(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.)
This is the fourth part of a six part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) taking a military historian’s look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackon’s adaptation of Return of the King. Part I, II and III can be found here, here and here. Last time, we looked at Mordor’s siege tactics in attempting to breach the city. This time, Rohan arrives and we take a more detailed look at how a cavalry charge does – or doesn’t work. What is heavy cavalry for? And how does it accomplish that goal on a battlefield? And what about elephantry? And are you really telling me elephantry is a real word? (yes it is).
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But first, you know me, and you know you weren’t getting away without…
Look, Mr. Frodo – More Logistics!
It is hard to get an exact sense of the timeline of events within the film, in contrast to the books, which feature not only repeated references to what day it is, but also a complete timeline of the events in the appendix. Nevertheless, the film-language being used here strongly implies that we, the audience, are being shown the Gondor and Rohan scenes in parallel (note for instance how Pippin lighting Beacons directly runs into Aragorn seeing them). That gives us some sense for the chronology of events.
Théoden is at Edoras (scene 20 – scene counts by the extended edition DVDs) when Pippin lights the Beacons (scene 19). At the end of that scene, he departs with his household guard and the army he has gathered to Dunharrow to complete the mustering of his forces. Dunharrow is just to the South of Edoras, up in the mountains, so Théoden should arrive there fairly quickly – but he doesn’t arrive there until scene 29, after Faramir’s ill-fated attack on Osgiliath. Aragorn then takes the Paths of the Dead (30-32) and the Rohirrim depart in the morning for Gondor (scene 34). All of which is to say that the Rohirrim leave Dunharrow on the same day as the Army of Mordor hits the Pelennor Fields.
That gives Théoden about 48 hours to reach Minas Tirith. Is that reasonable? Well…no. Mongol cavalry could move as much as 60 miles a day – there are fantastic operational mobility advantages to being Steppe nomads – but even that wouldn’t be enough. Dunharrow is nearly 200 miles from Minas Tirith. While Théoden and his house are essentially legendary heroes, if even the Mongols could not make your ride, I don’t think we can expect the horse-lords to do it either.
Book Note: I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll include it here: Tolkien gives the Riders of Rohan significantly longer to get to Minas Tirith. Théoden is already preparing the muster before even the first orc has left Minas Morgul. The messengers of Gondor (Hirgon) meets Théoden – already marhsalling at Dunharrow – on the 9th of March, two days after the beacons are lit and the very day the orc army departs Minas Morgul. That gives Théoden five days to get to Minas Tirith. A hard ride – 40 miles or so a day – but not an impossible one.
What about from a supply perspective? Actually, the supply situation of the Army of Rohan is reasonable. At only six thousand strong, this is an army small enough to make use of local supplies as it moves. Moreover, since it is moving primarily over Théoden’s own territory, he may well have sent messengers on ahead to make sure supplies were gathered along the marching route.
The horses do pose additional logistics issues: while wild horses can subsist entirely off of grass, European warhorses (and one assumes Rohirrim warhorses) have been bred to be so large and strong that grass is no longer sufficient to support their nutritional needs. It would have to be supplemented with cereal grains (traditionally barley) in some quantity; Roman warhorses were rationed 5kg of barley per day, very roughly five times the intake of an infantryman. For an army with 6,000 horses, that’s a lot of feed, but not an insurmountable amount.
One thing is missing for this army, however: spare horses. A knight does not ride to battle with a single horse, but rather with several. The war-horse is a specialized creature, bred large to support the weight of a knight in armor; they are not endurance runners. So a knight would ride to battle on a smaller, cheaper riding horse. This also, of course, spares the really expensive asset: a good war horse could cost vastly more than a basic riding horse (check out some comparative prices here). A third horse would be required to carry baggage – the riding horse can’t support more weight (it has the rider) and the war horse, again, ought to be spared for the fight. Rohan’s army of 6,000 riders should thus be marshaling out of Dunharrow with more than 18,000 horses.
As we’ve seen elsewhere, this is a common movie trope – showing armies marching in battle formations. It is useful to remember that any army – including a modern one – moves far more encumbered than this and that just because an army is pre-modern doesn’t mean it isn’t hauling a lot of stuff.
The Ride of the Rohirrim
At last we hear the horn-call of Rohan. In the film, it is a single solitary call, which is a bit odd given that what the books describe is, “Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing” (RotK, 113). This choice, I have to assume, has a lot to do with the pacing of this scene. In the book, Tolkien is able to build suspense and anticipation by using his chapter order to jump backwards about 32 hours after the above line. Jackson has cut this sequence, so to build the same anticipation, he has to draw out the moment before the Rohirrim charge. Nevertheless, it seems worth noting that you should not alert the enemy to your impending flanking cavalry charge before it actually arrives.
Book Note: What’s missing? Actually a fairly interesting sequence. Théoden makes a deal with the leader of the Woses, Ghân-buri-Ghân to lead this army through the forest rather than down the main road (RotK, 117). This is the sort of detail that it makes sense to cut for time in a film, but in a book is a wonderful thing to add. As in the film, the Rohirrim arrive unannounced because the forces of Mordor have apparently failed to set a rear-guard, or scouts of any kind. But in the books, the Rohirrim arrive with surprise because Théoden is a canny leader who knows when to use local knowledge. The orcs did have a rear-guard blocking the road – they had ditches and obstructions in place to prevent the classic Rohirrim cavalry charge – but these were bypassed by way of the forest trails.
The other thing that is missing is the Rohirrim’s arrival. In the book, the geography of the battlefield is more complex. In addition to an orc force blocking the road, there are enemies on the Rammas Echor, and then scattered parties across the Pelennor Fields (which are farmlands rather than steppe, as in the film). However, the orc presence on the Rammas is thin, and Théoden routs it quickly. The use of blasting fire to surmount this defensive obstacle now aids the Rohirrim, as they pour through the holes, still largely undetected, in to the Pelennor (RotK 122-3). Thus in the books, the Rohirrim charge into the unsuspecting rear of an army, rather than into infantry facing them in good order.
Théoden now gives a set of functionally nonsense orders (“Grimbold, take your company right, after you pass the wall”) because these lines are lifted from the books, where they took place just beyond the Rammas Echor, rather than in the open field. In practice, Théoden’s unit commanders essentially ignore him and the Rohirrim charge as a single mass, rather than a set of discrete units as the book dialogue implies. It works out anyway.
Cavalry Formations
We’ve actually already discussed a fair bit about cavalry tactics before (here). Fortunately, there are fewer baffling decisions in this scene then in That Dothraki Charge, so we can get a bit more focused. This is the right kind of cavalry (heavy, shock cavalry) at the right time (daylight) in the right general place (a fairly flat and open area).
They are, however, in the wrong formation. For cavalry, this formation is very deep. The front block looks to be about 12-14 horses deep, and the rear block seems to be about as large, making the entire formation c. 24 x 250 (we were told they had 6,000 horses, you will recall). This is a very deep cavalry formation (presumably so it would neatly fill the screen), which is mostly a problem because of the size of the enemy force. Attacking with such a purposefully narrow front means that the Rohirrim will be enveloping themselves on contact. This is particularly dangerous for cavalry because the feint is so important for cavalry tactics.
But the real problem here is the density – the horses are shoulder-to-shoulder, front-to-back. While the formation loosens a bit as it charges, it is still too dense to allow these men to maneuver. As we discussed in That Dothraki Charge, the problem here is what happens if a horse slips and falls or is shot by an arrow (which we’re going to see happen). A downed horse spills its rider, creating two possible obstructions for the horses trailing behind. In this kind of tight order, they have neither the time to react to that or the space to weave around it.
