Hey folks! Fireside this week! I was hoping to have a post on Roman infantry tactics this week, in particular the oddity of the Romans not using spear-and-shield infantry (much), but it isn’t ready yet and other things have me quite busy, so fireside it is. Fortunately, we have Ridley Scott to complain about.
For this week’s musing, I want to comment at least briefly on dust-up surrounding Ridley Scott’s latest film, Napoleon and historians. As was evidently heavily reported, Ridley Scott responded to historians doing critiques of the film’s historical accuracy by telling them to ‘get a life‘ and suggesting that the earliest works on Napoleon were the most accurate and that subsequent historians have just progressively gotten more wrong.
I think there are two questions to untangle here: is the film accurate and does it matter? Now I haven’t yet seen the film, I’ve only seen the trailer. But my response to the trailer seems to have been basically every historian’s response to the trailer: Napoleon shows up at all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things he didn’t do. In particular, the battle scenes I’ve seen in the trailer and other snippets bear functionally no relationship to either Napoleonic warfare in general or the Battle of Austerlitz in particular (the bit with large numbers of soldiers drowning in a frozen lake was disconfirmed at the time; the lake was drained and few remains were found).
All of this is not a huge shock. All of Ridley Scott’s historical movies take huge liberties with their source material. Sometimes that’s in the service of a still interesting meditation on the past (Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel), sometimes in service of just a fun movie (Gladiator). Ridley Scott, in particular, has never mastered how basically any historical battle was fought and all of the battle scenes in his movies that I’ve seen are effectively nonsense (including Gladiator, which bears functionally no relationship to how Roman armies actually fought open field battles). Cool looking nonsense, but nonsense. Heck, Gladiator‘s entire plot is basically nonsense with some characters sharing historical names and very little else with their actual historical counterparts (the idea of Marcus Aurelius aiming to restore the republic in 180 is pretty silly).
So it isn’t a surprise that Ridley Scott’s grasp on Napoleonic warfare is about at the level of a not particularly motivated undergraduate student or that he has finessed or altered major historical details to make a better story. Its Ridley Scott, that’s what he does. Sometimes it works great (Kingdom of Heaven), sometimes it works poorly (Exodus: Gods and Kings).
Does it matter?
Unsurprisingly, I think that Ridley Scott is being more than a bit silly with his retorts to historians who are using his film as an opportunity to teach about the past. That’s what we do. Frankly, I find the defensiveness of ‘get a life’ more than a bit surprising, as I assumed Ridley Scott knew he didn’t have much of a grasp on the history and was OK with that (or better yet, did have a grasp on it, but chose to alter it; I do not get this sense from his commentary), but it rather seems like he thinks he does know and is now very upset with the D+ he got on his exam and has decided to blame his ‘nitpicky’ professor instead of his not having done the reading.
That said, when it comes to criticism (in the sense of ‘saying things are wrong,’ rather than in the sense of ‘critical analysis’), I think there is a distinction to make. In the past I’ve framed this as the degree to which works ‘make the claim‘ to some kind of historical validity. It might be a fun exercise to talk about the armor in, say, Dungeons and Dragons or The Elder Scrolls and we might even learn something doing that, but neither of those works is making any claim to historical accuracy or rootedness. And so the tenor of the discussion is quite different.
But here I think Ridley Scott is to a significant degree making the claim. Of the battles, Ridley Scott says, “It’s amazing because you’re actually reconstructing the real thing” and that he “started to think like Napoleon,” which is once again both clearly making that claim (‘the real thing’) and also just a remarkable thing to say given how much of a mess his battle scenes generally are. He also comments that “the scale of everything is so massive…I’d have 300 men and a hundred horses and 11 cameras in the field” and while that’s far more cameras than were on any Napoleonic battlefield, that’s just not a statement which suggests that Ridley Scott is even very aware of other achievements in recreating historical battles. Gettysburg (1993) had something on the order of five thousand reenactors on the field for filming and it is by no means the largest such effort! Spartacus (1967) had a cast of eight thousand Spanish soldiers to play the Roman legions.
So while I do not know if Napoleon is a good movie or not – I haven’t seen it yet – it seems pretty clear to me that Ridley Scott did make the claim for some of its fundamental historicity and the response of historians has been to reject that claim. And I think it’s actually quite fair to also skewer the apparent whiny arrogance of Scott making that claim baselessly and then responding petulantly when historians handed him that ‘D+, please come see me after class.’ If you want to make historical fiction, by all means do – Scott is very good at it! – but do not be upset if historians call it what it is.
(And you thought I wasn’t going to give you at least one cat picture?)
On to Recommendations:
First, friend and colleague Mary Elizabeth Walters, assistant professor at the Air Command and Staff College had a really good interview/podcast on the implications and difficulty of urban warfare. The discussion is clearly tilted for implications in Gaza which we’re seeing unfold now but is a generally useful expert’s case on urban warfare.
On the current situation for universities, I had planned to link to a working paper posted by University of Chicago Classics professor Clifford Ando, but he seems to have pulled that down, announcing that the paper will be appearing soon in revised form at the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the meantime, here is a Chicago Maroon article covering some of the points in his paper, where he notes that the University of Chicago’s debt level is rapidly increasing despite the university’s high tuition and considerable funding, with the funds plowed into a mix of expensive programs and vanity projects for administrators (including $3m to renovate the president’s residence). It seems fairly clear to me at this point that the professional administrators brought in to ‘run universities like a business’ have generally failed their institutions. UChicago is a private institution, but the same thing is going on at public universities and it is long past time that taxpayers demanded some accounting.
Speaking of which, I should also flag this Wall Street Journal article on wild overspending by universities and their unsustainable financial models from August. As the article notes, university spending on things other than the core education mission, including athletics and new construction (especially on student amenities) has tended to be profoundly profligate, backstopped by rapidly rising tuition and debt.
Over at Pasts Imperfect, University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond has an interesting piece on incorporating AI into her assignments by having students fact-check the results ChatGPT spits out at them. I think that’s a useful response for a certain kind of assignment and know of others who have done the same; I don’t think that makes ChatGPT useful, but I think it is a good approach for assignments otherwise vulnerable to ChatGPT as a method of limiting harm. Put another way: it is a good assignment for what I am still unconvinced is a good technology.
And finally, over at Peopling the Past, they have a short blog with Macquarie University’s Danijel Džino on the Illyrians, the peoples of the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The Illyrians, who do not write to us, are one of those peoples who appear primarily in the writing of the Greeks and Romans (and in material culture), and so about whom we are less well informed than we might like, but Džino essay here is a useful entry-point for the beginner trying to get a sense of who these people were, where they were and how they interacted with the broader Mediterranean.
Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I was going to save this until after we discussed the emergence of Rome’s rather unique tactical system, but now is as good a time as any, I’m going to recommend Jeremy Armstrong’s War and Society in Early Rome: From Warlords to Generals (2016). In this book, Armstrong presents an up-to-date vision of what we know about Roman warfare before the evidence of the Middle Republic (Polybius and books 21-45 of Livy) gives us some relatively reliable foundations on which to rest our feet.
So the great value Armstrong provides here is in putting together the archaeological evidence with the literary sources and tracing out what we can know about Rome’s warfare down to roughly 338 B.C. It’s a tricky task: While we have literary sources that claim to document this period (Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, inter alia), they write much later and so can be very difficult to use, especially for the non-specialist. Archaeological evidence can help, but it can be tricky to interpret and cannot answer all of our questions. Compounding this is the tendency of the literary sources we have (and as a result, also of some modern historians) to assume a far more centralized, state-organization to early Roman warfare – something rather a lot more like the organization we see in the third and second century (and in our societies today). But the archaeological evidence (and bits in the literary evidence) suggests quite strongly that early Roman warfare probably wasn’t centralized like this.
