This is the first part of our [I don’t know; a few?] part series looking at the Siege of Eregion sequence from the second season of Amazon’s Rings of Power and what we can learn by pointing out its missteps.
And I’m not going to bury the lede here: this entire sequence is a mess. It will not surprise anyone, given my response (A, I, II, III) to the first season of Rings of Power, that I came into the second season with low expectations, but Rings of Power still managed to unpleasantly surprise me, with ungainly narratives that still seem bogged down in getting characters from A to B and worldbuilding that continued to feel very flat. But at the center of that was a big siege sequence which absorbs most of the back half of the season, spanning multiple episodes. And this too is, to be frank, quite bad, both from a historical realism perspective and also from a writing, themes and narrative perspective. But we may at least learn some things about historical warfare by discussing the ways in which the siege does not work from a historical realism perspective.
As with last season, before we dive in, I want to deal at the beginning with the argument that because this is just a TV show (well, streaming show) it is unfair to judge it by the standards of films like the Peter Jackson adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. To which I noted last time, the first season of Rings of Power had almost the same total screentime and budget as Peter Jackson’s films, but did far less with those resources. Meanwhile, this second season of Rings of Power is reported to have been, somehow, inexplicably, mind-bendingly more expensive than the first. In short, these series are getting feature film levels of resources thrown at them, and I think it is fair to judge them on that basis.
This week, we’re going to focus on the relatively simple task of marching a massive army of orcs, complete with complex siege equipment, over roughly 650 miles of apparently largely unsettled terrain, unnoticed by anyone. Because even a journey of roughly 1,300,000 strides begins with a single step and ends with death by starvation roughly two weeks later, lost in a forest.
Somehow, things will go downhill from here.
But first, as always, logistics are expensive! If you want to help out with the logistics of this blog and my scholarship more broadly, you can support me and this project on Patreon! If you, like Eregion, completely lack scouts or information gathering of any kind and are thus regularly surprised when posts like this appear outside of your walls, ready to sack your homes, you can get a bit more warning by clicking below for email updates or following me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I am in the process of shifting over more fully to Bluesky than Twitter, given that the former has, of late, become a better place for historical discussion than the latter.
Paper and Screen
Before we dive in, this series is intended, in some ways, as a continuation of the Siege of Gondor (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) and Helm’s Deep series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII). In those posts, I sometimes contrasted the way that The Lord of the Rings books approached a given concept, scene or sequence as compared to how Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films tackled adapting it. I aim to do that here as well, at some points contrasting how Tolkien seems to have imagined the War of the Elves and Sauron with how Rings of Power has opted to adapt that material.
This immediately introduces a tricky new question however, because unlike Tolkien’s nice, finished text of The Lord of the Rings, the War of the Elves and Sauron and the fall of Eregion, as events in the legendarium, exist in a bunch of different places in various forms. As folks who deal with the larger legendarium will know, this material, often assembled by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s notes, are often unclear, incomplete or even at odds with each other. So I want to clarify at the outset here when I supply ‘book notes,’ my system for deciding between the various different bits of information in the legendarium is as follows (along with how I’ll cite them):
- Information in The Lord of the Rings (RotK, particularly the appendix) comes first, as this was a finished, complete work in Tolkien’s lifetime.
- After that comes information in the Silmarillion, particularly the Akallabêth: the Downfall of Númenor (Aka) and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age (OROP), which concern this particular period (the Second Age) in Tolkien’s legendarium.
- Finally after that comes materials in the Unfinished Tales (Tales, most notably “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”), Tolkien’s letters or other writings.1
That has the advantage, of course, of privileging the LotR appendix material that Rings of Power had the full rights to. Often the immediate defense of this series is to note that the creators didn’t have the rights to use the full legendarium and indeed, that shows through – for instance with the capital of Eregion being always called “The City of the Elven-Smiths” because they didn’t have the right to use its actual name, Ost-in-Edhil, “Fortress of the Elves.” But there are a lot of things, like the basic timeline for the war, that they did have the rights to, but disregarded anyway, to the detriment of the end product.
And with that out of the way, onward!
Objectives: Orienting Orc Operations
We started our first siege analysis with the upper two levels of military analysis – strategy and operations – and we’ll do so again here. For those just tuning in, when we say strategy, this is the level of analysis where we decide what objectives are worth achieving and how to achieve them; we could sum this up with the questions “why are we at war? what do we hope to gain? and most importantly, should we go to war at all?” After all, it is rare that anyone smashes armies together simply for the joy of it. Operations are the next level down, often abbreviated to “where do we fight?” which focuses on the question of actually moving your military forces to the fight, because it turns out moving large armies is quite hard.
The reason we begin here is that military actions are, when they’re well planned, planned from the top downward through the levels of analysis: one first decides what overall state objectives are, then if they need a war to achieve them (these are both strategy), then how to move armies on the macro-scale to achieve those objectives (operations) and then finally how to manage individual smaller-scale battles and engagements to ensure those operations achieve their aims (tactics). So we ought to start by asking about the objectives of this campaign.
And already at this point, Rings of Power begins to fall apart.
The fellow leading this war (in the TV show) is Adar. Adar’s strategic concern, stated repeatedly in dialogue (mostly with Galadriel) is that if Sauron rises again to power, he will bring the orcs back under his control. Adar thus has no particular objectives regarding Eregion itself except that he knows Sauron is there. We also learn, quite early on, that Adar is incapable of recognizing Sauron if the latter is disguised – Sauron disguised as Halbrand infiltrates his camp and is released, his true identity unguessed – though it is not entirely clear to me if Adar knows this. Still, Adar evidently served under Sauron for some time before betraying him the first time around and stabbing him to apparent-but-not-actual death with a spiked crown, so he ought to be aware both that Sauron is a shape-shifter and also that as a Maia, he can’t be fully killed by normal means.
So Adar’s strategic objective (re-)killing Sauron. To this end, he settles on an operational design: marching to Eregion and besieging its capital, referred to in the show as the “City of the Elven Smiths” but which we’re going to refer to by its book name, Ost-in-Edhil, for simplicity. This is, simply put, a bonkers operation to embark on, given the objective. As we’ll see, the task of moving Adar’s entire army is an enormous one, Eregion is itself a major power and the city is difficult to besiege. Moreover, there is absolutely no reason for Adar to suppose, in the chaos of a siege, that his regular orcish warriors can even identify Sauron, much less kill him.
This operational design – a large-scale army movement over vast distances to accomplish a difficult siege assault against a distant land’s capital – is entirely wrongly fitted to the actual objectives Adar has. Instead, this is the kind of problem for which one might dispatch a small raiding strike force or an assassin; in the context of Middle Earth, this is a job for a heroic (or villainous) quest. A small force might move rapidly, undetected, gather intelligence about the political situation in the city to determine who is actually Sauron and then stage a quick, surprise raid against the target. An assassin might do much the same. Orcs might be less than ideal for this mission, but Adar conveniently has also absorbed a bunch of human followers (whom he brands, massively reducing their infiltration value) who might better pose as travelers or refugees in order to infiltrate the city. And of course, Adar himself is an elf, and so might be able to access the city personally in a way that his servants cannot. Notably, later in the series, even while Adar is clearly in arms assailing an Elven kingdom, both Galadriel and Elrond take Adar’s statements seriously; they don’t dismiss them out of hand, the same as they might the statements of an orc.
Instead, he sends a massive army he knows to be vulnerable to Sauron’s mind control and never, himself confronts Sauron, despite the fact that as far as Adar knows, exactly one being in Middle Earth has defeated Sauron so far, and that being is…Adar. Evidently Adar doesn’t need to stay in Mordor to administer his new orcish kingdom there, so it is baffling why he doesn’t make some effort to simply infiltrate Eregion (especially given that Sauron has just shown us that infiltrating Eregion is, in fact, really easy). Burning down an entire kingdom as a prelude for permanent occupation is one thing, but Adar doesn’t intend to stick around! Adar has no intention of setting up shop in Eregion: his orcish kingdom is explicitly to be in Mordor so when this is done he is going home.
Now a bad operational design does not make, necessarily, for a bad story. Saruman’s operation design for the Battle of Helm’s Deep, for instance, was quite bad – Saruman is a dummy-wummy whose plans fail because they are bad – but it was bad in ways that made sense for the character, overcomplicated in the ways a tinkerer might overcomplicate a plan, careless in the ways that a novice at military operations might be careless, thoughtless in the way a man spirit who was driven by bitterness, anger and above all envy might be thoughtless. Adar, however, has been doing both war and trickery for quite a long time and I think we are to understand in the show he is fairly good at both. He opens the season in a flashback successfully tricking and assassinating Sauron, personally, so he must have been quite good at this at some point. He also isn’t driven by overwhelming hatred of the elves: he talks calmly and negotiates with Arondir, Galadriel and, briefly, Elrond just fine.
It is perhaps fair enough that he would distrust the elves too much to try to do the otherwise obvious thing and reach out in a diplomatic capacity to the other elven kingdoms – remember, the elves here are fragmented and Celebrimbor is only one of their leaders and by no means the most important (that’s Gil-Galad) – to warn them of the danger and have them exert diplomatic pressure on Eregion. But I have to confess, I don’t see the character groundwork laid that would explain why Adar opts for such a counter-productive operation design, devoting immense resources to attack an entire kingdom for the sake of getting at a single Maia who may-or-may-not be hiding there.
To take a guess, I think the problem here is that the writers want Adar to be at least somewhat sympathetic in his goals (defeat Sauron, avoid having the orcs re-enslaved), but also need him to foolishly hand-deliver his army to Sauron. That foolishness would make sense if he was the kind of leader who was bloody-minded enough to default to ‘Elf Genocide’ as a solution to all of his problems (this is the direction I would have taken the character), but then he wouldn’t be sympathetic enough for his downfall to generate pathos: he’d simply be a genocidal villain who got what was coming to him at the hands of another, even more powerful villain. That’s a tough circle to square, but I’m not sure I give the writers a lot of credit for the difficulty, because this is a problem they created for themselves.
Book Note: Because of course none of this is in the book material. Adar doesn’t exist at all in the legendarium; the assault upon Eregion is launched by Sauron for entirely different reasons. Sauron’s aim in attacking Eregion is both to conquer the kingdom, as he despises the elves for resisting his control (he desired “to set a bond upon the Elves and to bring them under his vigilance.”) and to recover the rings of power the elves had made and subsequently concealed (OROP, 287-8). In particular, Sauron’s goal in attacking Ost-in-Edhil and Eregion was the House of the Mírdain, where the nine rings were and where he might then torture Celebrimbor and the smiths to reveal the locations of the others (Tales, 228-9). Immediately following he “attempted to gain the mastery of Eriador” (Tales 229) and then “to make himself master of all things in Middle-earth and to destroy the Elves” (OROP 289). So the goal here was to seize the rings first and then either reduce the elves to servitude or destroy them.
That is a much more reasonable set of objectives to lead to an operational plan that includes sacking Eregion’s capital. As we discussed with the Siege of Gondor, attacking the core administrative center (there Minas Tirith, here Ost-in-Edhil) as a main objective in a campaign that ultimately intends to destroy a kingdom makes a lot of sense and was a fairly typical operational structure for pre-modern agrarian state-on-state warfare. The destruction of the main administrative center, especially if it came with the death of the rulers (in this case, Celebrimbor) might well be sufficient to end local resistance and enable the conquering force to consolidate the terrain which is Sauron’s objective, but not Adar’s.
Nevertheless, Adar settles on this as his overall strategic design: he will defeat Sauron by entirely destroying the capital city of Eregion and killing everyone to be sure.2 I really do want to stress, in terms of Adar’s incredible lack of planning: neither he, nor his soldiers have any way of identifying the shape-changing Sauron, so the plan really is “kill every living thing in Eregion and hope somewhere in there you got the right one.”
