Welcome back! At last, the hiatus has ended and we are back to regular weekly posts. As we’ve done a few times before, this week I am breaking the hiatus by taking a chance to answer a few shorter questions posed by my patrons over at Patreon who are the Patres et Matres Conscripti of the ACOUP Senate. It’s been a while – too long, to be frank – since we’ve done one of these, so let me reiterate that as with previous responses, the answers here may not be as exhaustive or careful as they would be as a full feature post but reflect roughly what you would get asking the same question in my office hours or after class.
Just as a quick advisory before we dive in, one of these answers is going to involve discussing apotropaic (magic protective) objects, which are frequently *ahem* shaped like human anatomy, so if you read with little ones, you may want to give the final question-and-answer a read over before sharing it with them.
And of course if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; as mentioned patrons who join the Patres et Matres Conscripti get to propose questions that I answer here. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
Onward to the questions!
Douglas Perrins asks, “What was the mechanic that brought weapons innovation back from the frontier to Rome? Was it ad hoc or systematized?”
This is actually quite an interesting question, although unfortunately the this is case where we’re mostly relying on what we can suppose rather than what we can know.
First, the background: Nearly every major weapon or weapons-system the Roman military uses by the Middle Republic was adopted from one enemy or another. Ovid’s quip that fas est et ab hoste doceri (“It is right to learn, even from an enemy,” Metam. 4.428) was clearly borne out in Roman equipment choices. The Roman sword of choice seems to have been a local Italic variant of the early La Tène sword, before it was overtaken by the adopted Spanish variant of the same, the gladius Hispaniensis, where it then served alongside the Roman adopted version of the late La Tène sword, the spatha. The Roman javelin, the pilum, was probably from Cisalpine Gaul, the Roman Montefortino-type helmet was also Gallic, as was Roman mail, the lorica hamata. Roman artillery (catapults) were Greek, as likely were Roman warships, although Polybius insists the Romans also copied the Carthaginians and they may well have done. In the imperial period, we see a new helmet type, which we call ‘Gallic’ because it was derived from Gallic iron helmets, and also the adoption of the famed lorica segmentata (segmented plate armor), probably picked up in the East from a Seleucid or Parthian source (their ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry had used that type of armor for some time). So almost no part of the Roman equipment set was indigenous to Rome or even Italy.
So how did they go about acquiring this stuff? In nearly all cases, the sources do not tell us; sometimes they are aware of the borrowing (the gladius, for instance) but do not detail how it was borrowed. The exception are the ships: Polybius twice notes (1.20.15 and 1.59.8) that the Romans copied Carthaginian ships they captured during the First Punic War – and ironically for one of the rare times we are told how they did it, I think most ancient historians doubt the story. For one, it’s a bit too neat and just-so, but more broadly it was almost certainly unnecessary: the Romans had socii specialized in ships (these were the socii navales, naval-allies) who seem to have mostly been Greek and would have been familiar with up-to-date warship designs. Notably, the names in the Roman navy for a ship’s specialist crew were Greek, not Latin, suggesting that the Roman naval tradition was Greek and that the Romans likely relied on Greek naval specialists, drawn from Greek socii in S. Italy to fill those key specialist roles.
So what can we suppose? Well, for most cases, we can probably dismiss the idea that there was any formalized, state-run system for this. For most of the Roman Republic, soldiers supplied their own equipment and likely had some discretion (within limits) on what they purchased. We continue to find, for instance, some La Tène-style swords in second-century BC Roman sites (Grad near Šmihel, the camps at Numantia near Renieblas) suggesting that not all Roman soldiers switched over to the gladius Hispaniensis. There may have been some regulations on this – we know, for instance, that fully body armor was required above a certain census requirement (Polyb. 6.23.14) – but within those limits, soldiers seemed to have a fair bit of choice.
While popular culture likes the image of uniform Roman soldiers, they were never uniform in that way. Even into the imperial period, if you saw a Roman legion marching down the road, you’d likely see soldiers wearing mail (lorica hamata), segmented armor (so-called lorica segementata) and scale armor (lorica squamata) all in the same unit. It’s also possible you might see an officer wearing a Greek-style muscle cuirass and I wouldn’t be shocked if, at least early on, one might see Greek-style textile armor, though the evidence for its use by the Romans on the regular is almost non-existent.
So we generally suppose that the adoption of personal equipment was probably ad hoc: Roman soldiers might start by looting enemy equipment they thought performed well or filled a niche. What’s clear is that then we have Roman artisans – in the Republic, still very much private concerns, not state fabricators – copying what they are seeing. We can tell because while they match the form, they don’t always make them the same way (for instance, Roman Montefortino helmets aren’t manufactured the same way, structurally, as their Gallic forebears). At some point – in some cases, this clearly happened within a few decades (mail, in particular, takes off quick)1 – the adopted equipment becomes ‘standard’ as more and more soldiers use it and pressure to conform kicks in. That may in turn have been codified by changes to regulations implied by Polybius’ claim that, by perhaps 216, mail was required for the First Class of Roman heavy infantry.
The pace of military change certainly slows during the early and high imperial periods, but it does not stop. As Ian Haynes notes in Blood of the Provinces (2013) the auxilia – units recruited of non-citizen residents of the empire – seem to have have played a role, presumably informal, in the dissemination of weapons and tactics. Cohorts of auxilia were often recruited from particular ethnic groups within the empire, at least initially, and expected to fight in local style with local equipment, but we rapidly see both the auxilia adopting a lot of Roman-style kit and also weapons used by the auxilia drifting into more common usage in the Roman army, either in the legions or in other auxilia cohorts. As a result, while these cohorts tend to keep a distinctive combat role – a cohort of archers or cavalry or horse archers or light infantry remained as such – their ethnic and equipment distinctiveness declines over time as tactics and equipment normalize. That probably wasn’t the intended purpose of the auxilia, but it was a long-term effect.
Matthew Planchard asks, “What is your system for annotation, note-taking and synthesis of all of the content you read and see?
Ah! This is far scarier than our upcoming spooky Halloween question!
So the fact is, I am terrible at taking and keeping notes and always have been. A major top-down overhaul of my note-taking method has been on my to-do list for a while and I hope to implement that in my next big project. I haven’t been able to do it yet for the current book project precisely because this project is built atop my dissertation research.
For the dissertation, I kept the bulk of my notes in OneNote (part of the MS Office suite). The biggest chunk of this was keeping track of all of the artifacts I was collecting data on, since the core of the project was considering a whole bunch of arms and armor – I ended up with something like 400 pieces for the dissertation (and the figure has gone up somewhat for the book project). To keep track of that, I created a standard ‘template’ note-card with a header that gave each piece a unique numbered ID, along with an easily searchable identifier (so “110 – Roman – Gladius Hispaniensis” for instance, is one of the Grad near Šmihel swords) and then the card for each piece includes all of the measurements I had for it, scanned images of it, date, findspot, bibliography, and any notes. I originally spaced the numbers out so each initial digit was a category (0xx was pre-Roman Italic, 1xx was Roman and so on) but several categories (Spain and Gaul) burst their edges, requiring me to replace this system for the final catalog of artifacts in the dissertation.