In particular, Armstrong guides the reader through how the aristocratic gens-based (read: clan-based) warfare of the sixth century gave way first to the incorporation of a broader range of non-aristocratic Roman in the fifth century and finally to a fully state-centralized Roman army, based around a new set of equipment – what will becomes the distinctive Roman equipment package of the pilum, scutum, Montefortino helmet and so on – in the fourth century.
The book benefits greatly from Armstrong’s clear and straight-forward writing, which makes it very readable even for non-specialists. I have no idea how he managed to convince Cambridge University Press to give him footnotes (not endnotes, footnotes) but whatever magic was used it is most welcome here as it allows the reader to follow the evidence through the notes as they read the text. There are a few black-and-white illustrations, including some very useful line-art drawings of period artwork, though one wishes for a bit more. The maps are excellent, grouped neatly at the beginning of the text and extremely useful. Overall, this is a book intended to move the scholarly consensus (it is the book-version of Armstrong’s PhD thesis), but one which is, I think, accessible to a general audience who I imagine will find it quite interesting. A solid recommendation for those looking to get a sense of what the Roman army was like before there was a singular Roman army in the way we see it later.
What a great photo! Funny — my wife once did the same thing, she dressed up like one of the history professors she worked for (faculty support, University of Texas at Austin) for Halloween at work. That was a big hit! He was also a Roman history specialist (Dr. Gwyn Morgan, in case you’ve heard of him, but this was about 20 years ago). He had a major beef against Michael Grant and his books, but I’ve forgotten why, was it professional disagreement or just jealousy over a popular historian.
I sure wish Kubrick had made his Napoleon film. I’ve never been a fan of Scott’s historical work. I disliked Gladiator quite a bit, I couldn’t even sit thru the Crusades movie, and I dread this Napoleon.
Black Hawk Down did seem to match somewhat closely (Art least from reading the book), though that’s done as a modern war movie, so different style.
The theatre cut of *The Kingdom of Heaven* is pretty dire. I have been informed that the director’s cut is much better, and it’s on my list of things to get around to.
With Kingdom of Heaven it helps to forget every single thing you know about the Crusades and watch it as a cool AU fantasy
It’s probably better than Oliver Stone’s “Alexander”, wow, what a stinkeroo that was.
What’s so wrong about Kingdom of Heaven? Other than the protagonist being a nobleman in actual history as opposed to a bastard blacksmith, I mean.
I’m not a historian and most of my knowledge of the crusades comes from pop history and Age of Empires 2.
Also, I definitely recommend the Director’s Cut. It’s an entirely different movie (although it’s also quite long)
Everyone’s positions are jumbled up. Sibylla didn’t hate Guy de Lusignan, she was crazy about him. She was only allowed to ascend to the throne if she divorced him, after which she was allowed to pick her husband. Unfortunately, she picked Guy again. Tiberias and Balian were trying to raise Balian’s stepdaughter (he was married to the widow Baldwin and Sibylla’s father, a Komnene princess of Byzantium) and Sibylla’s half-sister, Isabella (who doesn’t exist in the film), to the throne and only ended their rebellion when Saladin invaded.
Balian was present at the Battle of Hattin and was captured, then paroled. When he reached Jerusalem, he negotiated a release from his parole to lead the defense of the city.
Reynald de Chatillon never killed Saladin’s sister, though the depiction of his death is pretty accurate.
The portrayal of religion is not consistent with 12th century Christians at all. Unsurprisingly, it is very consistent with how Hollywood screenwriters treated religion around 2005.
Still an absolute 10/10 movie.
I did read most of the Anthony Burgess book “Napoleon Symphony” that he was going to base this movie on and let’s just say Kubrick made the right call in not adapting that impenetrable book of ramblings
Thanks especially for including that precious picture of your students dressing up in your professorial attire–may they be excellent pedants themselves one day!–and for this unsurprising yet choice comment: “I think that Ridley Scott is being more than a bit silly with his retorts to historians who are using his film as an opportunity to teach about the past. That’s what we do.”
I’ve forgotten how many Soviet soldiers were made available to Sergei Bondarchuk to film his War and Peace or his Waterloo, but it was a very considerable number — I think way more than Spaniards in Spartacus, even.
Indeed. No director will ever again have access to an actual brigade of actual cavalry, more’s the pity.
The largest Hollywood productions have the budget to hire a brigade of extras, and the CGI to appear to have several times as many. The Lord of the Rings trilogy shows how to pull this off convincingly.
Unfortunately, a brigade’s worth of extras needs an actual command structure and logistics group to manage. A borrowed army comes with both, but it takes an exceptional film producer and assistants to get that many people doing the right things on camera. Add the logistics costs to the extras’ pay and it works out to a few million dollars per day of filming, plus an additional few million dollars’ fixed costs.
Fun fact: when the US dissolved its cavalry units, it sold off its horses. Hollywood bought a lot. So if you want to see actual cavalry horses in a movie, you need to look at the timing.
The US “Taras Bulba” in 1962 had a lot of horsemen, and used members of the Argentinian army, but I think some of the horsemen were independent gauchos? But it’s still rather spectacular:
Borodino on that movie used 12,000. Which is also bonkers.
Bondarchuk, in an interview, said that he has 12,000 soldiers for the filming of Borodino.
Talking of films with large casts, the 1970 Waterloo had (according to Wikipedia) 15,000 extras.
I have NEVER understood why people use endnotes instead of footnotes, or why it seems to be such a common publishing practice. It is absolutely maddening to flip through towards the end and trying to keep my place when I want to chase down some detail and then trying to find my way back. Footnote, you just look down, look back up. Is there anything behind the continued existence of this writing practice besides mere inertia?
I’m guessing it’s just a huge pain to paginate footnotes properly, especially when you’re publishing in multiple formats. Especially with long footnotes and having to worry that the footnote will take up so much space it pushes the thing it’s a footnote for onto the next page, thus causing no end of confusion whichever way you resolve it.
Also, many publishers claim that readers don’t buy/read books with footnotes.
So they put them at the end where the reader will only stumble upon (and ignore) them when he/she has already bought and read the book.
I agree, though, that footnotes are far better.
As a reader, I’d like to decide myself if I want to read or ignore them, at exactly the point where they are relevant.
Tell that to fans of Terry Pratchett and Susanna Clarke.
I hope you’re not planning to displace Ollie with a baby 😁
I love footnotes
In the e-books I read, footnotes and endnotes are functionally identical – I have to tap on the link to get whisked away to the relevant note, regardless of whether it was supposed to be a footnote or an end note.
The main difference seems to be that footnotes are inserted at the end of chapter, and endnotes at the end of book
That’s the proper and different use of footnotes vs endnotes for me:
End notes should be bare citations “p314, study of pi”
Foot notes should be side commentary “At this point the use of 3 as the approximation of pi was rampant, see p 314 of the study of pi”
For books that are aimed at both an academic and a popular audience, endnotes mean that the popular audience can completely ignore them, which is much harder to do for footnotes.
Publisher’s firmly believe that the (general) book buying public detest footnotes. Which leads to the latest trend — un-numbered endnotes. Instead of those “intrusive” little superscript numbers in the main text, the endnotes provide the page number and a short portion of the text, then the citation — eg “page 439, “many soldiers…at Austerlitz” Author, Book (publisher, year) p such-and-such”
For myself, I decry this sentiment — the best jokes are always
in the footnotes/endnotes.