So what are the other options? One option would be advancing in loose order – creating horizontal space between the files of horses to provide maneuvering room. The handy thing here is that by giving each horseman room to maneuver on his own, the formation can potentially switch direction quite quickly – a real advantage if you are pulling off a feint, where the cavalry pretends to charge but wheels off at the last minute. It’s a lot easier to turn each horse individually then to turn the entire formation as a block (if you are going to turn the entire formation, it should be a wedge of a diamond – something we can discuss in the future if we ever look at Alexander (2004)).
Given the battlecry of ‘Death!’ shouted in unison, one assumes that the Rohirrim are not going for a feint, but rather hoping the morale impact of their charge will break the enemy lines. In that case, tight order isn’t a bad idea – horses arrayed closely, pounding forward are scary. Here, though, you would put a lot of forward space between your ranks, creating a series of long, thin lines of cavalry with separation between them. Another advantage of this kind of formation is that it would let you match the frontage of the enemy, so you are not self-enveloping the moment you make contact.
Book Note: The formation issue is largely solved in the book, because the situation of the battle is very different. Théoden’s orders to split the force – with the main body coming down the center and two subsidiary forces splitting to the sides – is given before passing the Rammas Echor. As a result, the Rohirrim, passing through the outwall are spreading out over the Pelennor, still undetected by the orcs.
Théoden holds his charge until hearing a loud boom – doubtless Grond breaching the gate – at which point he now gives his speech, sounds the horn (‘such a blast upon it that it burst asunder’ (RotK 123), because Tolkien wants you to know that, he too, has read the Song of Roland), before delivering his charge into the still unsuspecting rear of the enemy.
We’re not told the Rohirrim’s formation, but we can assume it is potentially much looser (either forward or horizontally) because they’ve covered a lot more of the plain. Moreover, splitting the force makes a lot more sense given the more complicated battlefield: Théoden’s riders need to navigate fields and farms, not just open endless steppe, which in turn demands a lot of freedom to move and maneuver.
What to Expect When You Are Expecting a Cavalry Charge
Withstanding a cavalry charge in the open is one of the sorest tests infantry can face. When it comes to cognition, we humans are still basically animals – no more so than when our capacity for reason is overwhelmed by fear and adrenaline. Animals assess threat chiefly by size – is this thing bigger than me? This impacts all sorts of things. We find deep sounds ominous and scary because deeper noises in nature are produced by larger things (the combination of a deep noise and a high pitched one unsettles us because of the mixed signals, discussed here, for instance). It is easy to try to think about this rationally, in a moment of calm, but we didn’t survive in nature for thousands of years by being rational: we surviving by running away from things bigger than us.
Horses, of course, are big; men on horses are larger. The pounding of thousands upon thousands of hoofs from a cavalry charge is a deep, resonating noise (the pounding of the hoofs of just a couple dozen horses can be heard over a cheering crowd at a horse-race; consider the volume of 6,000). And they move fast. We don’t think of a horse charging at perhaps 15mph as being fast because we have cars, but for a pre-modern infantryman (or infantryorc) that charging horse is probably the fastest ‘vehicle’ they have ever seen. Everything in our animal brain at that moment will be telling that infantryman to run away.
The Rohirrim are doing some very historical things to intensify this effect. Their armor features a lot of polished, uncovered metal (especially of scale and chain) which will glint in the sun. The gleam of armor is often described in ancient and medieval sources as terrifying, because an enemy with lots of nice shiny armor is likely to be a far more dangerous opponent. Moreover, the horn-call at the onset of the charge (along with a wider formation!) makes the attacking force seem far larger than it is and more intimidating. Even the painting and decoration of the equipment fits with historical methods of inducing terror in enemies, along with things like high plumes (to make you seem bigger and taller). Finally, the battlecry of death! is unlikely to be reassuring to an enemy.
Book Note: In the books, the “Death!” battle-cry only comes later, after Théoden has fallen, and Eomer believes his sister Eowyn to be dead as well. Instead, Tolkien notes that the Rohirrim break into song at their onset, “and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing was fair and terrible came even to the City” (RotK 124). That may sound silly – singing in a battle – but it isn’t. While Tolkien is drawing from Anglo-Saxon epic (where battle and war songs figure significantly), it puts me in mind of the Hussites (15th cent.), who would go into battle singing “Ye who are warriors of God” or British infantry advancing to “The British Grenadiers” in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Infantry in the pre-modern world is all about finding ways to get men to withstand this nearly impossible challenge. This is the cohesive principle (which we’ve touched on here). There are different ways to achieve cohesion in infantry: strong community bonds, strong personal bonds between soldiers, intensive drilling, even certain formations (deep formations tend to lend confidence to a defender). But getting a levy of unenthusiastic conscripts to stand before a cavalry charge is nearly impossible.
Almost immediately as the Rohirrim appear, we see problems for the orcs. The orc general, Gothmog, has to push through the ranks and reorder his infantry, while the orcs just stare, dumbfounded at the new threat. This is a task that should have been taken up by a hundred-hundred NCOs all up and down the line, which speaks to problems of command structure. Moreover, the fact that something as simple as “pikes in front, archers in back” has to be given as an order suggests insufficient training for the orcs. Well-drilled infantry ought to assume appropriate formations by force of habit.
This kind of formation, as a side note – with two discrete bodies of troops, melee infantry in front and archers behind – is not actually all that common outside of Total War games. While arrows can be fired over intervening troops, such shots are less accurate and strike with less power (having to move through much more air in a high arc before falling on a target). Ranged troops were more frequently intermixed with melee troops. At Agincourt (1415), the billmen and longbowmen were mixed into a combined formation called a ‘hedgehog,’ the precise nature of which remains unclear. Warring-States period (475-221 BC) and Han Dynasty (220 BC – 280 AD) infantry seem to have combined units of ji-wielding ‘halberd’ infantry with crossbows. Missile troops could also be deployed as flanking or screening forces, as in the Macedonian and Roman armies.
Either way, the orcs – with no real system of cohesion to hold them together – begin to break apart as soon as it becomes clear that the arrow volleys will be insufficient to stop the oncoming charge. While the breakup of the orc infantry line ought probably to occur a few moments sooner (many of the orcs are still in position and braced when the cavalry arrive), the basic theory here is actually good. As John Keegan famously noted, “the ‘shock’ which cavalry seeks to inflict is really moral, not physical in character” (Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976), 96).
Impact
Cavalry impact is one of those things that is so frequently debunked on the internet that it has produced an odd sort of over-reaction. On the one hand, most of popular culture still portrays horses as battering rams that can simply smash through all but the stoutest of infantry with the raw force of impact. On the other hand, there are voices in the enthusiast community (particularly the HEMA (Historical European Matrial Arts) community) who will insist that horses will never, on any account, slam into a body of humans.
First: horses will absolutely hit people, trample them and charge into crowds (warning: links include footage of real horses hitting real people). It is easy enough for a rider or an infantryman to miscalculate and produce a collision. At Agincourt, the sources are clear that the failed French charge nevertheless left some knights stranded inside the English infantry formation (where they were swiftly captured or killed).
At the same time, horses are not battering rams and cavalry is not a suicide pact. While some of the Agincourt riders did impact with the English, they also died – or were captured. Assuming the horse remains functional after impact – and this is a big assumption, horses are fragile creatures – if the enemy aren’t already put to flight, you have come to a stop within weapon’s reach of perhaps half a dozen enemies, while sitting atop a large, mostly unarmored horse. This is, of course, even worse for a thrown rider.