Alongside that, I had a OneNote folder in the same notebook for each chapter and if I hit something I thought was useful, I could create a card or add it to an existing card, organized topically. I didn’t hew as tightly to that system as I ought to have done and so also ended up with quite a few miscellaneous word documents with scattered notes as well. But each chapter got its own drafts folder, so those notes were at least sorted that way (along with each chapter’s ‘bitx box,’ my term for paragraphs I’ve written but either pulled out of the draft or not yet placed in them; I never delete anything – it just gets pulled over into what is basically a ‘holding bin’ document, one for each chapter).
In terms of synthesis, this helps for what a historian is often expected to do, particularly in footnotes, which is to document previous works, especially where their positions conflict: so-and-so (1999) says X but such-and-such (1987) says Y, to which what’s-his-face (2012) agreed, building on the work of that-old-fellow (1935). Ideally, my notes put those positions next to each other, so I can see the contrasts. That said, when I write, I almost always want to have the things I am citing – books, articles and primary sources – in front of me (as you might imagine, this means when writing, my office is a mess – stacks of books, often with index cards holding pages, all over). That’s an option for an ancient historian in a way that it wouldn’t be for a modernist who, after all, cannot remove documents from an archive and can probably only scan or photocopy so much.
That is, to be frank, not the best system and if I was a more modern historian dealing with archival records, it would be woefully insufficient. But as an ancient historian with a relatively smaller collection of sources which I can more easily check back on, I can get away with the disorganization. Still, I am trying, as I spin up book project to, to lay the groundwork for being much more systematic.
Tom Roeder asks, “What are the largest gaps in the literary evidence in antiquity? Where do you wish you had more information?“
This is a question that we could go a few ways with, depending on how we’re thinking about gaps and how wide a net we’re casting for ‘literary evidence.’
Taking the sort of broadest possible brush to this question while confining myself to the Mediterranean, my first answer would be Iron-Age Phoenician Literature, especially Carthaginian literature. We have a little bit of Bronze Age mythology but from the Iron Age, we have very little – basically just scraps. This was a literate society and we know from the Greeks and the Romans that they were writing history, mythology, poetry, agricultural treatises, philosophy and all sorts of other stuff, functionally none of which survives except in tiny fragments or references. That leaves us almost entirely reliant on the Phoenicians Greek and Roman enemies to understand their culture, which is a sad state of affairs indeed.
If we want to get into specifically Greek and Roman literature, I think we need to start with missing genres. Greek Comedy, for instance, was broken into periods: Old, Middle and New. We have some Old Comedy (Aristophanes, in particular), but only snippets of New Comedy (Menander) survive, although a papyrus with big chunk of one of his plays, Dyskolos, gives us some window into New Comedy – that said, most of what we know comes from Roman adaptations of Greek New Comedy by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. Greek Middle Comedy, however, wasn’t so adapted and survives only in scattered fragments, leaving us not knowing a lot about it as a transitional literary form between the other two.
We can also talk in eras, because there are also clear chronological preferences and gaps. We’ve talked about this before, but preserving works was expensive and not every era’s authors were viewed as quite so indispensable. The clear ‘winners’ of this process of preservation were the Classical period in Greece and the Late Republic in Rome, in part because they have a dense concentration of authors considered ‘the best’ and thus used as school-texts for teaching (which ensured lots of copies). The ‘losers’ here were the Greek Hellenistic period and the high and late Roman imperial periods: both periods where we know there is a lot of writing going on, but which don’t excite the same sort of attention and as a result, preservation is a lot thinner. One of my hopes with the prospect of ‘unrolling’ the carbonized papyri of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (this is the ‘Vesuvius Challenge‘) is that because of the date of the library (destroyed in 79 AD) it might have a lot of Hellenistic literature, although given the purpose of the library, it is likely to be a lot of Epicurean philosophy. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but hardly bad to have more texts!
Finally, we can think about specific works that would be particularly transformative to have. Every classicist has their own lost works they’d love to have. I think my first choice would have to be Claudius’ (yes, the emperor; he was a historian too!) histories of Carthage and the Etruscans, two societies about which we are poorly informed. Likewise, Aristotle reportedly wrote down descriptions of the government of 158 governments, of which only one – for Athens – survives. Almost any of these would be amazing to find – the Athenaion Politeia was a revelation on its discovery in 1891 – but the crown jewel would almost certainly be the Constitution of Carthage that was in that collection of 158. Smaller-ball stuff, but a complete copy of Livy or Polybius – we are missing most of both – could pretty radically reshape the study of the Roman Republic and the broader Hellenistic world.
To close out, I do want to note since we’re bringing up preservation, one planned series for the blog probably some time next year is going to be How Did They Make It: Books, covering the production of the codex (probably with an addendum on papyrus scrolls), which will give us some space to also talk about preservation.
Finally, in an appropriately Halloween mood, Laura Fox asks, “With October closing in, What did the Romans think about “spooky” stuff – ghosts, monsters, witchcraft, etc.? If they saw such things as threats, what did they do to mitigate the danger?“
This is actually a really neat question, because on the one hand, Greek and Roman literature feature a fairly robust set of ‘spooky’ stories, often where it’s clear that the story is all in fun and no one is expected to take its supernatural elements particularly seriously, but whereas for us moderns there is often a sharp divide between spooky stories and religious belief, for the Greeks and Romans this is something more of a continuum from frivolous stories all the way to well-evidenced religious practice.
On the more frivolous end, you have, for instance, some of the stories in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (often known in English as The Golden Ass) which features a number of stories concerning witches – often from the perspective of unreliable narrators, though the main character and narrator, Lucius, eventually dabbles in witchcraft and turns himself into a donkey, with the rest of the story relating his efforts to get transformed back into a human. The reader isn’t really expected to take these stories particularly seriously: they’re mostly for humor value. Likewise, in Petronius’ satirical Satyricon (62-3), the characters Niceros and Trimalchio trade spooky stories, first a werewolf story from Niceros about a soldier who visited a graveyard with him and transformed into a wolf, then a story from Trimalchio about witches who could curse with a touch and stole children, replacing them with bundles of straw, though we really don’t take any of these characters seriously in the novel.
Shifting to something slightly more serious, the Romans also told ghost stories. Pliny the Younger tells such a story in a letter to Lucius Licinius Sura (Plin. Ep. 7.27), complete with a ghost haunting a house in Athens, complete with a ghostly apparition appearing with rattling chains, though in the story the haunting is found by the philosopher Athenodorus to be caused by the improper burial of a body, wrapped in chains, beneath the house. The stories Pliny tells are basically harmless, but unlike Apuleius, he seems to credit their truthfulness.
Of course these stories blend into mythology proper. As recalled in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (and elsewhere), a collection of myths related to transformations Zeus/Jupiter punished some evil-doers with being transformed into wolves, particularly the mythical figure Lycaon. Both Odysseus (in the Odyssey) and Aeneas (in the Aeneid) visit the underworld and Aeneas is also visited at one point by the ghostly apparition of his dead wife Creusa. As reflected in Pliny’s story, it was thought that one consequence of improper burial was the potential that the angry dead might haunt the living (something that also occurs in Mesopotamian religion, by the by).