Marching Off Map and Screen
What really pushes that strategic plan into absolute, awe-inspiring absurdity is its operational implications. At the end of last season, Adar’s army of orcs had respawned in Mordor, having first been crushed by a falling tower, then slaughtered in a village ambush, then wiped out by a cavalry charge, then utterly annihilated by a massive volcanic eruption. I cannot stress enough this is an army of orcs we have seen apparently wiped out several times in the first season of the show, which appears to take place at most a few months, if not weeks, before the second season, which now springs back to life for the second season, undiminished and with a lot of brand new siege equipment they got from somewhere, I guess.
In any event, Adar’s plan is to march his army from Mordor to Eregion in order to lay siege to Ost-in-Edhil by surprise, keeping his army camped near the city until the right moment to strike.
So we might ask if this operational plan is reasonable from an operational and logistics perspective. We might do careful calculations of the population density of the route, the rate of march, the army’s ability to move supplies given its size and so on. Or we might just look at it on a map:
We’re actually being – if you can believe it – being overly kind here. What I’ve drawn there is the best route from Adar’s position at the end of last season, in the foothills of Mount Doom, to his end objective of Ost-in-Edhil, on the Sirannon River.3 However we see men loyal to Adar have camps near Pelargir in s2e3 (it’s the one Isildur runs into), and in s2e4, Isildur finds the trail of that army4 and runs into some Ents who report “an army of them [orcs], maiming and murdering as they marched.” Except Isildur is with Arondir and Estrid on foot (without much in the way of supplies and not traveling for long – they’re on a rescue mission for Theo), so they can’t actually be very far from Pelargir when they run into the traces of this army. Which instead implies an utterly baffling march route that looks like this:
So the show implies that what Adar’s Army does is march from Mordor (perhaps around Mount Doom? Perhaps further south?) either through what will be the Morgul Vale (top line) or somehow straight over the Ephel Dúath in order to get to South Ithilien for some reason, despite it being in the wrong direction and the easier crossings being to the north at Cair Andros. Then they ford the Anduin somewhere in Losarnach, thus moving just north of Pelargir so that Isildur and Arondir can find their trail, which is also baffling because the Anduin isn’t easily crossed south of where Osgiliath will be (this is, in fact, one of the central considerations of the planning of the later War of the Ring), but isn’t yet. Then they march north, around Mount Mindolluin (where Minas Tirith will be, but isn’t yet) and up into Anorien, before moving into what will be (but isn’t yet) Rohan; that region is known in this period as Calenardhon.
But for the sake of all of our sanity, let’s assume that Adar didn’t accidentally take the wrong exit coming out of Mordor and march a full week too far South and instead took the more reasonable first route: a direct shot from Mount Doom, through the Morgul Vale, crossing the Anduin probably at Cair Andros, then following along the White Mountains of Ered Nimrais where the Royal Road will later be, over the Fords of the Isen, through the Gap of Rohan, and then northward through the Enedwaith to the Sirannon and Ost-in-Edhil.
As before, I’ve done my measurements using my paper Map of Middle Earth and by my reckoning that route comes out to, give or take, 650 miles. Is 650 miles a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network? No, obviously not. It is several times over too far to do this thing, so far, in fact that the logistics math doesn’t even work despite the fact that Adar’s army also moves absurdly fast.
We don’t have a good ‘clock’ for how long the events of season 2 take. Adar’s army only departs Mordor in s2e3 (they’re still preparing at the beginning of the episode), and by the end of s2e4, they are in Eregion to be spotted by Galadriel and Elrond’s reconnaissance party (who make no effort to warn Ost-in-Edhil, I might note). The best thing we have for a clock is Gil-Galad’s effort to alert Celebrimbor to the continued danger of Sauron: he sends a messenger in the first episode, becomes concerned at the lack of report from that messenger (shown dead in the second episode), at the end of episode 2, sending Galadriel and Elrond to go check it out, which leads to them encountering the orcs at the end of episode 4, where Galadriel is captured. By that point, to go by the map, Adar’s army is on Ost-in-Edhel’s doorstep (but not yet detected, which we’ll come to next week). All of that suggests this march was accomplished in weeks or even days, rather than months.
Put another way: Adar’s massive army covers 650 miles of unknown dense forest at about the same speed as Elrond and Galadriel’s small group of scouts moves less than half that distance (about 250 miles, by my measure) over known routes in friendly territory.
Is that reasonable? No, not even remotely close. As we’ve discussed, large bodies of infantry, moving over good roads in known terrain might make something like 10 miles a day, 20 in a forced march. But Adar isn’t moving over good roads and known terrain: he is, instead, being forced to cut a road through unknown and heavily forested, apparently largely uninhabited (save for the Ents) lands. And although we don’t see it yet, he is also bringing a substantial amount of siege equipment with him; even if his catapults are assembled on site, that is a large siege-train carrying their components.
Now, you might be saying, “well, do we know the entire route is forested? After all, when we see Rohan later in the timeline, it is a rolling grassland, rather than a dense forest.” And that would be a fair argument except that the show goes out of its way to briefly show us an actual map, which marks the entire route as forested, showing the path the orc army is clearing through the forest on the map. So the show is, in this case, explicit that the army’s route runs through dense forest which has to be cut and cleared as they go.
Now, armies do not generally take unknown routes through heavily forested regions at all because they have few means to reliably find their way through such terrain. Until the very recent past, armies had few ways to determine their location in an absolute sense; they might have maps (although they might not have them, or not have good maps), but just as often relied on local guides. As a result they are going to rely on the road network itself and local landmarks (mostly known settlements) to navigate. But heading ‘off road’ into a dense forest removes all of these systems of navigation. Worse yet, for armies moving supplies (or siege equipment) via carts or wagons, dense foliage is going to make that nearly impossible, requiring an army to cut a road as it moves.
In the rare cases where armies do cut a road through a forest – and it does happen, just not often – doing so is, as you might imagine, very slow, which is in turn a big problem because armies need to keep moving in order to keep foraging in order to keep eating. So this is an army that ought to be moving much slower than 10 miles a day, looking to cover 650 miles, so we might imagine a marching time on the order of 100 days or more to make the whole trip, potentially quite a bit longer given how dense this forest is. Instead, the show has the army buzzing along at something that seems close to 80 miles a day (assuming the trip takes, as it seems in the show, about a week), which is rapidly approaching the speeds where I stop asking, “how much did their horses eat?” and instead “how much fuel did their trucks require?” Although in this case, I’d suppose the fuel for their industrial logging equipment might be more relevant.5
As we’ve noted, even with wagons and pack animals, armies could never carry more than a couple of weeks supplies with them at most and were otherwise forced to rely on foraging, which is to say taking food from the local population in order to sustain the army. But Adar has no population in his route of march to forage! Ents and their trees neither eat food that Adar’s orcs can eat, nor can the orcs eat them either. Wild game and gather – fruits, nuts and the like – are going to be woefully insufficient for Adar’s large army. We don’t know how large it is, but we have to assume many tens of thousands, given that he is heading off to besiege a large city and his victory is never meaningfully in doubt despite the arrival of significant relief forces.
As we discussed back when we picked apart Game of Thrones‘ “Loot Train” battle, the main question for foraging capabilities is the local population density, but in these dense forests, that’s basically zero. Meanwhile, Adar’s large army would probably – some back of the envelope math – need something on the order of 20-30 people per square mile in order to have enough food locally available to forage. That’s not quite dense urban terrain, by pre-modern standards, but it is certainly agrarian terrain; that population density is about the average for the American South in 1861.6 This is an army that cannot take a month-long detour through a forest without starving (or preparing the route in advance); indeed it almost certainly cannot even take a week long detour through a forest without starving, given that we see nearly no large wagons.
In short, this march, which Adar’s army accomplishes off screen is pretty flatly impossible: it would take months to cover the distance for an army that would probably be starving within days of setting out. And that’s assuming the more sensible route, rather than what the show implies, which is that the army comes quite close to Pelargir, a larger settlement likely full of much needed supplies, which it then avoids and does not sack, prefering instead to starve to death.
In the show, we meet some Ents upset that the orcs have hacked and burned their way through their forest. In reality, we’d meet some Ents upset that they had to deal with burying the bodies of tens of thousands of starving and dead orcs, somewhere in Anorien at the farthest.
Sauron’s Slow Wars
Book Note: Even between the appendices, the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, we get at most a skeletal description of the fall of Eregion from Tolkien’s own pen. That said, we get relatively more about the operational context of the siege of Ost-in-Edhil than most parts of the war and it has none of the problems that the show created with Adar’s unsupporting lightning march through dense old growth forests. Just as replacing Sauron with Adar created problems of motivation for the writers (which they failed to really solve) not present in the books, so too it created operational timetable problems.
Whereas Adar proceeds, as above, very rapidly, Sauron is willing to move very slowly in attacking Eregion. Unsurprisingly, an immortal spirit-being in existence since the dawn of the world is able to think on even longer timetables than the Elves. The exact timing of events differs a bit between the appendices and Unfinished Tales, but as noted above, we’re going to follow the appendices. In that timeline, the rings of power begin to be forged in Eregion, under Sauron’s disguised guidance, in Second Age 1500 (S.A. 1500). He leaves Eregion sometime before S.A. 1590 to forge the One Ring and in his absence, the Elves forge the Three Rings. The One Ring is then forged in S.A. 1600 and the Elves immediately sense it. In response, Sauron changes his plan to one of conquest rather than control through the rings.
Sauron’s base of operations is, I should note, already Barad-dûr in Mordor; its construction was begun even earlier, in S.A. 1000. Unlike Adar, Sauron does not immediately open his war on the Elves, even though the moment he forges the One Ring in c. S.A. 1600, they are in a state of hostilities. Instead, he spends approximately 90 years getting ready for what will be the War of the Elves and Sauron, which he launches in exactly S.A. 1693. That’s a long gap and we’re not told what Sauron is doing in that period, but it would make a fair bit of sense if the answer was, “steadily consolidating allies and control in Calenardhon (that is, Rohan) to provide his army a route to Eregion.” No real historical polity moves quite that slowly to prepare for a military operation, but there’s quite a lot of things Sauron might have been quietly doing in that period. He could have been consolidating the loyalty of the people living in Calenardhon, even perhaps quietly facilitating the creation of roads and routes that might enable his armies to move through the region. As his plans grew closer, he might also have established magazines – supply depots, in this case, of grain, not ammunition – so that his army, rather than foraging along the route, could move from one grain stockpile to the next to sustain its supply, allowing a quicker march. He might even have established something akin to the Spanish Road that Spain used to move troops to Flanders during the Eighty Years War (1566-1648), a network of agreements, supply bases and routes enabling troops to move over foreign territory.
Sauron then opens his war in S.A. 1693 (RotK 415) but does not immediately rush to besiege the capital. Instead, it is in 1695 that Sauron “invades Eriador” (RotK 416; Tales 228 – note that the war beginning two years earlier is a detail not included in Tales). Then the fall of Ost-in-Edhil, represented in Tales as if it happens immediately in 1695 is, in the appendices (RotK 416 again) clearly noted to happen (as it involves the death of Celebrimbor, a dated event) in 1697, two years later. Then Sauron takes two more years to consolidate Eriador (the larger region of which Eregion is a subunit), a task completed in S.A. 1699. The appendices timeline is a bit more extended than what is implied in Unfinished Tales (though it doesn’t directly contradict anything in Tales) and is, I think, to be preferred.