Each impact with a horse is thus a dangerous gamble by the rider: will the horse break a leg, foul a step or fall? Will the person I strike get a sharp point into the horse first? The goal is not to hit the enemy with your horse, but to hit them with your weapon, ideally without stopping. A stopped horse is a vulnerable horse – horses, after all, are large animals that panic easily when wounded. A man on horseback simply cannot adequately defend his entire horse if he is not moving. Even with a much longer lance, at low speed the horseman loses as much as he wins. Against an enemy that is facing you, you want a weapon that can strike out beyond the head of your horse; this is part of why the lance (any kind of spear, really) is the classic weapon of the horseman. Videogames (glares in Total War) often feature ‘sword cavalry’ or ‘hammer cavalry,’ for instance, in contexts where those would be backup weapons to be used when a lance broke.
As noted, the goal is to do this without stopping. Lance drills involve training to let the point of the lance trail to the side after impact, so that the forward momentum of the horse pulls the victim off of the lance, which can then be raised and leveled for another hit (descriptions, for instance of the British 17th Lancers at Ulundi (1879) make reference to the lance points ‘rising and falling’ as they inflicted terrible losses on the retreating Zulu). You can actually see a modern sport version of this drill with the sport of tent pegging. The same is true for sabre drill, although the motion is different.
The impact of the Riders of Rohan breaks functionally every rule of we’ve laid out. While the front rank of the orcs is broken up due to the failure of cohesion, the overall formation is very deep and still quite dense. Nevertheless, the Rohirrim’s horses just seem to ride over orc after orc without stopping. No effort is made to weave in and out of the gaps or to strike with weapons. When we zoom in on individual characters, however, they are at a complete stop, surrounded by enemies, striking downward chops with swords and the like, which is a terrible situation to be in.
Book Note: The book largely avoids this by not describing the impact in much detail. Tolkien notes that “the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them” (RotK 124), but the more relevant passage, I think, is this one, “Well nigh all the northern half of the Pelennor was overrun, and there camps were blazing, orcs were flying towards the River like herds before hunters; and the Rohirrim went hither and thither at their will” (RotK 125).” This makes more sense than the great impact of the film – here the Rohirrim, having broken the morale of the orcs, use their own terror to push them here and there, annihilating small or isolated groups without ever plowing straight into the central mass of the enemy.
So on the one hand, the general principle (‘once the orcish line is broken by morale failure, the cavalry will win, inflicting heavy losses’) is correct, how it happens (‘the cavalry simply tramples hundreds of orcs at a time’) is not. We should instead see the horses weaving in and out of the fleeing orcs, lances rising and falling, rising and falling (if you look closely, you can see that, for safety reasons, all of the riders are keeping their lances well above head-height).
Yes, Elephantry is a Word
Up come the Mûmakil, and it’s time to talk about war elephants. The elephants of Peter Jackson’s film are, of course, much larger than real war elephants, but war elephants were very much a real thing. It really was possible – as pictured – to build small archery towers on the backs of war elephants to provide firing positions (although nothing near so large as we see in the films).
Jackson’s war elephants attack without any supporting arms, which is a significant mistake. The fleeing orcs make no effort to reform behind and support the elephants. War elephants are fearful weapons, but they are not invulnerable ones. Elephants are prone to panic when wounded, for one. Moreover, because they are so large and slow to turn, against light infantry, they are very vulnerable. The common Roman tactic against war elephant was to deploy light skirmishing troops (the velites) to throw javelins at the elephants from out of reach. These troops, in loose order, could evade the elephants’ charges, while the heavy Roman javelin (the pilum) was capable of causing serious wounds to even an elephant. Effective elephant use thus required some infantry support (although this, in turn, was hard – a elephant in panic became a hazard to everyone, friend and foe alike).
Side note: many of the Rohirrim in this sequence pull small bows and begin firing from horseback as if this would be an expected skill for them. Effective archery from horseback is very hard to do. It is the sort of thing that one either learns to do from a very young age as an essential skill for living (or something deeply embedded in culture), or not at all. The Rohirrim are an agrarian society – they have villages, we’ve seen them – not a nomadic one, meaning that the Riders of Rohan have all learned to ride horses as a secondary war skill, not as a primary skill of life. It thus seems very unlikely the Rohirrim would have any horse archers among them.
What Jackson shows is the Mûmakil defeating the Rohirrim by simply wading into them and smashing them – which is not how cavalry and elephantry interact. Horses are, you will recall, animals; they have animal responses to other animals. For instance, horses unfamiliar with camels will refuse to charge camelry (yes, also a word), being panicked in some cases simply by the smell of the unfamiliar animal. Likewise, horses of all kinds will not willingly go near elephants. While some riders with bold horses might be able to get close, most of the Riders of Rohan would find their mounts simply turning aside as the Mûmakil approached – or worse yet, panicking and throwing their riders.
Book Note: both of these issues are resolved in the book. First, the Mûmakil do not come up unsupported, but rather they themselves are supporting the advance of the Haradrim cavalry and infantry. The Haradrim prince, spotting Théoden’s banner, foolishly charges early and is soundly beaten by the heavier Rohirrim cavalry in close combat (I am reminded of the battles at Nicea and Dorylaeum (1097) in the First Crusade, where Turkish cavalry (under Kilij Arslan, Sultan of Rum), unfamiliar with European heavy horse, charged into close combat too early and were sorely beaten – it was a mistake they would not continue to make in subsequent crusades).
Moreover, Tolkien has a better grasp on the effect the Mûmakil have on the battle, noting that “wherever the mûmakil came there the horses would not go, but blenched and swerved away; and the great monsters were unfought, and stood like towers of defense, and the Haradrim rallied around them” (RotK, 133).
That said, the weapon attached to the tusks of the elephants – which I have sometimes heard regarded with disbelief – do, in fact, have a historical basis. Rather than wrapping the tusks in what looks like oversized barbed wire, in India, war elephants might be equipped with sword-like weapons that fit over the tusks of the elephant, providing greater reach and lethality.
Some of the tactics we see the Rohirrim use were established anti-elephant tactics. While the thick hide of elephants made them resistant to arrows, heavy javelins could panic them, and the Romans used their javelin troops, as noted, for this. Even missile weapons which couldn’t kill or seriously wound an elephant might panic it, as at Thapsus where archers and slingers were able to drive war elephants back into the ranks of their own troops (Ps. Caes. De Bello Africo 83). Striking at the legs could also be effective. Interesting, Caesar also made a point of familiarizing his horses with the smell of elephants prior to fighting them, so that his own horse would not panic, an option presumably unavailable to the Rohirrim.
Conclusions
As a piece of film, I love this sequence, which perfectly builds up anticipation and then delivers payoff. And the broad outlines of it – the bullet-point form (‘cavalry charges, infantry breaks and is destroyed, enemy brings up elephants, which stops cavalry’) checks out. Where I think it succeeds most is in the attention to the importance of morale – Eowyn’s pre-battle effort to master her own terror at the sight of the enemy, the mounting concern of the orcs turning into panicked rout, and Théoden’s efforts to reform his forces in the face of the elephants all touch on the importance of psychology in warfare.
Battles and wars are not won by killing all of the enemies, or even most of them. Battles are won by making the enemy run away and wars are won by breaking the enemy’s overall will to resist. In portraying the see-saw of emotion, the waxing and waning of courage and determination, and the efforts by the heroes to keep their troops in the fight is where this sequence is at its best.
Where it stumbles is in the physics of the actual combat. It isn’t unreasonable: the scenes are framed for filming safety and how they look on screen, not for realism. You can see this in the stage combat – how often orcs are ‘killed’ by ‘cuts’ to their metal breastplates which obviously don’t achieve any kind of penetration, for instance. Even with modern CGI, it may just be that a realistic cavalry charge remain out of reach.