> Publisher’s firmly believe that the (general) book buying public detest footnotes.
Terry Pratchett, David Foster Wallace, and Susannah Clarke are making their surprised faces.
Two of those authors of fiction have footnotes that have footnotes…
Randall Munroe (also known from XKCD.com) too
For an electronic version footnotes are great.
For a paper version though, footnotes are generally in a much smaller font size. This, combined often with italics for book titles, etc. can make them a lot harder to read – particularly for older readers.
It doesn’t help when the footnotes are more than a reference. I’ve seen the occasional footnote take up half a page – in that smaller font.
I just use 2 bookmarks?
Whenever people claim that they know how Napoleon/an infantryman in the trenches of Ypres/a soldier storming the beaches of Normandy must have felt because they have made a movie, watched a movie or taken place in a weekend re-enactment, I want to take away all their technology, modern clothing and food and throw them into the line of fire. Preferably for several weeks. Without a shower. And, the ultimate punishment for some of them, without anyone taking a photo of them.
I worked as a military extra in the “Two for Texas” TV movie (filmed in 1997), both as a Texian volunteer and Mexican soldier, and it was an educational experience. Professional reenactors played officers and NCOs and had the responsibility of “commanding” us and taking direction from the filmmakers. We were taught some period drill and how to safely handle and fire black powder muskets (with no charges, and only a fraction of the powder that would have been used in reality). We worked long days, in ill-fitting uniforms, outdoors in all weathers and conditions, and most of the day was taken up in waiting around. The authentic tedium of soldiering! It was kinda like the real thing in those ways, except nobody was firing live rounds at us, the food was regular and decent quality, if we got injured or sick or just fed up we could drop out (that occurred regularly), and at the end of the work day we got to go home to nice soft beds!
So, in effect, it was not authentic at all.
I’m not sure what you infer. Are you just being snarky? I laid it all out as plain as could be. It had elements of actual 19th century military experience while being overlaid with 20th century illusion and modernity. This was educational and engaging at all those levels. I might have also added that while we were not paid that much, it was still better than an 19th century volunteer or soldier would have received. The contrasts were what was instructive. Nobody thought they were living in the past.
I can understand what homeless people feel like, because I once missed the last train in Hamburg and had to spend the night at the train station.
Yeah, he seems to be needlessly snarky lol.
for firearms, the term “charge” is short for “powder charge.” You were not provided with “shot,” but were provided with a “weak charge” or a “blank charge”
I am curious if you loaded powder and wad, or just powder. The wad holds the powder in (and would have given something for you to ram), but it itself a dangerous projectile even with blank charges at short range.
Just powder, from paper cartridges, down the spout and a bit for the firing pan. It looked realistic on camera. Even the cannons were just firing a quarter of what would have been loaded had shot been used. Apologies if my terms were unclear.
There were shots during the San Jacinto battle sequence where the extras went into “Charge!” mode before the artillery were cleared , and they went into the fire (which might have scorched them). When recalled, the assistant directors tore strips off them for unsafe behavior. But when I look at the film now, I see that THIS was the take that was used, because it looked so “dramatic”!
4 years after Brandon Lee’s death was long enough for the hardnosed attitude towards prop firearms safety to have taken hold
I’ve seen “Tropic Thunder” cited as one of the best war movies ever made for precisely this reason — it’s not a movie about war as such, it’s a movie about the ludicrous self-importance and unwarranted sense of “gritty” “realism” in big-budget Hollywood war movies and the people who make them, a premise Ben Stiller described as inspired by his experiences during an early-career bit role in Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun.”
Oh yes, “Tropic Thunder”, that was a great movie!
I remember seeing it in a cinema in Harlem. Two friends of mine and me were the only white folks in the audience, and it was hilarious when the movie got to the race issue.
Along the same line of thought, it always drives me crazy when people call a movie “authentic” without ever having been near the situation or time depicted in the film.
A few years ago, I was in Ypres, and it was the time of the movie “1917”. Everyone who had watched it told me how “authentic” it was. This came from 30- or 40-year olds who had no personal experience of World War I, of trench warfare, and often no other experience at all besides having watched a ton of other movies.
OK, this would seem to imply that without direct personal experience, no one can ever understand what historical events were like? If you weren’t there, you can never understand it? I cannot accept that logic. Why bother to study history at all by that thinking? It’s all in the past, the past cannot be recreated, so forget about it? You can do better than this.
Of course we can study history. (I am a history student myself: https://andreasmoser.blog/2017/10/28/history-hagen/ ) And I never advised nobody to forget about nothing.
But that must not lead us to pretend that we can “feel” the history.
Just like psychologists admit that they don’t really understand what a depression feels like, yet they can still try to treat it.
Or a fireman can rescue people from burning buildings, yet he won’t really know what it feels like to wake up in a room full of smoke, with your child in the next room.
And the cancer surgeon may be able to rescue some of her patients, but she won’t be able to understand what’s it like to receive the news of having stomach cancer.
If these people are professional, they would never claim to know what their clients/patients go through. I am a lawyer and even when I help a client through a hotly contested custody battle and am by his side at all steps, I would never pretend that I can feel what it’s like to have access to one’s daughter denied by the mother.
OK, this would seem to imply that without direct personal experience, no one can ever understand what historical events were like? If you weren’t there, you can never understand it? I cannot accept that logic. Why bother to study history at all by that thinking? It’s all in the past, the past cannot be recreated, so forget about it? You can do better than this.
I don’t think we need to go that far. We might not be able to fully understand what something is like without taking part ourself, but we can read accounts by people who did take part, and get some idea that way. On the other hand, movies and TV shows are primarily about entertainment rather than accuracy, so if your idea of what WW1 (or any war, for that matter) was like is based on those, then your sense of what’s “authentic” or not is likely to be off.
Well, there are people who have not had experiences yet writing about them in such a way that those who had said it was accurate.
But notice which way the judgment went: those who knew first-hand could make it.
Heck, it is important to recognise that even with direct personal experience, we aren’t 100% sure what historical events were like! We only have one set of eyes and cannot be in many places at once, after all.
Fun fact, Tropic Thunder’s antagonists of Mandarin speaking drug runners in the Laos/Burma borderlands is actually accurate.
There are several armed groups in Burma who are not members of the majority Bamar ethnic group and they fund their activities via drug production. At first, heroin, but increasingly methamphetamines’.
Groups like the Wa State Army would legitimately be speaking Mandarin, processing drugs, and be armed like the people in the movie and be in the right location.
Absolutely, the movie’s foregrounding of Golden Triangle drug kingpins is an excellent touch, not just because of the realism per se but because of how well it fits the movie’s broader theme of pouring cold water over Hollywood-style cartoon imagery of the modern Western way of war, particularly in southeast Asia: not brave uniformed GIs heroically vanquishing hordes of snarling comic-book mooks face-to-face on an open battlefield, but covert destabilization ops by intel agency cutouts using narcotics trafficking to funnel off-the-books revenue to gangster proxy thugs, with the resulting bloodshed and/or drug epidemics subsequently blowing back onto Westerners oblivious of the extent to which they’re catching strays from the geopolitical shenanigans of their own government.
I’m unclear to what extent Stiller or any of the other filmmakers intended for the political message to be quite so incisive and subversive, but either way it works brilliantly.