But of course Roman religion is one in which the whole universe is alive with divine and semi-divine powers, which are controlled and channeled by ritual, so naturally all of this blends into small-scale religious practice. The Romans believed in a few supernatural perils: not only could hostile spirits potentially do harm, so too could human individuals who, intentionally or inadvertently, drew on spiritual powers. For both the Greeks and the Romans, curses were real things one individual could call down on another and spoken or written curses could thus have real power that needed to be counter-acted or warded off. Not only was a spoken curse a problem, but the evil eye – a glare with evil intent – could also project harmful spiritual energy; in the Roman thinking this was closely connected with invidia, usually translated as “envy.” But the etymology here is telling: invidia comes from invidere, which in turn is in+videre (‘to see, perceive, discern) – it is a intense looking into or indeed, looking against. And so invidere can mean “to envy, to loath” but also “to cast the evil eye upon,” a hateful glance intended to harm. Someone looked upon with powerful envy was themselves at risk of a sort of curse.
How did one protect against such evil energies? We call any sort of ritual or superstition intended to ward off evil spirits or energies or just bad luck an apotropaic practice from the Greek ἀποτρέπω, ‘to turn [something] away.’ The usual way to make sense of Roman superstition in this is that the Romans regarded the evil eye as fundamentally feminine and feminizing in its nature (it is not hard to note that the folds of the eye might somewhat rather resemble the folds of some feminine anatomy), so the response was to counteract this force with something masculine, generally phallic. Indeed, one still sees in some modern Mediterranean cultures, including in Italy, the sign of the horns (corna) used to ward away bad luck: the symbol evoking the horns of a bull, a symbol of masculine energy.
Roman practices could be more explicit than this. Priapus, a Greek and Roman fertility god marked by his enormous phallus, appears sometimes as an apotropaic device, with paintings or statues of the god (frequently in gardens, with which he is also associated) thought to ward off the evil eye. Young boys seem to have been thought particularly vulnerable to the evil eye, presumably because they hadn’t yet fully developed their own masculine presence, and young Roman boys as a result wore an amulet called a bulla, a small container which generally contained a carved phallus (a phallus-shaped charm is called a fascinus), a sort of protective magical phallic booster, as it were. An interesting trend I recall from a conference paper I listened to – but alas, cannot currently find the reference – is that while Roman boys left behind their bullae when they became adults, we sometimes find these amulets in Roman legionary contexts on the frontier, where they seem to be worn not by boys but perhaps by the soldiers themselves.2 The thinking seeming to be that Roman soldiers stationed out on the Rhine or Danube, in a strange country with strange gods, might well require a bit more extra spiritual protection.
Likewise, a general in a triumph was clearly the target of a lot of invidia – the triumphing general, after all, was achieving and being lauded for the greatest possible achievement in Roman society. In part to ward off that envy, his soldiers sang baudy, often insulting songs (humor was thought to diminish invidia), but Pliny the Elder also notes (HN 28.4.7) that a fascinus was hung beneath the general’s chariot as an apotropaic device. There’s also a suggestion that a triumphing general might have worn a bulla during the triumph, but the evidence on that is thin.
Now you may well ask what exactly women and girls were supposed to do and my sense is that part of the answer is that the Romans didn’t really know. Magic, witchcraft and the evil eye are generally female-gendered in their legends and thinking. Roman girls are sometimes shown wearing a crescent-shaped amulet, the lunula (‘little moon’) in place of the bulla, but we also have references to girls in Roman literature (Plautus’ Rudens 1171) having bullae and my understanding is that some bullae have been recovered in burial contexts were the deceased was female. So in some cases, a Roman woman might, like a Roman man, try to ward off evil with a phallic apotropaic device. On the other hand, though they’re quite rare, my understanding is we also sometimes find amulets shaped like female genitalia, which may well have had a similar sort of logic to their function, boosting a woman’s feminine energy to resist the evil eye.
For evil spirits, the other approach was to attempt to ward them off with something frightening. By far the most pervasive form of this in antiquity was the gorgoneia, a stylized depiction of a gorgon’s head (that is, a creature like Medusa). That approach – something scary to frighten away evil spirits – appears in quite a lot of cultures the world over, so it isn’t surprising to see it in Greek and Roman practice. Notably, both the Greeks and the Romans tended to regard what we’d call ‘liminal spaces’ (the limen is the threshold of a door) – places halfway between two states of being – as particularly vulnerable to evil spirits: doorways, crossroads, graveyards.3 We tend to see apotropaic devices in these contexts more often: for instance the Greeks often put up hermai (or herms) at crossroads: a plinth with a sculpted head (of Hermes, the god that protects travelers) usually with a prominent phallus on the lower part of the sculpture; those gorgon-faces often protect entryways for similar reasons.
In any case, Happy Halloween! My hope over the next few weeks is to cover a few of the longer ACOUP Senate requests, starting with the ‘afterlife’ of the Roman Republic’s institutions, alongside some Tolkien content, some related to season 2 of Rings of Power and some not.
- On this, see, um, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022
- Roman soldiers in the imperial period aren’t supposed to have families, but often did anyway, however my understanding is that the find contexts here suggest adult usage.
- In a doorway, you are not within or without, at a crossroad, you are not on one path or the other, likewise a graveyard is a midway point between life and death – what connects these spaces is that ‘in between’ liminal nature.
Bret is back! Now I just need Oversimplified to release “Punic Wars: Part III,” & all my history content needs will be met for the month!
Regarding book and scroll making, how useful is current production of Torah scrolls as evidence? As far as I know it’s the only regular use of handwritten parchment documents today.
I’d guess Torahs are something like an upper bound on production time; they have extra ritual concerns and focus on letter accuracy that someone e.g. copying out the poems of Catullus in a scriptorium would not have had.
Glad to have you back! Hope that it was a productive period of writing.
Whelp, made it up to January 2020 of the backlog during the hiatus (although must only reach early/mid 2021 to catch up to where I started following the blog at least).
Hey welcome back! Three points:
1. On the history of the book, I’m sure you have your sources, but for my money, nothing beats The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston. It covers the history of literally every aspect of the modern illustrated codex and draws on the scholarship to do so. Plus it has pictures and tactile descriptions from the author’s own experience.
2. Finally, someone else who uses OneNote for notetaking! I’m an English professor, so I don’t need to collect such a wide range of material, but I use OneNote because it’s like one big virtual whiteboard that you fill with virtual index cards. So much freedom! Each of my cards is usually a citation, a summary, and key points illustrated with quotations. Within each point the quotations are in page order, but the points are organized according to eight hierarchical levels, which again is why I enjoy that whiteboard freedom! BTW the levels in ascending order are quote, inserted parenthetical quote, paragraph, card, column of cards, page, note, and notebook.
3. Oh hey, I just saw La Chimera, where “apotropaic phallus” is mentioned once as an in-joke! Thanks for explaining that.
> In the imperial period, we see a new helmet type, which we call ‘Gallic’ because it was, along with the famed lorica segmentata (segmented plate armor), probably picked up in the East from a Seleucid or Parthian source
Why would a helmet type from the East be called Gallic?
