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Helm (2)

04 Wednesday Sep 2019

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

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Alan Lee, Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Christian Schwager, Dernhelm, Eowyn, Frank Frazetta, great helm, Great War, helmets, Howard Pyle, John Howe, kettle helm, King Arthur, spangenhelm, Tolkien, vikings, WWI

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In our last, we focused upon the helmets worn by Tolkien and other European and US soldiers in the Great War, the French

image1adrian.jpg

the German,

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and the British (US troops eventually settled on the British pattern).

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The British helmet, we said, has produced the common comment that it looks like it was inspired by the medieval “kettle helm” (the second image being from the 13th-century Maciejowski Bible—but these helmets were clearly so practical that they continued to be used well beyond that time).

image4kettle.jpg

image5kettle.jpg

“inspired by medieval” is the way we commonly see JRRT’s Middle-earth, and it made us wonder about the kinds of helmets we would meet in The Lord of the Rings.  Unfortunately, if there were a concordance (that is, a book dedicated to listing all the times various words are used within a text, like this concordance for Homer’s Odyssey)

image6concordance.jpg

for Tolkien’s work, we are betting that perhaps the only word we would find there would be “helm”, which is generic, unless one adds “great”, which produces a more specific kind of head protection, looking like these, in use from the late 12th to the mid-14th centuries—

image7greathelm.jpg

image8ghelm.jpg

With only “helm” to go on, what clues might help us better to visualize what warriors are wearing?

We’ve suggested before that one possible visual resource for JRRT’s images of medieval warfare was the work of the American illustrator, Howard Pyle (1853-1911), in books like The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), which Tolkien could have read as a boy.

image9pyle.jpg

And here’s a well-known illustration—with a knight in a great helm, in fact.

image10pyle.jpg

But what did Pyle use for models?

In Pyle’s time, the collection and classification of armor was still at its very beginnings (the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York only instituted an Arms and Armor Department in 1912, for example).  We can only assume, then, that he thought “knights = medieval” and so any armor might do.  (If Arthur were real—there’s been argument about this for many years—he would have lived centuries before the medieval period and so would have had neither knights nor the military equipment of later days anyway.  As myth, Arthur can live at any time, of course.  We think of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, where, at one moment, we’re facing Huns and, at the next moment, Vikings.)

If Pyle were one of JRRT’s sources, then, “helm” can easily stand for any kind of protective headgear made of metal and vaguely medieval.  We think that there is more to be said on this, however, and we’ll go into a bit more detail about helmets in The Lord of the Rings in the third part of this little series, but, for now, we want to concentrate on one helmet in particular.

Normally, one thinks of helmets as protection, but, in the novel, we see one also used as a disguise, as Eowyn becomes “Dernhelm” (Old English dirne, “hidden/secret” + helm “head covering/helmet”, so, something like “a helm which hides”?).

What kind of helmet, we asked ourselves, would Eowyn be wearing which would:

  1. keep her identity hidden
  2. blend in with the helmets of other Rohirrim?

We began by looking at modern illustrations of Eowyn but, unfortunately, a cursory survey shows us that almost all modern illustrators appear to have chosen the same scene:  the moment when Eowyn has removed her helmet when facing the Witch King.

image11eowyn.gif

So far, we’ve found only a few artists who capture the previous moment:

  1. whose name so far has eluded us, but who shows a rear view of something which looks rather like a French Great War helmet.

image12helm.jpg

image13rear.jpg

  1. the second, another anonymous (to us), again shows Eowyn from behind, but with a style of helmet which appears to owe more to fantasy than to any medieval reality—

image14eo.jpg

and perhaps a little something to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

image15monty.jpg

  1. the third is Christian Schwager, based in New Zealand.

image16schwager.jpg Her armor is full plate, which, in our world, is later medieval.  As for the helmet, it somewhat resembles a visored sallet, but only vaguely.

image17sallet.jpg

And that plume and its placement strike us as problematic, at best.

