A Little Ring, the Least of Rings

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

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

Tags

Aladdin, Alexandre Dumas, Barad-Dur, Chateau d'If, Edmond Dantes, Elba, French Revolution, Galadriel, Harad, Hitler, Jinghiz Khan, Louis XVI, Morannon, Mordor, Napoleon, Nazgul, Ring Wraiths, St Helena, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Toulon, Umbar, Waterloo

Welcome, readers, as always, and, if it’s part of your culture, Happy New Year!

We’ve recently been reading a book about Napoleon

and his first fall, in 1814. He was forced to abdicate,

thereby losing the massive empire he had built up in the early 19^thcentury.

His many enemies had a number of possibilities as to what to do with him. They could, for example, have imprisoned him, as Edmond Dantes is in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (serialized 1844-46), in a fortress like the Chateau d’If.

Or, more radically—but certainly very effectively—they could have permanently removed him by the same means by which revolutionary France removed his predecessor, Louis XVI.

Instead, they allowed him not only to live, but even to continue to be a kind of monarch—although only of a tiny island, Elba, off the west coast of Italy.

They thought they’d seen the last of him, leaving him to spend the rest of his life as a sovereign of a ragged collection of fishermen and farmers.

For Napoleon, however, who always saw himself as destined for only the greatest things, being king of Elba must have felt to him rather like the way the genie in Disney’s Aladdin (1992) expresses the contrast in his life–

That being the case, Napoleon lived on Elba for less that a year before he planned and accomplished his escape.

Back in France, he was welcomed by the very soldiers sent to stop him,

image10fifth

raised new armies,

image11napog

marched north to deal with his nearest enemies, Prussia and England, and was finally—and permanently—defeated at Waterloo, 18 June, 1815.

image12waterloo

This time, his enemies, having learned their lesson, sent Napoleon as far away from Europe as they could and to a much less hospitable place, the island of St Helena, in the South Atlantic,

where he died in 1821.

From his first success, at the siege of Toulon in 1793,

Napoleon had climbed and climbed until, by 1801, he was the real ruler of France (as “First Consul”)

and then, in 1804, Emperor.

And yet, it was never enough, which reminds us of so many of the “great conquerors” of history, from Alexander,

to Jinghiz Khan and his successors,

to Hitler.

In every case throughout history, no conqueror has ever had enough and, if we move out of this earth to Middle-earth, we find Sauron, a figure in many ways like all of these earthly conquerors, who, although defeated by an alliance of Elves and Men in the past, has returned and, in time, reacquired immense power. To begin with, he has the entire realm of Mordor.

He has also somehow gained the means to create giant fortifications (sometimes based upon older constructions), like the Barad-dur

and the Morannon and all of the other inner and outer works of Mordor.

image26morannon image27mord image28cirithungol

He also controls the Nazgul,

massive armies of orcs,

as well as allies from the Harads and Umbar.

All of which he has done, it seems, by whatever innate powers he possesses—without the Ring. And this made us wonder: what is it that the Ring actually does for its wearer that Sauron wants it back?

Certainly, the only power Gollum appears to have gotten from the Ring is that of invisibility (and the side-effect of longevity).

This is true for Bilbo, as well,

and for Frodo–

although, when Frodo puts on the Ring on Weathertop, he is plunged into a kind of alternate dimension, seeing the Nazgul as they really are

and, again, on Ammon Hen, he is put into direct contact with the Ring’s real owner.

Does this suggest that the Ring’s power is only as powerful as the Ring’s current wearer? Galadriel confirms this when Frodo asks her about the other rings: “why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?”

To which she replies:

“Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor?”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

This then accounts for Gandalf’s almost violent explanation when Frodo offers it to him:

“’No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great, for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.’” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Or when Frodo offers it to Galadriel:

“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

Sauron has been able to accomplish so much without the Ring—what would happen should he ever wear it again? In “The Shadow of the Past”, Gandalf tells Frodo that it controls the other rings—even the three long-concealed from Sauron:

“The Three are hidden still. But that no longer troubles him. He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others. If he recovers it, then he will command them all again, even the Three, and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.”