This is a much more reasonable operational plan. Sauron presumably spends decades building the alliances necessary to both assemble his armies and pave the road from Mordor to Eregion. He opens direct hostilities in S.A. 1693, presumably marching his main forces from Mordor to southern Eriador in that year and then perhaps engaging in operations to both consolidate his logistical position (perhaps bringing over the peoples of Enedwaith and Minhiriath in this period). But he might also be engaged in late 1693 and 1964 in an attritional strategy, drawing out Eregion’s forces and wearing them down in smaller engagements. The normal way to do this in pre-modern warfare would be a strategy of agricultural devastation, targeting smaller outlying villages and rural populations, which might both force the enemy to battle but also deplete the local resources – men (well, Elves), grain, supplies, craftworkers – available for the defense as populations move to get out of the war zone. During the Thirty Years War, repeated instances of this sort of ravaging created depopulated zones in parts of the Holy Roman Empire over time. We’re told in Unfinished Tales that Celebrimbor is actually able to drive back Sauron’s initial forays into his lands and that may be in this period or perhaps the two years after (Tales, 228).
Evidently, his position secure, Sauron escalates his operations in S.A. 1695 as this marks the beginning of the ‘invasion,’ which may simply mean that rather than seasonal raiding where Sauron’s forces return south to the Gap of Rohan or Enedwaith, Sauron’s forces moved into Eregion on a permanent basis. Yet it takes two more years for Ost-in-Edhil to fall and Celebrimbor to be slain. We’ll come back later int he series to what we might imagine, with some historical thinking, Sauron might have been doing doing the two years between his invasion and the fall of Ost-in-Edhil in a later part of the series. But for now, I want to note that for a large-scale expeditionary operation, this timeline makes sense. It probably didn’t take two years to move the army from Mordor to Eregion, but it might well have taken two years (which is to say, two fighting seasons) to establish a permanent base of operations in Eriador and weaken Eregion enough to provide for an invasion and continual presence. Pre-modern warfare could often be slow and creeping like this, with each side using strategies of agricultural devastation or attacks on smaller settlements to try to set favorable conditions for a battle or to lay the logistics prerequisites for a long, large-scale siege.
Meanwhile, of course, Sauron ends up aiming to consolidate all of Eriador (RotK 416, Tales 299), so a major multi-year invasion with a large army intending to set a permanent presence in the region makes a lot more operational sense than Adar’s plan to try to use an army to assassinate a single person neither he nor any of his men can identify by sight.
Building a Better March
So Adar’s operational planning here is a mess: the plot demands his army leap through trackless forest at speeds that would be the envy of Mongol raiding parties moving over the open plains, with no apparent source of supply – which they would certainly need even with their absurd rate of speed – or baggage train, despite bringing large numbers of siege machines, lunging through territory that is treated as simply empty, when it probably ought to be at least thinly settled.
Can we build Adar a better campaign? I think we can, even without resorting to the incredibly long preparation time-scales that we see Sauron, as a Maia, engage in. Indeed, we’ve actually covered historical examples of this kind of long-distance expeditionary warfare before, particularly in the context of the the Second and Third Macedonian Wars (200-196, 172-168). Something like the primary wave of the First Crusade (planning begins in 1095, the actual campaign runs 1096-1099) can also serve as useful historical comparanda, although the crusaders benefited greatly from Byzantine support both in providing a logistical ‘jumping off’ point at Constantinople and initial logistics support, as well as some naval resupply during the Siege of Antioch (1097-1098).
What we see in all three cases is that an expeditionary campaign like this moves in stages, with each stage establishing the logistical conditions to advance into the next geographic area. For instance, in the case of the Third Macedonian War, first, the Romans needed a strong diplomatic position in Greece to enable them to move armies to and operate in Thessaly; this was achieved through the victories of the Second Macedonian War. Then the Romans had to secure northern Thessaly – controlled by Perseus and his Macedonians – in order to provide the logistical jumping off point for operations to get around Mount Olympus. They secure northern Thessaly by 171, then clear the route through Tempe in 169 (which now allows direct access into Pieria, the southern part of Macedon proper) which finally sets conditions for the decisive battle at Pydna in 168.
The First Crusade likewise moves in identifiable, logistics driven stages. First the crusaders have to obtain (and hold) the support of Alexios I Komnenos (the Byzantine Emperor), who provides the market access and food supply to get the crusaders to Nicaea and then from Nicaea into Anatolia. The trip through the rest of Anatolia was difficult as the local Turks – under Kilij Arslan, Sultan of Rum – engaged in a scorched earth campaign to deny the crusaders foraging opportunities. The dire crusader supply position was aleviated once they crossed out of Anatolia into Cilicia because of Baldwin’s adventure in Edessa, which ended up with him becoming the local ruler – the First Crusade is a strange campaign – and thus able to assist in supplying the army as it turned south towards Antioch. The crusade runs badly out of food both besieging Antioch and then being besieged in Antioch, but naval resupply gets them through the first problem and the defeat of Kerbogha relief force (which had besieged them in the city) left the crusaders in control of the northern Levant by August, 1098, providing the logistics base for the final push southward towards Jerusalem in 1099.
I should note that is an absurdly brief summary of the very complicated First Crusade. But it gives a sense of the stages. Part of the reason the core campaign lasts from 1096 to 1099 is that the crusaders need to repeatedly secure their local base of supply, either diplomatically (Constantinople, Edessa) or militarily (Nicaea, Antioch) in order to proceed further.
So how might we apply this approach to Rings of Power? There are quite a few ways for this to go, but let me suggest one vision of an operational plan and how it might be implemented in the story.
Adar’s forces begin in Mordor and first need to secure a jumping off point. Instead of showing him preparing his army in the now volcano-ravaged Plateau of Gorgoroth, we might use Isildur’s escape from Mordor towards Pelargir as an opportunity to show Adar already building up a logistics base in the logical jumping off point: the Morgul Vale. Isildur might see stockpiles of food, animals and siege equipment being collected there once he escapes from those spiders (presumably intended to be some early version of Shelob’s lair?). This would be an example of Adar employing magazines – depots of supplies, mostly food (rather than ammunition) – to extend the movement range of an army. Because while armies are limited by the ‘tyranny of the wagon equation,’ a general can use wagons to build up depots with supplies along his route of march, so long as the territory is safe enough to ensure the enemy won’t simply destroy them.
Establishing those depots might take a few months and can probably furnish Adar enough supplies to get his army over the Anduin and into Anorien. But he’ll then need a new source of supply to rely on. Fortunately, he has a few months while his army assembles and his depots in the Morgul Vale build up. This might be a good time to use most of his human followers. Anorien and Losarnach are not empty, after all, they have a human population (which in the Silmarillion is altnerately laboring under the yoke of Sauron or living in wonder (and then servitude) of the Númenoreans). I don’t think Adar can expect to resupply his army simply by foraging this population, in part because the larger population centers, like, Pelargir, are too far south. But what he might be able to do is use his overwhelming military power and the fact that these human populations live well within his campaigning range: send human envoys to the people of Pelargir and all of the other settlements, demanding tribute, in the form of food supplies to be gathered (by his human followers) along the route of his march. The Romans often treated the cities of Greece this way, demanding that notionally allied (or even notionally neutral) Greek cities supply Roman armies moving past them as a condition of not making an enemy of Rome. A “don’t make me forage you” sort of diplomacy.
Thus by the time Adar’s army steps off, he has a full supply depot at the gateway to Ithilien and merely has to lunge to already filling supply depots in Anorien, filled up by the tribute of Losarnach, paid by those people so that Adar’s army goes west instead of south. Once again, Isildur might be able to witness this, arriving in Pelargir as the people toil under the demands to provide so much food for an army that would otherwise destroy them.
Adar’s next challenge is Calenardhon and here he has a problem. Even if we make this terrain rolling plains (because this is Rohan and I don’t see why its rainfall patterns would have been dramatically altered at any point during the Second Age), that is still poor territory for the sort of foraging Adar’s army might need and yet far enough away from Adar’s own starting bases that he is unlikely to have the diplomatic inroads necessary to repeat the trick he used in Anorien and Losarnach.7 But I think we can make this work for our story: Adar’s march over the plains of Calenardhon is doubly brutal. On the one hand, his army forages every bit of food it can as it moves, leading to immense suffering among the poor folk unfortunate enough to be caught in its path. At the same time, that forage is insufficient for the army’s needs and so we also see the march take a brutal toll on Adar’s orcs, a way of suggesting in the story that his monomaniacal focus on pursuing Sauron is coming at the cost of a brutal callousness towards his ‘children.’ These sort of harsh forced marches do happen in war, though wise generals avoid them whenever possible: the First Crusade’s march through Anatolia is one such example, but equally Alexander the Great’s brutal march through Gedrosia is another.
Adar’s army thus reaches the Gap of Rohan and the Isen watershed low on food, but we might posit this as a rather more densely peopled part of Middle Earth. The Isen, after all, is a major river and we learn in Tales that during the Second Age, the peoples of Enedwaith were numerous and warlike (Tales 252). In the legendarium, these peoples eventually side with Sauron, outraged at how the Númenoreans have despoiled their forests (for their ships, Tales 252-3); having Adar, claiming to be on a crusade against Sauron, fall upon them at this point might produce a similar result. Operationally, Adar is likely going to want to move his army rapidly into the settled areas, demanding that the towns and villages ‘surrender in advance’ by providing food to his army as tribute; when the warlike peoples of Enedwaith refuse, he storms their settlements and takes the food by force.8
Now we’ll come back to Eregion’s dismal scouting soon, but this might provide an opportunity for another set of character beats: Celebrimbor is likely to be receiving reports – distant, confused and incomplete – about what is going on. That might begin with scattered refugees from Calenardhon arriving near the southern borders of his realm, telling confusing stories of strange invaders pillaging their lands. Then, somewhat later, clearer reports of sudden warfare in Enedwaith, of towns being sacked. But the confused and incomplete nature of the reports – which might not offer clarity as to who is doing the sacking – could provide Celebrimbor an opportunity to, a bit more reasonably, dismiss the warning signs of what is coming, removing the need to have Sauron engage in outright mind control as he does in the show. Instead, Sauron as Annatar might gently nudge Celebrimbor to dismiss the rumors of an army in Calenardhon as thinly founded, and discount warfare in Enedwaith on the grounds that the humans of Enedwait are always fighting anyway.
Meanwhile Adar consolidates his control over Enedwaith, resupplies his army and probably winters there, before opening his war against Eregion – still somewhat unexpectedly – the following spring. He still can’t, logistically, dash directly to Ost-in-Edhil because he must suspect its siege will take some time and so he needs to secure his logistics for that. Instead, his spring campaign might open with an effort to draw out Celebrimbor’s army (in the books, Celebrimbor is, in fact, so drawn out; Tales, 228-9) and over a series of smaller engagements in the spring and summer, slowly wear down Eregion’s army. At this point, Gil-Galad is probably sending Elrond with a relief force, but that takes time to prepare and move. Adar, having weakened Eregion, winters south of Ost-in-Edhil, supplied by his conquests in Enedwaith. Elrond leaves Lindon the following spring, but too late, as Adar launches his assault on Ost-in-Edhil at the same time. In the few months it takes Elrond to march his army, as quick as he can, to Eregion, Ost-in-Edhil falls and thus Elrond arrives just in time to see that Celebrimbor has been slain and his disheartened army is swiftly pushed back, leading Adar master of Eregion.
The whole timeline might then be:
- Year 0, Fall and Winter – Supply depots in the Morgul Vale prepared. Adar winters in Gorgoroth, Isildur escapes to Pelargir to find Adar’s men already pressing it for supplies.
- Year 1, Spring: Adar moves his main base to the Morgul Vale in early March, picking up his supplies and setting out into Ithilien as quickly as he can. He has as many supplies as he can carry, which is still only a few weeks worth – enough to lunge to his new depots in Anorien.
- Year 1, Late Spring: Adar crosses the Anduin and picks up his supplies in Anorien and western Calenardhon, which by this point his human servants have had almost a year to prepare them.
