(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 fifth 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 Jackson’s adaptation of Return of the King. Parts I, II, III and IV can be found here, here, here and here. Last time, we looked at cavalry mechanics with the Ride of the Rohirrim. This time, we’re going to at the physics of some of our supernatural creatures and their equipment. The popular perception of pre-modern weapons and armor is often shaped by fantastic portrayals of their weight, durability and effectiveness in fiction. How did these objects hold up?
Book Note: This entire sequence I am assessing in the next two sections does not occur in the book. By the time the gate comes down, the effort to sow terror and despair has left the ground behind the gate completely undefended, save for Gandalf on Shadowfax although the tops of the walls were still manned (RotK, 112). The Witch King enters alone, without any orcs or trolls and is stopped by Gandalf.
This sequence in the book where Gandalf challenges the Witch King is fascinating for how Tolkien represents a power-duel between supernatural creatures. As with the Balrog, victory is marked not by an exchange of fireballs or blows, but by an ‘outside’ event that confirms the winner’s greater supernatural power. In the earlier case, Gandalf declares that the Balrog “cannot pass” and indeed – as the bridge collapses – it becomes clear that the Balrog very literally cannot pass (FotR, 392). We do not see the final battle between the two – but Gandalf has already proved the stronger, and wins the final confrontation (if only just) as well.
At the gates of Minas Tirith, Gandalf again makes a declaration, “You cannot enter here” (RotK, 113), not a plea or an order, but a cold statement of fact by Olorin, wisest of the Maiar. And again, he is correct – the Nazgul mocks him and threatens him, but does not enter. He is instead drawn away by the arrival of the Rohirrim, to his doom; Gandalf’s victory is decisive, though not total for the loss of Théoden (which it is implied might have been averted had Gandalf been able to ride out rather than having to return to counter the madness of Denethor). If this seems too much important to place on words, remember that this is a world where all spells are spoken, there are ‘words of power’ to command objects to action and the curse of a king might bind a people in undeath. In staging this confrontation for the extended edition, Jackson commits one of his rare errors of adaptation, and reverses the victory of the confrontation, breaking Gandalf’s staff.
The next we see of the men of the city is after Théoden has fallen, where we are told, “out of the City came all the strength of men that was in it, and the silver swan of Dol Amroth was borne in the van, driving the enemy from the Gate” (RotK, 130). It thus seems likely no orc or troll set foot in Minas Tirith – instead the men of Gondor appear to have attacked out of the city as soon as the Witch King was drawn away. There is certainly no space for the extended street-fighting of the film.
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Trolling Physics
I want to start with the trolls. When the main gate of the city is smashed open by Grond, the scene in the film is quite different from the books. Gandalf has gathered a dense mass of heavy infantry, supported by archers, to defend the position. This formation is almost immediately overrun by a combination of trolls and orcs, essentially brushed aside by the power of the army of Mordor.
The trolls are shown to be monstrously strong; they stand roughly twice the height of a man and can easily smash armored Gondorian heavy infantrymen into the air with their clubs. Now, on the one hand, fantastical creatures are fantastical and that’s fine. On the other hand, as noted, many people’s only exposure to how historical arms and armor (or fantasy versions of them) might function is in contexts like these, where the CGI team is utterly unconstrained by any real limits of weight or speed. So let’s do some science to the trolls. This is, perhaps, the only time one should not ignore the trolls.
Starting with their clubs. Most of the clubs we see have stone heads, which makes things very difficult to estimate: stone can have a very wide range of densities and strengths. But there is one troll, later seen bashing down a gate, with an iron hammer that we can use to get a sense of how strong these trolls are supposed to be. Note: this section is going to be math heavy. If you do not care about the math and foolishly trust me, you can skip below to where you see the bold, END MATH notation, to get the results.
Also, what is the point of that spike on the top back of the hammer? Is he planning to stab someone with it, because it barely projects further than the flat haft of the weapon. Looks like a great way to hurt yourself on your back-swing though.
Estimating the size of things here is always difficult, but we can try. The metal gate’s iron reinforcement is composed of five sections of that repeating pattern of circles and straight lines, and the hammer’s head is about as tall as one of them; we can see from the other side the gate is about 10ft tall or so – just short of twice the height of the soldiers defending it. So the hammerhead would be about 2ft tall on the large front face. Accounting for the thick front face, but also the thinned center and the hole for the shaft, we might estimate something like 1.5 cubic feet (around 42,500cm3). How heavy is that?
Iron, it turns out – and this is going to be a theme – is really dense. In particular, pure iron is 7.86g/cm3. Steel densities vary around that figure, but steel is still mostly iron (just 0.5% carbon content in iron is mild steel; 2%+ is pig iron – useless for most weapons), so it will be close enough to this figure for our purposes. So the iron alone in that club (7.86g/cm3 * 42,500cm3) is 334kg, or 736lbs (just over a third of a ton). Obviously, no human could lift this weapon, much less swing it – the heaviest clean-and-jerk lift in Olympic history is just 263kg. And that’s just to get the thing off the ground, much less swing it.
But trolls are much larger and stronger than humans. How much? Put another way: is it reasonable to expect a creature this size to be able to wield that hammer? A lot of things influence strength, but muscle force is closely tied to the cross section of the muscles involved. Again, it’s hard to get a clear estimate of how big a troll’s arm is across from the film. Let’s assume a troll’s arm is three times as thick as a human arm – trolls are twice as toll as men and orcs, and have bulkier frames, three times seems fair. Muscle strength scales with the cross-sectional area (we’ll simplistically assume a circle shape, so A=πr^2) of the muscle, so instead of being three times greater, it’s going to be roughly nine times greater (note: yes, I know that animal strength doesn’t scale this smoothly and there are all sorts of other factors, this is just a ballpark).
For our point of comparison, we might use a heavy modern sledgehammer. Sledgehammers are far too heavy to be used as weapons. While fantasy games – looking at you Elder Scrolls and Warhammer – often represent warhammers as essentially weaponized sledgehammers, real warhammers were nothing of the sort. Actual warhammers, such as the one pictured below, were relatively slender. For comparisons, the three war hammers in the Wallace Collection weigh 0.64, 1.22 and 1.51kg each (including head, haft and everything), while just the heads of normal sledgehammers can range between 4-9kg.
And those of you doing the math in your heads already know where I am going: if a troll really is around 9 times as strong as a strong man, we might figure that a troll sledgehammer might be something like 81kg, and a troll warhammer only 5.76 – 13.59kg. Wildly short of the massive clubs and hammers the trolls wield in these scenes.