And, just as important—maybe even more so—Sauron has based his place of power and refuge, his sure foundation in Middle-earth, upon it, as Elrond tells the council:

“Sauron was diminished, but not destroyed. His Ring was lost but not unmade. The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed; for they were made with the power of the Ring, and while it remains they will endure.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

So, then, just as Napoleon, exiled on Elba, could plot and accomplish return, given the Ring, Sauron, defeated before, could return and, with a greed for conquest as insatiable as that of the French emperor, reappear again and again in Middle-earth, where there was no St Helena to keep him for good.

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

Green and Quiet.2

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

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Tags

21st Lancers, Bataclava, Cavalry, Charge of the Light Brigade, Edwardian, Great War, horses, King Edward, Medieval, Omdurman, Oxford, Pelennor, railways, Rohirrim, Romans, Scots Greys, Tolkien, Victorian, Waterloo

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

The late-Victorian/Edwardian world of JRRT’s childhood and youth was full of stirring stories and illustrations of military adventure, from the 1815 charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo

to the disastrous (but glorious) charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854

to the near-disastrous (but also glorious) charge of the 21^st Lancers at Omdurman (1898)

to the expectation of more glorious attacks in the event of a Great War on the continent.

Such images may have inspired him to join a volunteer cavalry unit at Oxford, King Edward’s Horse,

and may even lie behind the charge of the Rohirrim at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

To us, however, it also symbolizes something else: the role of the horse in Tolkien’s world. Its military role was more than simply carrying the glamorous cavalry, however.

It also pulled the guns,

the supply wagons,

the ambulances,

as well as carried those in control of it all, from the Kings (after 1901)

to the generals,

and it was the same for all of Europe and the US, as well.

All of which simply reflected that, for all that there were railroads

and the West was crisscrossed with railway tracks,

horses still pulled the world,

as they had from Roman times

through medieval

and still did, even beyond the Great War.

In our last posting, we discussed a line from The Hobbit : “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

We suggested that, with that phrase “long ago” and that imperfect tense verb form, “was”, all was no longer so quiet or green and that goblins/orcs, or their modern equivalent in the Industrial Revolution, were eating up the green of the world, as well as the quiet, but we would like to add to that that a major change in transport, which removed the horse almost entirely from the picture, also contributed greatly.

First, of course, it was those railways which cut through everywhere, steaming and smoking and hooting.

These greatly reduced the use of horses for carrying things—and people—over distances.

At the turn of the century, however, a new invention would come to so diminish the employment of horses eventually to the point where they would be thought obsolete.

At first, they were few and far between, available only to the rich for personal use.

The massive production needed for the Great War (1914-1918),

however, encouraged both post-war demand and supply.

As we’ve discussed in previous postings, the Romans had been masters of the paved road.

image30romanroad

After the Romans, however, the secret (and the massive amounts of cash, as well as the numbers of workers) to such roads was lost and roads declined into, at best, wide paths—dust baths in summer, swamps in winter.

At best, a road might be “metalled”—that is, covered in loose stone (from Latin “metallum”—here, meaning “quarry”).

In the 1820s, the Scots engineer, JL McAdam, created roads with a crushed stone surface over larger inlaid stones.

image33mcadam

Each of these was an improvement over a dirt track,

but, about 1900, the next process arrived, with the use of bitumen and then various petroleum substances to cover the surface and, along with the use of concrete, these produced the roads we still drive on today.

Unfortunately for green and quiet, this rapidly multiplied the decay of both, as cars and trucks and the roads they needed began to spread across the landscape. Imagine, for a man who had been born into the greener and quieter and horsier world of 1892, what this 1930s traffic jam would have been like and you can easily see why he would have believed that goblins and orcs could so harm the peaceful world!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Recently, we happened upon this very interesting story, which we had never seen before, from the online BBC New, 3 July, 2006. The author mentions “Tolkien’s son” by whom he means JRRT’s second son, Michael.

Many years ago I corresponded with Tolkien’s son, a schoolmaster like myself. He said the Dark Riders in his novel were based on a real recurring nightmare from the Forst World War. Tolkien, riding a good cavlary horse, had somehow got lost behind the German lines,and, imagining he was behind his own trenches, rode towards a group of mounted cavalrymen standing in the shade of a coppice.

It was only when he drew nearer he realised his mistake for they German Ulhans, noted for their atrocities and taking no prisoners. When they saw him they set off in pursuit with their lances levelled at him. He swung his horse round and galloped off hotly pursued by the Germans. They had faster steeds but Tolkien’s horse was a big-boned hunter.