I’m guessing it has to do with the Galatians, a Celtic (not sure about Gaulish directly, but definitely Celtic) people who migrated into what’s now Turkey in the 3rd century B.C. and became very militarily active, albeit usually as mercenaries in the armies of Hellenistic Kingdoms.
Sorry, the sentence is unclear. The lorica segmentata is from the East. The Gallic helmet is from the West.
The thing I can’t shut up about is that it’s the Gorgoneion came first, and the stories about Medusa (and her sisters) later. There is no actual “original myth” of Medusa, it’s all just stories to backfill an explanation of why Athena goes around with a scary monster head on her shield.
What I also find interesting concerning the matter of “Scary supernatural monsters” is the matter of the Yokai of the Japanese culture. While some of them (e.g. the kitsune) are actually very old and connected to the religious beliefs, most of them are inventions specifically for stories. In the Edo period, telling spooky stories to each other after sundown (while the candles slowly burned down) because a very popular pastime, and authors and artists were working overtime to create new scary stories (and new monsters for those scary stories) because there was an huge demand for them.
Source for the first claim? I’m somewhat sceptical that we can accurately guess the order in which oral stories were composed. Or that we can even assign a date to what was a continuously evolving and changing series of inter-connected stories.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908
Also in terms of archaeological evidence, “Just Head” depictions of Gorgons are found earlier than “Perseus decapitates Medusa” depictions, which are also found earlier than “Medusa was a beautiful woman” depictions. Also, the gorgon head keeps its property of facing the viewer even if the rest of the figure is shown in profile and surrounded by people drawn in profile, indicating that the head iconography was the important part with long tradition.
Thanks, but 1908!! Not only is that missing over a century of later finds and research; but historians back then were also rather more confident in making bold claims not properly backed by evidence. If no one has picked up this theory in 116 years, there’s probably a reason. The archaeology you mention certainly points towards the theory you mention, but do we have a big enough sample to be able to draw safe conclusions from it? Is the dating of the finds accurate enough to begin with? I’m not saying that your claims are false, only being cautious about accepting hard-to-prove theories.
Still assuming what you’re saying is all true, it’s an interesting example of myths being invented to explain other myths. Which is perhaps not all that shocking: most myths seem to be there to explain social customs and institutions (more often than natural phenomena). As myths themselves are a social practice, I guess we should expect this to apply to them too. I’m reminded of Near-Eastern cities that invented a Greek foundation story based on Homeric heroes during the Hellenistic period in order to fit in with poleis. Which resulted in ancient Levantine cities having more recent Greek cities as their Metropolis!
Lead curse tablets manage to hit two of these questions, when found, whether in a sacred spring or other water source. Unrolling them can be tricky, though.
Looking forward esp. to a Tolkien round-up, since I haven’t read much chatter about Season 2 of “Rings of Power,” unlike the first season, that garnered a ton of reviews and commentary that didn’t have to be searched for. I disliked Season 1 so much I haven’t even bothered to look in on Season 2 — and what little I have read about it, e.g. how Tom Bombadil was treated/mutilated, did nothing to draw me back.
Many people on the Silmarillion Writer’s Guild Discord seem happier with Season 2 than with Season 1, for what it’s worth. I wasn’t paying that much attention to the discussion, so can’t fairly say why.
I watched all of season 2 in a week (not quite a binge?), partly curiousity, mostly being ill and unable to do much else.
The good news: no appearance of the hobbit tribe/clan who think it’s fine to leave people behind to die if they’re injured. (The individual hobbits with Gandalf-we-just-won’t-call-him-that are still around.)
The bad news: just about everything else. Of direct relevance to this blog, the big battle at the season end should come with a warning for military historians to look away. But there’s plenty of other jaw-dropping moments.
Just the battle:
– A few episodes ago there wasn’t a city wall there.
– The orcish trebuchets can shoot how far? That’s World War-era artillery.
– They do what to the mountain? Yes-yes, there’s an eyeblink where if you pause, you can see that little “pegs” hold up the boulders. There’s zero setup for that, and actually hitting them at range would require <1 m CEP. That's more accurate than most early homing guidance systems. But we can't throw that away either, because then we're well into high-explosive yields, and the "why don't you just level the city and its walls directly?" issue comes up.
– That's not how water works. This is a gentle, flat river, so even if a loose pile of rubble (without even a hint of clay or anything) formed a perfect dam (…wait, this going perfectly is a loadbearing part of your strategy?) the water level would drop very slowly.
– That's not how a riverbed behaves. Nice setup for WW1 vibes, though. (On the one hand, they did lay planks for the siege engine, but then it doesn't look like any load is applied to them. On the other hand, when the cavalry arrives they do remember how the riverbed should behave, so this almost rises to the level of continuity error, except as soon as they dismount, the cavalrymen also become immune to terrain effects.)
– They accidentally reinvented the battering ram, almost! Hammering splints into the gaps of stonework, or just chipping away at the masonry (probably limestone here), is an entirely viable way to attack a wall. Of course, that is not where they are going.
– The trebuchets would be much better employed attacking the wall, removing the defenders from the parapet, than leveling the civilian buildings inside the city. Nice mixture of WW1-2 vibes, though. (During the night we will see “danger close” artillery support into the melee. On the one hand it is nice they remember it exists. On the other hand, their artillery pieces still have trebuchet sprites.)
– Our characters teleport off into a WW2 action sequence. Meanwhile, a chaotic melee decorates the background, but that has no interaction with what our characters do. Some enemy LMG (I assume) that they failed to suppress takes out our heroine with a burst. The background decoration melee contains no real targets, you see. She nonetheless manages to use her bazooka (or PIAT or whatever) to blow up the enemy tank, or ammo depot, even. Quite spectacular from a mass of wood and ropes, I say. (The reason nobody else blew it these last several hours of continuous battle is because they all had bows and arrows, not bazookas.) Then the rest of our heroes burst forth from behind the berm they used as cover from enemy fire. …background decoration melee?
– Everybody died. Not the end, though? By my pointy ears!, these elves have some casualty tolerance.
– There’s a whole lot more, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
> – The trebuchets would be much better employed attacking the wall, removing the defenders from the parapet, than leveling the civilian buildings inside the city.
Maybe inspired by the siege of Minas Tirith, which I recently read again. Sauron’s artillery don’t bother trying to damage the city’s magic indestructible wall. Instead they attack morale by throw fireballs into the city, along with the heads of Gondorians they’ve killed in the field.
The question then becomes whether the writers of the recent TV show remembered to duplicate the “the walls are made of invulnerable magic stone” justification which in turn justifies the “enemy trebuchets are being used to bombard the civilian buildings inside the city, rather than the walls” situation.
Very often, writers who are writing about things they don’t understand (as the Rings of Power writers clearly do not understand medieval warfare) will copy over some interesting idea while changing the underpinnings of why that idea worked or was used at all. This invariably creates a terrible mess from an accuracy standpoint.
I recall from the fortifications series that most catapults weren’t actually used to breach main walls, but to target towers and crentallations.