Next Week: We look back at what is happening in Minas Tirith, and we talk about flails.
I have to disagree with the suggestion that mounted archery is a very unlikely skill for an agrarian warrior. Mounted archery was extremely common in Japan (from the Kamakura period and on) and was practiced to a lesser extent in China (including dynasties without a nomadic origin). Those obviously aren’t the cultural inspiration for the Rohirrim, but they show it’s perfectly possible – it simply requires a sufficiently widespread belief that mounted archery is worth the time it takes to practice.
With that minor quibble aside I’m really enjoying this series so far.
Oh, it is absolutely possible to train agrarian cavalry to use a bow, it is just very hard. Although I would note that Chinese dynasties often essentially bought steppe warriors to supply their cavalry. The Han, for instance, seem to have procured most of their cavalry forces from allied steppe Nomads, for use against enemy steppe nomads. The Romans did much the same with the nomadic horse archers of the Arabia Peninsula.
Japanese Samurai, or later Ottoman Timariot Sipahi are both examples of agrarian – or effectively agrarian – cavalry being trained from an early age to use a bow on horseback. As you note, you just need the commitment to the fighting system – but for mounted archery, that commitment is a lifetime of training. I’m not suggesting this is flat out impossible – just that the Rohirrim are clearly not this kind of cavalry. If you have been trained to use a bow on horseback, that skill is so difficult and so militarily powerful that it is almost certainly going to be the primary way you fight. If Theoden had a bunch of horse-archers to work with, one imagines he would have fought the battle very differently.
I agree with all of those points. The Rohirrim would likely have been using their bows more often if that was a common skill they trained for. However, it wouldn’t be outlandish to believe the Rohirrim would have a cultural history of horse archery. Before they settled in Rohan, they are described as being what sounds like a nomadic horse culture.
Hm… I agree, though I think that’s the better emphasis – based on how they’re used most of the time, it’s clear these aren’t mounted archers. Even if they were horse nomads, it’d be incongrous for them to pull out bows given how we’ve seen them fight every other time they’ve appeared.They’re clearly all in on being shock cavalry, socially speaking. As you said in the other post, that’s very clear in what they glorify e.g. Theoden’s speech.
Mounted troops whose primary function was a ferocious charge that also had a bow DID occur in history. Examples of fierce charging cavalry who definitely also had bows include the Sarmatians, Charlemagne’s household Caballari and Sogdian Chakar. Charging cavalry that probably also had a bow include the Parthian and Kushan nobility. I would tend to equate the Rohirrim with the Caballari, as the Rohirrim are based upon the contempary and fellow Germanic Anglo-Saxons.
It is true that Rohan does have fields, that the riders they are not nomads, and they are sometimes called knights. But even so, I doubt that Tolkien they were meant to be like the agrarian heavy cavalry that you write about (though perhaps that’s what they are in the films).
Rohan also has vast expanses of grassland, where there flocks (presumably of sheep), and of course herds of horses (not sure about cattle). So Rohan had a substantial pastoral component to it’s economy matching its landscape. We can imagine the riders, were if not nomads, then like cowboys. That is they worked day-to-day on horseback, looking after flocks and herds.
In this picture, I’d imagine the riders had a skills skills and equipment intermediate between European knights and steppe cavalry. Lighter armour, more endurance and very plausibly skill at horse-archery.
So more like Byzantine style cavalry? Apart from the cataphracts, Byzantine cavalry tended to sit in a sort of ‘middle ground’ position. I think there’s something to that idea, but…the reason I don’t totally buy it is actually – as Adam Morris pointed out – cultural values.
If you read something like, for instance, the Alexiad (Byzantine; written by Anna Komnene, c. 1120), archery is a key martial skill. Alexios Komnenos is actually described by her (she portrays him as a larger than life hero) as shatteringly deadly specifically with his bow – he blasts unruly crusaders with it from the walls, for instance. You can see the same reading something like the Heike Monogatari (Japanese; c. 14th century epic about the 12th century Genpei war) – archery skill figures very heavily in the accounts of the warriors.
I’d have to go back and re-read, but I don’t think Tolkien ever comments on the heroic archery of any of the Rohirrim – indeed, it is the men of Gondor who are said to have boasted of their skill with a bow (but presumably fired on foot, from a wall). The Rohirrim’s talk is all of swords, spears and shields. A society that is producing significant numbers of horse-archers has to regard the bow as a – if not the – primary martial weapon. It just takes too much time and skill to become an effective horse archer to consider it a secondary role. Of course, Tolkien borrows much of the language of the Rohirrim from Anglo-Saxon epic. You can even tell that his tone and language changes when the Rohirrim are fighting, more closely matching the diction and style of something like Beowulf. Consequently, the bow does not figure highly.
Yeah, I think you are right, if they were horse-archers we would have known about it.
I don’t have a copy of the book with me, but what happens in the scene where Aragon & co pop up out of the grass near Eomer’s squadron? Tolkien talks about how well they managed their horses to surround the intruders.
But then what weapon did they brandish? I thought it was bows, but it might just be me interpolating that into the scene. And even if it was bows, they would not be using them from a *moving* horse.
P.S: I did know now that about the Byzantines. Thanks for that.
There is a comment in The Two Towers when Aragorn/Gimli/Legolas first encounter the Rohirrim, that “some of the horsemen had bows in hand, and their arrows were already fitted to the string” after they wheel to surround Aragorn & Co.
There’s also a description when the orcs are being hunted by the Rohirrim:
“A few of the riders appeared to be bowmen, skilled at shooting from a running horse. Riding swiftly into range they shot arrows at the Orcs that straggled behind, and several of them fell; then the riders wheeled away out of the range of the answering bows of their enemies, who shot wildly, not daring to halt. This happened many times, and on one occasion arrows fell among the Isengarders. One of them, just in front of Pippin, stumbled and did not get up again.”
So the skill seems to be rare, possibly something a few riders learned from hunting (or perhaps a regional thing), rather than a technique common to the Rohirrim as a whole.
Actually, Tolkien does mention Rohan’s horse-archers and their skill, in the chapter in which Merry and Pippin are prisoners of the Uruk-hai. In fact they are saved from Grishnakh by a well-placed arrow from a horseman. Also, Legolas refers to the skill but small numbers of the archers defending Helm’s Deep- and the defenders there were mostly dismounted cavalry.
On a different note because I don’t know how to leave a regular comment?
In the skirmish near Fangorn in the Two Towers, we hear of dedicated
Rohirim Horse Archers. So it could be semi-plausible(maybe?) That they were given
Lances for the charge only
Tolkien describes that part of the Rohirrim still live as nomads in the Eastemnet: “there the herdsmen had wandered much, living in camp and tent, even in winter-time”. Éomer, Third Marshal of the Mark, states to Aragorn he has removed all herds and folk because of the threat from Mordor.
I suspect we should understand this as transhumance pastolralism within an agrarian society, not true nomadism. Herdsmen within many agrarian societies move around (often up and down in terms of elevation) as the seasons change, while the main population didn’t move. It is quite clear the Rohirrim have farmers and settled villages (and even a town in Edoras).
Maybe the Rohirrim are to some extent a transitional culture? One that started out as horse nomads, then moved into a more settled area and began mixing and integrating with the sedentary agricultural people who lived there? So they still have *some* proficient horse archers, raised from clans/tribes/subcultures that follow the traditional old ways of their ancestors from several generations ago, but the bulk of their warrior-horseman class has transitioned more towards the kind of heavy, armored, grain-fed horse cavalry typical of a more settled population.
Alternatively, some of the warrior elite still practice horse archery, but many do not, so that Rohan can raise only a small number of horse archer companies as part of a much larger heavy cavalry force?
