something the witch king of Angmar never gets to do, perishing instead, at the hands of Eowyn and Merry.
And there the parallels end, as does our posting. Did JRRT have the fall of Constantinople somewhere in the back of his mind? What do you think?
In this post, we want to think out loud a bit about the Rohirrim.
Everyone knows where their language is from, as Tolkien says in a letter to “one Mr. Rang”:
“…’Anglo-Saxon’…is the sole field in which to look for the origins and meaning of words and names belonging to the speech of the Mark.” LT 381
And yet they are horse people (their own name for themselves, in fact, is Eotheod, “horse people”), which the Angles and Saxons who went to make up the Anglo-Saxons, were not. Tolkien was well aware of this difference, saying in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings:
“…this linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances…” L1136
Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, suggests that
“The Rohirrim are nothing if not cavalry. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons’ reluctance to have anything militarily to do with horses is notorious…How then can Anglo-Saxons and Rohirrim ever, culturally, be equated? A part of the answer is that the Rohirrim are not to be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend.” (112)
Or, could there have been other models?
Tolkien may have been suggesting one when, in a letter to Rhona Beare of 14 October, 1958:
“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’ in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Taptestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” Ltr 280-281.
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts both Normans and their allies, on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons, on the other, but Tolkien doesn’t appear to distinguish between them. The Normans themselves are mounted, the Anglo-Saxons on foot, as was their custom (they did use horses to move rapidly from place to place, as in the race north to Stamford Bridge and then back south to face the Normans).
Here, to the left, we see those mounted Normans and, to the right, the Anglo-Saxons behind their shield wall. The “tennis-nets” are clearly visible and would actually have looked like this:
In this further illustration, by the way, it’s easy to see the consequences of having the shield wall crumble: men on horseback can have a significant advantage when their opponents lose cohesion.
This, however, is only their look . What about those horses and an entire culture based around them?
For a clue, we look to another element in the culture of the Rohirrim, the use of burial mounds. Here they are at Edoras.
(We can’t resist, by the way, saying that our absolute favorite part of the Jackson movies is anything to do with the Rohirrim—to us, absolutely inspired and we see the depiction of the charge of the Rohirrim against the army besieging Minas Tirith as being right up there with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 and the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917–
One might say, in reply, that there are Anglo-Saxon mounds—like the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial.
But that leaves us where we started, in the land of foot soldiers.
So, let’s go farther afield, to the north of the Black Sea.
Here, we see the so-called “Kurgan Culture”, with its burial mounds
[This, by the way, is not to be confused with The Kurgan from the first Highlander movie
The Kurgan]
These were a people who:
are believed by many linguists (and some archeologists) to be the direct ancestors of the Indo-Europeans who gradually invaded Asia Minor and western Europe (including, eventually, the Anglo-Saxons) as well as moving east, to India and beyond
buried their dead (at least what appear to be the high status ones) in mounds
were a horse culture
And, in fact, were seemingly the forerunners of the Scythians, a later well-known Indo-European horse people
And the Scythians, in turn, may have been the model for those mythical horse folk, the Amazons.
In the 19th century, when the idea of Indo-Europeans began to circulate, there was a preference for a northern European origin (a theory no longer held), but the idea of an eastern home was also circulating and we would suggest that Tolkien would have known about this, as well as, from his early classical training, Scythians and Amazons, their actual and mythical descendants.
Imagine, then, that what we see in the Rohirrim is, in fact, an interesting mixture of people sprung from an earlier people (as Tolkien tells us, the Rohirrim were descended from the Edain of the First Age—see LOTR, Appendix F 1129), both in our world and in Middle Earth, who based their culture upon horses, and bury their dead in mounds, combined with people who may also bury their dead in mounds, who speak a version of Anglo-Saxon and who dress like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons of the 11th century AD.
doubtfulsea 