Well, they also speak their native language (related to some small tribal languages of northeast India and more distantly to Vietnamese and Cambodian) but you’re right that they do use Mandarin for inter-ethnic communication.
Interesting that you regard footnotes as being dark magic when dealing with academic publishing. I generally prefer evidence being in endnotes.
Though that said, I suppose it’s a partial move towards my preferred system – if it’s just a bare reference, put it in endnotes, but if it’s commentary of any sort, put it in footnotes. This seems profoundly obvious to me, but it’s not a system I see very often (and never in anything academic, to the point where I mentioned this to my cousin the IR professor, and she basically told me that it’d never happen). It makes me wonder if other people have other preferences somehow, and if so, what their reasons are.
We’re all different, I suppose. I would prefer the really long commentary (over a page?) to be in endnotes, and the rest in footnotes.
I have frequently thought that commentary that long should have been incorporated into the main text – or left off entirely. Otherwise I agreed with grandparent, additional material in the foot, references and sources at the end.
It’s really maddening to read a book that mixes the two at the end.
I agree. I have always believed strongly that footnotes should only give sources, plus where necessary bibliographical information or discussion on said sources. Everything else should either be incorporated into the test or omitted and left to some other article.
Sad to say, my strictures are far from universally accepted, depending on the discipline. Law review footnotes are among the worse offenders, surpassed only by certain deconstructionist literary critics who think it’s funny to have two discussions of equal length (and importance?), one in text and one in footnotes.
I occasionally amuse myself by reading Art. III appellate court decisions, and the use of footnotes to provide something something is something something…
When I’m reading a book like that, I’ll generally make a mental note of the next endnote with commentary, and flip back to the end when I get to that note number.
Not exactly an ideal reading experience, though.
I remember a textbook I had in college, the class was pre-Socratic philosophers and the text consisted of a Greek quote, a translation, and then a half page or more of footnotes discussing possible alternate translations. Eek! I don’t approve of burning books but for that one I would have made an exception!
I recall theology books where three quarters of the page was notes – in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and Italian (and the occasional Syriac, Armenian and other). They smelled lovely.
This. I hate flipping all the way back to follow a note, only to see that it was just a citation. I really wish that simple citations and substantive notes were kept entirely separate – don’t care if it’s foot-or-end, just so that if I see a little number at the end of a sentence, I immediately know if there might be more to read, or if it’s just a cite.
On footnotes, this reminded me of John Hodgson’s ~170 page footnote detailing his study of Hadrian’s wall, and identifying it as such(previously it was attributed to someone else?) I think i first read about this on Twitter and im unsure if the accuracy of the story
I’m currently reading an English-language edition of Epictetus, where the endnotes give context ranging from “Cf. Plato (Republic)” to multi-paragraph explanations, while the occasional footnote just says something about ambiguous Greek readings.
Given the proportions it was probably easier to format that way, but yeah it’s annoying having to flip back.
I had one professor who banned us from using footnotes or endnotes at all. Any citations were to be done in brackets, and anything else was to be incorporated into the main body of the essay.
That’s how biologists do things. (Probably how natural scientists in general do things, but I’m not familiar enough with academic publishing conventions in other fields of science to be sure.) Of course, we hardly ever write books.
That’s also common in at least some social sciences. Running short form citations, with full citations at the end of the chapter or article, and the very rare footnote reserved for substantive discussion.
As long as we’re talking about endnotes and footnotes (unsurprisingly I agree with everyone else here that footnotes are far better), a thing that annoys me about academic writing in many fields is that (foot/end)notes serve two different purposes: To supply references, or to add explanatory comments. As a casual reader from outside the field I only care about the latter, but the two aren’t distinguished in any way; this is particularly annoying with endnotes, for obvious reasons.
In mathematics, my own field, the two are separate; footnotes are for explanatory comments (and also not used that much), citations are in brackets (and are essentially always put at the end — separate from the footnotes). So the two are instantly distinguishable, and if like most readers you want the additional commentary but aren’t going to check most of the references, well, things are set up to make convenient exactly that way of reading things.
More fields should adopt this practice, IMO!
I wonder if you could use e.g. Roman numerals for citations and Arabic for commentary. Or vice-versa. As long as people were consistent…
“University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond has an interesting piece on incorporating AI into her assignments by having students fact-check the results ChatGPT spits out at them.”
Since I do most of my best work bouncing off of someone else, I’ve been playing with something like that for several months now. Using WordPress’ built in AI text generator to create an anime review, then going back and responding to the review paragraph by paragraph.
It hasn’t worked as well as I’d hope because the AI generator is so heckin’ inconsistent. One paragraph will be not bad, or at least not entirely out in left field… and then the next will be utter nonsense. “Not entirely in left field” is easy to work with, I’ve been doing it with people for a decade or so now. Utter nonsense is much less useful as a writing prompt.
I would just like to call attention to the screenwriters of these pictures. Scott doesn’t write (sometimes he gives ideas to his writers, a la Hitchcock), so although certain aspects of his movies can be attributed to him (e.g. how he stages a battle scene), others, less so (e.g. having Marcus Aurelius want to restore the Roman republic). Not to say that he doesn’t bear responsibility for a movie whose script he signs off on, but authorship in movies is complex.
In particular, Kingdom of Heaven was penned by a formidable screenwriter named William Monahan, who also wrote a very good unproduced screenplay about the Barbary Coast War called Tripoli. To whatever extend Kingdom of Heaven is a smarter movie than Gladiator, that’s got more to do with Monahan than with Scott. They both are well cast and often look terrific, which is all about Scott. (Gladiator was something of a mess on the writing side; very little of the script was finished when the project began, and Ridley Scott has said he mainly took on the project because he liked Gerome’s painting ‘Pollice Verso’). Most of Gladiator’s storyline seems to be a standard revenge drama cribbed from Ben-Hur (and before that, the Count of Monte Cristo).
The Last Duel was penned by the unlikely trio of Damon/Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, the writer/direction of indie dramas and comedies like Please Give, Lovely and Amazing, and Enough Said, and I suspect its Rashomon structure and subtle sexual politics are more their work than Scott’s, though I equally suspect Scott appreciated the qualities of what he was working with. (I think Duel is his best film in many years.)
Given that Napoleon scribe David Scarpa previously worked with Scott on All the Money in the World and will again on Gladiator 2, it seems likely that this was a more collaborative effort than e.g. Kingdom of Heaven, which – if it was anything like Tripoli – was probably pretty well finished by the time it landed on Scott’s desk.
“I suspect its Rashomon structure and subtle sexual politics are more their work than Scott’s”
I’m not sure I’d describe The Last Duel as “subtle” in its sexual politics. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.
A point of comparison in literature with Scott’s Napoleon is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I am not a military history buff and did not serve my country, but I doubt that Tolstoy’s battles were very good. I think he did have Russian soldiers drowning at Austerlitz. Even worse were his disquisitions on the role of individuals in history. But, those are minor defects as the real subjects of the novel are love, redemption, maturity, forgiveness, and Russian culture. For that it is immortal.
I haven’t read War and Peace, so I’m curious: what was Tolstoy’s normative take on the Napoleonic wars?
I ask because I’ve read some of his other stuff and he was *very* critical of other Russian wars, including the 1877 Russo-Turkish war and the Russian wars against the peoples of the Caucasus. (And if I remember right, in his last novel had some extremely critical and caustic mockery of the Russian military in general- that was the one he was eventually excommunicated for writing).