Likewise, the tremendous impacts we see – literally tossing men around like rag-dolls – probably exceed the strength of trolls. Armored men are, it turns out, quite heavy and hard to fling. How heavy? We can do a fairly quick estimate. Let’s assume a 170lbs (77kg) man, first off. Then we add armor – Gondorian soldiers wear a kind of mass produced plate armor that in early modern Europe was called almain rivet (discussed here and here). Some of the partial sets of armor in the Wallace Collection can give us a decent sense of what this sort of ‘half plate’ weighed – e.g. A30 at 16.3kg or A37 13.53kg. To which we must add weight for the mail shirt they wear under it (c. 5kg). Then a sword and spear (c. 1kg and c. 2.5kg respectively). And the shield – Gondorian soldiers carry a fairly large, semi-rectangular shield similar to a Roman shield, the scutum, which weighed around c. 10kg. So all in, a battle-ready Gondorian soldier might weigh around 110kg (242lbs).
Now we see one unfortunate Gondorian soldier tossed what looks like more than 20ft in the air (he is well over the heads of the trolls) – how much energy does it take to do that? In our own simplified high school physics sort of way, we can figure this out, very roughly. The energy required to lift a thing is equal to its potential energy after being lifted, which is equal to it’s mass, times the gravitational constant, times its height, in this case 6,576J (110kg * 9.8m/s^s * 6.1m); the hit must have imparted at least this much energy (more, in fact – we haven’t accounted for friction or air resistance). Since the club is still moving very fast, we might assume it retains something like half of the energy of impact (again, this is almost certainly a low-ball figure), so the initial kinetic energy of the club the moment before impact is c. 13,000J – the equivalent energy to a bit more than 3 grams of TNT.
As noted above, we might expect a trollish warhammer to be around 13.5kg tops – so how fast does the troll have to get it moving to launch a man? Kinetic energy is equal to 1/2 mass times velocity squared, so (13,000J = 1/2 * (13.5kg) * (v^2)), solve for ‘v’ (velocity in meters per second). 43.9m/s (98mph). That is very fast – for comparison, professional golfers, using long and quite light-weight clubs cap out under 130mph for the highest speed of the head of the club in their swing – and golf clubs are made to maximize head speed. And we have made a lot of favorable assumptions for the troll (for instance, a lot of the energy of impact is going to be absorbed by the body as it crumples or recoil into the hand of the troll; we also assumed the entire mass of the hammer is up at the point, which it isn’t). I think it is fairly safe to say that a troll’s one-handed swing is probably not sufficient to get the impact surface of a club or hammer moving at 100mph.
END MATH. So what is our conclusion? Mainly that it seems very unlikely that – as real, non-magical but monstrous creatures – trolls could actually function as they are shown. The weapons they are shown using are so heavy that they aren’t even on the right order of magnitude even when we assume a troll essentially has the strength of ten men. Moreover, even with such tremendous strength, it’s unlikely that trolls are going to be able to produce and impart the sort of energy necessary to – for instance – toss armored men high into the air with each hit. Casually smashing their way through a battle-line by tossing multiple men out of the way with their hammers isn’t something trolls can do without magic.
“Alright” I hear you say, “but you’re supposed to be a historian, not a physicist. Who cares?” I think this exercise is valuable because trolls – for all their limits – represent a fantastical extreme in size and power. If trolls can’t do it, no human, horse or camel can. And that is my point.
In popular media (especially video games), we often see weapon strikes or horse impacts send men flying from the impact (the Total War series is a particular offender here). Hammer blows – or gunshots – send hapless ‘mooks’ flying through the air (the latter makes no sense when you remember that basic physics means that the recoil from a gun that powerful should also throw the shooter as hard in the other direction!). Dense infantry often simply gets ‘bowled’ out of the way and I’ve heard people thus question if dense infantry formations were just a fool’s game entirely as a result. Many modern reenactments or group spars do not help in this, because the groups are small and so the lines are drawn up with very little – if any – depth to them, so it seems possible to just ‘red rover’ your way through.
In practice, the physics work very differently. Trying to ‘push over’ or actually shove back an infantry line requires a lot of force – consider that, at ~8 men deep, a file (a single line of men from the front to the back) of Gondor-style infantry closed up together is essentially a c. 1-ton object with a huge base (around 72 square feet) and a low center of gravity (around 3ft off the ground). Even before you remember that those men are trying to kill you, there are very few natural things that can push through that – that’s the point.
The only real way to shock (as distinct from softening them with missile fire) close-order heavy infantry out of position was with other close order heavy infantry, and even then, it is going to be a slow, grinding affair of close-in fighting (as it was, for instance, when Roman legions met Macedonian phalanxes, or the ‘push of pike’ between early modern pike squares).
Troll Tactics
So troll strength, as shown, doesn’t seem in keeping with the laws of physics as we understand them. Trolls should be dangerous and massively, massively strong, but not so strong as to be able to casually toss armored men into the air. Yet a troll would also be a huge problem for a dense mass of infantry. How can we probe what that might be like? What is the nearest equivalent to trolls in terms of size, strength and ability to disrupt a formation in the real world? War elephants (which are discussed more detail in my War Elephants series, I, II, III).
First off, war elephants could be even larger than a troll – the Indian elephant (Elephas Maximus Indicus – my choice here over African species will make sense in a moment) can be more than 10ft tall (capping out around 11.5ft) and weigh in excess of 4000kg (4.4 tons). While elephants obviously do not use weapons, they will use tusks and trunk as weapons (J. M. Kisler’s War Elephants (2006) has some shocking accounts of elephants using trunks as weapons to smash, crush and even tear apart humans). Elephants could also be armored, and (unlike trolls) have warriors mounted on them.
But unlike the Mûmakil in the previous post, the trolls at the gate are not deployed alone. Instead, they advance with the support of large numbers of orc infantry. So the best comparison here would be a situation where disciplined, close-order heavy infantry, somewhat but perhaps not entirely unfamiliar with elephants, encountered them used in close concert with supporting infantry. Fortunately for our curiosity, exactly such an encounter occurred on the banks of the Hydaspes River in the spring of 326 BC between the army of Porus, a powerful Indian king, and Alexander the Great. Normally I don’t go into tremendous depth on these comparisons, but I’ve found some descriptions floating around online – and even some translations – to rather miss the mechanics of the confrontation. So I want to go follow this through, step by step, with reference to the ancient sources.
The Macedonians were formed up into their traditional sarissa-phalanx, a deep pike formation (see image). We are less well informed about the equipment of Porus’ infantry, but Arrian does tell us that they were heavy (Arr. Anab. 5.15.6). The main body of the infantry was arrayed in a strong line directly behind the elephants, but with advance companies in the spaces between the elephants (5.15.7) – this is important: Porus is deploying his infantry like a sawblade, with the elephants in between the teeth of the saw, so the elephants cannot be surrounded (as would be the later Roman anti-elephant tactic).
The battle is joined with cavalry at first, but when the elephants come up, the Macedonian cavalry has to retreat and be rescued by the phalanx, which now finds itself facing this elephant-tusk sawblade. Here is where many some interpretations fall into error – they reason from later tactics that the Macedonians might have loosened up their formation, let the elephants charge into the empty spaces between them, and then surrounded and destroyed them. But Arrian – the best source for the battle – is in fact quite clear this is what they do not do. Instead, the Macedonian formation stays tight (Arr. Anab 5.17.3).