You are right about that, I guess. It is what I later thought myself.
I imagine that, because of the importance of the horses in their society about half of the population of Rohan lived in the Eastemnet, so perhaps a slightly earlier stage.
They had at least one other town, Aldburg.
> Roman warhorses were rationed 7kg of barley per day, roughly twice in the intake of an infantryman
100 g of barley have 320 kcalories, so 3.5 kg would be 11200 kcalories. I’m sure the lifestyle of a Roman soldier requires a lot of energy but that’s a little excessive, isn’t it? Bodybuilders and Tour de France riders eat less.
Good catch, I’ll fix that. Not sure what happened there, since I have the correct figures in my notes for this post. It is 5kg (7 attic medimni per month, Plb. 6.39.12) of barley per horse (plus 2 attic medimni of wheat for the cavalryman). The average Roman legionary in the same system gets *around* 830g of grain per day as part of a total ration of perhaps 1.1 to 1.3kg and around 3,390 calories.
The complication here, in case you are curious, is the unit conversion: the ancients measured grain in dry-volume measures (the Attic medimnos or the Roman modius) rather than by weight – converting unmilled grain from volume to weight by density is tricky.
That said – be careful using modern measurements for calorie density when thinking about pre-modern armies! 100g of milled barley flour (which is about 300 calories per 100g, I think) is for modern, milled barley flour. Roman soldiers were issued unmilled grain (again, wheat usually), which they then milled themselves with portable ‘hand’ mills (they’re mule-portable, not really man-portable; a few have been reconstructed). There’s quite a bit of material loss in the milling process, along with inedible products included in unmilled grain being removed (hulling or threshing). You are also dealing with pre-modern grains which have undergone less selective breeding, so the calorie density is lower than what you’d get from a modern American or European farm.
If you are curious about the specifics of the process, the best article on the topic is L. Foxhall and H.A. Forbes, “Σιτομετρεία” Chiron 12 (1982), 40-90. Don’t be scared by the Greek title, the article is in English. The two places to look for the basic figures for Roman armies specifically is Erdkamp’s Hunger and the Sword (1998) and Roth’s Logistics of the Roman Army at War (1999). Both are great, but be aware that Roth is more willing to speculate than Erdkamp.
What’s with this theory that “[e]ffective archery from horseback is very hard to do”? I’m terrible at archery, but I do ride quite a bit, and I can’t imagine why mounted archery would be so much more difficult than standing archery. I know people who do mounted firearms; it takes a modest amount of practice. Once one is used to being in the saddle, the motion becomes a non-issue; I’ve known people who have fallen asleep while riding.
The time commitment for two unrelated disciplines? I’m guessing the real issue, if mounted archers are in fact historically rare, is that it’s not that useful on most terrain. On plains, maybe, as shown by the Mongols and several Native American tribes. but most of Europe was not that open. But for the claim that it’s “very hard to do”, I’d like to see more evidence.
First: archery – of the sort that is practical in war – is in and of itself already a skill not easily gained. The quip often attributed to Edward III – If you want to train a good longbowman, start with his grandfather – may be apocryphal, but it speaks to the difficulty of learning to use any kind of proper war-bow. I know some folks in the process of working their way up to proper war-bow draw weights (80+lbs) – or who have done so, and being able to fire such a bow accurately and quickly from the ground is hard.
Second: you must then do all of this on a horse, not in calm riding conditions, but on a battlefield where people are trying to kill you. You cannot – as I’ve noted elsewhere on this very blog – stop the horse to shoot, but must shoot at a full gallop, with a weapon that requires both of your hands and – as following point (1), a considerable amount of strength. Mongol bows have draw-weights often in excess of 120lbs.
Third: you must do this in coordination. Really, do see my horse archery post, where I discuss coordinated mass caracole drills. So now you are not only on the horse and moving with the horse, but you need to control the horse to make a turn at a key point (which, in Mongol or Parthian fashion, is done with the legs and not with the reins, because, of course, both hands are busy with the bow). While shooting. And coordinating with your friends. And watching the enemy. And avoiding hazards, which may include dead horses or friends (but also terrain).
You are training to be able to do *that* reliably.
I will say, comparing modern firearm shooting from a (moving?) horse to horse archery is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Firearms – even early black powder muskets – were notable (and, indeed, were noted *at the time*) to be far easier to train to use than traditional archery.
Anyway, if you want to see more evidence, read Timothy May, The Mongol Art of War (2007). The evidence for the difficulty of learning this combat skill is copious, largely uniform in its tendency, and broadly undisputed in the scholarship.
I will say, comparing modern firearm shooting from a (moving?) horse to horse archery is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Firearms – even early black powder muskets – were notable (and, indeed, were noted *at the time*) to be far easier to train to use than traditional archery.
Actually, that seems to be a myth — whilst a bow requires much greater physical strength to use, the actual motions used are very simple compared to those necessary to fire a musket, and 16th-century authors seem to have universally considered the musket to require more training. See, e.g.: https://bowvsmusket.com/2017/05/29/musketeers-were-not-easier-to-train-than-archers/
That article is written about England. I’m going to generalize a little bit but a major problem with a *lot* of the enthusiast discussions of European military history is that the English-oriented bias (for English language writers) is extremely strong. But England was perhaps the *least* typical major European state in this period. In no small part because – unlike nearly every other European major state – it had substantially reconfigured its society to generate significant numbers of bowmen.
But the axiom that guns are easier to train than bows is an axiom because it shows up, again and again, in a multitude of places. It shows up in China (where the crossbow emerges specifically as a weapon to mass-provide to peasants who couldn’t be expected to fight with a traditional bow; firearms later serve the same purpose) and continental Europe and in the Ottoman Empire and in Persia and in India. I’ve had the same observation from one historian I know who both shoots muskets and does war-bow archery. Heck, I have both shot a musket and attempted – poorly – to fire a fairly modest (80lbs draw) war bow.
In the case of the link you shared, I think this fellow has severely misunderstood the question. The question is not, “which requires more training” so much as “which weapon *can be trained*” in the context of military service. You can – and European armies regularly did – drill a musketeer up to fighting proficiency in a few months; that’s not just weapon operation, but formations and the countermarch. But it takes years of building up muscle strength to even manage the draw of proper longbows or steppe bows (again, speaking as someone who converses with people who *do this* – trust me, it takes a lot longer).
So, you must forgive me, but no, this one isn’t a myth. This is the scholarly consensus and it is so for a reason – a lot more has been said on this topic than a single blog post.
England was atypical, sure, but you’d still expect that the supposedly greater ease of training people to use a musket would be brought up at least occasionally in the pamphlet wars of the era. IDK, maybe a lifetime spent doing agricultural labour meant that people had already built up more muscles in the arms, and so could learn to pull a bow much quicker than their average modern counterparts. (And FWIW, the author of the blog mentions doing both archery and musketry in the comments.)
As for the scholarly consensus… well, most of the works I’ve read either repeat the claim that bows took longer to learn as common knowledge, or else cite other modern works. If there are any primary sources stating that training musketeers was quicker or easier than training archers, I haven’t seen them cited.
So, 1) I’d encourage you to read: Landers, The Field and the Forge (2003); Parker, The Military Revolution (1996); Chase, Firearms, a Global History (2008); Murphey, Ottoman Warfare (1999). Then read May, The Mongol Art of War (2017) and May, “The Training of an Inner Asian Nomad Army in the Pre-Modern Period” JMH 70 (2006). Then read Stretton in Soar et. al, Secrets of the English War Bow (2006), Mike Loades, The Longbow (2013), and Robert Hardy’s Longbow: a social and military history (1994).