Tolstoy was very positive on the Russian national effort against Napoleon’s invasion. In a post-script, he noted that “everyone agrees” that the year [18]12 is a special moment. He also responded to criticism that the novel doesn’t say anything about serfdom (most of Kutuzov’s infantry was conscripted serfs). His riposte is that nobody was talking about serfdom ‘back then.’ Which isn’t entirely true, but to a considerable extent. Tolstoy is very high on Kutuzov, the only military figure in the epic to whom he ascribes agency. Which is somewhat ironic, because (i) Kutuzov got the top job because of his personal relationship with the Tsar’s court, and (ii) he declined to engage Napoleon a second time in front of Moscow after Borodino, because he knew that if he lost that time the Tsar would promptly can and replace him (as happened to his predecessor after the major Russian defeat at Smolensk).
Tolstoy claimed that he was meticulous about the military history in War and Peace, and he did try to be. He read widely in the historiography available at the time of writing, including many memoirs by Napoleon’s comrades/deputy commanders. But subsequent work showed that Tolstoy still go a number of things at least a bit off.
The Cambridge Companion to Literature series has a fine volume, The Cambridge to Tolstoy, which I highly recommend. Many excellent essays from a variety of authors; an especially enlightening essay on Tolstoy’s treatment of his women characters.
Tolstoy had served in the Russian army during the Crimean War, so he presumably knew what it felt like to be in a battle (particularly since warfare in the Crimea was still quite similar to Napoleonic warfare).
By all accounts Crimea was absolutely horrible for both sides.
It is so emblematic in British culture of a catastrophically badly run war that it can be quite a shock to learn that the Allies actually won, and that a big reason was that they were not nearly as catastrophically bad at running a war as Russia was.
And then of course for British strategic culture to spectacularly overlearn the resulting lessons and repeatedly press for logistically-nightmarish seaborne invasions of distant enemy-held peninsulas, resulting in some combination of quiet and ignominious failure, enormous and catastrophic failure, or nominal success that accomplishes little beyond a pointless waste of strategic resources.
I would be delighted to see some backing for the claim that the British actually thought “We should invade Italy, because Italy’s just like Crimea, and the Crimean War went really well”. Not holding my breath though!
I guess I have a different take on footnotes than most of you. My professional career was as a lawyer. As such I produced and consumed enormous quantities of heavily footnoted text*. (inline references are also common.) I came to detest it.
Lawyers tend to read legal texts in disconnected chunks, looking for the stray bits that address the issue that is on their minds not the one the author was worried about. The notes which are supposed to gather relevant cases and statutes are often more important than the main text.
OTOH, the US Supreme Court has had a nasty habit of sticking important pronouncement on legal rules in stray footnotes. That is a very bad habit.
When reading non-legal texts, I am just as happy to not have my attention distracted by footnotes. Indeed I prefer the system of end notes that does not use index numbers but relates the reference to the text by page number and a snippet. If you are really interested in the notes put a bookmark in the back so there is less effort flipping.
We should also recognize that technology is sweeping all of these issues away. Hyperlinks and popups are taking over. The students of 2050 will wonder what all the fuss was about.
*In an only semi-serious article, “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule” 123 U. Penn. L.Rev. 1474 (1975), the first word of the article “The” is footnoted and the second use of the article gets a note with a cross reference.
I had a law school prof who had the strongest take on footnotes in legal writing. He began the first class in every course – no matter the specific subject matter – with this admonition:
“Q: What happens to lawyers who don’t read the footnotes in court opinions?
A: There children will starve.”
I hope he wrote “their” for “there” or that sentence might have been struck down as ungrammatical and therefore potentially unreliable.
Was probably verbal.
No, he literally meant that if lawyers don’t read footnotes, then children will starve* in the footnotes.
*It’s true, I haven’t had a bite to eat in days – Tiny Tim, op. cit.
I think that I am interpreting the cat picture correctly, in which case, congrats Dr. Deveraux! I hope that the stroller being filled will still give you enough to sleep!
How do you rate Georgette Heyers romances on Harry Smith in Spain and at Waterloo? Cranwell college is said to have set “an infamous army” as cadet reading.
Likewise CS Forester’s “death to the french” ?
I’ve read contemporary accounts of Spain and Waterloo like John Kincaid’s and they don’t read that differently to either Heyer or Forester.
Let us be fair, in “Kingdom of Heaven” they almost got a Conroi right!?
The most interesting thing about Napoleon from a modern revisionist perspective is how one of the most destructive individuals in modern history (up there alongside Stalin, Hitler and Mao) is treated as a hero by all French people, many non-French people who should know better and (for all I know) Ridley Scott.
I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to paint in broad strokes.
In France the mythologisation of napoleon is a big and contentious issue… Sure many (the majority) like to see him as this great figure (hello nationalism!) but many will also be more critical (the man was, at best, a mixed bag).
Hitler was a mixed bag. Stalin was a mixed bag. Mao was a mixed bag.
No, they really weren’t. Unlike those three Napoleon was a successfully general. Also unlike them he left a few positive contributions like the Napoleonic code.
Mao was an incredibly successful strategist if not a proper field general.
Like if you read “On Guerilla Warfare,” that book was written in 1937 and it is the basis for the next 90 years of asymmetric war.
Napoleon lost as many campaigns as he won but that is hardly the point. Stalin beat Hitler which must count for a bit more than a law code. Hitler and Mao did a whole bunch of ‘positive’ things. But none of this means we should lionise Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Napoleon killed fewer people, that’s the best I can say about him.
Stalin was not the general who defeated Hitler.
Napoleon was a very successful general and a gifted administrator. The minus is his thinking that military force would solve all problems. Stalin and Mao were not much out of the run of post-revolutionary leaders (Cromwell, Ataturk) – ruthless modernisers. Their populations give them a mixed record. Hitler’s vision was of unending racial war – an unalloyed disaster.
Their surviving populations give them a mixed record. I suspect the dead would have a different story, especially since they are history’s two greatest mass murderers.
Stalin and Mao were not much out of the run of post-revolutionary leaders (Cromwell, Ataturk) – ruthless modernisers.
Assuming that by “Cromwell” you mean Old Nol, that is, with respect, a really, really flawed and anachronistic way of understanding him.
Napoleon gets a bit of homage in the Polish national anthem (which I think is my favorite of all the national anthems I know).
My two favourites are those of Napoleon and Stalin!
My two favourites are those of Napoleon and Stalin!
Reminds me of the Dutch national anthem declaring loyalty to the King of Spain.
what’s the story behind that?
It was written when the Dutch Revolt was still in its “We’re totally loyal to the king, honest, we just oppose his evil councillors” stage.
Have you considered writing an analysis of *The Forgotten City*?
It’s not the kind of game you usually write about (it’s a fairly constrained adventure game with a time loop), but I think it would be pretty good material for this blog.
The game at its core makes *explicit* claims about history and culture, and Roman culture in particular. Without spoiling too much, one of the main themes is that even a though a bunch of people from various origins are living in the same roman-ish settlement, they all share a common understanding of what morality is, roughly “Do unto others as you’d want them to do unto you”.
I’m very curious what’s your take on the game.
I certainly hope The Forgotten City doesn’t make any historical claims, considering that it is in fact set in Fourth Era Skyrim with a Roman veneer.
You are describing the original Skyrim mod. They took that mod, and by all accounts reworked it pretty heavily, and then re-released it as a standalone game.
The standalone game is set in the real-ish* world and does attempt to depict people from a specific time period. In that sense, it’s very much worthy of evaluation as to historicity, especially when it comes to religion.