It’s bad, but still an improvement. It still plays fast and loose with the lore, but that’s the premise of the show, not something inherently wrong (if real world mythology was constantly morphing and being retold very differently, why can’t fictional mythology?). Purists won’t like it, but it’s not aimed at them, and criticising the show for lack of fidelity is missing the point. Judge it relative to what it’s trying to do, not for being different to what you wish it would have been.
The best thing about S2 is Annatar, and especially his relationship with Celebrimbor. It’s beautifully acted by them both and shows how devastating psychological manipulation can be, with someone’s virtues and vices both turned against them. Sauron genuinely believing he’s the good guy is also a nice twist, a psychopath rather than a cartoon villain. The other story lines go from meh (the Numenoreans and Dwarfs) to bad (the Hobbits and Grand-elf). These all suffer from too many disparate elements and trying to make every single scene have a cool, badass moment: everyone is constantly making grand speeches or showing off their one defining character trait all the time. It’s exhausting and unnatural, getting in the way of actual character development, world-building, and narrative progression.
In terms of what Brett said about S1, S2 the show has improved a little in having a consistent geographic / temporal scale, but barely. I still don’t really know idea how far it is from Lindon or Moria to Eregion. The siege started off promising by having it be a progressive attempt at taking the city (rather than a single huge assault that Hollywood loves), despite the weird WW1 aesthetics it had. Obviously, the trebuchets knocking down the mountain or the reverse-crossbow-anti-battering-ram-that-pulls-walls-down are so silly they break what tiny bit of immersion there was.
Still, the Annatar / Celebrimbor bits are so good that it pulls up the season from the solid “bad” of S1 to a mediocre “passable”
– It’s still a military plot where we have not the faintest idea how big Adar’s army is. Is their charge at the end of the siege an inevitable victory, or a desperation move?
– It’s still a high-politics plot (actually, three: in Moria and Numenor and the Elfin Confederation) where the social structures are unclear. For instance, with Elrond and Gil-Galad both present at the battle, how do their command authorities relate to each other? With his distinctive armor, Gil-Galad is sure doing some royal display, and later will bark some orders (and Elrond follows them as if a ranker), but at the beginning the army is clearly following Elrond. Elrond is also the ambassador sent to an enemy who evidently isn’t above hostage-taking, so if he were the actual commander, they’d just capture/kill him. “Platoon lieutenant, acting brigadier general for one hour” is not a thing.
– It’s still an act-of-metalworking plot with dodgy metalworking.
+ The elves got better armor! They have helmets! They have what plausibly looks like a padded layer under the plates! This is visible between the breastplate and the pauldrons …because there are no mail voiders covering that gap. The breastplate’s decoration plausibly functions to deflect arrows over the shoulder (with the V shape)! A separate gorget would go well if they ever wanted to bend forward… but they all have helmets, even the heroes! There is some great stuff here. (Does the helmet decoration serve as rank insignia? That would be really neat, and is plausibly consistent with what we see, modulo Elrond’s rank.) No faulds and the tassets (if that’s what they are) are dangling off to the sides. Most of them have lances! They also have shields… strapped to their backs during the charge… they never needed one because they have “three-quarters plate”… it’s of a “moth-eaten leaf” shape, with a cutout on the side for unclear reasons… is it a footman’s shield with a cutout so that the shield doesn’t get in the way of their spear? But who cares, they have helmets!
+ There is less individual trick-riding. (The cavalry charge into the forest is accounted separately, under “stupid clever tactic” or “general military folly”. It also has the defense that arguably, Elrond called for help when surrounded, with the response snowballing in an unorganized manner, each unit commander following the next into the forest on their own recognizance, rather than an army-level considered decision to charge the whole cavalry into the forest.)
I mean, sure, but I feel like hyper-focusing on exactly what kind of armour they have is very low down the list of what makes fiction good or bad. You could make the armour perfectly realistic, show the exact hierarchical organisation of the elvish (or orcish) army, and have a 1h documentary detailing dwarven political institutions; but it wouldn’t meaningfully improve the show. I know we’re history nerds here, but fiction requires wearing a different hat. Basic narrative structure, character development, and emotional engagement are far more important elements to story telling than playing by perfectly consistent and realistic internal rules. (Not that those aren’t nice to have too, and can help the important stuff stick.)
If Rings of Power had better narrative structure, character development, etc then I for one would be a lot more sympathetic about flaws in the armour and military tactics. But it doesn’t. My friend who is very much NOT an arms and armour geek doesn’t like RoP either, for character and plot reasons. (Eg the ancient Numenorean ritual of Trial by Squid.)
That’s one way to look at it, that if the broad outline isn’t good, we start noticing the faults in the details. Another would be that good authors write about their world building process and how getting the foundations correct is essential to building a solid story structure. So the RoP sloppiness about military history just one aspect of the overall failures. But since this is predominantly a history and military history blog, that’s what gets focused on here.
And hey, Basil Marte is trying to be positive about RoP. They did some things better with the elven cavalry!
I definitely agree, it’s amazing how much better Sauron is as Annatar once they’d thrown away the weak Haldir mystery-box plot. It almost makes it worse to see something actually quite enjoyable locked in the cage of the rest of the show.
The quality is about the same, so no reason for you to bother.
As a bookbinder and occasional student of book history, I look forward to that series!
Really looking forward to How Did They Make It: Books
Those “everyday life in premodern society” articles are just so so useful in feeding my roleplaying hobby. ;p Now if the How Did They Make It: Books article comes accompanies, perhaps a few weeks down the line, with a brief introduction to how premodern academia functioned, that would be perfect…
I’d say that I want to see more of those, except that I want to see more of *everything* that ACOUP has to offer and Dr. Devereaux only has time for so many articles in a year, so it’s hard to tell sometimes what I’d like to see more of *at the expense of the others*.
I’ve done a bit of book-binding and paper-making (lint from the drier makes a reasonable paper when you’re a kid!), and..yeah….it’s a whole process. There’s a reason why a complete Bible–as in, one codex with all the books in it, as we see today–was worth as much as a town in the past. There are still libraries today where the volumes are chained to the shelves, because they were valuable enough as physical objects (meaning without regard for their content) that people would steal them.
The first part Bret would need to provide is a list of vocabulary. The difference between a book, signature, leaf, and codex, for example–a codex can (as in the case of “The Lord of the Rings”) contain multiple books, or a book could be spread over multiple codexes. Or a bok could be in a scroll and not a codex at all (I think Aristotle was like that). And whether you’re binding individual leaves into a codex, or building the signatures first, is going to have implications for how you’re writing and even how you think about writing.
What I’d love to see is an exploration of how we went from scrolls to codexes. As I said, I’ve done some book binding (octavos as part of world-building, mostly, the sort of thing you see when Townsends pulls out historical documents on YouTube), and while I’ve tried scrolls, they don’t make as much sense to me. Give me an octavo and I’ll start writing; give me a blank scroll and I sort of stare at it stupidly. It’s probably all cultural, which is why I’d love to see an exploration of this–one thing I love about history is that it allows you to see alternative ways of doing things, and to understand other perspectives on life.