- Year 1, Summer: Adar’s difficult march over Calenardhon. It’s a bit more than 250 miles through the Eastfold and Westfold, but Adar’s army is big and moving a siege train and so likely to move fairly slow (6-8 miles a day), plus he’s having to forage as much as possible simply to stay afloat. It might thus take most of the summer to make the crossing, badly straining his supplies.
- Year 1, Fall: Adar arrives at the Isen and demands the submission of the people in Enedwaith; when they refuse he falls upon the country with pillage and slaughter to get the supplies he desperately needs.
- Year 1/2, Winter: Adar winters now in Enedwaith, consolidating his control over the conquered settlements there and stockpiling for the coming war.
- Year 2, Spring: Adar launches his ‘surprise’ invasion of Eregion, seizing smaller outlying towns and pillaging south of the Glandiun, with the aim of denying the kingdom the supplies it needs to resist.
- Year 2, Summer: Celebrimbor sends to Gil-Galad for aid and marshals out his forces to engage Adar. The result is a series of smaller engagements as Celebrimbor disperse to try to defend outlying settlements from Adar’s raiding parties; the attrition begins to weaken Eregion’s armies.
- Year 2-3, Winter: Adar winters south of the Glandiun in striking distance of Ost-in-Edhil, pulling supplies north from Enedwaith. Celebrimbor prepares for a siege. Elrond readies to march.
- Year 3, Spring: Adar’s assault reaches Ost-in-Edhil while Elrond is still marching; the city is invested in late March and falls in May. Elrond arrives too late to save Eregion in early June.
To which the response might be that showing an extended campaign in film is quite hard as compared to simply having armies teleport to each other and then engage in Big Single Battles. But a skillful use of the medium can accomplish this sort of thing! It is possible to represent the slow progress of a ‘long war’ on screen; the second season of Arcane does this twice, representing the slow progress of what is essentially a counter-insurgency mission through montages suggesting that we’re skipping over what are likely weeks or months of operations. Another film that does this fairly well is actually…Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. We hear Boromir speak of Gondor’s long fight against Mordor at the Council of Elrond and, in the extended cut, we see a flashback to the recapture of Osgiliath, an early stage of that fighting. Then we see skirmishes along the Anduin as Frodo passes through in The Two Towers, so that when Sauron’s main effort finally comes in The Return of the King, the audience knows it is the culmination of fighting that has been going on quite some time.
Stretching out the time tables of Rings of Power‘s second season to encompass a few years would actually solve quite a lot of problems, like the speed with which Ar-Pharazôn (who, in the book timeline, isn’t going to take power for another 1,558 years after the fall of Ost-in-Edhil) consolidates power, the corruption Durin III’s ring works on him, and Celebrimbor’s fall and repentance, as well.
Instead, what we get is a massive orc army teleporting halfway across Middle Earth in the space of a single episode. Armies do not work this way. But, alas, getting our orc army to Ost-in-Edhil is merely the beginning of the problems with this siege.
- I am working from the Kindle edition of Unfinished Tales, so page numbers may be approximate
- In the event, when Adar’s orcs find Sauron, in his guise as Annatar, they have to ask, “Are you him? Are you Sauron?” suggesting they do not, in fact, have a way to identify Sauron even if he is standing alone, unarmed in a room. This is something of an oversight in the plan.
- The exact location of Ost-in-Edhil isn’t, as far as I know, certain in the legendarium, except that it was decently near the western entrance to Moria (but out of sight of it) and along the Sirannon River, which does limit the possibilities quite a bit. I think the Lord of the Rings Project’s map’s solution above makes the most sense, to be frank.
- Explicitly, he says, “we saw what they did” when their presence is reported, so there’s no question the trail of destruction they see was Adar’s army.
- I suppose it at least explains where they are going to get their petrochemical-based incendiaries later on in the series. As an aside, just like infantry columns maneuvering in potentially hostile territory do not move at standard human walking speed but quite a lot slower, so too mechanized or armored elements with modern vehicles do not usually move at modern driving speeds. The famously rapid armored ‘Thunder Run’ to Baghdad in 2003 took about three weeks to cover the c. 300 miles from its starting points to the outskirts of Baghdad, despite moving on mostly flat terrain along existing roads and facing resistance that was, famously, not very effective. Which is to say, yes, Adar moves his army of foot-mobile orcs faster than a mechanized thunder run.
- Figuring c. 30,000 orcs might require around 40,800kg or so of food per day, so they probably need to forage something close to 2,000 farmers daily and – assuming there’s some cavalry hiding somewhere in that force – they might sweep about 5 miles to either side of the army. Moving at Just maybe 6 miles a day (because of the forest), that’s 60 square miles a day, so they need 33 people in each square mile to get up to around 2,000 as the population being foraged. Note that the real number would be higher because this army would have a siege train and also 30,000 is not necessarily a very large force for what they’re attempting to do.
- Yes, of course, the destruction of Númenor entails some substantial metaphysical changes to the world – it is literally made round – but unlike the War of Wrath, the destruction of Númenor doesn’t reshape the geography of Middle Earth. No mountains get submerged or coastlines moved. So there’s no reason the obvious rain shadow that makes Rohan relatively dry would change.
- I am assuming these settlements are probably not well fortified. These folks are described as being ‘in awe’ of the Númenoreans (Tales 252), so I doubt they have stone-walled cities and it isn’t hard to imagine small towns with wooden pallisades falling quickly to Adar’s army.
So, this is off-topic, but does anyone know why they were only sold the appendices in this fashion? It’s a pretty small work and it seems fairly difficult to police what’s in the appendices vs. the Simarillion, and it’s not like they didn’t pay a lot for the rights.
My understanding is they have the TV rights to The Lord of the Rings as an entire work, and opted to adapt from the appendices rather than the main body of the work because even Bezos wasn’t ambitious enough to think he could get away with that one.
I suspect it was down to competing interests within the Tolkien family. The deal was made when Christopher Tolkien was still alive and, I believe, still in control of his father’s literary estate. CT was outspokenly skeptical of dramatic adaptations of his father’s works (he thought Jackson’s movies were too action-oriented, e.g.), but I imagine was under significant pressure from other family members to strike another incredibly lucrative deal.
So, is he going to let Hollywood vultures run rampant over the Silmarillion, which was really HIS baby and HIS contribution/extension to his father’s work, which became his own life’s work? Of course not. But LOTR has already been sold and compromised, so let’s do it again. They didn’t sell the appendices, they sold the whole of LOTR. It was Amazon’s choice to use that as a way to tell stories that wouldn’t immediately compete with the memory of Jackson’s films.
It should be noted that Christopher Tolkien had already had bad experiences with the material already licensed away. Middle-Earth Enterprises, a company that only exists to hold the licensing rights for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (that is literally its only source of income, that you pay it so it says “Yes” when you want to use the word “Gandalf” in your product) allowed the creation of Lord of the Rings themed gambling products (slot machines and such), and Christopher tried to stop them, with no success – he backed down before the matter was scheduled to appear in court, likely because MEE would have been able to afford ten times as many lawyers as the Tolkien Estate.
“that is literally its only source of income, that you pay it so it says “Yes” when you want to use the word “Gandalf” in your product”
I’m curious how that works. The word “Gandalf” comes from the Poetic Edda–as do all the Dwarf names in The Hobbit. I get that most people only encounter the names, or first encounter them, do so via LOTR, but I’d be curious to see what happens if it’s challenged in court.
I think to be safe I would make the new ‘Gandalf’ a nasty little troll with a club. I suspect ‘wizard with staff called Gandalf would to close for the judge’s liking
IP (intellectual property) cases can involve messy factual conundrums. (And the rules for copyright vs. trademark vs. patent are often different.) I’m not the world’s greatest expert (they cost a lot of money) but off the top of my head, almost certainly you can refer to “Gandalf” in a scholarly or even a popular (if there is such a thing) work on the Edda. OTOH, as John T said, a wizard named Gandalf is almost certainly over the line, especially since I don’t believe the Edda characterizes the person as such. What about a set of coasters engraved with names from the Edda, where the one engraved “Gandalf” outsells the others 100 to 1? More difficult, but probably not allowed.
I can’t seem to reply to ey81 directly, but in regards to|
” a wizard named Gandalf is almost certainly over the line, especially since I don’t believe the Edda characterizes the person as such.”
Gandalfr in the Volupsa doesn’t have any characterization whatsoever, it’s just a list of names of the “dverga”. But interestingly, it doesn’t match the linguistics for a lot of the other dwarven names, and seems more like an alfar name. Especially since the name most literally means ‘Staff-elf’ or ‘Wand-elf’.
I suspect the very notion of Gandalf’s character in The Hobbit started with Tolkien reading this and wondering why this elf with a staff is associated with a bunch of dwarves, and we eventually got Gandalf accompanying Thorin and company.
“I suspect the very notion of Gandalf’s character in The Hobbit started with Tolkien reading this and wondering why this elf with a staff is associated with a bunch of dwarves, and we eventually got Gandalf accompanying Thorin and company.”
This is also what Prof Tom Shippey thinks (in “Tolkien: Author of the Century”, which is a very good read).
As someone who’s been in contact with people who knew Christopher Tolkien, this seems to me to be mostly correct. Though as Alien points out the rights to LotR, including the appendices, had already been sold. Also Christopher didn’t want to take much credit for assembling the Silmarillion, and later regretted that he had written the majority of ch. 22 of the book
To simplify a FAMOUSLY complex mess, the rights to adapt the The Lord of the Rings books in different ways are owned by different people, and the rights to the rest of Tolkein’s work were NOT sold off at the same time as the Lord of the Rings books; the Tolkein Estate (and Chris Tolkein) in particular were so unimpressed with the franchising of the series that they’ve since largely refused to sell further rights. As a result, Amazon found it much, MUCH simpler to buy TV rights (Or maybe they bought out the rights-holding company itself) to the books (Which include the Appendices) from the existing copyright holding business, than to try and negotiate directly for the Silmarillion rights with the Estate when they likely didn’t intend to follow the material very closely anyway.
One complication that our host seems unaware of is that roughly (but not exactly) the same package was adapted a few years before the Rings of Power as a couple of videogames, by WB. Celebrimbor is both already dead and a main character throughout those, and stuff that WB added in their adaptation has to be carefully avoided in the TV adaptation, as those additions might be treated as distinct elements owned by Warner Brothers. There’s a whole lot of ‘how do orcs work, exactly?’ that’s invented in those games, too.
In one of his posts (can’t remember which) he linked to an article criticizing Shadow of Mordor’s theme.
The state of the LotR intellectual rights is insanely fractured and complicated. Whatever you imagine, it’s worse. This summary is a few years old but still correct AFAIK:
Papa Tolkien sold the original trilogy rights in the 60’s when he was hard up for money. This predated the extended legendarium. This is how we get the the Hobbit cartoon and is still the source of media adaptations today.
The legendarium material including the Sil is held by the Tolkien Estate. At least while Christopher was alive, they would not license this out. Is it complicated to determine what’s in the LotR versus the extended works? Yes! Also the Estate is very litigious.
“this material… [is] often unclear, incomplete, or even at odds with each other”
Só basically you’re saying that, as you are a historian of the pre-printing press era, this is your time to shine!
This is very nice. So I feel a bit bad that I am compelled to make one minor, pedantic point. The Ents at the very least have food (or more precisely, a sort of drink which sustains like food) that hobbits can eat. Orcs seem to have pretty loose dietary requirements, so I’m pretty sure ent-draughts could sustain them, if they could obtain the stuff.
Of course, there’s the rather insurmountable problems of identifying ent-draughts as opposed to just being faintly muddy water, or dealing with the furious ents if you try to take their stuff, but it doesn’t seem any more absurd than half the things the narrative apparently makes this army do.