The elephants clearly push through the wall of pikes, because Arrian reports that the elephants do serious damage to the phalanx (5.17.3), but that end up confined to the space between the lines of opposing infantry (5.17.5), closer to the Indian troops than the Macedonian ones (5.17.6), eventually turning on both in panic and rage. Critically, the Macedonians were able to give ground when the elephants would attack and then push forward once the animal’s charge was spent (I have seen this interpreted wrong – the Greek is quite clear that this is an ‘retreat and advance’ tactic (5.17.6), not spacing out the lines as against the chariots at Gaugemela(3.14.5-6)). They also continually harass the elephants with javelins. We can be sure Arrian does not imagine the elephants have been let into the Macedonian formation to be surrounded because they remain closer to their own troops than the Macedonians. The Macedonians win the struggle in the end, as Arrian notes, more due to their superior cohesion and experience than anything else (5.17.4).
What does this suggest for our trolls? Porus’ elephants were able to shove through the Macedonian pikes, we know (otherwise they would have inflicted no casualties), but not dislodge the entire formation. They could force it back and do damage, but the rain of missile fire and the hedge of pikes prevented any sort of overrun, while at the same time, the mass of supporting Indian infantry prevents the Macedonians from quickly surrounding and killing the elephants. We might expect the same for our trolls and orcs.
This isn’t to say the trolls and orcs are doomed to failure as Porus was against Alexander. The men of Gondor are not the hardened veterans of Alexander. Moreover, they are spear-and-shield infantry and their spears are a lot shorter than Macedonian pikes (though, to be fair, their armor is much more protective). On the flip side, as we’ve seen in the last post, orcish cohesion and discipline leaves much to be desired, compared to Porus’ heavy armed and quite effective infantry. Gondorian cohesion seems to hold – this is one of the last shots we get of the fighting at the gate on the ground:
This is one of those shots that show up in all sorts of movies (and shows) but make no sense. In the foreground and the extreme background, we have solid blocks of good guys, still fighting effectively, but in the middle somewhere, is just a never-ending column of orcs shoving straight through that line – despite there being no break. If you see crane-shots of these scenes as they are filmed (or if the director is careless) what you will see is that the extras from both sides are simply letting the other group through. Presumably the intended effect is to show stubborn but hopeless defense against an unstoppable tide, but as we’ve seen above, dense heavy infantry cannot be casually shoved out of the way like this, no matter how deep the formation you send at them.
So what should we see? Since the Gondorian formation doesn’t break and run, we should probably see it pushed back with heavy casualties, as parts of the line are forced to withdraw from the trolls. It would be a grinding forward push by the orcs – probably at heavy casualties given that the Gondorian soldiers seem to be better trained, more cohesive and better armed than they are – until they either the Gondorians broke and ran, got pushed back far enough to be enveloped, or were simply whittled down too far by casualties. But assuming they hold tight, we should not expect the ‘men of Gondor’ to simply be swept away.
(Note: If you are wondering why there was the eventual adoption of light-infantry centered ‘let them through’ anti-elephant tactics (since the Macedonian pikes, supported by javelins seemed to have worked eventually), I suspect it was to avoid the heavy losses the Macedonians seem to take fighting elephants at closer quarters. While the Macedonians win at Hydaspes, Arrian is clear the elephants inflicted serious damage. by contrast, the Romans will later get sufficiently good at elephant neutralization tactics as to effectively take them off of the field altogether.)
Just Flailing About Shields
Meanwhile, on the Pelennor Fields, the Witch King returns for Théoden. The Witch King’s mount is clearly some kind of magical beast, so I won’t spend too much time on it, except to note that the way it casually ragdolls Théoden and Snowmane both at once strikes me as unlikely. The muscles in that creature’s relatively thin neck would need not only to move Théoden (something like the same 110kg armored man we calculated above), but also a roughly 800kg destrier (Snowmane) and probably 10-15kg of tack and horse armor – altogether, about a ton. I do not think that creature’s neck looks muscular enough to casually lift a 1-ton object. Fortunately, the winged beast suffers catastrophic neck failure at the hands of Eowyn shortly thereafter, so we may move on.
Book Note: In the book, Snowmane is not slain by the Witch King’s flying beast, but rather “Snowmane wild with terror stood up on high, fighting with the air, and then with a great scream he crashed upon his side: a black dart has pierced him” (RotK, 126). The ‘black dart’ here could mean a javelin or an arrow, possibly fired/thrown by the Witch King himself in his descent.
Eowyn then swiftly grabs a prop shield and – yes, we have to talk about the shield. I know – you are here for flails. We’ll get there. But this shield is a pretty poor prop to be featured so prominently, especially since much of the armor and weapons for the ‘good guys’ in the film are actually fairly sensible, for fantasy fare. First, the good: as a round shield with a prominent central boss, the shield has the correct grip. Many games and shows will show these shields as being held via two straps like a knightly kite shield or a Greek hoplite’s aspis. But here, the shield is correctly center-grip, held by a bar running down the center of the back of the shield, with the hand resting inside a hole in the wooden core, protected by the metal boss.
The issue is with the construction and thickness of the wooden core. The shield looks to be a bunch of 2×4 wooden boards held together by nails or rivets passing through the rim; you can clearly see the breaks in the wood boards on the front of the shields. This is not how such shields were made. Instead, the wooden boards – much thinner – were glued together against a leather facing (very thin – almost parchment). This is then reinforced with a leather – or rarely metal – rim to prevent de-lamination from the edges. From the front, a well-made round shield should not show the joins between individual planks of wood (or, indeed, any wood at all – being covered by leather).
The other problem is thickness – this shield looks to be about two inches thick, whereas historical viking shields were much thinner, between 1/2 and 1/4 of an inch thick. Some of them were carefully shaped so that they were thicker in the center and thinner on the edges. This shield is at least four times (and as many as eight times) too thick. It is also on the small size in terms of width – not out of the normal range for such shields (which is quite wide – anywhere from 70 to 100cm wide). You can see when Eowyn picks it up that there are larger shields strewn around, one assumes that the reason we only ever see these smaller ones carried by anyone is that they were already far too heavy.
This cuts to a general issue about prop version of weapons from the pre-modern period: they are almost always made much too heavy. Sometimes that is simply a misunderstanding of design, as it is here. Sometimes it is for safety – stage ‘blunts’ (prop swords and the like designed to be safer for stage combat) are generally a fair bit heavier than the real thing because the blades are made thicker so that they are not sharp. But the result has often been a deceptive emphasis on very great weight of these objects when, in fact, they were far lighter historically. There are, for instance, a number of interviews where the Game of Thrones cast comment on the great weight of their weapons – which from the descriptions they gave were far, far heavier than the ‘real thing.’ Yet these observations are often treated by journalists and fans alike as statements of some real truth about the tremendous weight of medieval weaponry.