I suspect, when you’ve done that, you won’t lack for primary sources and you may understand why the scholars who a bit closer to the metal consider, “bowmen are harder to get than musketeers” to be so obvious as to be axiomatic. And I want to be clear: *all* of those guys are close-to-the-metal scholars, writing relatively niche research for other close-to-the-metal scholars. You can probe their even more voluminous bibliographies for yourself.
2) Part of the problem is that you are asking the wrong question. The question is not “are muskets or longbows harder to train” the question is “which can be trained *at all*” What you’re going to find with Hardy and May up there is that good bowmen aren’t trained, they’re *born,* the bow is a core part of their lifestyle, weather that’s because they are fourth-generation English yeoman-longbowmen or because they are steppe nomads or forest hunters. There’s no source saying, “gee, it’s hard to train a bunch of completely green peasants to fight this way” because, in most societies, the conclusion they ended up with was, “you can’t.”
The same was true for the Romans, by the by. The Romans didn’t train archers – they mostly didn’t seem to think they could. They recruited archers into the auxilia from societies – Sarmatians, Cretans, Arabs, Syrians, Thacians, etc – that produced good archers already. As you will find if you read the books at (1), that was an assessment that was widely repeated over a number of agrarian cultures.
3) The assumption that folks in the past were just ripped because they did farm labor doesn’t stand up to the archaeological evidence. The intensity of farm labor is subordinate to nutritional factors (read: peasants were frequently malnourished and could thus, often be physically *under* developed). People in the past were not, on the whole, stronger. Except, of course, in societies where developing that kind of strength (and thus devoting the calories and protein to it) was a multi-generational social priority and thus an embedded part of the culture (or they’re the small upper-crust of military aristocrats).
By the time a recruit shows up to the army, all of those considerations are baked in – if he isn’t already strong enough to manage 150lbs of pull, you aren’t going to make him so in six months or even six years (not that you would waste that kind of time for an infantryman of any sort). Another reason why, returning to (2), you can’t train archers most of the time, you just have to have the good fortune to have them already.
So, 1) I’d encourage you to read: Landers, The Field and the Forge (2003); Parker, The Military Revolution (1996); Chase, Firearms, a Global History (2008); Murphey, Ottoman Warfare (1999). Then read May, The Mongol Art of War (2017) and May, “The Training of an Inner Asian Nomad Army in the Pre-Modern Period” JMH 70 (2006). Then read Stretton in Soar et. al, Secrets of the English War Bow (2006), Mike Loades, The Longbow (2013), and Robert Hardy’s Longbow: a social and military history (1994).
Thanks for the book recommendations; I’ll try and look into them when I have the time. I have in fact come across Loades’ and Chase’s work before, and as I recall they both hold to the view that bows had a longer range and were more accurate than muskets, something which is contradicted, repeatedly, by primary sources of the 16th and 17th centuries. So in the meantime, I will I think take their conclusions with a rather large grain of salt.
(Incidentally, it’s no wonder that they’d conclude that muskets must have been easier to learn than bows, if they start off with the — false — premise that bows were more effective weapons. Sixteenth-century generals weren’t idiots, after all, and there must be some reason why they were so eager to adopt firearms. But this is a false problem, since contemporary accounts make it clear that the musket was the more dangerous weapon.)
It’s also worth pointing out that the tradition of archery in England was decaying in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, which no doubt partially prompted some of the pro-archery pamphlets of the time. It seems that, if training archers really was a multi-generational thing, people would bring this up, either pro-archery people saying “We’re losing our ability to raise archers, we must do something at once” or pro-musket people saying “We’re losing our ability to raise archers, looks like we have to use muskets anyway.” And yet, to my knowledge, nobody did.
So, I don’t mean to pick on you, – but you realize that Chase – who you ‘take with a rather large grain of salt’ – has read not only the primary source material in English, but also – and no I am not making this up – in French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Korean and Farsi? Page through his bibliography sometime. Now, I don’t want to make any assumptions, but I am going to guess that you probably do not read all – or even most – of those languages. I sure don’t.
I think you may want to at least consider the possibility that the fellow who learned more than half a dozen languages to investigate the question may have seen more of the sources than you have, or than your favorite blogger has (I include myself here – I have five research languages – well short of (and mostly not overlapping with) Chase’s spectacular language proficiency), and is – on that account – to be trusted as to the general character of the evidence those sources present. And now, of course, he doesn’t quote them all in his book, because no publisher could sell a book where he did; it would be a thousand thousand pages long.
This is, I think, a common misunderstanding by folks outside of the field: history is, of course, a critical discipline in that it is meant to be practiced with aggressive questioning, where arguments are approached critically. But – and this is the part I find it often missed – that critical bent must be balanced with an appreciation for the breadth of sources and evidence that stand behind an argument.
If I may give another example – James McPherson has read, conservatively, *thousands* of documents, letters and memoirs from the American Civil War, and in his books, discusses the general character that emerges from those letters – the patterns and so on. It is not possible for him – in the space of one book – to actually give you anything but a tiny, tiny sliver of those letters and memoirs and so he is asking you to trust him that the sample he provides is representative of the truly, truly vast whole. To respond to him – as for instance, the SCV frequently does – by petulantly holding up a handful of exceptions is to miss the point, because the first step to disproving McPherson would be, of course, to also read thousands of the things he has read (and ideally, a few more besides). Reading that massive corpus is the cost of admission for getting to have an opinion.
That isn’t an argument to authority, to be clear – McPherson is not a Civil-War-Wizard (well, I mean, he is, but that’s not my point). His authority does not emerge from his person, it emerges from having done the reading. Mike Loades and Kenneth Chase – and the others I listed who agree with them – have, I will suggest, done the reading.
Until I can be shown an argument **with a similar mastery of the sources** (which needs must include non-English sources as yet untranslated) which can hold up an alternate interpretation with as much plausibility, I remain profoundly unconvinced that either are peddling ‘myths.’
I think you may want to at least consider the possibility that the fellow who learned more than half a dozen languages to investigate the question may have seen more of the sources than you have, or than your favorite blogger has (I include myself here – I have five research languages – well short of (and mostly not overlapping with) Chase’s spectacular language proficiency), and is – on that account – to be trusted as to the general character of the evidence those sources present.
Yes, as it happens, I have an advanced degree in history (albeit not early modern history), so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with how sources work. I’m also not entirely unfamiliar with the ways in which academics can wander down blind alleys, let their pet theories interfere with their assessment of the evidence, and casually dismiss the opinions of people with far more practical experience in whatever it is they’re studying. Whilst I haven’t read sources in eight different languages like Chase has, what I have read almost universally supports the idea that firearms were more effective weapons than bows, and I have no reason to suppose that it constitutes an unrepresentative sample to the extent that would be necessary if theories like Chase’s were accurate. So I think in this matter I’ll go with the commanders and commentators of the time, who had to actually fight battles with these weapons and lead armies using them, rather than the armchair theorising of modern historians who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger.
Looking back at this particular comment in retrospect, I had a thought based on another post on this blog, though I don’t recall whether it had been posted at the time *this* was posted.
Clearly, yes, guns were adopted over the bow and arrow because they were in some significant way superior. Now, some possibilities to explore include:
1) It is easier/possible to train a peasant with no relevant experience to use a gun, as opposed to using a bow…
Or one of a variety of ways in which guns might outperform bows in some material parameter. We can immediately dismiss “guns are inherently cheaper” for obvious material reasons. We can likewise dismiss “guns fire faster,” because an Early Modern arquebus or what have you plainly does not. Options we cannot *casually* dismiss from rudimentary subject matter knowledge would likely be:
2) Early guns are more accurate than bows.