I don’t think that’s true. In LOTR (The Two Towers) Treebeard didn’t just pull some water out of the river and drink it. He did something to it–I’m more than three-quarters tempted to say he did some ritual to it, with the spring and the jars–to make it able to sustain the Hobbits. In order to utilize this resource the army would need the support of a fair number of Ents. And nothing I’ve read indicates there were ever nearly enough Ents to provide an army with food. I’m reminded of the carnivorous bees, which make meat honey: they only make enough for their own survival, and pulling enough out of their stores to supply others with food would cause them to starve.
A better option may be to use orcs to feed orcs. We know they’re cannibalistic (“Meat’s back on the menu, boys!”), so any dead orc becomes a food source. I don’t know that any army has ever moved on that principle, but I can think of two historical examples of something similar happening. There was a Mesoamarican empire where a significant portion of the ruling class’s diet consisted of human flesh, showing that you can sustain a population on this food supply (for a time–they used prisoners of war as food, which historians speculate led them to ever-increasing reliance on warfare, which destroyed their empire). And there was the expedition to the South Pole where the team moved via dog sleds, and the dogs were slaughtered to feed the remaining dogs at pre-set points (an act I find absolutely abhorrent, since this was planned in advance and didn’t net us anything other than “We put eyes on this insignificant point on Earth’s surface”).
The Mongol practice of drinking horse blood may also come into play here. How much blood can an orc lose before they’re killed? And is it just orcs, or can we include trolls and other beasts that we saw in LOTR (those things pulling the battering ram, for example)?
When you don’t need to worry about morality, you have a lot of options for food….
You’d need a staggeringly large army, because you’re only going to have a quarter of it or less by the time you get to the city you’re besieging. And you’d either have to have an army of generalists or a very, very sharp line between those who aren’t allowed to be killed and those who are. Not totally implausible–we see such distinctions exist at several points in LOTR–but it does introduce a tremendous hazard. An army that marches by eating each other is not an army that’s going to have a lot of cohesion, and if I’m an officer in such an army I’m going to make very, very certain that I’m well-guarded on the march and when I sleep!
I feel compelled to point out that the ‘meat’s back on the menu!’ is a PJ line, and not found in the books. In fact, pretty early on in Chapter 3 of Book IV in The Two Towers, we get this line in a dispute between the Mordor-Orcs and the Isengard contingent.
‘Swine is it? How do you folk like being called swine by the muck-rakers of a dirty little wizard? It’s orc-flesh they eat, I’ll warrant.’
Which seems to indicate that if anything, cannibalism is one of the few recognizable taboos that orcs do have. That being said, the way orcs actually act means I suspect that they would resort to cannibalism if needed, even if it’s hateful to them. You see similar instances of orc hypocrisy, probably most clearly with the whole business with a story of leaving Ufthak for Shelob’s consumption a source of humor not two minutes after Shagrat and Gorbag express real disgust at leaving a companion behind to distract Shelob as an ‘Elvish trick’
There’s this somewhat macabre XKCD what-if https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ which talks about the logistics of cannibalism; an average human provides 30 human-days worth of calories. If we assume orcs have the same ratio of consumed calories from eating them to the caloric requirements of the orcs eating them, and the journey takes a week like our good host mentions in the impression he gets from the show, they’d have to eat about a fifth of the army to make it to Eregion.
I’ll grant that it’s a Peter Jackson addition. But I’m on the fence about cannibalism in orcs. We never get a clear answer one way or another. They certainly don’t balk at eating other intelligent species, though there’s clearly a hierarchy as to which are preferred.
But okay, let’s assume they avoid orc-meat. They eat humans, it’s fairly well-documented among the evil beings of Middle Earth (I don’t know of any case of orcs eating elves, oddly enough). An army of 30,000 would, by your calculations, require about 6,000 people per week. At 20 people per square mile, that’s 300 square miles of foraging per week (we can assume they’re willing to depopulate the area as part of the campaign, though that’ll make the return trip problematic) or 42 square miles of forage a day if you’re supplying this 100% with captives. But you can capture people from one place and move them to another, so we can drop this number, especially for short pushes. It would be reasonable to sack a city, take a few thousand captives, and use them as a food supply to support your army for a short push between populated areas (by “reasonable” I mean “logistically possible”; morally it’s pretty obviously deeply evil). It also keeps moral up among the orcs–which isn’t a huge consideration most of the time, but not NO consideration (none of the orcs are happy when they’re told to not damage the prisoners, which contributes to the internal violence within the ranks).
This would explain the trip south. It’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because using those captives as food during the push through the woods was part of the plan.
(I’m now curious as to how well human meat preserves. Can you smoke it? Salt it? Make jerky out of it? I know you can make leather out of human skin and our fat can be treated like tallow. Taphonomy forces you to confront a lot of really disturbing things, as the best case-studies are always anthropological.)
I will happily grant that this is post-hoc reasoning on my part. If this was the intent the burden is on the show to tell us that. And none of this explains how the army avoided the Ents and the trees they shepherd, which should have been harassing the army the entire way. Even if there weren’t many Ents, there are by definition a LOT of trees in a forest, and we know that in Middle Earth trees are capable of violence. The army should have been eroded faster than an overtopping earthen dam, with any survivors being absolutely broken mentally from the horror.
“It would be reasonable to sack a city, take a few thousand captives, and use them as a food supply to support your army for a short push between populated areas”
Why not just take ordinary domesticated animals? It is almost unheard-of for captured animals to escape, loot an armoury, and hack their captors apart with their own weapons. Humans have been known to do that.
Not often, but a lot more often than sheep.
“Why not just take ordinary domesticated animals?”
Possibly because of cultural food preferences. I mean, how long did it take for Europeans to eat potatoes? (Fascinating history there, with some fun psychology.) We know from Sarumon’s speach (in the movies) and the orcs’ debate in “The Two Towers” (book) that one of the ways rulers of orcs perform rulership is to provide humans to eat from time to time. So we know it’s part of their culture, and not an insignificant one; makes sense that a general on a difficult campaign would ensure he’s able to do this, to maintain the army’s loyalty.
Possibly to depopulate the region to allow for future settlement. Not really an issue in this case, but in others I can see it being a reason. If your goal is to remove the enemy and establish your people in the area, eating them is a pretty good way to ensure they’re gone. Taking cattle, in contrast, may or may not do this. Not really applicable in TROP, but a valid reason for Book Sauron.
Possibly to work. Cows can’t really swing an ax or dig a ditch, whereas human captives can, even after some remarkably brutal treatment. So you have a workforce to cut down trees that also provides nourishment when they’re not useful for cutting down trees anymore. They serve double duty.
Possibly to spread terror. Fear is an under-rated factor in ancient warfare. It’s why Rome behaved the way they did when they won a siege–the story spread (inevitably some would get away), and next time there was a siege folks were far more inclined to let the Romans in without a fight. For another fun option, you can use them as shields. I’m going to be rather hesitant to shoot into people I know, or to pour hot sand on them, or the like, and being forced to do so would quickly erode moral (the Witch King does a variation of this in the Siege of Minas Tirith). Cattle don’t have that sort of emotional impact, as humans are used to slaughtering them for food. Or you can torture them outside the city walls. That’ll either sap the moral inside the city/town, or cause them to rush out and make stupid mistakes.
Finally, arrogance can play a role. If you think you’re going to win regardless, you can afford to take risks. If you have an endless, respawning supply of orcs, you can afford to lose a bunch of them. And 6,000 people isn’t going to do much to 30,000 if you take some fairly basic precautions.
This all gets really dark really quickly, so I’m leaving a fair bit vague. A bit of imagination should be able to fill in some of the gaps. Sad part is, all of this–and more–was done in the past by humans to humans. And to be clear, I’m not saying this is a fantastic idea. I’m just saying it’s not inherently stupid. It could possibly work.
Interestingly, another author took up the man-eating-orc theme that Tolkien had only hinted at and turned it into a main feature of his Orc-like creatures in his mythology: Robert Jordan in the “Wheel of Time” Series. In it Trollocks (who are Orcs really), typically take human captives in their raids and use them as food. The subject is addressed many times and even is a major plot point in some books.
I disagree that Trollocks are Orcs.
Firstly, Orcs are people. Bad people, but still clearly people. Trollocks are some kind of weird animal thing that only fights in an organized fashion because of their non-Trollock commanders’ mind control powers.
Also, Trollocks are bigger and stronger than Humans. But Tolkien’s Orcs are smaller than Men. In Moria, the protagonists fight a “huge” Orc who is “almost as large as a Man”. At Helm’s Deep, Gimli is intimidated by the size of the enemy Men (who are just regular guys) and can’t bring himself to attack them, but in the same battle he kills loads of Orcs – and these are the big Orcs, the “fighting Uruk-Hai” who push around smaller Orcs.
” Cows can’t really swing an ax or dig a ditch, whereas human captives can, even after some remarkably brutal treatment.”
If anyone is giving an axe or a pickaxe to someone who knows he is planning to eat him later, he is not going to be doing it anywhere near me. I am going to be as far away as possible, preferably in a completely different army.
@Bullseye, wordpress won’t let me reply to you directly for some reason: When I say that Trollocks are Orcs I mean that they occupy the same place in Jordan’s Mythology that Orcs occupy in Tolkien’s mythology: The faceless, featureless evil creatures that serve the Dark Lord and do evil things, who are undoubtedly evil without question. I did not mean to say they are identical in shape, form or character.
@kostaszag
That’s the thing, though. Jordan actually does make the “Trollocs” are less like ‘hostile people’ and more like beasts in humanoid form who have to be mind-controlled by smarter beings (typically the Myrddraal), and the Trollocs don’t get much treatment or attention as people with their own priorities and goals. By contrast, we have entire chapters where orcish named characters figure prominently, and where we actually get significant insight into how they think and how in many ways their thought process is more familiar to human experience than we’d like.
They don’t actually play the same literary role. Jordan’s Trollocs are specifically and only the muscle for his overall villain faction, whereas Tolkein’s orcs are presented as being psychologically complete beings, as people who raise questions like “what is it like to be ruled by Sauron, given that Sauron desires dominion over all peoples and not just the destruction of the world?”
I did a bit of back-of-envelope stuff on cannibal logistics and, in addition to all you’ve mentioned, there are two critical factors.
First, if you’re doing cannibal logistics, fighting battles along the way becomes desirable, because it’s a very useful replenishment tool – instead of having to eat your own soldiers, you can eat some of the enemy as well.
But, of course, only if you win (because you need to control the battlefield in order to collect the dead).
Second, that thirty orc-days ration per orc or human body is all very well, but it’s small compared to what you get from a horse. If you’re commanding a logistics-light raid into Rohan, for example, you should be trying to provoke as many skirmishes with *mounted* Riders as you can. Even if you’re losing 100 of your orcs and only killing 10 Riders and 10 horses, that’s fine, because the alternative is that you’ll have to kill about 190 of your orcs to eat, and the enemy has zero losses. This way you avoid the morale consequences of drawing up the daily Dinner Rota, and you’re losing fewer of your own soldiers.
I’d say the real missed opportunity here for the writers is that they had a chance to do an origin story for orcish consumption of humans and possibly cannibalism. Bret’s figures about population density for foraging don’t account for how many fewer farms you’d need to steal from if you were also eating the farmers, and orcs probably should be written as eliminationist racists even when they aren’t fully controlled by Sauron. You could even give Adar a big ‘burning the boats on the beach’ moment with an order to wipe out the farms that might supply the army if it retreated, and then contrast that with the horror of the orcs enjoying the order.
I don’t think eating the farmers would make a huge difference to be honest. Back of the envelope sums suggested that even a large family would have about half as much meat on them as a cow. So you’re looking at something on the order an extra half a cow of food per 30 acre farm or so. Not an insubstantial increase, but hardly ground breaking. At the level of approximation we’re working it here (aka, guessing about the metabolism of orcs and the agricultural yields of a fantasy world) it probably gets lost as a rounding error.