The Epic Flail
And that, at last, brings us to the main event: the Lord of the Nazgûl ‘s epic flail. The cast and production team actually discussed the process by which this absurdly large prop was created and also revealed that swinging it required the assistance of people off-camera. Though I am amused by one person declaring “some people call it a mace, some people call it a morning-star” given that both names are incorrect. Both a mace and a morning star involve a metal object hafted atop a wooden shaft, not attached via a chain. This is a flail.
Book Note: In the book, the Witch king does not have a flail, but rather “a great black mace” (RotK, 126). He swings it only once, to shatter Eowyn’s shield. It is not clear if the shield shattered because of the force of the blow, or perhaps because of some magic. Eowyn’s sword, after all, explodes into splinters upon killing the Witch King.
As distinct from a flail, a mace is simply a metal weight, hafted on a wooden shaft. Unlike the (very rare) flail, the mace is a common weapon throughout history, essentially a high-tech club. In the Middle Ages, the mace’s popularity was a response to the ability of mail armor to render many cutting weapons much less effective.
We can dispense quite quickly with the actual design. Obviously, this weapon is too large. Were it made of a single large piece of iron, I doubt anyone could lift it (don’t worry, I’m not going to send you through the density-of-iron math problem again). Even the prop version couldn’t actually be wielded by the giant of a man they got to play the Witch King on screen. Moreover, the discussion (linked above) of the construction of the flail indicates that it was produced in cast iron, which is much too brittle for use as a weapon. Iron and steel weapons had to be forged, not cast, to withstand the stress of use in combat.
And if you watch carefully, you can see part of why this design is silly – the fight choreography only works because Ewoyn keeps throwing herself away from the Witch King to dodge the weapon. But the chain is short enough that she has the reach with her sword to lunge the c. 3ft chain and simply strike when the Witch King wiffs his shot and lands weapon in the dirt. The chain is nowhere near long enough for him to simply ‘zone out’ Eowyn as he does, without the fight choreographer making Miranda Otto let him.
All of that aside, what I want to address is what is a flail and was the flail a real thing? Flails are ubiquitous in fantasy and historical fiction. Functionally every D&D cleric has one, typically of the ball-and-chain variety. So it may surprise you to learn that these weapons seem to have been so rare that a number of serious historians doubt whether they were ever used in battle at all.
The flail originated as a farming tool, for threshing grain. Two wooden sticks (neither is a metal ball) were attached via a chain, almost like an oversized set of nunchaku. The chain is typically very short. It is not hard to see how a farm tool like this might find itself reinforced and converted into a weapon in the event of a peasant revolt or other sudden need. This converted version – a long handled flail with a very short chain (often just a pair of links) attached to a cylindrical head – is by far the most common version of the weapon. It is this version that appears in late medieval and early modern fighting manuals, for instance (such as the 16th century Arte De Athletica by Paulus Hector Mair). And it is, by and large, a peasants weapon: if you could afford something better, you did.
This, of course, is not the version of the flail that appears in nearly all of popular culture. What we see is what is sometimes called a ‘military flail’ – a small round (often spiked) ball at the end of a slightly longer chain attached to a short, one-handed handle. There is, in fact, serious argument by serious historians that this weapon simply did not exist – perhaps the most sustained effort available openly on the internet is here, by Paul Sturtevant. To sum up the evidence he presents:
Many of the so-called medieval flails in current museum collections appear to be later fakes. Sturtevent demonstrates fairly well that the three famous flails in the MET are probably not authentic medieval weapons – at least one such weapon has had its date changed on its information card. Many other such flails lurking in museum collections are of uncertain provenance (we don’t know where or when they are from) and may also be later forgeries.
Moreover, at Sturtevant and others have pointed out, a flail like this wouldn’t be a very practical weapon. The chains they have are just long enough to let you strike yourself with the weapon, but not long enough to provide any kind of reach advantage or tactical options (compared with, for instance, East Asian chain weapons like the Japanese kusari-gama, which allows for attacks to entangle an opponent’s weapon with its much longer chain).
Other scholars are split on the question. Kelly Devries and Robert Douglas Smith (in Medieval Military Technology (2012), 30) suggest that military flails probably existed, but were very rare, while Philip Warner in Sieges of the Middle Ages (1968) calls all examples of the weapons fakes. John Walderman, however (Hafted Weapons in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (2005), 146-150), identifies a number of military flails appearing in contemporary medieval artwork and at least one museum example that seems genuine (or at least, is damaged in a way to suggest use). He concludes – and this seems to be the most prudent course – that while the converted peasant weapon was common, the ‘military flail’ was exceedingly rare. It properly derived from a similar (but still rare) Eastern European weapon (the kisten), but never found widespread use in Western Europe.
Which makes it very strange that this extremely uncommon and by no means typical medieval weapon has often come to stand in for the weapons of the entire period. Why does this matter? Because it contributes to an impression about not only the weapons of this period, but also the society – one which is primitive, brutish and honestly a bit dumb. In particular, it feeds into this sense that even professional medieval warriors (like knights) were essentially untrained brutes just bashing away at each other.
One of the real lessons the study of the past has to teach us is – to quote L. P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” What I mean by that is that so much of how we assume all societies work and all people think is just how our society works and we think. Properly done, the study of the past can disabuse us of this silly notion and show us that smart people in different times and different places did things all sorts of different ways. But this lesson is ruined if we construct caricatures of the past wherein people living long ago were just big stupid brutes with big stupid weapons.
Conclusion
This sort of analysis that we have been doing of the physics of the battlefield really entered modern military history most forcefully with John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) – where he called this sort of thing ‘military mechanics.’ And it is a useful exercise in trying to decode accounts of battles fought with weapons and tactics long out of use. It helps to remind us that the one thing we know for sure about many of these weapons and tactics is that they worked (at least some of the time). In particular, it is important to try to engage these questions carefully, rather than simply assuming that we know ‘how it was’ based on fictional representations or fictionalized accounts.
Ancient and medieval close-order infantry tactics were not a suicide pact, but in fact highly successful for thousands of years, so long as cohesion could be maintained. Medieval weapons could be fairly heavy, but were not ludicrously so. In any case – they mostly worked. And weapons – even those you might see in movies (or even sometimes museums) – which look absurd might well be later forgeries or the fanciful imaginings of a 21st century production crew. Though there is care in this last point – I have also seen some exotic looking weapons (especially polearms like glaves, bills and guisarmes) dismissed by well-meaning internet warriors as the creations of fantasy, when in fact those weapons are very well documented.
Next Week: Aragorn finally gets here, and we wrap this thing up.
One thing of note is that gorillas are already 4-9x stronger than a man. For example, https://gorillafacts.org/how-strong-is-a-gorilla/. A well trained and bred troll, then, being 2x as high and hence about 10x as large a a gorilla, may conceivably be not 10x as strong as a human, but 50-90x. This brings it back well into the realm of possibility.
Actually, using your cross-sectional argument, if a troll was built like a gorilla it would have but 2^2 the cross-section of a gorilla, or 5x the area to be generous. Still, though, 5x * 4-9x could easily be 45x the strength of a human.