  1. the last is the well-known fantasy illustrator, Frank Frazetta, and although we enjoy some of his work, this illustration suggests to us that the artist doesn’t appear to have taken the scene–or Eowyn– seriously—or practically.

image18fraz.jpg

As we wrote in a post some time ago, the basis of the Rohirrim is Anglo-Saxon, men who wore long mail shirts and conical spangenhelm,

image19spangen.jpg

making them look very much like dismounted versions of their Norman opponents, both being shown in the following panel from the Bayeux Tapestry.

image20bayeux.jpg

A characteristic feature of the spangenhelm is that nasal—the bar which comes down to protect the wearer’s nose.

image21spang.jpg

Potentially, this and the helmet’s brim might shade the eyes and make the face less visible.

image22

 

So, with the need for disguise and blending-in being crucial, and only “helm” to go on in the text, we asked ourselves what did the two artists who acted as inspiration for Jackson’s films, Alan Lee and John Howe, choose to do? Here’s a picture of the battlefield confrontation by Lee—

image23lee

 

Eowyn is, as in the case  of other illustrators, here depicted as having removed her helmet, and, even under magnification, it’s difficult to make much out.  Howe, however, has given us a very detailed picture.

image24howe.jpg

It’s clear, however, that, in choosing to emphasize the dirne in “Dernhelm”, he’s stepped away from the world of knights entirely and into a slightly older world, that of the Vikings, as his helmet more closely resembles the so-called “spectacle helmets”, of which a few examples survive from Viking burials, like this, reconstructed from a discovery at Gjermundbu, in Norway.  (For a very useful view of Viking helmets in general, follow this LINK.)

image25spec.jpg

In turn, Jackson’s designers have followed Lee—

image26eo.jpg

This certainly gives us the “hidden/secret” part of “Dernhelm”, but what about the idea of blending in?  Looking at a group shot of Rohirrim, we find a little surprise.

image27ro.jpg

Instead of looking like Anglo-Saxons, as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, Jackson’s Rohirrim look more like Vikings—and so Eowyn’s helmet blends right in (in fact, in this picture, you can see at least one other warrior with a spectacled helmet), almost as if her helmet and its secrecy requirement have been the basis for all of the warriors of Rohan.

There are lots of other helmets to pursue, however, which we’ll do in our next, so, with thanks to you, dear readers, for reading this, we’ll say

MTCIDC,

CD

Orc Arsenal.2

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

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

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Anglo-Saxon, Angus McBride, Bayeux Tapestry, Celts, chain-mail, hauberk, lamellae, lorica segmentata, medieval Russians, Mordor, Mycenaeans, Orcs, Renaissance irish, Republican Romans, Rohirrim, sallet, spangenhelm, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Zulus

So, dear readers, welcome, as always.  In this posting, we want to finish our brief overview of orc weaponry which we began in our last.

A famous military illustrator, Angus McBride, (1931-2007)

image1am.jpg

once said in an interview that there was one thing which he hated about doing such illustrations:  painting chain mail, which he said was the most tedious part of his work.  Considering that he painted it on early Celts

image2celts.jpg

and Renaissance Irish,

image3irish.jpg

and Republican Romans

image4romans.jpg

and medieval Russians,

image5russians.jpg

McBride must have suffered many hours of boredom!  It didn’t stop him, however, as we see in these illustrations for The Lord of the Rings,

image6lotr.jpg

image7lotr.gif

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from putting armor on Rohirrim and orcs alike.

Chain mail—or simply mail—is made by linking together a series of metal rings.

image9amakingmail.jpg

image9bmail.jpg

This is, as you can imagine, a very time-consuming process, especially if you have to make the rings first.  (Here’s a LINK on mail manufacturing, in case you’d like to try it yourself.)

We have seen the number of rings used in a full mail hauberk to be over 20,000, so it’s also metal-consuming, as well as time-consuming.  It also appears to have been expensive.  We once heard an expert say something about the “same price as a two-bedroom house”, but that seems a little excessive.  The always-useful Regia Anglorum website gives the price of a mail shirt in Anglo-Saxon times at 529d (that’s 529 pence), or 10,580 pounds in modern UK money ($13,785.18 US at today’s current exchange rate).  Here’s a LINK to their web page to see the author’s reasoning for his equivalences.