How many domestic animals there would have been around. I suspect the orc army would have had to eat the animals and humans alike.
This has been addressed by XKCD: ( at least with humans, but we can assume they are nutritionally similar to humans.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/
There truly is an xkcd for every situation. It’s getting close to wikipedia as a repository of all human wisdom lol.
> The Mongol practice of drinking horse blood may also come into play here. How much blood can an orc lose before they’re killed?
> The Mongol practice of drinking horse blood may also come into play here. How much blood can an orc lose before they’re killed?
I don’t think that works. Transferring nutrition from one orc to another, when you expect both of them to keep marching, probably isn’t worth doing. On the other hand, if you’re in a grassland, transferring nutrition from an animal that eats grass to a man who doesn’t can make a lot of sense.
There was a Mesoamarican empire where a significant portion of the ruling class’s diet consisted of human flesh,
I know Marvin Harris speculated along those lines, but has it been verified?
to be clear, i know the Aztecs practiced cannibalism of human sacrifice victimes, i’m questioning if we know how quantitatively significant it was as a protein source.
The men of Calenardhon would have been the ancestors of the Dunlendings and the Men of Dunharrow.
The strategic level of this campaign is the one that continues to get me. Everyone involved (except Sauron!) has as a primary objective ‘kill Sauron’. Adar & his orcs want Sauron dead, Elrond’s Lindon army want Sauron dead, and even the people of Eregion, if they knew who he was, would want Sauron dead.
The amount of nonsense they have to write to avoid the obvious happening is therefore immense.
I’m still annoyed at the scene where Elrond – a millenium old renowned diplomat! – actually sits down to negotiate with Adar – a millenia old super-elf! in the presence of Galadriel – a millenia old semi-divine super-elf! and they can’t work this out. Adar insists on Elrond giving him an Elven Ring so he can get the job done, and Elrond does not accept this, obviously. But for some reason Elrond doesn’t counter with ‘call a truce, keep my girl Gal, I’ll go in there, fetch out Sauron, bring him out, and we’ll all have fun killing him together once you’ve handed over Galadriel’
Talking about Sauron’s long-game machinations as an immortal being from the dawn of time makes it funny to consider how fast he had to move during the events of Lord of the Rings. From Frodo setting out from the Shire to Mount Doom is just about six months.
He actually had to hustle for the first time in god knows how long.
I mean, one of the things they are doing in Return of the King, most especially by Aragorn looking into the Palantir and confronting Sauron within it, is forcing him to move faster than he wants to, to react instead of just building up into complete invincibility. He is moving faster than he wants to, but events are spinning out of control so he goes for it.
Tolkien prefigured the concept of the OODA loop, it would appear.
The name may be recent, but the basic concept is about as old as “hit him with a rock by surprise.”
I mean, that’s what an ambush is after all.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/case-against-ooda-loop/
Everyone was acting slowly. The White Council waited for almost a millenium before finally agreeing to confront Sauron in Dol Guldur. Although Sauron surely did the best he could under the circumstances, as his plans always failed at a hair’s breadth due to the intervention of Eru.
I started a discussion about this problem last year: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/#comment-68646
From Sauron’s perspective the timeline is a bit longer: For him, the “hot” phase of the War of the Ring begins with the capture of Gollum and the discovery that the One Ring has been found.
I also just realized that if you look at the war from Sauron’s perspective, his strategy and operations actually mirror Saruman’s pretty closely, except of course Sauron is better about them:
1. He sends a small team of elite operatives to retrieve the Ring
2. He is engaged in a year-long PSYOP campaign against his neighbour to weaken them as a military threat
3. He then launches a conventional assault to subdue that neighbour
To be fair, Sauron does also benefit from having a far greater power base to draw from (though of course his strategic planning is also just better). If I remember correctly, our host argues in his Helm’s Deep series that Isengard is the weakest belligerent (single infantry force of c. 10k at Helm’s Deep + negligible garrison at Isengard), and Mordor is by far the strongest (at least c. 50k at the Pelennor Fields + c. 60k at the Black Gate (though possibly at least partially reconstituted from the previous rout) + unknown quantities of other forces engaged in Dale and Mirkwood + possibly other armies). This pretty much nullifies the biggest pitfall of Saruman’s strategic planning, which is that Isengard absolutely could not afford to antagonise every major power at once in the way that Saruman did. In fact, Sauron attacks multiple strongholds of the Free Peoples simultaneously (Gondor, Lorien, the Woodland Realm, Dale and Erebor), all of those assaults fail (at heavy cost to both sides), but he was still well-positioned to ultimately achieve victory through attrition if not for the ring.
Now this I adore. Mainly because it turn immortality into a tragic flaw for Sauron (in the literary sense), and mortality into a strength for mankind.
Sauron’s MO is slow, generations-long meticulous planning in a way that men cannot hope to match due to their short lifespans, and consequent difficulty at staying on task for generation after generation. This approach would prioritise low-risk, gradual and steady growth in power and influence.
Elves, themselves being immortal, are probably operating along similar principles. They can go toe-to-toe with Sauron at the long term thing (though have clearly been gradually losing this centuries-long tussle given their relative situations by the events of LoTR).
Forcing Sauron to operate in a rush (even unintentionally) is something I can imagine him being deeply uncomfortable with. It’s not his wheelhouse at all. It’s not particularly the elves’ wheelhouse either (possibly because all of the elves brash enough to operate that way self-selected themselves out of the gene pool during the events of the Silmarillion).
You know who it does operate in that wheelhouse? Men. From the perspective of immortals at least, we’re always rushing about at a breakneck pace trying to get something, anything, done in the 30 seconds we spend on the earth.
Something as profoundly *rushed* and *risky* as taking a dozen or so random bods to smuggle the ring into Mt Doom on foot as fast as they can is probably something Sauron (in his immortal methodical approach) would never in a million years conceive of, and it catches him completely on the hop. It’s explicitly described as a ‘just make it up as you go along’ approach by Gandalf (“Look not too far ahead!”) that would be anathema to Sauron’s mind.
One could argue that Sauron has a lot of experience dealing with impulsive and risk-prone humans in his long existence, and you’d be right. However, this is a bit of a unique situation. The only time anyone posed that much of a threat to him (Isildur being in possession of the One Ring in Mt Doom), he just about lucks into turning Isildur and then it’s back to the status quo of gradual corruption and power-building. It’s possible that lots of people have tried risky stupid things before against him, but without the enormous boon of being in possession of the One Ring those plots have always been ground to dust beneath his meticulous long-term attritional approach.
It also ties in with the pros and cons of centralization. Sauron forges the One Ring because he desires personal control over all of Middle Earth, but by doing so, unavoidably renders himself vulnerable in a way he was not previously. The loss of the Ring (misplaced then destroyed) is singlehandedly enough to first delay him for millennia, and then finally end him outright.
If his egotism and monomania hadn’t led him to create the One Ring in the first place, a less centralized approach via other means could easily have worked out for him in perpetuity. The scope of the tragic flaw/seeds of own destruction narrative is a big part of the enduring appeal of Tolkien’s work. I’m sure this has all been said before, but it’s fun to talk about. XD
Perhaps the business about a forested Rohan is based on Treebeard’s remark in the *The Two Towers* that there was a time when “there was all one wood from here to the Mountains of Lune and [Fangorn Forest] was just the East End” – which would imply that at least the Gap of Rohan used to be forested. However, Treebeard goes on to imply that this time was prior to the War of Wrath and the sinking of Beleriand, so at least an age prior to the events depicted here.
> The famously rapid armored ‘Thunder Run’ to Baghdad in 2003 took about three weeks to cover the c. 300 miles from its starting points to the outskirts of Baghdad, despite moving on mostly flat terrain along existing roads and facing resistance that was, famously, not very effective.
There was also the Great Swan – British armour in 1944 covered 270 miles from Normandy to Brussels in four days after Falaise
The fact that the Battle of Winterfell disease is so common these days is kind of astounding, considering that The Two Towers solved this problem over 2 decades ago.
That makes me wonder though, how common were night battles, historically? I understand that raids often happened at night, but are there any examples of full-scale battles?
(Of course, orcs being nocturnal makes night battles much more likely in Middle Earth.)
Phase 2 of Teutonburg Forest was at night, but I understand they’re pretty rare because it is just hard to control an army at night.
I think the most essential reason that pitched battles are not typically conducted at night is because we’re biologically wired to go to sleep at that time. There’s an extent to which that can be offset sure, but I’d say reliably doing so at scale under those conditions has historically been somewhere between highly impractical and outright impossible. As I understand, this was something that led to trying to experiment with drugs to keep soldiers consistently alert through the night in World War II, with less than great results.
Which does actually raise the question of the circumstances in which orcs battle other races, really. Elves are one thing; they don’t really sleep like mortals anyway, and are kind of creatures of the night themselves. But for the rest? It’s curious that Morgoth and Sauron’s concerns for this seem to lean towards “make the day dark” rather than “have the orcs primarily fight by night when their targets might be asleep”. Perhaps orcs are something like diurnal creatures who are nevertheless weakened in direct sunlight.
Eh, it’s not ideal but certainly possible to pull one all-nighter without chemical assistance, and this is managed by the people who do night raids. If a night pitched battle was favorable for the attacker, it would be done. For that matter, although with chemical assistance, modern armies facing outdated ones like night battles because they have night-vision goggles and their enemies do not.
I think it’s because without modern flashlights the process of walking from one fortified camp to another is difficult, and the necessary lantern swarm will give you away in plenty of time for the enemy to wake up, armor up, and deploy, and then when the battle is joined even the limited control generals can exercise goes away.
For Sauron and Morgoth darkening the day, that’s generally for extended campaigns where the Orcs would be vulnerable to daytime attacks.
I suspect the lack of night battles is more because it’s really dark and a recipe for accidents and chaos. _At Day’s Close_ by Roger Ekirch is a really interesting book on society before gas and electric lighting. Nighttime was _different_, in a way that’s probably not very intuitive for those of us who have mostly lived under urban streetlights.
“The death of Isildur is in the appendix of ROTK”
Not in any detail that I can find by doing a search on his name in my ebook. Just ‘Disaster of the Gladden Fields; Isildur and his three elder sons are slain.’
There’s a little more detail in Chapter 2 of Fellowship.
“But the Ring was lost. It fell into the Great River, Anduin, and vanished. For Isildur was marching north along the east banks of the river, and near the Gladden Fields he was waylaid by the Orcs of the Mountains, and almost all his folk were slain. He leaped into the waters, but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and then the Orcs saw him and killed him with arrows.”
@guy
“it’s not ideal but certainly possible to pull one all-nighter without chemical assistance, and this is managed by the people who do night raids.”
So you’re saying that there’s an extent to which that can be offset sure?
No, wait, I’m saying that.
Night battles are not unknown even before widespread night vision. Pretty much every land battle in the Falklands War happened at night (Goose Green stretched on into the next day) – the tradeoff is that you lose situational awareness but gain surprise and a degree of protection from fires. If you’re outgunned, but confident in the superior training and ability of your own troops, that might be enough.
I think the most essential reason that pitched battles are not typically conducted at night is because we’re biologically wired to go to sleep at that time.
That’s frankly absurdist — humans can easily go a night or more without sleeping, but they don’t even need to for a night battle; most people fall to sleep after it falls dark and not before.
The obvious reason would be that having massive numbers of people run about over rough terrain with zero visibility is dumb as hell.
Not usually by choice if commanders could help it. Indeed, IIRC if a commander wasn’t particularly confident about a battle, he’d try and open the battle late in.The day so that failure of light could cover the retreat of things went wrong.