Much of that is because gorillas are already bigger and more heavily-built than humans. You’re trying to double-dip the numbers.
Trolls are stockier than humans and have longer arms than legs, but on the whole they’re closer in build to humans. (Which is obvious—they don’t walk on their knuckles, do they?) Saying that trolls should have roughly the strength of ten men seems adequate…especially when you consider that larger humanoids have additional stresses on their body that limit their effective strength, what with the square-cube law. (For instance, the big, stocky trolls are much heavier than humans, meaning more of their strength needs to be used moving their limbs than a human would.)
Chimpanzees are also stronger than humans (about 30-35% stronger, according to this paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5514706) despite being much smaller than us and far less built than gorillas. Humans aren’t a great benchmark for hominid strength capabilities since evolutionarily we’re built for endurance, not strength. I can believe LotR trolls, which were created by Morgoth to be powerful to the exclusion of all else, could exceed the proportional muscle strength of chimps and gorillas and should certainly exceed that of humans given that all other real life great apes do. This strength would need to come at a price somewhere else, like low endurance and absolutely ravenous hunger, but we don’t see enough of them to tell.
We do know one price trolls pay – sunlight turns them to stone, which may be related to their increased strength and durability…
That figure is complete nonsense, though. Apes are stronger than (untrained) humans at the same weight, but not to these absurd degrees.
This is correct. The most popular numbers given for primate strength are a complete mess and don’t pass the sniff test.
One difference is that trolls are smarter or more human-like than elephants: with hands and using weapons, less likely to panic, more able to execute intelligent and coordinated strategies. “10-12 feet high armored guy with mace or proportionate spear”.
An imperfect analogy would be to consider adult humans vs. a mass of toddlers. How much stronger are you than a 3 foot high human? Can you pick one up and toss one?
I can pick one up and toss one (its one of their favourite things!). I could knock them tumbling with a blow but I don’t believe I could send them flying. Certainly not several at once.
Love this series. But, a nitpick: your “flailing about” “pun” is not a pun if you are literally describing what they are doing, even if it is not in the metaphorical sense that is the modern common usage.
‘One of the real lessons the study of the past has to teach us is – to quote L. P. Hartley, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” What I mean by that is that so much of how we assume all societies work and all people think is just how our society works and we think. Properly done, the study of the past can disabuse us of this silly notion and show us that smart people in different times and different places did things all sorts of different ways. But this lesson is ruined if we construct caricatures of the past wherein people living long ago were just big stupid brutes with big stupid weapons.’
Best paragraph of the entire series. Thank you!
While the weapons seen in the movies for the “good guys” are feasible in and of themselves, they often stem from completely different times – cf. the Rohirrim compared to the men of Gondor. That’s centuries of metallurgy and armor design in between.
As it should be. Gondor was founded by exiles from Nûmenor, a civilization “light years” ahead of other human societies in Middle Earth, due to its history of favor from the Valar and tutelage by the Elves.
And in the past three thousand years, they’ve both managed to maintain their level of technology and failed to share the technology with even trusted allies.
Compare that to Earth, where the US managed to maintain their nuclear monopoly for half a decade. Or where the secrets of ironworking spread throughout Europe, Asia and Africa in six or seven centuries. That’s about 20% of the time since the Akallabeth – the Downfall of Numenor.
I feel as though you are playing a little too conservative with the strength of the ogres (though not with the mass of their weapons) as I think it is entirely feasible for an elephant to throw a person into the air with no difficulty. I’ve seen one lift a car with an offhand twist of its head, and likewise toss a man head over heels with a jerk of its neck. Angered and with two arms the equivalent strength would likely be able to throw 300 pounds of armoured person into the air with ease (and that’s not counting the fact that the humanoid body may make an ogre far stronger than an elephant’s trunk, as other commenters have noted), I’ve found photo evidence of an elephant goring and lifting a water buffalo (which can be anywhere from 800-1200kg in the wild, but average out at 900) about 6ft in the air, and then tossing it off. According to the witness, this took all of 10 seconds. That mean an ogre, with say a stabbing implement (an equivalently sized spear or sword) could potentially stab, lift, and then toss something around 2000lbs if it were suddenly attacked and just reacting (as the elephant was, apparently it just walked by this sleeping buffalo, who woke up, charged it, struck the elephant and was promptly murdered for its offense) if it were actually geared up and ready to go I’d say tossing something (someone rather) who weighs one tenth that should present little problem.
Now your comments on hammers are fair, a silly weapon for an ogre/troll. All the trolls needed to do to deal with those tight formations was hurl stones the size of men’s torsos at them. Or better yet the corpses of their friends. 300lbs of armoured Gondorian will ruin your day. Or they could have been kitted out with big lead balls, and just tossed or rolled them at the enemy, sure it won’t send them flying, but you can’t fight if your legs have been shattered.
As for the Nazgul beast, in my watching of the scene it seems like the beast uses its momentum to land grab and then fling horse and rider. Which seems more plausible. It also seems like the things neck changes size (changing the size of a model between cuts isn’t unusual in scenes like this, framing big digital creatures and stuff can be a nightmare) because when it drops the horse its neck looks to be almost as thick as the entire horses body, but when its fighting Eowyn it looks like maybe its as thick as a human torso (which still would take more than a couple snicker snaks to get through).
I agree. The assumption of the trolls strength is too conservative in part because it assumes that the trolls have similar muscle strength per cross-sectional area, which is actually *very unlikely*. Most primates for example have far greater amounts of fast-twitch muscle fibers and other structural differences compared to humans, that result in a 40 kg ape having FAR greater strength than an 80 kg human male. The trolls clearly have a stocky build as well, which gives them immense mechanical advantages. 9x stronger would be a good estimate for an up-scaled *human* whose arms have 3x the diameter, but a human that’s 3x normal size can’t even walk unaided so this is a moot comparison to trolls that are shown to be moving around quite fluidly and fast.
This results in a mace weight that might be off by an order of magnitude. This error is then propagated further by using ONLY the mass of the mace when calculating the speed required to fling a human into the air (which really should be done with momentum anyway but alright). This treats the mace like a lone projectile impacting the human, when in reality there’s a large additional mass behind it (the arm of the troll), which acts as an enormous driving force that can accelerate the human over a short time period. E.a. if you calculate the impact of a right hook, you don’t use just the mass of the hand; if you did you’d think that the hand would have to move impossibly fast, because the real ‘momentum’ of a right hook is in the arms, the shoulders, and the rotation of the entire torso, which is a huge, slow moving mass. Similarly, the mace is not a projectile shot at the Gondor infantryman, it is connected to a huge, thick arm, which is connected to an immense shoulder and body, ALL
of which support the toss.
Using momentum instead of kinetic energy, using a more realistic mass for the mace, and adding the mass of the troll’s body parts will give you an impact velocity well below 10 m/s.