They got near enough for him to see their skull and crossbone helmet badges. Fortunately for Tolkien (and us, his readers)he raced towards some old trenches which his horse, used to hunting, took in its stride. The Uhlans’ horses weren’t up to it and they reined in leaving Tolkien to get away to his own side.

He was terrified and the cruel faces of those Uhlans and their badges haunted him in nightmares for a long time afterwards. Years later, when he was writing his novel, the Dark Riders were the result of that terrifying chase.
Revd John Waddington-Feather, Shrewsbury

There are some odd typos, but we think that the basic story might be true except for the details about the German cavalry. Uhlans are lancers, but lancer cap badges looked like this.

German hussar busbies, however, could have the famous “death’s head” badge.

And German hussars also could carry lances as in this picture from 1915.

German cavalry went to war with covers over their headgear (as in the photo of the hussars), but, if the story is accurate, we might presume that the hussars, for some reason, have shed those covers.

Charge!

01 Wednesday Aug 2018

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

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16th Lancers, Aliwal, Australian Light Horse, Australians, Balaclava, Beersheba, Cavalry, Charges, Great War, Light Brigade, Palestine, Rohirrim, Scots Greys, The Lighthorsemen, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Turks, Warhorse, Waterloo

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In an addition to an entry in Letters, the main portion of which has rather a murky history (see 217-218), but which the editor dates as “presumably written circa 1966”, Tolkien says that several features of The Lord of the Rings “still move me very powerfully”. These features include being “most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow”.

As this is one of our favorite parts of the book,

we would absolutely agree, but, as is so often the case, both with JRRT and with ourselves, we wondered why.

The easiest answer is that it’s a highly-dramatic moment: the main gate of Minas Tirith is giving way under the blows of Grond, the orcs are about to pour in, and it looks like Aragorn and his companions won’t appear in time to save the situation.

We have been following the Rohirrim, of course, from their muster to their march

to their meeting with Ghan-buri-Ghan,

so the build is two-fold: the attack, which is completely focused on breaking in, and the approach of the Rohirrim. Thus, when it looks darkest, the charge is like sunlight breaking through heavy cloud.

This is a beginning, we thought, to why, but could there have been another reason for JRRT?

When Tolkien, growing up, thought of cavalry charges, he probably saw, in his mind’s eye, the glorious mounted attacks of Britain’s past, like the Scots Greys at Waterloo

image6scot

or the 16^th Lancers at Aliwal

or the Light Brigade at Balaclava.

In all of these, soldiers in bright-colored coats waved swords and lancers and dashed fearlessly against the enemy. Even his toy soldiers would have had that same devil-may-care look

as did the real cavalry of his childhood,

but, when 1914 and the Great War came, soldiers put away those bright colors and put on khaki.

But did that wild courage have to be put away, as well? In 1914, there were a few moments when even mud-colored mounted men had a moment of glory.

This wasn’t to last—at least on the Western Front and a major reason was this—

(Here’s a LINK to a clip from the film Warhorse, which shows the effect in rather a symbolic way, thank goodness! We love horses and mourn their terrible losses through all of world history—they never asked to be part of human violence and, so often, their fate was to die because of it. We also think that it’s just as well that the commander of this imaginary attack didn’t survive it—it’s absolutely inept, both in conception and its carrying-out and he would deserve to have been court-martialed.)

So, instead, those men dismounted and became infantry, fighting from hole in the ground to hole in the ground.

This was the world which JRRT

knew: heavy guns, gas, and the rattle of machine guns, no place for wide double ranks of sabre-wavers.

There was at least one bright moment, but not on the Western Front. Instead, it was in far-off Palestine, where, on 31 October, 1917, Australians and their horses swept over a line of Turkish trenches at Beersheba in a charge very reminiscent of the 19^th-century world.

Ironically, these were not cavalry at all, but Australian Light Horse—mounted infantry—who, lacking swords or sabres or lances, attacked using their long bayonets, instead.

(You can see this charge reenacted wonderfully in the 1987 Australian movie, The Lighthorsemen, one of our very favorite films of the Great War.

Here’s a LINK to the charge scene, before you see the whole film—but we recommend that you see that charge in context.)