That said, to me at least it was quite obviously an amateur production made by a small-ish team, so it doesn’t deserve to be raked over the coals, even as it does need legitimate correction, especially on ancient attitudes towards religion, which is a key theme of the game.
* It falls pretty unambiguously under the umbrella of speculative fiction.
The thing that’s particularly frustrating to me about Scott’s historical films (and any number of authors like GRRM), is that their claims to accuracy just worsen the chronic problem of viewers and readers taking historical fiction as historical fact. These films and books have massive influence on how people think about history, for better or worse. It’s not as bad when it’s obviously not trying to be accurate but when it has that veneer of prestige and credibility…
My beef with Scotts Napoleon is that it makes him, in the previews at least, look like an awkward, distant, socially maladjusted weirdo.
That is a questionable choice for Napoleon Bonaparte, who was immensely charismatic, a glad-hander and social operator of the first order, with a huge, room-filling personality.
You don’t inspire fanatical loyalty in your soldiers and conquer most of Europe by being socially awkward.
Joaquin Phoenix’s age is also a problem. Napoleon became a general at 24, a national hero at 28, virtual ruler of France at 30, emperor at 35, and was sent into permanent exile at 46. No doubt there are scores of books analyzing Napoleon’s character in detail, none of which I have read. But it seems pretty obvious that his youthful success distorted his assessment of his own abilities, leaving him prone to the major blunders that ultimately laid him low. That’s not going to come across in a movie where Napoleon is portrayed throughout his career by an actor who’s pushing 50.
“Napoleon became a general at 24, a national hero at 28, virtual ruler of France at 30, emperor at 35, and was sent into permanent exile at 46. No doubt there are scores of books analyzing Napoleon’s character in detail, none of which I have read. But it seems pretty obvious that his youthful success distorted his assessment of his own abilities, leaving him prone to the major blunders that ultimately laid him low. ”
These numbers alone are not so obvious. But for something better, have a look at marshals.
Marshal of Empire was a position invented right after Bonaparte made himself Emperor and gave Marshal posts to others – he did not make himself Marshal. But looking at his own list of 18 Marshals from 1804, plus three missing names…
*Rochambeau, born 1 VII 1725, lieutenant general 1780 (month?)
1)Kellermann, born 28 V 1735, field marshal 1785 (month?)
2)Serurier, born 8 XII 1742, general of division December 1794 (age 52)
3)Berthier, born 20 IX 1753, general of division June 1796 (age 42)
4)Perignon, born 31 V 1754, general of division December 1793 (age 39)
5)Moncey, born 31 VIII 1754, general of division June 1794 (age 39)
6)Lefebvre, born 25 X 1755, general of division January 1794 (age 38)
7)Augereau, born 21 X 1757, general of division December 1793 (age 36)
8)Massena, born 6 V 1758, general of division December 1793 (age 35)
*Pichegru, born 16 II 1761, general of division August 1793 (age 32)
9)Jourdan, born 29 IV 1762, general of division July 1793 (age 31)
10)Bernadotte, born 26 I 1763, general of division June 1794 (age 31)
*Moreau, born 14 II 1763, general of division April 1794 (age 31)
11)Brune, 13 III 1764, general of division April 1797 (age 33)
12)Murat, born 25 III 1767, general of division October 1799 (age 32)
13)Mortier, born 13 II 1768, general of division October 1799 (age 31)
14)Bessieres, born 6 VIII 1768, general of division 1802 (month?)
15)Ney, born 10 I 1769, general of division March 1799 (age 30)
16)Soult, born 29 III 1769, general of division April 1799 (age 30)
17)Lannes, born 10 IV 1769, general of division 1800 (month?)
*Bonaparte, born 15 VIII 1769, general of division October 1795 (age 26)
18)Davout, born 10 V 1770, general of division July 1800 (age 30)
Now look at the conclusions… Only one of the marshals was younger than Bonaparte, that was Davout, and he was general of division much later than Bonaparte. The 6 junior marshals who were at most 2 and a half years Bonaparte´s seniors by age all reached divisional general level 1799 or later – at least 3 years after Bonaparte. Of the senior generals who were generals of division before Bonaparte, the youngest were Bernadotte (and Moreau) and they were 6 years older than Bonaparte. Is it just a chance that Bernadotte of all marshals became king, and Moreau was exiled because of quarrel with Bonaparte?
How far were the “Roman” armies of the civil wars a revival of the ancient warlordship? Like Pompeius Strabo who raised his armies in Picenum, not through dilectus in Rome, or Crassus who raised an army of his father´s clients in Spain? How did they compare to the armies of the clients of Attus Clausus, who migrated from Sabine country to Rome, or of Fabii who waged a war against Veii on their own?
I think there are a few things going on with “true” and “historically accurate”.
First, obviously, you can reproduce an event of the past. You reproduce it as accurately as you can, with as little added as possible. This is a documentary.
Second, you can reproduce the physical objects and the way people act, but in a novel setting. Everything COULD HAVE occurred, but didn’t. This is stuff like “Master and Commander”, a criminally under-rated move. I would also put the better parts of LOTR and similar fantasy here. Sure, there are no real Nazgul, but I think it’s been proven that the battles rest on coherent, realistic military and socio-economic concepts.
Third, you have movies that show modern audiences something important about the past. This is the tricky one. Modern audiences are not people from the past. Take “Kingdom of Heaven”. A major debate at the time was whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father to the Son, or from the Father through the Son. People died over this. Yet modern audiences are typically not well-enough versed in Christian theology to understand the debate, much less have a strong opinion about it. To convey that world to modern audiences requires altering facts such that those truths you’re trying to convey are comprehensible.
(Fourth is things like “Gladiator” and “300”, which are neither historically accurate, nor intending to make any commentary on the time, but rather fun movies that have all the depth of a single sheet of mica. They can be ignored for this purpose.)
The ideal is, of course, all three. A historically accurate depiction of events that is exciting enough to capture the attention of audiences and which conveys some message to the audience without sacrificing any historical accuracy. But often that’s simply not possible. Most films simply do not have the time to educate the audience to the point where they can comprehend the issues of the past, or to appreciate the implications or importance of these issues. #3 is, most of the time, the ideal compromise position–accurate at 30 yards and squinting, but something people will understand.
Does this mean historians can’t comment on them? Of course not! Once an artist makes an artwork, it leaves their control and people will interact with it based on their own perspectives. A historian will naturally engage with the artwork as a historian. And that’s good–even criticisms are good, both because it advances the art, and–more fundamentally–because it means you’ve connected with the audience. Art is communication, after all! And as my Minerology professor once said, using up a red pen to critique a paper means there’s something there to critique. Our good host spent an absurd amount of time critiquing LOTR’s battle scenes. He spent about a line and a half critiquing the movie “300”. (The critique on the American views of Sparta is something different.)
I would also put the better parts of LOTR and similar fantasy here. Sure, there are no real Nazgul, but I think it’s been proven that the battles rest on coherent, realistic military and socio-economic concepts.
Though I do find the demographics of LOTR pretty unbelievable. Supposedly large parts of Middle Earth were depopulated by war and plague, which is fine, but that was thousands of years ago, so the population should have long since rebounded. Frodo et al. should not spend most of their time travelling through more-or-less deserted territory.
Third, you have movies that show modern audiences something important about the past. This is the tricky one. Modern audiences are not people from the past. Take “Kingdom of Heaven”. A major debate at the time was whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father to the Son, or from the Father through the Son. People died over this. Yet modern audiences are typically not well-enough versed in Christian theology to understand the debate, much less have a strong opinion about it. To convey that world to modern audiences requires altering facts such that those truths you’re trying to convey are comprehensible.
