No blog post this week, folks, as I am both fiercely busy and – by the time this goes up – out of town. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week, with the next big topic I want to tackle being what a shield wall is and how it actually functions on a battlefield as opposed to what one sees in most film and video games – and also get into a bit about why the actual mechanics of a shield wall fit both the physics of the battlefield and the cultures using the formation, and the Hollywood versions do not.
In the meantime, though, I can hardly leave you without reading to do, so here are some things to read!
Over at Tales of Time Forgotten, Spencer McDaniel has an interesting essay about the connection between the Greek agricultural calendar and the myth of Hades and Persephone, noting that the grim months when Persephone is in the underworld and nothing grows will have been summer, not winter, as the fertility of the land in Greece has a lot more to do with moisture (the summers are very dry) than with temperature.
Meanwhile, Sean Manning over at Book and Sword has an interesting essay from a while back on the weight of the Roman scutum which is I think well worth a read. Sean has made the point there and in his scholarship that a lot of reconstructions of ancient military equipment tend to be quite a bit too heavy and that is certainly my experience as well, combing through the scholarship on these sorts of things for my book project. I am far more often adjusting older estimates down and almost never adjusting them up.
But if you really just want more of me, I did put in another appearance on the Three Moves Ahead podcast, this time taking a look at Victoria III at its one-year anniversary, with Leanna Hafer and Ryan Dixon (aka Father Lorris, the author/artist of strategy-gaming comic The Chapel, which is a fixture particularly for Total War and Paradox gaming humor). The conversation was interesting; I tend to think more positively of Victoria III than Len or Lorris and generally like it, but it is certainly not without some lingering issues. Also Lorris is a lot funnier than I am, which makes it generally an enjoyable podcast.
And finally, for the Americans out there: the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is putting out a call for public comment on an initiative to create a grant program to fund research on the state of the humanities. I think this could be quite valuable, because we really do need more data to understand the problems we face that are causing the decline of our fields – including the precipitous collapse of history as an academic discipline – in order to halt the decay and begin to rebuild. So now is a good time to let the NEH know if you think this sort of initiative is a good one.
And with that I am off, I’ll be back next week with something more substantive, but for now wish me luck because maybe, just maybe, exciting things might happen.
On Victoria 3’s warfare, I think wars are just too large and impactful a thing for most players to want them to run on automatic. A major war can strip you of a large chunk of your productive capacity if it takes a bad bounce, and that’s the sort of thing players want to be able to influence rather than just have run.
Safe travels!
Best of luck out there! Wishing you safe travels (and, if I’m reading you right, a wrinkle-free suit and a barrage of softball questions)!
Ah, but if it’s the winter, we can speculate that Australia is the Underworld! She brings summer with her.
Thanks for the link about the scutum — In reenacting I’ve had the opportunity to handle original (American) civil war era swords right next to modern reproductions, and it is night and day — the originals are much lighter and the balance is so much better. But when you look at them, the dimensions all seem very close. Same thing is true with many of the reproduction muskets. And this is a time period where originals are plentiful and inexpensive, accurate reproductions of ancient equipment must be very difficult to achieve.
It’s a disappointment there’s not anymore major battles in the Lord of the Rings after Pelennor Fields, since it would be awesome to listen to you doing another guest spot on the Prancing Pony Podcast.
Awesome. That’s got to either be a book deal or you might get offered a tenure position at a university, right?
I think you forgot about the Battle of the Slag Hills.
Touche. Although there’s not much to analyze there – Aragorn forms up his men into defensive rings on high ground, and then the forces of Mordor mostly collapse into disarray once Sauron is gone.
It carries on our host’s (repeated) point that real battles are usually won, not by superior weapons or by killing all the foes, but by defeating the foe’s will to continue the fight.
You win when the enemy runs away, not when you kill them all. And of course, especially in dynastic wars, one way to make them run away is to kill the enemy king or in this case Dark Lord/Sorcerer King/Fallen Angel.
The biggest thing here–and the one that’s often forgotten in these discussions–is that the entire Aragorn/Gimli/Legolas/Merry/Pippin story arc, for all its grandeur and excellence (it’s my favorite part of the series), is really nothing more than a series of feints. Aragorn and Gandalf openly discuss this in “The Final Debate”, but it’s an undertone running through the entire story arc. Ultimately whether they all lived or died was only a minor consideration. The issue was keeping Sauron’s attention.
If you’re going on a suicide mission intended to distract an overwhelming enemy, you don’t need much in the way of tactics.
It reminds me of the discussion of WWI strategy in Albion’s “Introduction to Military History”. He was writing between the World Wars, and had a very different perspective than later writers. A lot of the apparently stupid actions were actually very rational at the time. If Germany was putting too much pressure on the Eastern Front, the Allies would attack somewhere–didn’t really matter where (though they chose places where if they won it would be beneficial), because the main objective was merely to pull men and equipment out of the Eastern Front to prevent Russia from being overwhelmed. It’s a fairly bitter calculation. Do you protect your own units (and perhaps yourself) today, only to be overwhelmed next month once German can bring her full power to bear on one front? Or do you attack, and possibly be destroyed, in hopes that Russia can hold out a little longer?