On the whole, however, modern war had become one big, bloody ditch,

and victory came in mud-color and mass industrial slaughter. Perhaps it was a relief to imagine another world, where brave men in armor, mounted on flying horses, still had a place?

As always, thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

Lent to a Museum (Mathom.2)

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

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

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Abbotsford, armor, Ashestiel, Cartley Hole, Castle, Craigievar, cuirassier, czapska, Edinburgh, Gothic, Henry Fox Talbot, Horace Walpole, Marquis de Montrose, Mathom-house, Melrose Abbey, Napoleon's Hair, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Rob Roy MacGregor, Scottish, Scottish Baronial, Sir Walter Scott, Strawberry Hill, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Waterloo, Waverly

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a posting from January, 2017, we discussed the idea of a “mathom house” at Michel Delving in the Shire. We know about this place from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called: for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.” (Prologue, The Lord of the Rings)

Rereading this passage this time, we were caught by two things: “some store of weapons” and “Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms” because, put together, they sound like part of the description of the personal Mathom-house of the original inspirer (we would say) of adventure-writing in English, Sir Walter Scott.

Trained to become a lawyer, Scott had lived for some years in several houses in Edinburgh, for much of his later life at Number 39, North Castle Street–

Although he began his rise to literary fame with the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a long poem, in 1805,

money began to pour in with his first novel, Waverley, published anonymously, in 1814.

(What a great illustration, by the way—both the first edition and the manuscript.)

Because his legal work required him to have a residence outside Edinburgh, Scott had rented this, at Ashestiel, from 1804-1811.

When the lease was up, he then invested in this rather modest farm house at what was called “Cartley Hole”, which locals called “Clarty Hole”, “clarty” being a Scots word for “mucky”, suggesting that our illustration is prettier than the actual place.

More commercially successful novels and an eventual baronetcy gave Scott grander ideas and he began to rebuild—and rebuild—the house, as well as changing its name to the more dignified “Abbotsford”, as it was near the ruins of the 12^th-century Melrose Abbey.

“Bigger” at this time might have meant something Georgian, like this—

but Scott, no doubt influenced by the Gothic ideas of people like Horace Walpole

image9hw

and his Strawberry Hill

fixed upon a design which, in time, was not only bigger, but Gothic—and Scottish, in the style called “Scottish Baronial”, like this castle at Craigievar, completed in 1626.

In a way, such a choice makes sense: many of his novels have Scots locations and they made him wealthy enough to build such a place.

This is perhaps the first photographic image of Abbotsford. It dates from 1844 and is by the English inventor, as far as we currently know, of photography, Henry Fox Talbot.

And here is a modern image.

The outside of Abbotsford is striking enough, but it’s what’s inside which made us think of a Mathom-house.

There is seemingly an endless “store of weapons”.

And then there are all of those other things. A lock of Napoleon’s hair.

image17nappy'shair.jpg

The sword of a 17^th-century Scottish hero, the Marquis of Montrose.

The sporran (purse) of that early-18^th century Highland legend, Rob Roy MacGregor.

(Scot also believed he had Rob Roy’s musket.)

And even souvenirs he had picked up from the battlefield of Waterloo, which he had visited only a short time after the battle.

Note the hole in the breastplate—and also that the headgear with it (a czapska) belongs not to the man who would have worn the breastplate, a cuirassier,

but to a French/Polish lancer

With all of these trophies tacked onto every possible surface—including full suits of armor–

we wouldn’t be surprised to see a rather familiar object, ancient, famous, which we are told “was arranged on a stand in the hall (until he lent it to a Museum)”—would you?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Abbotsford was opened to visitors within a few months of Scott’s death. Among those tourists were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

They liked the place so much that, when they decided that they needed a little place in the country, Abbotsford would be one of their models.

Long after Albert’s death in 1861, the Queen continued to pay a yearly visit to Balmoral.

PPS

If you’d be interested in seeing Abbotsford as an early 20^th-century tourist might have seen it, here’s a LINK to Beautiful Britain: Abbotsford (1912).

The Man Who Was Killed

30 Wednesday Dec 2015

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

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

Dear Readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tolkien-x deadgerman

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

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

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.”

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

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

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

Colenso,_KwaZulu-Natal_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_16462.jpg

British losses had taught them to do the same.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Charge! The End?