TBH I’d put Kingdom of Heaven with 300 or Gladiator. It’s not as egregious as the other two, but the main characters’ “Why can’t we all just get along? Christianity and Islam are basically the same anyway” attitude owes more to modern “Coexist” bumper stickers than to anything genuinely medieval.
Amen. I’m something of a Saladin fangirl but he was NOT some laid back ecumenical. If he could have completely destroyed not just the Crusader Kingdoms but Christianity he would have. And he sold Christian captives as slaves.
Your second point is true, but if the film makers presented something truly Medieval it would be dismissed as religious propaganda. Most people today simply wouldn’t believe the depth of belief back then–the most casual Christian of the time made the most fanatical today look nearly agnostic. To convey the points that the film makers were trying to convey, to the audiences they were trying to reach, they pretty much had to sacrifice historical accuracy when it comes to religion.
As for your first point, I simply don’t buy it. We only see a very small section of the lands previously held by the North Kingdom, and most of them are horrifically dangerous. The Old Forest and the Downs lie between the Shire and Bree, two of the most civilized areas in the region. We DO hear of other areas–for example one (I forget the name) that the Rangers use as a sort of stronghold–and we learn that trolls and goblins engage in extensive raiding in many portions of the region. The use of raids to deny others use of forage lands is classic First Systems warfare, and it’s entirely believable that, given the level of technology, the trolls and goblins could maintain a fairly effective barrier to entry to much of the former North Kingdom.
We simply don’t know how extensive the strongholds and population centers are for the evil creatures in the region either. The hobbits had no reason to explore them, and those that did weren’t interested in the demographics or culture of their enemies. Given what’s in the text, and that the creatures of this region are a credible threat to the Rangers, Bree, and Imladris, it’s entirely plausible that there were entire cities (possibly occupied and built by Men prior to the fall of the North Kingdom) that we know nothing about. All we can realistically say is that there’s no substantial dwellings of humans or elves in the region.
Yes, but several millennia of peace and prosperity should result in the Shire’s population overflowing its bounds. The result would be either colonization (of empty land) or war (with occupants of nearby areas), be they trolls or hobbits). We do hear of Buckland as new settlement, but no others, and no warfare.
Hobbits in particular are shown to be rather docile and uninterested in the sort of rugged adventures that colonization necessarily entails. If we assume that the “unpopulated” areas are in fact populated by groups that are engaging in raids intended to deny access to resources (land), it makes sense that the hobbits of the Shire would reach some sort of equilibrium with those outside groups. The hobbits don’t want the trouble, and the inhabitants don’t want the hobbits, so they’d naturally set up boundaries to minimize hostilities.
Remember, we know that the Shire is constantly guarded. By Numenorians, no less. This rather strongly implies that there’s a significant threat.
Further, we know from the final chapters that the Shire can handle a larger population than it had at the beginning–the boom in offspring following the War of the Ring was considered an unmitigated good, and people weren’t terribly concerned with how to feed everyone. This implies that the population was at a lower equilibrium than was theoretically possible. Why that’s the case is unclear. We can assume a certain rate of infant mortality, but it doesn’t appear high. Maybe it’s economic? We are told hobbit children eat a lot (all hobbits do), and of all the things Bilbo is criticized for being unwed and not having children are not included.
“several millennia of peace and prosperity should result in the Shire’s population overflowing its bounds.”
The Shire is only 1400 years old by the War of the Ring, and the North-kingdom fell 1000 years before Frodo. “several millennia” takes you back to Feanor and the time of the Two Trees.
1000 years at the reproductive rates in the family trees should also fill up a large area, but ehhh. At any rate the Shire _does_ fill up somewhat, from the initial ‘colonists’ setting out west from Bree (which is _tiny_ in Frodo’s time, couple thousand people at most) to the Shire and Buckland. There’s at least one ‘war’ against goblin invaders, led by Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took. There was the great plague way back when, and the Fell Winter much more recently — when Bilbo was 21, in fact! with White Wolves invading from the north, too.
2740: orcs invade Eriador
2747: Bandobras defeats orc-band in the Northfarthing
2758: Long Winter. Great loss of life in Eriador (and Rohan)
2911: Fell Winter. Wolves invade.
So there have been at least some setbacks in ‘recent’ centuries.
As for your first point, I simply don’t buy it. We only see a very small section of the lands previously held by the North Kingdom, and most of them are horrifically dangerous. The Old Forest and the Downs lie between the Shire and Bree, two of the most civilized areas in the region. We DO hear of other areas–for example one (I forget the name) that the Rangers use as a sort of stronghold–and we learn that trolls and goblins engage in extensive raiding in many portions of the region. The use of raids to deny others use of forage lands is classic First Systems warfare, and it’s entirely believable that, given the level of technology, the trolls and goblins could maintain a fairly effective barrier to entry to much of the former North Kingdom.
We actually see quite a bit — Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin travel about three-quarters of the length of Eriador, from the Shire to Rivendell, and between Bree and the Fords of Bruinen the only intelligent creatures they have to worry about are the Nazgul. Certainly Aragorn never says anything about orc villages in the area.
The people who went around assuring people that Love had to exist outside the bounds of marriage and every lord and lady should love?
A great many religious people today who are by no stretch of the imagination fanatical are more devout than that.
Though I do find the demographics of LOTR pretty unbelievable. Supposedly large parts of Middle Earth were depopulated by war and plague, which is fine, but that was thousands of years ago, so the population should have long since rebounded. Frodo et al. should not spend most of their time travelling through more-or-less deserted territory.
It’s repeatedly mentioned in the books that they’re deliberately trying to avoid meeting anyone for the first part of their journey. Hence why they go through the Old Forest (which is lethally dangerous and therefore uninhabited), through the marshes north of Weathertop (which are waterlogged and therefore uninhabited), etc. There is an established road all the way from the Shire to Rivendell, and they don’t travel on it.
After the Mountains, they’re travelling largely through the Brown Lands, which are infertile (and therefore uninhabited).
It’s repeatedly mentioned in the books that they’re deliberately trying to avoid meeting anyone for the first part of their journey. Hence why they go through the Old Forest (which is lethally dangerous and therefore uninhabited), through the marshes north of Weathertop (which are waterlogged and therefore uninhabited), etc. There is an established road all the way from the Shire to Rivendell, and they don’t travel on it.
They don’t travel directly along the road, but they travel near it (within a day’s walk or so), and cross it at several points. Nowhere is there any indication that people, or even orcs or trolls, have any settlements along it apart from Bree. And this is the main east-west highway, so it should be the most populated part of Eriador.
It doesn’t have to be anyone associated with the movie to claim accuracy.
I saw Marcus Aurelius’s Mediations on sale as a Gladiator tie-in.
Oh. God. !!!
What’s worse is that I told this story and someone reacted with surprise at the notion that Marcus Aurelius was a real person.
Not sure why you’re upset. This is a very old way to get people interested in “better” literature. G. K. Chesterton wrote about this in his defense of Penny Dreadfuls, for example. Yeah, sure, people start the book because they’re curious about a character from a movie. But they continue the book because they found some value in it. That’s not a book that you can finish without personally enjoying it in some way.
For my part, I’m more curious about what the person thinks about the book than how they found it. If they found it through a frivolous movie, or if they found it by browsing a book store, or if they found it via recommendation from a friend, they read it. THAT is the important thing.
I am now trying to think of the worst possible film tie-in editions.