The attack on Mordor was indeed nothing but a feint. But the other moves had a key secondary goal: ensuring that there would be a Gondor and Rohan to return to after Sauron was overthrown.
I think that the attack on King’s Landing from Game of Thrones could make a good series. There’s some interesting stuff going on with scouting and amphibious movement. Though as usual, Martin isn’t as good a writer as Tolkien, so some of it is pure Hollywood nonsense (like mounted troops crossing a bridge of broken ships), but it’s got to be the highest profile pre-gunpowder setting battle in popular culture since Return of the King.
There are a couple of battles in Game of Thrones. Bret wrote about some of them, but not all. As I recall, he covered the Gold Road, focusing more on logistics than tactics, though he didn’t think much of either, and the Dothraki cavalry charge in the battle against the Night King, but I don’t recall any mention of the battles involving the Wildlings.
Incidentally, I thought Bret was too critical of the Gold Road battle (the tactics, not the logistics). Daenerys’ use of the dragon sort of paralleled the use of artillery in the black powder era: use cannon (or a dragon) to punch holes in the infantry ranks into which horsemen can penetrate, such formations being otherwise generally impervious to cavalry. Well-trained infantry will close ranks quickly enough to defeat that tactic, but presumably the Lannister forces hadn’t rehearsed this situation.
Mr. Devereaux devoted about one sentence to Daenerys’ tactical use of the dragon in that blog post, and engaged in no criticism of it. The only other mention was in two small paragraphs specifying that he would not be criticising the dragon.
Out of the entire post on the battle’s tactics.
I would call this a strawman, but that implies enough honesty to at least base your criticism off of real material, however much you twist it.
OK then: good luck!
On shield walls – I would fervently, if politely, ask that in doing so, you look at the sequence at Alesia at the start of HBO’s Rome and compete and contrast it to mauling in rugby. The methods of rotating the front, keeping a pressure on and getting an angle are very similar, and human body mechanics doesn’t change much.
There is no similarity between mauling in rugby and hand-to-hand combat.
> nothing grows will have been summer
This is one of the most surprising part I have read in your articles since I encounter it in the logistics series. Almost every other region I’ve read is very dry and dead in winter so the situation in Greece (and Mediterranean?) Is quite a reversal.
Yeah, in a Mediterranean climate (which occurs mainly around the Mediterranean, but also in a few other parts of the world including Chile, Australia, and where I grew up in California) summers are warm-to-brutally-hot and dry, while winters are cool and wet but – importantly – not generally cold enough for snow or significant freezing. During the 6-7 summer months without rain pretty much everything dries out and dies unless it’s got a natural source of water*; then in the winter the rains come and everything greens up for a few months.
*California gets its nickname of “the Golden State” from the color of all the dead grass everywhere in the summer and autumn (which is also part of why that’s prime fire season).
“Yeah, in a Mediterranean climate (which occurs mainly around the Mediterranean, but also in a few other parts of the world including Chile, Australia, and where I grew up in California)”
Those are four of the canonical “Mediterranean climate” areas, yea. The others are the Western Cape of South Africa, and then some further areas of the Middle East extending inland quite a bit east of the Mediterranean itself.
I haven’t played Victoria 3 and I think I understand some of your critiques about factions and radicalism. Italian separatists shouldn’t be read as communists but different radical factions joining together to cause unrest or potentially starting a civil war would be a good and historically accurate mechanic. It’s also not uncommon for different radical groups to start bleeding into each other. So while Italian separatists shouldn’t all be read as being communists, I don’t think it’s crazy to have some of them being read that way.
Similarly, a leader shouldn’t be able to change the goals of an entire group that are inconsistent or sideways with the group, but a popular or powerful leader can move a group away from its original aims. The Bolsheviks were a small faction of the socialist groups in Russia but they got a hell of a lot stronger and larger when they gained more influence and power through conniving.
I immediately tried the podcast episode the first i time I can listen to it and boy, it’s very enjoyable! Y’all hit every things that I want to talk about in Victoria 3 perfectly! I really need something to scratch my itch on Paradox games discussion especially since I don’t really open reddit anymore and 4chan is dogshit.
I guess the first sentence of Victoria 3 game design is LESS MICRO ON WAR, MORE MICRO ON ECONOMY! It certainly explains lots of things about this last 2 years.
Format quibble: Bret, would you mind moving your Twitter feed down to the bottom of your sidebar? As it is, I need to scroll down past several screens’ height of tweets to get to your tag cloud or archive links.
Yes, I can try to do that, given that I think the Twitter feed is less valuable these days.