It’s interesting that the modern English slang “to swan about” [wander around aimlessly, but perhaps a bit pretentiously] drives from military usage. It first referred to tank tactics of sending armor in several directions at once to feel around for the enemy dispositions.
Really? That’s interesting. I (and, so it seems, the rest of the internet) always assumed “The Great Swan” derived from common non-military usage, not the other way round. THE OED doesn’t seem to agree with you though – it dates “swan” as a verb to the 1890s, although the full etymology is paywalled
‘To swan’ derives from the common English-language practice of abbreviating metaphor by turning nouns into verbs or vice-versa.
At one point there was an intersection of class and fashion that produced a significant body of women whose normal walking style outwardly demonstrated no movement of the legs, and this was either originally or eventually taught as imitating the swimming of swans. The verb then came to have class and gender connotations, and then generational connotations as fashions changed, and became a fun word to use in descriptions.
There are various military history websites (esp. England ones) that give the tank tactics version. I have a hard copy of the OED (compact edition) though not handy, so need to look to see what etymology they may have there. Will report back what I find there.
Yes, the verb swan dates to 1893 (in print anyway), in a novel by George Meredith. But there it just means ‘to swim like a swan’ in the literal swimming sense. Meredith referred to a Goddess in his story,
But that’s verb meaning 1 in the OED.
Verb meaning 2 is:
“To move about freely or in an (apparently) aimless way (formerly, spec. of armoured vehicles); hence, to travel idly or for pleasure. Frequently with about, around, or off. slang (originally Military).”
The OED’s first recorded print usage of the term in this sense is from 1942, an item in the Daily Telegraph:
“Breaking up his armour into comparatively small groups of tanks, he began ‘swanning about’, feeling north, north-west and east for them [sc. British tanks].”
Daily Telegraph 3 September 6/6
Apologies for being off topic, but a time-sensitive PSA that’s likely to be of interest to readers of this blog: Amazon is changing the way you can download ebooks. Specifically, starting from next week, you’ll no longer be able to simply download them to your computer, you’ll only be able to send them via wifi directly to a kindle. If you want to back up your library, now is the time to do it!
> “In the rare cases where armies do cut a road through a forest – and it does happen, just not often”
This makes me think that a post of the Roman operations in Germania under Germanicus / Tiberius and cousins, where they did cut a road through forest, and build causeways over marshes, and co-ordinated an amphibious operation through the low countries, would be fascinating. They’re less well known that the disaster at Teutoburg Wald, but the logistics and operational sides of these campaigns must be fascinating!
Only too bad that Pliny the Elder’s book on the wars in Germania is lost
True, but there are enough surviving sources I believe. The 50BC – 50AD century is the period of Roman history that which we have the *best* evidence for, by quite a long way.
Might I suggest that you adjust the Contrast using the screen/video options for whatever you are watching RoP on?
I turned the contrast way up in order to be able to see anything at all in GoT’s Battle of Winterfell. this made it ugly, but at least visible.
1) We already know that Adar has figured out a way to respawn his army from violent death.
2) We have to entertain the possibility that the same exploit allows them to respawn from death by starvation, thereby obviating logistics as a concern. This may still leave a drag on the army, since soldiers would only be combat effective for a limited time after respawning. (Alternatively — in case this doesn’t directly work — it is possible the soldiers have gained enough experience with the method to cooperate with fratricidal respawning being made a SOP.)
3) The mere existence of one exploit suggests the possibility of others. Allow me to propose the working hypothesis that the worker automation feature move-and-build-road, from current position to B is implemented incorrectly for stacks. In particular, my current best guess is that the implementation calculates the total cost (in terms of turns) the sequential move and build-road actions would take for a single worker, then divides it by the number of workers present in the stack (rounding upwards). Adar has figured this out, thus his doomstack including sufficiently many workers is able to move significantly faster than the ordinary move action would allow them to.
Congrats. You just broke Middle Earth.
To circle back to cannibalism, violently dead soldiers definitely respawn back at a spawn point; therefore, fratricide solves the provision problem directly at the sole cost of sending some of your troops back to base, potentially even functioning as a sort of messenger service.
Cue Monty Python “Message for you sir” (keels over).
I wonder how expensive all the PTSD counseling is.
Not funded, thus conveniently explaining why the orcs of all subsequent generations are deeply psychologically messed up.
It all comes together!
No disorder to be treated, no cost to doing so.
I wonder how high the desertion rate is…
That’s a boon in other ways as well. You don’t need to leave as much of a garrison against defence if your slain army on campaign just respawns back at base.
That should read’ garrison *for* defence’.
Whether or not they will fight when the enemy arrives is a different question…
You definitely have something here. It’s a bit like the original Doom 2 in Nightmare mode.. not only do you have respawning monsters, but also random explosive barrels left in convenient places.
Will Series 3 see Sauron break out the BFG 9000? That’s what I want to know.
Some proofreading notes:
Losarnach > Lossarnach
was aleviated once they crossed > alleviated
Losarnach > Lossarnach (again)
Losarnach > Lossarnach (and again, and again-again)
Enedwait > Enedwaithe
pushed back, leading Adar master > leaving Adar
late 1693 and 1964 > late 1693 and 1694
While the near portions of the Misty Mountains are likely mostly free of orcs and goblins at this point, Sauron’s campaign may very well have made use of some of the tribes still dwelling somewhat nearby. This campaign is what led to the foundation of Rivendell, so moving orc soldiers down through the Ettenmoors and Trollshaws would have been easier. And indeed, there may have been tribes that he subjugated, allowing him to attack from the North and creating a friendly region from which to base his invasion of Eregion
The other justification for analyzing the logistics in the series is not the production budget, but Tolkien’s own approach of building out the timeline of where the characters would be in LoTR and how long it would take them to get to the various locations.
Why hold RoP to a lower standard?
“I did my best to pull screencaps, but Rings of Power also has pretty terminal Battle of Winterfel disease when it comes to lighting most scenes with orcs in them.”
A lesser scholar would have stuck in screencaps from the Rankin-Bass “Return of the King” and called it a day.
I enjoy the thought of rebel slave orcs immensely, but the way to do this is to put Adar on the defensive, have our trickster who is a trickster god be whispering in Celebrimbor Ear about attacking the new power Orc Kingdom before it can grow, so Adar has the super tragedy of it all, add in the racism, have our Trickster actually be tricky, all the fun things.
fuck have it be a gradual alliance of most of the Elves, some who start doubting this new war of agression.
Adar responding in sheer desperation retaliatory atrocities, which Harden the Elf hearts even more would have set up Tragedy.
Saruon forcing two armies to fight each other when the real enemy was him for his own Gain works better.
Adar is destroyed, then Celebrimbor Destroyed, the ruin and tragedy of it all.
Meanwhile all the other hero’s watch in horror. While saving what you can.
The analyses of the sieges of Gondor and Helm’s Deep were how I was introduced to this blog, and while I enjoy reading pretty much everything on here those are some of my particular favorites. I’m excited to be around for the inception of a new such series.
Regarding the mismatch between Adar’s actual plans and Adar’s theoretical command abilities, the siege of Eregion is in keeping with the tactics he employs in in the taking of the village and the tower–whatever your objective is, take all of your troops to it, so that way if nothing else works you can simply swamp your opponent with bodies.
Now, does this line up with how the show wants to think of Adar? No. But the fact is that it’s patently obvious that the showrunners and writers don’t know anything about warfare at all, know less than nothing about pre-modern warfare in particular, and don’t seem to have any interest in learning.
Re: armies marching by cannibalism, I’m reminded of this part in Herodotus where the Persian king Cambyses attempts to invade Ethiopia without any preparation:
“…Before, however, he had accomplished one fifth-part of the distance, all that the army had in the way of provisions failed; whereupon the men began to eat the sumpter beasts, which shortly failed also. If then, at that time, Cambyses, seeing what was happening, had confessed himself in the wrong, and led his army back, he would have done the wisest thing that he could after the mistake made at the outset; but as it was, he took no manner of heed, but continued to march forwards. So long as the earth gave anything, the soldiers sustained life by eating the grass and herbs; but when they came to the bare sand, a portion of them were guilty of a horrid deed: by tens they cast lots for a man, who was slain to be the food of the others. When Cambyses heard of these doings, alarmed at such cannibalism, he gave up his attack on Ethiopia, and retreating by the way he had come, reached Thebes, after he had lost vast numbers of his soldiers.”
“I will kill as many people as I have to as long as you are one of them!”
—A very calm and rational prince who should be emulated by wise generals
How to deal with the inability to recognize Cathar heretics.
(“Kill them all, let God sort them out” — Papal legate Arnaud Amalric at the siege of Beziers, 1209 AD)
To be fair to the writers, “Kill everyone in the city, including the babies and pregnant women” was a fairly common tactic throughout history. It’s not entirely unreasonable that this would be part of the campaign. The unreasonable part is that the attacking army has no idea how to determine if the high-value target was included in the slaughter.
I would also argue that the objective is nonsense. Sauron was killed a few times in history. Tinuviel killed him when she and Baron stormed Morgoth’s fortress, for example. Tolkien’s writings on the subject make it clear that Sauron was dead; Maia can be killed. He just got better. Death isn’t necessarily permanent in Middle Earth–Glorfindel basically bad-assed his way back to life, Beron returned due to Tinuviel’s singing, Gandalf returned (though I’ve always thought that was Eru taking a hand in, so probably doesn’t count), and a few others I’m forgetting die and come back. What happens at the end of LOTR is NOT that Sauron and Sarumon die; their spirits survive, but are weakened to the point where they’re irrelevant and rebuked by the Valar (the winds that blow away the clouds and the eagles that carry Gandalf are associated with Manwe).
So the guy trying to kill Sauron has a few problems:
1) Sauron is in a heavily defended city far from Mordor.
2) No one can reliably identify Sauron to kill him, necessitating wholesale slaughter.
3) No one can identify if Sauron was killed, making this at best a matter of chance.
4) If they DO succeed in killing Sauron, it won’t last anyway.
To be fair, killing Sauron is generally a good way to stop him from causing any immediate problems for you and the people immediately around you for a good long while- centuries or more, long enough that even an elf might consider it a goodly chunk of time.
Though the rest of your point still stands.
Regarding
> 4) If they DO succeed in killing Sauron, it won’t last anyway.
Yes, but if it takes him a century or ten to come back, that’s still worth something.
Now I want to see some myths written about people saving *themselves* from the underworld.
Think Orpheus and Eurydice…but it’s Orpheus who is dead and he just manages to weasel his way out of the underworld anyway.
Actually, Orpheus would be a poor choice of character for this myth (and his story is perfect anyway). That tricksy rat-bastard Odysseus would be a far better choice.
Although Herakles, perhaps, might be a better equivalent to Glorfindel if the plot of the story is ‘I’m too badass to be contained by death’.
Cheating death multiple times via clever tricks is what Sysyphus did and how he ultimately earned his infamous punishment.
These stories are not hard to find, if you look at modern works. American superhero comics (if you accept the reading that they are simply a mythology) return to the theme continually. But this theme is most seen in classical-mythology-derived videogames, where the player-protaganist is given the task of fighting their way out of the afterlife; God of War (2005) features “Kratos” (a trademarkable character with a lot of references to Herakles in his backstory), Hades (2020) is all escape-from-Hades, and you could even fight your way into Tartarus as Orpheus in Battle of Olympus (1988) all the way back on the NES.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote “Inferno” in 1976, about a science fiction author (based on Niven) who ends up in the top level of Dante’s Hell and decides to get out, which is done by going all the way to the worst circle of Hell at the bottom, where there is said to be a tunnel you can climb to Heaven.