In Aristotle’s time, all books were scrolls. Codices came in along with Christianity. Literally. There are archeological digs that find collections of books where more than 90% of the pagan works were scrolls, and more than 90% of the Christian ones were codices.
“reflect roughly what you would get asking the same question in my office hours or after class”
Are those for students only, or can anyone walk into a random university, choose a promisingly looking professor, and start asking them weird questions about their niche?
Based on a couple of decades working at an Australian university and occasionally sending off questions myself, yes but I recommend emailing first. Results will vary depending on the prof.
Lots of university buildings are happy with visitors, but go to reception first and introduce yourself. Where I worked there had been a couple of incidents of people wandering around looking for open office doors and laptops / phones to steal, so if you are an unaccompanied stranger people may call security.
Email works better, at least initially, because whoever you ask can answer when it’s convenient for them. If you turn up in person and the prof you want to question is giving a lecture or marking assignments/exams, they can’t make time for you.
As to whether you should do this, universities (in Aus anyway) are funded by the government for the good of society. Part of being an academic is/should be outreach, general public education. So if you’re a member of the public, you are entitled to ask questions. But remember you’re a lower priority than the enrolled students, academic collaborators, etc – there are only so many hours in the day.
As to weird questions, if it’s weird but interesting, my experience is that a lot of profs will respond. Just weird, “are the higher levels of government infiltrated by velociraptors in disguise?”, probably not.
Yes and no. Because academics are people and act just like anyone else.
If it’s interesting in some way, a lot of academics will drop everything to talk about it. Why not? A pretty large amount of a teaching professor’s job is tedious. Yes, taking to a stranger about something interesting is better than grading essay 43 of 57.
If it’s crackpot nonsense, you’re going to at the very least annoy them. No, you haven’t invented cold fusion in your garage, found the lost city of Atlantis, or developed an elementary proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem that fits in the margin of the page. The Psychology department is that way.
If you are asking something that makes it obvious you haven’t done a Google search, you will also annoy them. (If you’re a student, substitute reviewing the assigned reading and lecture notes.) A modicum of self-sufficiency is required. Their job is probably a 60 hour a week job and their families want to see them more and you are getting in the way of that because Wikipedia was too hard to type into the browser.
So try Googling the question first, or try the public library. But then, certainly, go to your local university and ask someone there. Many to most have their office hours posted on the university website or their door so you know when an acceptable time to interrupt them is. Go for it!
> If it’s crackpot nonsense, you’re going to at the very least annoy them. No, you haven’t invented cold fusion in your garage, found the lost city of Atlantis, or developed an elementary proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem that fits in the margin of the page. The Psychology department is that way.
I remember, during my PhD, my supervisor once got an email from someone saying they’d found a loophole in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which, of course, they hadn’t). Such quackery is common enough, but this particular fellow had printed out his own email, annotated his own spelling mistakes in green ink and then sent it via snail-mail. I can’t fathom what would bring a man to do that, but to this day I am in equal parts awed by and terrified of it.
My academic father (a kindly patient man) had the job of explaining to inventors of perpetual motion machines why they could never, ever work.
I have never quite tried just walking in off the street to a random professor at a random university. What I have found is that (i) professors are usually quite responsive and helpful to email questions within their field, though usually I have confined myself to professors at one of my various almae matres and indicated my affiliation in my email, and (ii) professors at any university where I was currently enrolled have usually been responsive and helpful to me when I wondered in, and presumably would help anyone who looked like a student or said he was a student.
Note that (i) most professors keep very limited office hours and (ii) certainly Columbia these days, and probably many other universities, are so locked down that you can’t wander into too many places.
Gorgon-head door-knockers FTW
I know people today who sincerely believe in the evil eye, although they don’t wear phallic talismans. Did belief in the evil eye originate in Rome and spread from there, or were Romans just one of many groups that acquired it from an older source?
One of many; the evil eye in some form or another shows up in many, many cultures.
“my understanding is we also sometimes find amulets shaped like female genitalia, which may well have had a similar sort of logic to their function, boosting a woman’s feminine energy to resist the evil eye.”
Could they have been worn to strengthen the wearers evil eye?
You probably wouldn’t give such an amulet to a little girl, if nothing else.
Also, there could possibly be a “fight fire with fire” mentality- the witch can’t use her mysteeerious womanly energies to curse another woman who’s actually got more womanly energy than she does.
“You probably wouldn’t give such an amulet to a little girl, if nothing else.”
No, but you might secretly wear one yourself. Given the existence of a potential weapon system, you might expect people to try to use it as effectively as possible.
It wasn’t really seen as a weapon system, but rather “forces beyond our proper comprehension, try to use them and it’s at your own peril”, considering how the non-humorous myths are warning stories of how fuck around always leads to find out. What you describe is engaging in witchcraft.
You could say that about any curse, but people still cursed their enemies. Seems reasonable to suppose that they would try to maximise the efficacy of their curses.
Fires are dangerous: it does not follow that no one ever tried to injure his enemy by setting a fire.
The Evil Eye is not something you can control. Belief in it, in fact, decreases witch hunts. People tend to resort apotropaic charms or measures, and unwitching practices, because it’s hard for people to control their impulses, so there is less blame. Deliberately strengthening it would not reliably hurt people you wanted to hurt.
We’re currently in a society that where giving images of genitalia to children would have some pretty severe consequences, so yes, I wouldn’t. But give young girls things that I believe will make them more dangerous (and specifically, not merely more protected)? Absolutely I would. I hope I have. Romans may have had a low opinion of the value of women on average, but over hundreds of millions of people surely some of them would have felt the way I do, even if only in secret.
That woud be rather self-incriminating, no?
Lots of people do incriminating stuff, if they think there’s something worthwhile to be gained thereby. Why bother defending (with amulets, or fortifications, or laws, or whatever else) against behavior which nobody was particularly tempted to try in the first place?
Funny thing about the Greek hermai, there was an incident during the Peloponnesian War where some unknown person or group went around smashing the carved phalluses of hermai across Athens, which was seen as a horrible omen and a huge political scandal.
> Pliny the Elder also notes (HN 28.4.7) that a fascinus was hung beneath the general’s chariot
I know and adore that the Romans were like us in many ways, but nothing prepared me to find that they invented truck-nuts.
“descriptions of the government of 158 governments”
Should probably be “of 158 polities” or somesuch?
Welcome back, Bret! Thanks for writing.
Looking forward to your take on the absolute mess of pseudo-Medieval siege tactics in “Rings of Power.”
Good luck on your manuscript and publication!
I kind of wonder if the division between frivolous spooky stories and actual religious practice is actually all that sharp in modern culture.
I’m just barely old enough to remember the various forms of ‘if you don’t repost this a ghost will haunt you’ style hoaxes over emails and internet forum boards, and while they were generally dismissed I recall at least a few people with a “can’t hurt” attitude to those things.
There’s religious satire, those dreamcatchers that people buy, the popularity of new-age jewelry that supposedly absorbs negative energy, traditional funeral rites, fortune tellers, etc etc. It seems to me that there are a number of practices in today’s society that straddle the line enough such that some people engage with them as a purely secular cultural practice, some have a it’s-charming what’s-the-harm attitude, and others actually do give those things varying degrees of credence.