3) Early guns are longer ranged than bows.
4) Early guns are more lethal than bows.
5) Early guns’ fire is more sustainable than that of bows.
Consider that even if (2) is not true, (3) through (5) get… interesting.
First, the effective accurate range of a musket may or may not be longer than that of a bow, but the bow’s range is subject to a much harder upper limit. You *can* in principle, pepper an enemy with musket balls from 300 yards away, even if the odds are overwhelming that you won’t hit anything, at least a large fraction of the bullets will end up in the general vicinity of the target.
Second, we’ve had some extensive posts here discussing armor penetration, and one thing that’s clear is that even relatively modest body armor (heavy textiles or mail) is quite effective at blocking arrows fired from any but the shortest ranges. Guns having dramatically better ability to kill an armored man. The fact that the archer is theoretically accurate out to 150-200 yards means very little if he cannot penetrate an opponent’s armor at 150 yards, while a competing musketeer can!
Third, a conventional bow requires the archer to supply all the effort of launching the projectiles from his arms; it’s physically exhausting even if the supply of arrows doesn’t run out. Someone using a gun obviously has their share of physically demanding effort on the battlefield, but they are not specifically exerting those exact muscle groups so much. Perhaps, PERHAPS, a musketeer is more likely to be able to sustain fire for a greater period of time without collapsing in groaning pain because his biceps feel like agony-filled wet noodles.
Putting all this together, there could easily be ample reason for 15th and 16th century commanders to adopt guns at the expense of bows. Even given that guns are expensive and slow-firing, and even supposing for the sake of argument that they are less accurate. Because they are also more *lethal* on a direct hit and are lethal at significantly longer ranges, and in some plausible combat scenarios they are more sustainable (at least if you can keep them supplied with ammunition).
Wayne Lee makes exactly this argument (albeit briefly) in “The Military Revolution of Native North America: Firearms, Forts and Politics” in Empires and Indigenes (2011), 50-52, 56-59.
A friend (well read in history) pointed put that from the viewpoint of the elites, people can be readily expended, if the capital stays intact. Archers are hard to replace; a peasant with a season’s training is far easier. It could be that as casualties mounted (remember disease!), the archers were not replaced, while peasant musketeers were.
Very late, I know, but I got here from the Foreign Policy article on Spartan historiography. At any rate, I submit that I’d be rather more unhappy to learn I were hunted by a skilled bowman than by an arquebusier.
I’m not saying I WANT to be shot at with an arquebus, but a skilled arquebusier is basically a guy who manages a lot of moving parts and still sucks. A bowman, all these years later, is an immediate threat to my life in basically any situation where I don’t have operational control and full spectrum information dominance…basically any situation in history that doesn’t involve jet fuel.
I’m going through the series of 6 articles on a mobile, currently on the third, and it’s increasing difficult to try to find the next one. It would be really great if you could put a link to the next article in the conclusion of every article.
Re: the willingness of warhorses to run into obstacles (including standing infantry), Keegan has a good discussion on the subject in The Face of Battle. His conclusion is that while a trained mount would be more likely to remain in motion, that it’s damn near impossible to force a horse to slam into something it can’t see a way over or around.
That doesn’t really apply to individuals, since at least in principle the animal CAN see a way around them, and the encounter becomes a collision when one or the other misjudges their distance (here’s a better example than the London videos, from a mounted police encounter in Sweden in 2014 (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2732651/Swedish-police-cavalry-charge-anti-Nazis-protesters-attacked-officers-horses.html)
But a block of formed troops is another matter. You’re right in that the critical part of a cavalry-formed infantry encounter is moral. If the infantry doesn’t break the cavalry will find it nearly impossible to break them. The only example Keegan can find is from a freakish incident during a Napoleonic engagement in Spain (the horse and rider are killed within several strides of the infantry square, and the corpses tumble through the infantry and allow the trailing cavalry to ride in).
So Jackson’s staging is REALLY not remotely plausible, and Tolkien’s description of the broken orcs and the harrying Riders is the more militarily sensible of the two…
on the design of the mumakil howdahs, the forward projecting poles appear to be anchoring points for ropes leading to the uppermost tower of the multilayer howdah. similar ropes can be see attached behind the tower and it its sides, though the poles project less there. perhaps meant to be stabilizing ropes to help keep the tower’s structure lighter without it losing structural strength, or toppling as the animal moves around.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/lotr/images/9/95/180px-Oliphaunt.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140329114404
given that several of the Mumakil appear to have banners and pennants flying from these poles in many for the shots, it is also possible that normally the haradrim may have used the poles and ropes for flag-signals in many of the same ways as naval vessels once did, which would certainly have made coordinating a formation of such massive beasts much easier. that said, the banners and pennants we see appear to just be strips of colored cloth.
For a more realistic movie treatment of a cavalry charge might I suggest the charge at Beersheba in THE LIGHTHORSEMEN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7dm_nbjNjE
They deploy on the reverse side of a slope (out of sight of the enemy), in three lines with space between so that if a horse in a front line falls the horses in the next lines can go around.
They start at a walk, moving into a trot until they crest the hill, where they move into a canter. The signal to charge at the gallop is only given once they are within range of the enemy.
They win by breaking the enemy, with some of the Turks fleeing and others cowering in their trenches as the horses jump over them. (Note: in the scene where the horses go over the trenches, only some of the Turks duck. I suspect this is because for that safety reasons most of them were dummies, with only a couple of stuntmen actually in the trenches.)
Note: The Australian Light Horse normally fought dismounted, which explains why they were waving bayonets instead of sabres and dialogue such as “They won’t charge. They are Australian Light Horse” and “Hold your fire until they dismount”.
Belated proofreading corrections again:
rational: we surviving by running -> rational: we survived by running
(Historical European Matrial Arts) -> (Historical European Martial Arts)
every rule of we’ve laid out -> every rule we’ve laid out (delete of)
herds before hunters -> herds before the hunters
a realistic cavalry charge remain out of reach -> a realistic cavalry charge remains out of reach
In unfinished tails JRRT does make a nod to more of steppe culture. I describing both remounts lost and men trained to the bow on horse back in the failed defense of the Isen (?) river
I agree with this theory. A culture in transition from nomadic to settled. The Rohinrrim reader to the the open northern part of their country
by Fangorn forests the Wild Wold or the Open Wold. I suspect that is where a more nomadic culture is maintained.
*Rohirrim refer to
I’m finding this fascinating! This, even though I’m basically a pacifist and know nothing at all about military history, but I do love Tolkien–have for decades. And–
I agree with the commenters who point out mounted archers are present among the Rohirrim, but are rare. And it makes sense to me that this would be a culture transitioning from nomadic to settled. But what I wanted to mention–
I’ve read parts of Empire of the Summer Moon, and all of The Squaw with Blue Eyes. The European invaders actually could not defeat the Comanche until the repeating rifle was invented. They just didn’t have the firepower against some of the best riders and archers ever known. And apparently Qanah Parker and his brothers could already shoot from a galloping pony when they were seven or eight years old. They started learning as toddlers, and never stopped practising.
In other words, you’re right. It’s a rare skill, and one that takes a lot of work. But it seems Tolkien did know this, as he makes the skill present, but rare, among his riders.
Haven’t read through all replies, but contrary to your assumptions Tolkien shows Rohan as having horsed bowmen several times. Eomer’s eored, when pursuing the orcs toward Fangorn, exchange arrow fire with them. In fact, I always equated Rohan cavalry to being more like Byzantine cataphracts than traditional heavy cav. They (or some) may have a breastplate, but most/all only have chain or leather armor. Based on army travel speeds alone, they should not be heavy cav with plate weighing them down.