McBride shows orcs wearing mail—does JRRT?   In fact, in the first scene in which we see orcs, we read:

“…a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”

And, late in the story, when Sam and Frodo are in Mordor and Sam provides clothes for Frodo:

“There were long hairy breeches of some unclean beast-fell, and a tunic of dirty leather.  He drew them on.  Over the tunic went a coat of stout ring-mail, short for a full-sized orc, too long for Frodo and heavy.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 1, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”)

(We can attest to the weight of such a coat, by the way, having a modern reproduction ourselves.  It weighs 25 pounds or more—that’s 11.34 kilograms.  When it’s on your shoulders, the weight is displaced, so it doesn’t feel quite so heavy, but, if you have it piled in a box, you really feel the heft.  We would also add that, because of the cost, armor wasn’t commonly left on the battlefield.  This segment of the Bayeux Tapestry shows what must normally have happened.)

image9cstrip.jpg

McBride, in his illustrations, depicts two other types of body armor.  In these first two depictions, we see the kind of armor the Romans called lorica segmentata.

image9lorica.gif

image10lorica.gif

This is a system based upon a series of broad, overlapping iron strips.

image11lorica.jpg

image12lorica.gif

As far as we can tell, this is never mentioned in the text. There may be one mention of our third type:

image13lam.jpg

This is armor made up of a series of small plates, called lamellae, sewn in an overlapping fashion, rather like fish scales.

image14lam.jpg

There may be one mention of this:

“The orcs hindered by the mires that lay before the hills halted and poured their arrows into the defending ranks.  But through them came striding up, roaring like beasts, a great company of hill-trolls out of Gorgoroth.  Taller and broader than Men they were, and they were clad only in close-fitting mesh of horny scale, or maybe that was their hideous hide…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”)

But what about helmets?

McBride depicts most of his orcs in something which might be described as wild variations on the later medieval helmet called a sallet.

image15aorcs.gif

image15bsallet.jpg

You can see John Mollo, a costume designer for Star Wars, having fun with this pattern, too.

image15cdarth.JPG

image15ddeathstar.jpg

In the text, in that first scene in which we see orcs, there is a mention of Aragorn’s sword, Anduril, which “came down upon [an orc’s] helm”, but nothing more specific—and that’s true for the second mention, when Aragorn examines the orcs killed by by Boromir:

“…on the front of their iron helms was set an S-rune, wrought of some white metal.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

There is a bit more detail in this description:

“Sam brought several orc-helmets.  One of them fitted Frodo well enough, a black cap with iron rim, and iron hoops covered with leather upon which the Evil Eye was painted in red above the beaklike nose-guard.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 1, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”)

To us, this sounds like a kind of spangenhelm, the sort of thing the Normans wear in the Bayeux Tapestry.

image15spangen.jpg

image16spangen.jpg

To which we can add a couple of types of shields.  The first we see—it’s that same “orc-chieftain”—carries “a huge hide shield” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”).  There is no further description.  If it’s only made of hide, this could resemble anything from a Mycenaean “figure-of-eight” shield

image17fig.jpeg

image18fig.jpg

to a Mycenaean “tower” shield

image19tower.png

to a Zulu shield.

image20zulu.JPG

The hill-trolls of Gorgoroth, mentioned above for their possible lamellar armor, are said to carry “round bucklers huge and black” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”).

A huge buckler, however, is a contradiction in terms, as bucklers are, by definition, small—more a kind of one-on-one fencing defense, as we see in this illustration.

image21buckler.png

Like their helmets, orc shields commonly carry the sign of their master, Saruman or Sauron—“Upon their shields they bore a strange device” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”).  (Some of Saruman’s followers, however, seem to have unmarked shields, as the attackers of Helm’s Deep are described as “some squat and broad, some tall and grim, with high helms and sable shields”—The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “Helm’s Deep”)  This can also be useful if you’re the authorities and you want to catch deserters, as Sam and Frodo find out when they’re trapped by a column of orcs on the road in Mordor:

“Then suddenly one of the slave-drivers spied the two figures by the road-side…He took a step towards them, and even in the gloom he recognized the devices on their shields.  ‘Deserting, eh?’ he snarled.” ( The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)

image21shield.gif

This i.d.-ing leads us towards our next posting:  Heraldry and Serial Numbers, where we’ll see more of orcs and others, too.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

I Love a Parade

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by Ollamh 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.

image1minastirith.jpg

Here’s the gate from the films.

image2mtgate.png

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

image3linc.jpg

image4door.jpg

Or the main door of the cathedral of Palermo.

image5duomo.jpg

image6porta.JPG

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.

image7gondorians.jpg

 

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.

image8livery.jpg

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”.

image9huscarl.jpg

image10taphus.gif

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

norman-spangenhelm-2.gif

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

image12hauberk.jpg

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.

image13medhunter.jpg

image14shepherd.jpg

image15farmer.jpgimage16fishermen.jpg

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?)

image17rhood.jpg

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—

image18knight.JPG

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—

image19menatarms.jpg

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

CD

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