And you’re not even considering that Trolls in universe are supposedly mockeries of ents. Ents, we know, can send people flying with a punch, as Merry and Pippin attest. And Treebeard was supposed to be roughly twelve feet tall
“Most primates for example have far greater amounts of fast-twitch muscle fibers and other structural differences compared to humans, that result in a 40 kg ape having FAR greater strength than an 80 kg human male.”
That is an internet myth that just doesn’t actually match up to reality. Humans are actually stronger than chimps.
A chimp is about one third stronger than a person for the relative size and their muscles strand for strand are on par with that of humans in actual scientific tests. Literally, they extract a muscle fiber and hook it up to measure how much each strand can pull.
Those fast twitch muscles also come at a big cost that they require far more energy to actuate meaning that things like walking are downright tiring for chimps while they are pretty normal for humans.
So we are back again to measuring the diameter of the muscle to determine strength though potentially using chimps power to arm diameter as the basis.
Plus, if somehow they were 40-50x more powerful, they would rapidly be running into even greater issues with skeleton strength than they would be with the weight they already have.
Chimps strength does not come from stronger muscles, it comes from the muscle attachments. The moment arm is greater, allowing them a lot more functional strength, at the expense of our dexterity. Chimps can and have pulled peoples arms out of their sockets.
Of course that’s probably not how you would lose a fight with a chimp. Chimps have no chill whatsoever. Bite off your balls is their go to move, and then stomp you repeatedly, like they do to to other chimps they catch away from home.
I’d rather get pulped by trolls tbh. You can check on youtube. It’s brutal.
Seriously? If you are camping and see a chimp by the watering hole? Get Mr Bananas before he gets you.
Things like walking are tiring for chimps because our pelvis is made for bipedalism, and theirs is not. They are set up for brachiation.
A further consideration is the projectile motion of the bodies. To reach a height of twenty feet, the launch velocity of a projectile needs to be a bit over 10m/s (or ~25 mph) vertically (plus some horizontal component), not accounting for air resistance. If the troll could keep their weapon moving at a constant speed, and the humans bounced off it in perfect elastic collisions, that constant speed would be exactly half the actual launch speed; for a perfectly inelastic collision, the weapon would need to end up moving at the launch speed. The human body is pretty inelastic (though plate armour is going to be fairly springy), but even then, we’re not looking at anything faster than 10m/s or so.
In other words, a decent athlete could fun fast enough that a troll swinging their weapon at them wouldn’t be able to hit them because they’d be running faster than the weapon was moving…
Your mention of East Asian chain weapons reminded that, according to Stephen Turnbull’s “Samurai Invasion: Japan’s Korean War, 1592-98″( 2002), when the Japanese invaded the Korean cavalry was armed with flails. Unfortunately he does not describe them. (At least so far as I can recall: I think I read it a year or two after it appeared).
He further explains that after two hundred years of peace the cavalry was mainly used for bandit suppression, which makes it a little more understandable. Also, in other connections, he describes how the Korean court regularly ignored warnings about ineffective weapons, decayed defensive works, and especially the Japanese menace, now that Hideyoshi had unified the country, and had a surplus of unemployed veterans from all sides in the civil wars.
I don’t have access to a lot of primary materials in Russian \ anything else that specializes in Eastern European weaponry, but an hour or so of google searches has found a lot of references to kistens being extremely commonplace and well-established weapons (include numerous archaeological finds involving flail-heads and preserved weapons) distinct from the converted grain-treshing flail.
The difference between it and the battle flail as we know it from popular fiction seems fairly minimal – handle and chain length may vary, but the basic concept is the same.
Sure- nobody is saying that battle flails couldn’t be used, just that they didn’t catch on in Western Europe because there’s no particular advantage compared to a mace.
Now, why they *did* catch on in Eastern Europe I’m not sure, but I presume there was a difference in what the most common fighting was that caused it. That’s an assumption, though, since historically similar military problems tend to wind up with similar solutions.
One possibility is that these aren’t weapons, but instruments of punishment and torture.
That’s definitely the case for at least one implement I’ve seen cited as a medieval flail. It’s quite clearly a weighted scourge, suitable for flogging someone to death.
In regards to the heavy shield prop and how un-shieldy it looks: What if it’s not a shield at all?
Admittedly, you can see the classic round-shield grip on the back, but otherwise the thing looks like some early-bronze-age solid wooden wheel with some kind of axle cap still attached. Such as would have come from one of those wheeled catapults, which is to say knocked off one of those catapults by the force of its normal operation.
So I think the thing makes much more sense if you imagine it as a loose catapult wheel that Eowyn grabbed because she was too pressed for time to notice the actual shield nearby. Here’s a disc, it must be a shield, grab. That’s why it’s so thick, so heavy, and flies apart the instant it’s hit. It was designed to withstand stress from one direction but not another.
Also why Eowyn’s kind of flailing around (har har har) because she’s using her training for shield tactics on something whose weight she didn’t train for, so her own muscle memory is throwing her off-balance. (Not entirely certain about that one.)
Plus, you know, she doesn’t want to actually find out what happens if that horrifyingly large mass of iron actually hits her. Can’t expect any valiant hero to be dumb enough to deal with that thing. But hey, that’s why it looks like it does, right? A weapon to break morale more than anything. Doesn’t even have to work very well as long as it makes the enemy run. The key word of “horrifyingly large” is “horrifying”.
And it doesn’t work very well on a physical basis, does it? It takes way too long to get the thing swinging into a proper back-the-fuck-off mode. And when it hits the dirt WHAM it keeps the Witch King busy long enough to give Eowyn a moment to recover.
The Witch King relied just a little too much on his usual terror tactics when he made that weapon. Also, you know, he didn’t think any man could kill him.
(He really should have thought about how prophecies tend to be nitpicky with their wording.)
Hell, for all we know the flail is actually a cheap cast-iron prop, because the guy doesn’t think anyone actually wants to try getting past it, because he doesn’t think anyone is insane enough to actually get near him, because he doesn’t think anyone would waste their time. Even if his weapon WAS made to withstand battle, the guy acts like any bully who relies on the fear of force: he has trouble dealing with someone that won’t back down.
(Or two someones. Goddamn hobbits.)
If you look at the way he fights Eowyn, he’s not being very efficient or clever. He tries to make his incredibly valuable mount do all the work, wastes it, tosses his flail around a lot instead of using it as a distraction from his sword, spins around like he’s showboating and EXPOSES HIS BACK TO HIS OPPONENT, finally gets in a lucky strike, grabs Eowyn by the throat and taunts her instead of just using the damn sword, never bothers to check his six o’clock, never even thinks of it, gets a knife in the knee from behind, kneels there in front of his opponent and doesn’t keep fighting because he doesn’t think he can die, gets stabbed right in the face. Way to go, buddy. Wonderful performance there.
Everything he does there looks like it’s for intimidation. He has no idea how to actually fight. As soon as Eowyn hits the neck of the Fell Beast, he hesitates, because this twerp with the catapult wheel isn’t running away like people are supposed to be running away from him. He’s probably used to hitting people who are running away.