Larousse Gastronomique – as seen in The Silence of the Lambs
Collected Works of DH Lawrence as seen in GI Jane
Thus Spake Zarathustra as seen in Blazing Saddles
I like to think that a really good writer could put across some of these historical influences and attitudes organically, in the actions and speech of the characters, and not belabor them into a history lesson. But that talent is seldom seen in Hollywood (or similar climes).
One example of this done right (albeit in a far future setting rather than a historical one) is in the YA Mortal Engines book series. It doesn’t talk much about the characters’ religious beliefs, but it does offhandedly mention going to temples, having little shrines to household gods, and so on, in such a way as to make clear that this is a perfectly normal and everyday part of life in this setting. One could quite easily do something similar in a book set in the middle ages or ancient world.
“A Knight’s Tale” does a good job of it. People think nothing of going to churches, generally understand various religious references (“And try to beat the Second Coming, eh?!”), everyone accepted the principles, even if they forgot them occasionally (“You desecrate the House of God!!”). The movie wasn’t focused on religion, it was just part of the general background of their lives. In a way, it’s similar to some of the songs I’ve read from the Middle Ages–it was assumed, so deeply that they don’t need to discuss it, and a suitable subject for jocularity (not mocking holy things, but jokes based on religion).
Historic attitudes are equally hard. Even heroic figures of the past would be considered incredibly corrupt by today’s standards. Nepotism wasn’t just considered acceptable, but was actually considered a good thing–the assumption being that the son would receive the father’s aptitude and training. Sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like were ubiquitous in a way that most would find unacceptable. And frankly our social institutions are so different that explaining them would require a two-hour lecture prior to watching the movie, and this only gets worse as you go back in time. Hardly a winning proposition for a movie studio.
That’s why I said that I’m fine with #3. Pick specific things you want to convey, specific things you’re trying to present, and focus on that. “Master and Commander” shows that this can be done fairly well. They focused on one ship and a single series of actions, which means they didn’t have to worry about the larger society, about pay or prize money, or promotion, or influence, or the rest of the things O’Brian so adeptly portrays. In other cases, focusing on more abstract concepts and conveying them to the modern audience can work (and is a technique as old as literature). You fudge the language and the artifacts and the institutions a bit, but you convey, say, the betrayal of that guard who opened the gate during the siege, or the horror of the rolling barrage, or destruction of armies moving through your farmland. You’re translating from one culture to another, and you’ll always have some shifts in nuance; the thing is to carefully pick which shifts you’re willing to accept.
Not entirely on topic, but you brought it up– I am forever tickled by the scene in Gettysburg where you see the reenactor prompt his horse, pause, then prompt it again, and then the horse flops, apparently mortally wounded. What an actor!
John Woo claims the horses in Red Cliff were also trained like that, but I have a hard time crediting it.
Without having seen the film, apparently its best shot at immortality is to transcend the mundane morass of big-budget historical melodramas with vapid storytelling and bad history, and to enter the rarefied divine elect of hilariously-accidental, accidentally-hilarious high camp — Ridley Scott probably won’t achieve his Spartacus or Oppenheimer, but maybe he stands a chance of achieving Bram Stoker’s Dracula!
On a more serious note, maybe the contemporary relevance of the film is in the point about the film as channeling the longstanding traditional English depiction of Napoleon in skewed polemical caricatures of a self-important autocratic buffoon. For all we know, Scott is actually a genius political satirist making an incisive Starship Troopers-style metacommentary on the Anglophone tendency to dumb down our perspective on complex and morally ambiguous world events that legitimately have many different layers of meaning and interpretation to many different participants and observers, reading them as uncomplicated Manichean good-versus-evil melodramas against a monolithic enemy ruled with an iron fist by a single figurehead who somehow manages to be pure evil and laughably pathetic at the same time… paging Vladimir Putin, anybody?
Sometimes it really is a reasonable shorthand to describe someone as evil. A treacherous, lying mass-murderer, for example.
Dr. Devereaux,
I absolutely love this blog and enjoy reading it. However, since it came up, I feel compelled to point out one thing that drives me crazy about it, which is your use of footnotes. Footnotes are used in the blog for *both* citations and interesting side notes, so I never know whether to check the footnote or not. I’d love it if you could move to inline citations, or just drop them altogether, so I know the footnote is always going to be interesting. Or, symmetrically, move the interesting comment to a parenthetical and keep the footnotes for citations.
Note that if you mouseover the footnote number there is a hovertext of the footnote, at least on my system.
It seems to me that one of the big differences between modern urban warfare and war in and around cities in earlier ages is the sheer fragility of industrial capital and infrastructure. If you sack a modern city, you have no city, and if you have no city, you have a gaping wound in your economy that consumes massive amounts of production while itself producing nothing. Land and population are worth less in war than capital, and fighting war over capital destroys the capital. It’s like trying to wage war on the moon.
Having worked with modern industrial infrastructure – it’s incredibly tough. You have to apply massive amounts of damage, repeatedly, to degrade or destroy it. Because industrial accidents are routine, and dealt with, and there are numerous fall-backs and work-arounds.
A fought-over city can be back and running the basics within weeks, and up to a substantial fraction of production within a few months. The key is not the capital, but the workforce – lose them and you’re toast.
The way we handle city-scale disruption is by distributed networks. If you blow up one city, other cities take up the production that is no longer possible from the blown-up city. No enemy can hit every city, after all, not at once anyway.
But if you’re the attacker using modern weapons and tactics, you’ve just turned the city into a wasteland. You can’t rely on the distributed network because the one the city was originally attached to is hostile to you. In order to get any use out of that city you have to devote more resources to reconstructing it as you did to destroying it.
It would be far, FAR cheaper and easier to just skip the destruction phase and build the facilities on land you already own. For that matter, invite the owner of the facilities you’re after to build a franchise with some tax incentives thrown in–you’ll probably make money off the deal.
The exception is choak points like Gibraltar and the straights leading into/out of the Black Sea. In those cases it’s fine to destroy the city (from a strategic standpoint; obviously slaughtering civilians is evil), because what you’re really after is the territory. The destruction and necessary reconstruction costs are baked into the calculation from the beginning.
I firmly agree that any institution that wastes significant amounts of money on irrelevant trivialities such as sports should be heavily penalised for it.
I am not an expert in the field, but my experience has led me to believe higher education is broken. I would’ve been both a better student and a better person had I not gone to university at all. I learnt nothing, did nothing, and wasted years of my life. Thankfully I did not have to pay much for it, as that would have left deep and embittering scars. The field needs a fresh start.
In that case you will be interested in the recently published Revisionist Historiography which advocates the abolition of universities. Comparing them in function and utility to medieval monasteries. I forget the author’s name but I’m told it’s an invigorating read. And cheaply available in Kindle (the hardback price being prohibitive.)
Universities have value, and I would rather blow my brains out than argue for their abolition.
Universities must remember why they are here. It isn’t for sports, or research, or publishing. It is to teach!
Not for students to learn then.
This is one of the stranger comments I have ever seen. It lacks the “cadence” of an internet joke, but I can’t imagine how anyone could’ve missed my point.
Obviously if the role of universities is to teach, the role of the students who go to those places is to learn what is taught.
My point was that students at universities simply acquire data served to them by teachers in order to pass exams set by those teachers. I would not myself call that ‘learning’.
And what would you call learning?
I believe that a truly skilled writer has the ability to subtly weave historical influences and attitudes into the actions and dialogue of their characters, rather than overtly turning them into history lessons. Unfortunately, this level of talent is rarely observed in Hollywood or similar settings.