…of course, cards on the table, it could be that being a recently-industrialised society that was never traditionally monotheist, the country I live in just happens to have an unusually large number of those borderline practices compared to other high-income democracies.
A fair point, I think. I see regular posts denouncing the “black cats are bad luck” idea, which suggests it is still around, at least to the extent of making them harder to adopt out to people who aren’t military history bloggers.
And astrology, and the silly “oil well reveals screams of Hell” stuff in tabloids. yeah most people think it is nonsense, but I think some people actually buy into it.
Part of the issue is that we’re used to religion being highly centralized and monotheistic, at least in the USA and Europe. In a religion with a very different structure and many deities and other powers, things can get…weird. It makes sense to leave offerings of a particular wine to the earth-spirits of your farm, and makes equal sense that if you forget that offering that bad things will happen. Pass a few creepy stories around a few times and your religious experience becomes a ghost story to tell around a campfire. And it also makes equal sense that the earth-spirits of your neighbor’s farm prefer fresh bread–after all, they’re different spirits (or maybe the same spirit but you’re already giving them wine so they don’t want any more of that).
Practices can be extremely localized even today. I’ve never met anyone outside where I grew up that had heard of a hog trough dance at a wedding, yet where I grew up they were commonplace–either as part of the wedding, or as a reason to hurry an older sibling’s wedding (rule was if you were an unmarried older sibling you HAD to dance in the hog trough). If cultural practices can be this regionally-dependent in an age of automobiles and telephones, imagine how much more so they’d be in an age of illiteracy and movement being limited to horses and feet!
A LOT of this stuff never went away. Medieval and Victorian England were awash in practices carried over from Pagan days–wassailing, for instance, is more than just an old-timey word in a song, it was a magical practice archaeologists and historians can trace back to pre-Christian eras. Herbalism was also a version of this (one that is often effective–I keep herbal teas around for headaches in addition to more modern pain killers because they’re proven effective and taste better). A lot of Protestant complaints about the Church were the mystical practices the populace engaged in. And America isn’t rid of such practices either. Growing up many outbuildings had hex signs, particularly the older ones, and many outbuildings had chicken feet nailed over the door.
Well, some people, at least, appear to still straightforwardly believe in demons: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/tucker-carlson-demon-attack
To quote:
“No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”
Carlson, who said he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added: “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”
Most Christians, certainly most Christian churches that I’m aware of, believe in the existence of demons, at least in principles. For that matter, most non-Christian religions teach the existence of malign supernatural beings, although these don’t always map well onto the Christian concept of demons. Certainly, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians and as far as I know most Animists believe in the existence of malevolent supernatural entities (I don’t know enough about Taoism or Shinto to say for sure, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t). Exorcism rituals are important within the Hindu and Buddhist worlds just as they are in Christian contexts, for example.
Honestly I don’t really understand how one could be a Christian and *not* believe in demons, since demons and exorcisms play fairly big roles in the New Testament (and since Paul, John, Mark, Luke, the author of the Apocalypse, and Jesus himself all seem to take the existence of the devil and of rebel angels to be uncontroversially true).
Shinto has exorcisms, so presumably yes.
Despite attempts to create it in the Empire, there isn’t really a Shinto orthodoxy. Shinto has gods that practice mischief or even evil, and ghosts which are nearly always not gods except in the way that they sort of are, and monsters which are usually not gods and which seem to be pretty demonic but are different, and what outsiders would call demons; but the demons are classified by what other religious system they immigrated to Japan from, which is really the only reason the monsters aren’t demons (except to the people who think the distinction is silly).
Shinto is like Greco-Roman paganism. Or Hinduism. Notice that all three of these got *names* only when other religions came along to contrast.
Shinto is like Greco-Roman paganism. Or Hinduism. Notice that all three of these got *names* only when other religions came along to contrast.
More or less, if you asked me I’d say Hinduism is really at least three distinct (overlapping, but distinct) religions, not one.
Although in fairness, I think there was a vague concept of “orthodoxy” in the Hindu world before Muslims and Christians arrived, that’s why Jains and Buddhists have generally been considered separate religions (because they deny the authority of the Vedas, and in the case of Buddhism, also deny a permanent soul). It was very vague though, much less defined than orthodoxy within Christianity or Islam.
Oh and Peter and Jude, how could I forget them.
And James- really all the NT authors except whoever wrote Hebrews, i guess.
I live in a high-income, secular, democratic country, and whenever a new highway section is inaugurated, it comes with a consecrated shrine to St. Cristopher, patron saint of travelers.
“…a fascinus was hung beneath the general’s chariot”
So, wait, you’re telling me, another one of Rome’s great contributions to Western Civilization… was truck nuts?
I love this article. Both for its military interest, and for the “spiritual’ section. In reference to warding off evil, I note a resemblance to a Hindu deity. Vishnu the Preserver would sometimes take an earthly form to sort out disorder caused by Demons. Narasimha, is an avatar of Vishnu. He has the form of a human-like body and the head of a lion. He killed a demon-king who had received a “boon” from a god or holy man. The boon boon granted his wish that he could never die. Actually, a wish for immortality could not be granted, so he specified that he could not be killed by day or by night, in the house or out of his house. Narasimha appeared at his door at twilight and destroyed the demon on the threshold. Problem solved.
If I recall correctly, this “I’ll just kill you in a liminal space to avoid the prophecy” is also done in the Ramayana. The supernatural nature of liminal spaces is also one of those ages-old beliefs that are shared across a supermajority of cultures.
(Also, the reason Vishnu appears in that chimeric form is to avoid the other parts of the boon, which is that the demon could be killed neither by man, nor by god, nor by an animal – thus we need a god-incarnated-as-half-man-half-beast and also couldn’t be killed with a weapon or with bare hands – thus we need to kill him with claws, who are neither)
Also how Lleu Llaw Gyffes dies in Welsh mythology.
I was going to bring up the myth of Narasimha, but you beat me to it, haha. (I’m not using ‘myth’ here in the sense of ‘fiction’, but rather in the sense of ‘sacred narrative’).
To add a bit of detail, Narasimha appeared at his doorway because he had, unwisely, smashed one of the pillars of his doorway asking mockingly “if Vishnu is everywhere, is he in this pillar”, which I guess underscores the idea, also common throughout world mythologies and our religions, of our own free actions unwittingly fulfilling prophecy.
“A demon who could not be killed by the point or the edge, by day or by night, on sea or on land. So the god seized him at sunset, standing in the foam on the sands, and strangled him there.”
Tolkien fans will no doubt be thinking of the Witch-King, who boasted “No living man may hinder me!” only to be very terminally hindered shortly afterwards by a living Hobbit (therefore not a Man) and a living woman (who, in Tolkien’s world, is a Man, but not a man). Real Tolkien fans will remember that the Witch-King got his own prophecy wrong – the original version from the Silmarillion is “Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man will he fall”.