So he’s like — Shit shit shit what do I do, uh…the prop flail! That will work! That looks scary! Woosh! Woosh! Wham! Yeah! It worked! Alright now if I scare him away real good then he won’t bother me anymore OW JEEZ WHAT WAS THAT. Dammit. Alright. I guess if I tell him he’s wasting his time he’ll move on wait it’s a she. Dammit. Now was Glorfindel being general with his ‘not by the hand of man shall he fall’ bit or was he being specific OH GOD HE WAS BEING SPECIFIC.
The guy relied way too much on intimidation and that was his downfall. The very prophecy that he thought would protect him instead gave Eowyn the courage to overcome his terror, and that was the real shield all along.
So the fearsome flail of the Witch-King of Angmar is basically the battlefield equivalent of Spartan Diplomacy.
I think (between helpless paroxysms of joy at reading this series and others on your blog), that the troll’s hammer is actually a repurposed anvil– that’s the only explanation I can think of (besides ‘wild concept art’) for the placement of the horn on the back. It’d have to have been a very weirdly proportioned jeweler’s anvil of some kind with a teeny-tiny face, but there are some pretty weird historical anvil shapes out there. It would still definitely be a liability on the backswing though.
I kinda figured that was an anvil horn, but — having to jury-rig a club out of an old anvil makes Sauron’s army look like it’s desperate for resources. And they are certainly not desperate for resources. They can afford to arm a troll with a proper club. So why would they bother with the anvil?
But they are desperate for resources! Mordor, at least in the North, is a ravaged wasteland that’s been over-mined and depleted of all useable resources at this point, as seen by Sam and Frodo (rotk 245-246, probably one of my favorite passages in the book because it talks about where and how Mordor is growing the food to supply its army). Anvils don’t last forever, but a big lump of iron is a big lump of iron; to me it doesn’t seem too out of character for the army of Mordor to repurpose salvaged or looted gear. In any case, as an artistic choice by the WETA team, it’s just a neat detail that’s making us ask questions like “oh, why would they reuse an anvil?” in the first place, which I figure is just good use of storytelling in design. 🙂
Mordor is a desolate wasteland because it’s been heavily mined. And Sauron is on top of a vast empire. Iron is probably the last thing his armies are short of.
Coming back to this much later…
Trolls are sapient. It’s unclear whether they’re quite as smart as humans, but they’re still in some sense “people” who can make decisions and have preferences.
Maybe this particular troll just really wanted a hammer that had a literal anvil for a head, because the idea of hitting things with a damn anvil was just that funny. And when you’re the kind of monster that’s strong enough to swing an anvil on a fencepost and call it a warhammer… Well, the Witch-King of Angmar took one look at that requisition form and was all like “you know what, you do you, buddy.”
Nunchaku got their start as grain flails too.
And yet more belated proofreading corrections (boldface emphasis):
too much important to place on words -> too much importance to place on words
trolls are twice as toll as men and orcs -> trolls are twice as tall as men and orcs
until they either the Gondorians -> until either the Gondorians (delete they)
photo cation: prop shield shed does not grab -> prop shield she does not grab
Moreover, at Sturtevant and others -> Moreover, as Sturtevant and others
Just found this blog and it’s a lot of fun. I know this post is over a year old, but I love talking sources.
While Arrian might be the BEST source for the battle of Hydaspes, that doesn’t necessarily make him a GOOD source for that same battle.
Arrian is, to put it lightly, And Alexanderphile and spends a lot of time making alexander look much better. Especially for relying on detailed accounts of battles, I don’t like sources written almost 4 centuries after the fact. This isn’t a guy who saw what happened, or even talking to people who saw what happened. This is a guy writing based off of a like of biographical works of the leaders of the time, which have not been rediscovered yet.
A thucydides or polybius Arrian is not.
On the other hand, elephantine cohesion and discipline leaves much to be desired, compared to Saruman’s trolls. (What with trolls being able to speak Middle English or whatever you call the language everyone on Middle Earth speaks.)
The ease with which Cloud Strife handles his ridiculous weapon is probably closer to historical swordplay than anything a typical actor can do with the heavier prop swords. Well, some of the time—I doubt any knight could twirl a longsword that casually.
Sorry . . . who’s “Cloud Strife”?
Cloud Strife is the main protagonist in Final Fantasy VII video game and various related games. He appears to be a normal sized human but fights with a ridiculously huge sword, around 6 feet long and a foot and a half wide. He can also jump more than his own height in combat maneuvers.
Cloud Strife wiki link.
I have read several of your posts this year, and have really enjoyed getting an expert historian’s view on various topics. Being able to dispel common mistaken fantasy tropes is something that always catches my attention, especially since I find real medieval history so fascinating and yet know very little about it. Now on to my non-expert critique!
Many comments have addressed your (possibly poor) assumptions about the strength of trolls, so I’ll leave that to those comments. What I will address is your statement that most D&D Clerics have flails. I find this very interesting, as I have never encountered a Cleric with a flail (at least, not that I recall). In fact, in 5e Clerics are not even proficient with flails unless they pick a few specific subclasses. What I have seen as the typical Cleric weapons were either a mace or a hammer.
Another interesting aspect of flails is that in a lot of popular culture they seem to typically be the weapon of “the big evil guy” or at least not a normal weapon of the good guys or a typical warrior.
I’d love for my anecdotal evidence to be proved mistaken with some interesting examples. Always looking out for more cool examples of non-standard fantasy weapons (looking at you swords and axes) being used!
From what I understand, RL medieval priests were in a bit of a bind, because on one hand, there was a genuine problem of bandits and raiders trying to hurt them and their congregation, but on the other hand, christianity forbade violence.
So what happened was some mix of either genuinely trying to employ the least harmful form of violence they could, or trying to lawyer their way around God by using things that either weren’t nominally weapons, or which you might be able to get away with using without, supposedly, spilling blood. So this meant staves and farmer’s flails and nets, and really anything you could hope to incapacitate people with without actually hurting them (think of it like Batman’s whole attitude, except with a lot more mistakes). Part of this also came from how medical science was ultra primitive, and people didn’t understand how much harm “knocking someone out” does. Back then it probably seemed pretty harmless – certainly the attitude amongst historical boxers, for one.
This was much more of a thing with village parsons and common priests, and less of a thing in the “high church”. Probably a very realistic example of this is most depictions of Friar Tuck. Someone who feels morally obligated to protect people (the sin of inaction) but also feels very morally conflicted about actually killing anyone.
Of course, there were also actual knightly orders of monks, like the Knights Hospitaler, and that’s likely where the whole business of “lawyering your way around God” came in, because at that point, you’re genuinely losing any plausible deniability about being warriors; there were definitely some groups that tried to wield blunt maces/clubs and such as an extension of all the other stuff I mentioned, but it was really awkward cognitive-dissonance territory to be in. Some of these orders just washed away the cognitive dissonance with deference to authority (hey, the pope said the crusades are okay, so he probably knows more than me), but even in spite of that you had some amount of influence.