For nearly all of the Age of the Knight, heavy cavalry meant men armored in mail. Plate came very late in the medieval period. I suspect that Tolkien envisioned the tech level of Middle-earth to be roughly that of the time of, say, Henry III, when knights wore mail supplemented by small solid protection to vulnerable places* (this was when poleynes and couters first appeared). As Bret pointed out in his series on ironworking (which I highly recommend), it wasn’t until well into the 14th century that it was possible for bloomeries to produce ingots of sufficient size to make something as big as a breastplate.
*I invoke this because Imrahil wore “polished vambraces”
I do some larp and one friend of mine sometimes wears a gambeson and a mail shirt over it. I have helped him into and out of that, and I can tell you that is already quite heavy. It isn’t the*plate* wearing them down, but the armor and metal in general.
One advantage of muskets over bows: a footman could carry more ammuntion. A Napoleonic musketeer could carry 70 or so cartridges while a typical figure for a longbowman seem to have been 12 or 24.
I think you’re being hard on Eomer and his ability to remember his spear – at least in video it look’s like he’s shifting from an underhand grip to an overhand grip mid-gallop, as though recalibrating to stab downwards at infantry.
In fact, that is EXACTLY what Eomer is doing! If you watch the cast commentary version, Karl Urban tells us that he spent a ton of time practicing that little mounted spear flip to switch from underhand to overhand because he thought it was really cool, and he’s disappointed you can’t really see what’s going on in the film!
“Dunharrow is nearly 200 miles from Minas Tirith”
Actually it’s considerably farther. According to Tolkien’s detailed notes on distances (of course he kept detailed notes on distances!), it is 296 miles from Edoras to the north-gate of the Pelennor wall, and 22 miles down the Snowbourn from Dunharrow to Edoras. So 318 miles.
That does, of course, assume that the route taken from Dunharrow passes right by Edoras, rather than cutting a corner somewhere. Applying the triangle inequality, we can safely say that the distance is somewhere between 274 and 318 miles, and, considering the terrain, probably over 300, but, looking at Tolkien’s contour map of the area, it looks like there could be a workable alternate route passing south of the peak just south of Edoras and cutting off the corner that way
I’ve only just discovered this blog, so here’s a belated comment: the parallels between the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the Battle of Vienna seem so strong to me that I’ve always been surprised no one else seems to mention them. If Constantinople is Minas Ithil, then Vienna is Minas Anor. Facing hundreds of thousands of eastern and southern troops in the service of the enemy, the Imperial garrison is saved by the friendly barbarians settled to the north of their borders, who have marched all the way from their homeland to honor a treaty of alliance, and conduct an enormous cavalry charge that saves the empire and the West for all time.
Calling the ruling class of a Noble Republic “barbarians” is a little much 😉 But I agree it was probably inspired by these events.
I think it was a fusion: the siege of Vienna, and the battle of the Catalaunian Fields, where the declining Roman army and their ‘barbarian’ Germanic allies, the Visigoths, beat off the all-conquering Huns and arguably saved Europe. The 70-year-old Visigothic king, Theodoric, was killed leading his cavalry. Parallels? In neon!
Regarding Total War cavalry, if you’re referring to Warhammer, it’s worth noting that many of those cavalry units are riding something other than horses, or are riding horses that have been altered magically in such a way that some of their real-world weaknesses don’t apply. If you’re riding a gryphon or a giant bear tamed through various magical or other specialized knowledge, your mount is in fact capable of bowling over infantry and/or killing them by itself – the danger is one of those infantrymen getting back up and sticking a weapon into the thing’s flank. Hence, the logic of letting the mount take care of initial contact, while the rider just guides the thing and deals with any infantry who manage to survive the initial shock.
Regarding the bows of the Rohirrim Legolas had this to say at Helm’s Deep:
“I do not like this place, and I shall like it no more by the light of day. But you comfort me, Gimli, and I am glad to have you standing nigh with your stout legs and your hard axe. I wish there were more of your kin among us. But even more would I give for a hundred good archers of Mirkwood. We shall need them. The Rohirrim have good bowmen after their fashion, but there are too few here, too few.'”
We have to speculate about what exactly the “Rohirrim fashion of archery” is. However, given occasional descriptions of mounted Rohirrim with bows in hand it may well be mounted archery.
This might also be supported by Eomer’s remarks about the rear guard at Helm’s Dike. He wanted to establish this guard before learning of the men in the fortress, which means he was probably thinking about his own mounted troops. He may have changed the composition later, but whoever he sent “loosed every arrow that we had, and filled the Dike with Orcs.” If these were his own troops then they must have at least been horsemen who practiced archery, if not horse archers.
Yet Legolas wants for 100 archers despite 2,000 men already present so presumably archery is not a major part of Rohan’s culture. Perhaps some Rohirrim practice archery on their own initiative, and some of the most enterprising have thought to combine it with their horsemanship? They certainly don’t seem like an army of horse archers, and training good archers in isolation from an archery culture is very difficult, but I suppose maybe it could happen as the race of men were still not quite fully diminished in those mythic days of Middle Earth…
You want the good sound of a cavalry charge…https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5iva_jAbzJY
The Rohirrim are largely an agrarian society but the chapters in which the three hunters enter Rohan and when Eomer takes on the orcs and uruks, describe something of Rohan’s fighting kit and of their broad culture. The eastern part is stated to be sparsely populated (even for Rohan) and used mostly for their herds. This infers a semi nomadic, pastoralist culture or perhaps sub culture, which would likely include at least a small amount of horse archery.
Eomer’s men are described rather specifically. Conical helms, mail shirts, shields, spears, and swords. They’re basically norman knights or visually anglo-saxon huscarls on horses. However, Tolkien also notes that they had a few men skilled with bows among them and they clearly kill a number of orcs with arrows during the pursuit to Fanghorn Forest.
It’s clear the Rohirrim mostly function as heavier, shock type cavalry. But we can reasonably extrapolate that some small fraction of them at least, have this life long bow skill. Likely the most heavily drawn on section of the population given the hardiness of pastoral and nomadic peoples. They’d probably have a disproportionate number of individuals among an army, relative to their share of the overall population.
I recently re-watched the Extended trilogy, and it struck me that the cavalry-versus-infantry engagement that most matches the physical interaction you describe here is Éomer’s raid on the Uruk-hai at the Ford. The Uruks are in poor order to begin with, having stopped to rest, and scatter at the cavalry charge; the Rohirrim meanwhile attack in loose order and ride through the Uruks easily, spearing and shooting them as they go. Obviously night is a foolish time for a cavalry charge but otherwise it seemed to match up quite well!
On this part: “It thus seems very unlikely the Rohirrim would have any horse archers among them.” I’m certainly not the first to comment that the Rohirrim canonically DO have horse archers, even in the books – and unlike a historical text where the history might have been garbled in translation or the author mistaken, in fiction the text is the text, full stop. I’m also not the first to comment that these horse archers would, theoretically, probably be drawn from Rohan’s far-flung pastoral lands.
I can, however, dig up the quote I’m thinking of from the Two Towers (pg 474, HarperCollins 1996 large print edt, illust. Alan Lee): “A few of the riders appeared to be bowmen, skilled at shooting from a running horse. Riding swiftly into range they shot arrows at the Orcs that straggled behind, and several of them fell; then the riders wheeled away out of the range of the answering bows of their enemies, who shot wildly, not daring to halt.”
(And I should add that the open, grass-covered land of Rohan does seem like the kind of place where you would expect to find at least some people who’ve learned how to be horse nomads. The Rohirrim are horse people even when settled, with a very obvious reverence for horses and horse imagery everywhere in their art, tapestries, banners, on their shields, etc.)