However, we shouldn’t be too hard on the chap. He didn’t actually hear the prophecy when it was first delivered – he was too busy retreating rapidly away from Glorfindel (who was delivering the prophecy) and Eanur (to whom it was being delivered). He’d have to rely on secondary sources. Always risky.
For a start, you can’t hear capital letters, so the nuanced distinction between “Man” and “man” would have been completely lost on him, as it presumably was on Eanur.
Surely Man and man wouldn’t be the same word in Elvish.
“Surely Man and man wouldn’t be the same word in Elvish.”
Nothing like. Human (ie, Man) in Quenya is “firie” – literally “mortal”. Man as in male human is “ner”. Man as in adult is “veaner”.
But we don’t know what language he was speaking to Earnur: he might have been speaking Adunaic, in which “human” is “ana” and “man” is “anu”.
They’re very similar, and on a noisy battlefield he could have misheard.
“They’re very similar, and on a noisy battlefield he could have misheard.”
If this were another author I’d agree, but this is Tolkien. He’d have been acutely aware of the etymology of the word “Man” (mann vs wer)–multi-lingual puns are a hallmark of his works, after all. And remember the conceit of translation. Tolkien wasn’t giving a third-person omniscient viewpoint, but rather he was writing legends. This means that the person writing the pretend text would have had all the time in the world to be precise.
Plus as I recall Glorfindel and Eanur survived for a while after the battle, meaning they could easily have made any corrections necessary.
All told, I think we need to accept that Tolkien meant Man (mann), not man (wer).
But when the Witch-King speaks to Eowyn, he says “man”, uncapitalized. And Eowyn responds, “No living man am I. You look upon a woman.”
Doesn’t really count, I’d say. It’s not liminality that does the Witch King in.
Also, the whole prophecy is just Tolkien settling a grudge with Shakespeare.
That is not an act in a liminal space, though. Ladyhawke might give a better analogy. A man cursed to turn into a wolf by night, and a woman cursed to turn into a hawk by day, can only have the curse lifted if they stand in a church, next to each other, both in their human forms.
There’s an eclipse.
Ah, that’s a good one.
And a real-life non-superstitious example: the Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Paul of Russia meeting to discuss the Treaty of Tilsit. Both dictators were immensely defensive of their personal prestige and neither was willing to appear a supplicant to the other by travelling into his territory.
The solution was to moor a raft exactly in the middle of the River Niemen (the boundary between the French and Russian empires) and have the negotiations there, with elaborate precautions to make sure both men arrived on the raft at the same time from opposite sides.
Crossroads, as described, are regarded as liminal places. But they are for simple factual reasons. A crossroad is a good way to go the wrong way. In places, this could be lethally dangerous.
that sounds like a fascinating book- can you give me more details on what it’s about?
Hector, Ladyhawke is a 1980s fantasy film, although I believe there is a novelization.
Rutger Hauer is The Hero.
Michelle Pfeiffer is The Beautiful Princess
Matthew Broderick is Plucky Comic Relief who brings the above two lovers back together
John Wood is The Evil Bishop who causes all the trouble
It didn’t exactly set the box office alight, but I have a certain affection for it.
Hope this isn’t too off-topic, but regarding the general in triumph, is there any truth to the story that generals or emperors on parade would have someone standing with them in the chariot whispering “You’re only human, you’re only human…” to counterbalance the adulation?
This detail of the triumph is referenced in a few different sources, though the phrasing varies between “remember you are human”, and “look behind you” (i.e. ‘see what comes after’). Taking from public domain translations, here are some passages on it:
“In the chariot a public slave stands behind him holding up the crown and saying in his ear: ‘See also what comes after’.” (Fragment of Cassius Dio’s History, 6)
“If he is not a man, emperor he cannot be. Even when, amid the honours of a triumph, he sits on that lofty chariot, he is reminded that he is only human. A voice at his back keeps whispering in his ear, ‘Look behind you; remember you are but a man.'” (Tertullian, Apology 33)
“…hanging under the chariots of generals at their triumphs he [Fascinus] defends them as a physician from jealousy, and the similar physic of the tongue bids them look back, so that at the back Fortune, destroyer of fame, may be won over.” (Pliny, Natural History 28.7)
“…never yield yourself wholly to the fair semblance, nor let the passion pass into excess; but curb it, restrain it, – like those who stand behind triumphant victors, and remind them that they are men. Do you likewise remind yourself that you love what is mortal” (Epictetus, Discourses 3.24)
> Indeed, one still sees in some modern Mediterranean cultures, including in Italy, the sign of the horns (corna) used to ward away bad luck: the symbol evoking the horns of a bull, a symbol of masculine energy.
Ronnie James Dio popularized this gesture in heavy metal when he was the lead singer of Black Sabbath, and stated many times in interviews that he picked it up from his Italian grandmother who used it to ward off the evil eye!
> I originally spaced the numbers out so each initial digit was a category (0xx was pre-Roman Italic, 1xx was Roman and so on) but several categories (Spain and Gaul) burst their edges, requiring me to replace this system for the final catalog of artifacts in the dissertation.
This experience, repeated often, is how programmers came to the common practice of separating program version numbers with an offsetting character, most commonly the period.
Dear great Nitpicker,
welcome back and thanks for another interesting post.
Question: Is there something wrong with my eyes or has during your hiatus the search field somehow disappeared on your main page and on blog pages? I can only find it on the “Contact” page. It makes finding older posts quite difficult. Thank you for your work!
I can see it on the main page and this post’s page right now.
I wonder why envy is associated with the color green nowadays. Also, curiously, the technology company NVidia named itself after invidia, chose a green color to represent its company, and I guess its logo kind of, sort of looks like an evil eye?
The odd thing is that green-eyed characters are not particularly likely to be envious in fiction. Short-tempered, yes, but that’s because they have red hair.
Though you should note that it’s not particularly modern. Shakespeare put “green-eyed monster” in Iago’s mouth.
I think that envy = green because of the idea that envy was a spiritual sickness, and it’s common to talk about the kind of pallor that sick people have as “green”.
This has some suggestions: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/14/readers-reply-why-is-envy-green-is-it-the-same-in-other-cultures
The earliest use they found was from Ovid, (Met, II, 777) describing Envy herself: “pectora felle virent” – her breasts grew green with gall.
“Gall” here isn’t the emotion, it’s literal gall: the fluid from the Four Humors system of medicine. A greenish substance you can vomit if you’ve completely evacuated your stomach, supposedly, and associated with strongly motivated but negative emotions in general.
Gall is real, though we tend to call it “bile” these days; produced by the liver, stored in the gall bladder, and used in digestion, and it is indeed yellow-green.
We use “gall” to describe an emotional state as well, but it’s not envy, it’s more like “boldness” or “brass neck” or “chutzpah”. As in “I can’t believe she had the gall to say that to my face”. I assume we call that gall because it galls people – it annoys them – and if something galls you, it means it digs into you and causes a painful sore or swelling – like an oak gall on a tree, or a windgall on a horse’s leg.
The two are etymologically distinct: the word for bile comes from Germanic, the word for the swelling comes from Latin “galla”.
In the Ovid quote you’re right that it’s referring to the bile sense (fel, fellis = gall), not to the emotion sense.