The result of this is that this has bled into modern depictions of priests in role playing games. It’s a little whack there because it’s extremely based on the specific religion’s doctrine – it makes little to no sense outside of specific creeds of nonviolence, like christianity and buddhism, but the original D&D stuff was massively eurocentric, so it makes sense why they did it. I’m not enough of a D&D geek to know if they’ve gotten past this, but it would make a lot of sense for D&D to completely redesign what a “Cleric” works like, based on the religion the cleric is actually supposed to be following in-game.
St. George was a member of the Praetorian Guard for Diocletian. I don’t think there is any cognitive dissonance here.
At least as much as I’ve encountered the trope, it’s purpose is to restrict what weapons a cleric can wield, making the rare exceptions that much more desirable to obtain. For example in one MMORPG a Dwarven Hammer was usually unobtainable until you had reached a high level; giving one as a present to a low-level cleric would allow them to level up far faster than they otherwise would.
Speaking as a SCAdian . . . it’s actually really, really hard to break a decent shield wall. In fact, one of the tests of a shield wall is to have a fully armoured fighter, ca. 120kg total weight, jump at it. If he bounces off, it’s a decent shield wall, if he crashes through, y’all need more training. And that’s for a thin wall, basically just one line.
Holding a troll, especially an armoured one able to ignore a lot of the pointy things coming its way would be harder, but not impossible.
If only they had data on the no-firearms Sino Indian clashes up in the Himalayas. The best representation of ancient close combat tactics we have.
“… the way[the fell beast] casually ragdolls Théoden and Snowmane both at once strikes me as unlikely. The muscles in that creature’s relatively thin neck would need not only to move Théoden (something like the same 110kg armored man we calculated above), but also a roughly 800kg destrier (Snowmane) and probably 10-15kg of tack and horse armor – altogether, about a ton. I do not think that creature’s neck looks muscular enough to casually lift a 1-ton object.”
I know this is a long time after the fair, but: after seeing a few minutes’ truly terrifying footage in a David Attenborough programme of a pair of male giraffes fighting by whacking each other with their absurdly slender necks – relatively far thinner than the beast’s – where the fight culminates in a complete knockout blow, I’m less ready to rule the possibility out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKVYAqtKBVI
BTW: the Witch-king isn’t the only monarch who rides a fell beast: so does HM the Queen! https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/106/590x/secondary/queen-pony-853869.jpg
Hopefully, this will let me post a link on my second comment: https://alphacentauri2.info/BU%20Junk/Vreenak-fake-flail2.jpg
Neat. Now I wonder if I cant get the image to display in a comment:
https://alphacentauri2.info/BU%20Junk/Vreenak-fake-flail2.jpg
[img]https://alphacentauri2.info/BU%20Junk/Vreenak-fake-flail2.jpg[/img]
Too bad.
But it definitely needed an animated gif version:
https://alphacentauri2.info/BU%20Junk/Vreenak-fake-flail.gif
I’m going to go ahead and defend that flail. So sue me 🙂
I think this is where the film translates the book well – not in the actual mechanics, but in what the Witch King is. Over and over – as you’ve written in this series – it’s noted that the Nazgul’s power lies in their ability to inspire fear and terror. This is, in fact, the main power that they bring to bear.
So that nutcase flail is exactly fitting, especially if you assume it’s magical. The point isn’t to be practical but to inspire terror. Absolutely no one in Sauron’s army, no orc or troll, is going to start something with someone carrying that thing around. So it’s true to the spirit of the thing.
The only mechanical beef I’ll mention is that such a mass wouldn’t break Eowyn’s arm, but tear it straight off.
The energy required to lift a thing is equal to its potential energy after being lifted, which is equal to it’s mass, times the gravitational constant, times its height, in this case 6,576J (110kg * 9.8m/s^s * 6.1m)
If you’ll pardon my own Unmitigated Pedantry, no it’s not. The 9.81 m/s² is gravitational acceleration, normally notarized with a lowercase “g” in equations.
The gravitational constant (indicated by uppercase “G”) is quite different. For a start, it’s a universal constant, while gravitational acceleration varies depending on the distribution of mass. Even on the surface of the Earth the “gravity” an object experiences varies minutely from place to place due to the planet not being a perfect sphere with a symmetrical distribution of density.
Also, I find the argument a bit backwards. Clearly the War Troll is strong enough to punt an armoured human twenty feet into the air SINCE WE SEE IT DO THAT. That would require the troll to impart roughly 11 m/s of vertical velocity to the unfortunate Gondorian soldier, or about 24.5 mph in Imperial measurements. Trolls appear to be able to move about as fast as a human, albeit more clumsily, so if we assume the troll’s 18 times more massive than a human warrior (twice as tall, thrice as wide, thrice as thick) and can sprint at, say 12.25 mph or a nice round half of that figure, just to make the maths convenient (a healthy human can run at 10 to 15 mph so I don’t think that’s impossible), that means the troll has imparted 2/18th or the momentum and 4/18th the kinetic energy it eould generate to move its whole body at that speed. Since the troll is just whacking the poor sod up in the air using the strength of its upper body, you’d expect the amount of force and energy it applies to be considerably less than it creates when it uses both legs to move (although a troll’s legs are smaller in proportion to its arms than a humans, so it might be a higher ratio than a more humanoid opponent like Sauron or the Witch King would produce). Plus, of course, it’s got the advantage of leverage since it’s using a tool (its mace) to increase the moment of the limb that’s hoisting the Gondorian.
So I’m thinking it’s possible for a 12-foot tall hulking humanoid to perform that feat assuming such a creature was biomechanically viable (which seems unlikely due to restrictions of its skeletal and circulatory system, but that’s another matter).
However, that’s assuming that a troll is made of the same flesh and blood as an ape or hominid. Which is obviously not the case, since the last time I checked primates do not turn to stone when exposed to sunlight.
Actually, that makes me wonder: is the flesh of trolls as dense as rock? If not, a sunlight-petrified troll would have to turn into very light pumice-like stone with the density of flesh and bone that would quickly erode away. If trolls are as heavy as normal stone they’d mass several times as much as a human, and a 12-foot War Troll might weight 36 to 45 as much as the Gondorian infantry it’s facing.
For a trollish feat of strength that seems implausible, I find them pushing those Siege Towers far more problematic. It’s roughly equivalent to me and a few mates turning a bungalow on its end, filling it with people, and rolling or sliding the whole thing across a field. Even if we were somehow strong enough to do so, I suspect the soil would be way too weak to resist the ground pressure and friction of our four or five pairs of feet propelling the tower. We’d just be burying our legs in the earth and kicking dust behind us.
We don’t get a clear look at the towers’ undercarriage in the film: are they on rollers, wheels, or just sliding the thing across the ground? I’m guessing they are wheeled like the catapults or Grond, but the wheels on those look very crude. I suspect their performance would be appallingly, especially on bare earth. I’m surprised you don’t see all those massive siege engines immediately sink axle-deep into the ground and get stuck in place.