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

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

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Adventure, Bataclava, Bigelow, British, British Heavy Brigade, Cavalry, Cawnpore, Charges, Chasseurs d'Afrique, Crimean War, French, Funckens, Gandalf, Helm's Deep, John Ford, Minas Tirith, Oliphaunts, Prussian, Remington, Rohirrim, Rossbach, Russian, Schreyvogel, seige, Stagecoach, surreneder, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Trostle Farm, Warhorse, Waterloo, Western, William Simpson

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In our last, we were discussing film music, where it comes from and what it does. This brought us, as always, it seems, back to JRRT. In that post, we talked about the “Shire theme”. In this, we want to talk not about a theme, but about a scene, one we have mentioned before, the charge of the Rohirrim and the attempted raising of the siege of Minas Tirith.

Although, strictly speaking, what is happening to Minas Tirith is simply a frontal assault, not a siege in the classic sense. Although, seen in this illustration (by the wonderful husband and wife team of the Funckens), they may look the same—

in a formal siege, you surround a town/fortress

call on the place to surrender

use your heavy weapons to bombard the place

Drive the defenders back from their outer works

And then call upon the defenders to surrender—which, often they do (fewer Alamos than myth would tell you)

But, if not, a final—usually costly—attack

and, potentially, the massacre of all—or at least all of the garrison–inside. (In Jackson’s LoTR, the Orcs are certainly not taking prisoners as they break into Minas Tirith).

The charge of the Rohirrim, though, brought to mind other charges, such as the charge of the Prussian cavalry against the French/Allied army at Rossbach, in 1757—

or the French and British cavalry charges at Waterloo, 1815—

or those _other_ charges at the battle of Balaclava, 1854, that of the French 4^th Chasseurs d’Afrique

or of the British Heavy Brigade, which drove the Russian cavalry from the British camp.

Those last two remind us, of course, of one of our favorite adventure movies, the 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade

It is not so authentic in look as the 1968 movie of the same name,

and, in fact, the film states at its opening that it’s only loosely based on actual historical events (including not only the charge, but the 1857 massacre at Cawnpore—which, in reality, occurred some three years after the Crimean War battle). It also beefs up the Russian defense—adding non-existent earthworks, for instance. Here’s the movie’s view

and here’s William Simpson’s near-contemporary illustration (Simpson arrived after the battle, but must have talked to survivors and certainly could have seen the terrain).

All of these charges were directed at enemy forces on an open battlefield. The attack of the Rohirrim actually comes from a different scenario, one which is based upon a theme familiar to those who have seen American westerns: the arrival of the cavalry in the nick of time.

In this scenario, someone is trapped and surrounded—or at least persistently assaulted by a more numerous enemy—the classic is an attack upon circled wagons

The crisis comes and it looks like those attacked are about to be overwhelmed

but, at the last minute, help arrives—the cavalry, bugles sounding, guidons waving (although that illustrated in this vidcap is the 1885 pattern and the film from which this comes takes place in 1880—then again, the uniforms are a bit odd, too—here’s Remington’s and Schreyvogel’s more accurate views, as well) rides fearlessly to the rescue.

After sorting through more than 50 westerns, we believe that the movie from which our first image comes is probably the source of the modern idea of the arrival of the cavalry—see this clip from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939)

CLIP

This happens twice, of course, in The Lord of the Rings, first at Helm’s deep, when Gandalf arrives—

and again, as we began, at Minas Tirith. It’s interesting, however, to see that, in this second example, the cavalry rescue is not so successful, since there are those oliphaunts we discussed in an earlier posting—

In our world, it wasn’t giant oliphaunts who eventually defeated cavalry and drove them to the edges of the battlefield, where they lasted a little longer, but this

as you can see in this clip from Warhorse.

CLIP

And it’s for the best, really. It’s bad enough that we humans engage in violent actions without dragging the rest of the animal kingdom into it…

(A few of the 80 horses lost by Bigelow’s 9^th MA Battery at the Trostle Farm, 2 July, 1863—and, as a sad ps, 25 horses were killed or so badly injured that they were put down at the filming of the 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade—this so shocked those in Congress that a law for the protection of animals in films was passed to prevent future harm).

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Waterloo

A Little Ring, the Least of Rings

Green and Quiet.2

Charge!

Lent to a Museum (Mathom.2)

The Man Who Was Killed

Charge! The End?