As he works down through the circles he gets the new versions of the classic sins. He meets various historical figures. People complained that N & P were putting their political enemies in Hell, not realizing that Dante did the same thing. N & P do try to be somewhat even-handed, emphasizing that you get sent to Hell for betraying your principles, not for having the wrong ones.
Not giving spoilers for the ending here.
Robert Silverberg wrote “To The Land Of The Living”, a novel reworking his stories from the “Heroes In Hell” shared world series. Gilgamesh The King is trying to find the way out of the afterlife. Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft and many historical figures get involved.
Lots of interesting points folks!
@NeonoeN Man I need to brush up on my Greek myths (it’s been a while). Interesting how the whole ‘cheating death’ in the Sysyphus myth is presented as not a triumph, but something causing irritation to the gods. I especially love the version where Ares sorts it out because he’s fed up of his battles not being fun anymore because no-one dies.
@Endymionologist Superhero stories being a modern iteration of mythology has softened my attitude towards them somewhat, so thanks for that. I’d previously grown incredibly tired with the medium.
@Endymionologist and @cptbutton
It would be very interesting to see an analysis of attitudes towards cheating death through historical mythology into modern mythology. To me, it seems like there’s a few changes in how it’s conceptualised.
Negative-to-positive might be a perceivable trend, as might whether it’s possible to do it oneself vs having to have someone else bring you back.
Would be interesting to see if it tracks alongside perceptions of things like ‘the natural order of things’ or the rise in scientific medical thinking that saw death as something to be (eventually) conquered. Possibly even trends in the methods by which death may be conquered (Greeks appear to have favoured trickery, but modern mythology introduces strength/martial ability/strength of will/just-being-too-awesome-for-death-to-contain-whatever-that-means).
Personally, I really like the Gloranthan take on it (speaking of modern mythology). It’s not through fighting that Orlanth returns from death with the slain sun-god Yelm…it’s through humility. Orlanth descends into the underworld to *apologise* for slaying him, and ask him to come back. Motifs of gods undergoing personal growth are rare, as far as I can see…
Two additional examples for your consideration:
The Northern Lights trilogy. The protagonists enter the land of the dead and eventually not only find their way out, but fundamentally change how death works, forever. I won’t spoil further.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Most of the Gods in this series are simply ascended mortals, and are perfectly capable of being killed by a sufficiently powerful force. When this happens to the God of Death, some sufficiently strong-willed individuals *who are already dead* decide that the status quo is a crappy way of doing things, and simply take over to provide… direction.
I think the comment on Luthien killing Sauron is mistaken on a couple of notes. For one thing, their confrontation with him does not take place at Angband (Morgoth’s fortress), but at his own tower at the north edge of Belieriand on the Isle of Werewolves. Second, she threatens to force him to have his spirit abandon his flesh when he can’t wrest free from Huan’s grasp, unless he yields authority over his tower to her; unwilling to have to return in humiliation before Morgoth, he takes that option, is released, and flies away in the shape of a huge bat. He plays no further role in the Lay of Leithian, or indeed in the rest of The Silmarillion.
That is if I’m unaware of some later writing having it that Sauron’s body succumbed to wounds later on, or if there’s a version of the Lay prior to Christopher Tolkien’s editing that has him go through with abandoning the body, or something else of which I’m unaware.
Ah, Lúthien Tinúviel, the worlds most Heavy Metal version of a Disney Princess.
It’s one of those things that gets debated among the fandom. Tolkien was writing a legend, not a modern fantasy novel with omniscient third-person narration, and this leads to an inherent unreliability in the stories. He didn’t attempt to tell what “did” happen, he attempted to tell the stories of those cultures that thought those stories were important. There are cases where we know Tolkien acted as an unreliable narrator, and he used the language of legends, which isn’t intended to give a precise account of anything, but rather to tell you what it means.
That said, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Sauron died. It’s also not unreasonable to conclude that he didn’t. Both sides have merit. Here’s an article on the issue of whether Sauron died in this case:
https://middle-earth.xenite.org/how-many-times-was-sauron-slain/
For my part, I interpret it as Sauron dying. Threatening to cleave someone’s spirit from their body is a flowery way to signal that the person is threatening to kill the other person, after all. And the spirit taking the form of a bat is a bit too similar to what happens at the end of LOTR for me to believe Tolkien didn’t want us to draw parallels (there are a LOT of parallels between parts of LOTR and Beren/Tinuviel). I also don’t know of any other situation where a Maiar simply vacates their body. They can change shape, but the only cases I know of where the body is abandoned are when the Maiar is killed. Finally, Sauron is pretty much out of action for the rest of the story, which I can’t see happening if he was still capable of acting.
(There are three times when Sauron did die, indisputably, but as they happen after the events of RoP, they don’t bear on this discussion.)
That said, even if you don’t accept the interpretation that Sauron died when Huan and Tinuviel attacked him, the story never the less demonstrates that destroying Sauron’s physical body isn’t going to do you much good. Even if you don’t know he can die and get better later, the story still presents him as able to leave his body at will–maybe at great cost of will, but it’s certainly a possibility, and something that’s likely to occur if Sauron knows you’re going to kill him otherwise. And that makes the plan “Kill everything, Sauron will be among the slain” a very stupid one.
I’m not sure how well-known this story would be, but given that it relates to a Silmaril and the fall of Gondolin, I can’t imagine it was an obscure reference. Gondolin was one of the major centers of civilization in that world, and the Silmarills were ultimately the cause of the whole mess the people of Middle-Earth found themselves in! It wouldn’t be the first time a military man made a stupid mistake due to ignoring historic info (even in LOTR you have the issue with the Ents being ignored), but in general successful military leaders don’t ignore vitally important information about their adversary that’s readily-available.
If Luthien promised to let Sauron go if he gave up the magic keys, and then he gave up the magic keys, I think it’s nearly certain that she let him go. Killing him would have been Breaking Her Word, and that’s Bad.
As for Sauron simply letting go of his body, somewhere in HoME or NoME is stuff about Ainur and their ‘fana’ (bodies as raiment) which basically says they can do exactly that. The natural state of Ainur is to be an immaterial spirit; getting tied to a body means something unusual has happened. Granted, most of the Ainur we see in Middle-earth have indeed had something unusual happen (giving birth, Melian; getting too tangled in power distribution, Morgoth; getting killed in Numenor, later Sauron; getting incarnated as a handicap, the Istari; ??? Balrogs)
The Ainur we see in Middle-Earth have physical form because that’s how you interact with Middle-Earth. Melian already had physical form when she gave birth; how else could she do it? Likewise, Ainur who “die” must already have a physical form because an Ainur dying means their physical form dying.
“Melian already had physical form when she gave birth”
Of course, but giving birth locked Melian into that form, which was my point. The default state of an Ainu is immaterial, and being able to create or dismiss a ‘body’, which Tolkien called _fana_, the way we would put on or take off clothing. But it was possible to get locked into the body.
Some of this is in the Silmarillion, the Ainulindale:
“Moreover their shape comes of their knowledge of the visible World, rather than of the World itself; and they need it not, save only as we use raiment, and yet we may be naked and suffer no loss of our being. Therefore the Valar may walk, if they will, unclad, and then even the Eldar cannot clearly perceive them, though they be present.”
Tolkien Gateway “Fanar” cites various older sources, but Nature of Middle-earth has
“the Vala (or Maia) could move or pass over Sea. For their bodies were self-made. They houseless as spirits could go where they would (either slowly or immediately), and could then reclothe themselves.”
“Melian, having in woman-form borne a child after the manner of the Incarnate, desired to do this no more: by the birth of Lúthien she became enmeshed in “incarnation”, unable to lay it aside while husband and child remained in Arda alive, and her powers of mind (especially foresight) became clouded by the body through which it must now always work. To have borne more children would still further have chained her and trammeled her. In the event, her daughter became mortal and eventually died, and her husband was slain; and she then cast off her “raiment” and left Middle-earth.”
…that last bit is new to me; I thought Melian was permanently incarnate after giving birth.
To answer the question about the Istari, I believe that’s covered in the description of how, in the interests of going as emissaries of the Valar among fleshly beings in more humble fashion, they not only assume physical forms, but forms that are actually capable of aging (albeit slowly) and bearing the weariness of the world.
It’s ironic that this is something Gandalf underwent when he had previously been among the most active immaterial Maiar, wandering Middle Earth as an immanent presence to spread hope and comfort.
In any event, it’s both why they are at risk of real death (note that when Gandalf dies his spirit doesn’t simply wander freely as he would have before, but apparently departs the world for God’s presence, and requires divine intercession to return), and are capable of worldly foibles, whether malicious or benign (it being part of why Radagast became more occupied with the wilderness than his charge).
And, of course, you can do whatever you want once you have the rights — Hollywood has been known to buy such properties as The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Bladerunner, solely to put on unrelated works — so they really had a free hand to do a sane war.
I have a truly horrible suggestion that does, in fact, have a real-world equivalent:
Roald Amundsen’s march on the South Pole. Not an army, but I think you’ll agree that there’s not much forage to be found in Antarctica.
One of his ‘clever tricks’ was feeding dead bobsled dogs to the living bobsled dogs. Would orcs cannibalize themselves? Being orcs, I think they might. The Ents didn’t find dead orcs – they found piles of orc bones, split for the marrow. S.
Reminds me slightly of the Congo-Arab war around 1890, when King Leopold’s allies pushing east met Zanzibari Arabs pushing west. Two great empires of the world clashing in mortal combat: Belgium vs Zanzibar!
Cannibalism among the local armies is said to have been quite common:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Africa#War_cannibalism
I wonder how much wartime cannibalism (and a lot of cannibalism historically seems to be associated with war) is more about its value as a method of spreading terror, and less about the actual nutritional benefits.
Depends on the way you look at it. A number of peoples have thought that you are what you eat: If you eat the heart of a lion you become as fierce as a lion, and so on. Logic would appear to suggest, if you believed the above, that you should consume the flesh of those who fought well, or were otherwise admirable.
Debatable. If there’s a serious cultural taboo against cannibalism, indulging labels you as the Bad Guy and might seriously impact morale. If there is no taboo, well, there may not be much terror. Local ethics might even consider such behavior as normal or virtuous: don’t kill something if you don’t plan to eat it.
Maybe if it’s some in-group demonstrating shared contempt for neighboring groups with such a taboo? I.e. pirates or bandits might go for this… but likely not anyone planning to stick around and administer territory.
Debatable. If there’s a serious cultural taboo against cannibalism, indulging labels you as the Bad Guy and might seriously impact morale.
I agree, but exactly for that reason, being willing to transgress norms like that might make your enemies fear you even more.
“make your enemies fear you even more”
I wouldn’t want my enemies to fear me. I would want my enemies to fear defying me. The last thing I would want is for my enemies to fear submitting to me.
It was sort of interesting watching the Tigray War because the scale of forces involved meant logistics were a big deal for the TDF’s offensives, yet they had *extremely* limited motorized capacity. In addition Tigray was experiencing mass starvation and only ammo they had was smuggled through enemy territory, captured, or successfully hidden through the insurgency period. Most soldiers would have They did a lot of looting, which got flack, but as Bret has discussed, that was basically unavoidable. Fully logistically supporting a couple hundred thousand men in offensive action would have been absurdly beyond their capacities. Campaigning largely stuck to the roads and population centers. This of course as Bret notes results in the same places being fought over again and again. The cross-roads town of Gashena changed hands *6* times during the war despite extensive entrenchments being built by late-war there.
It’s a reminder that ‘backwards’ armies and societies can sometimes be competent too. A region with a population of perhaps 5 million raised 250k-350k men at peak. Mostly light infantry (AKs, maybe a grenade). But despite being significantly outnumbered they made it nearly to Addis Ababa at their highmark. Then Gashena fell. That same day they started a nearly 300km retreat, completed in *8* days (~35km/day!) with seemly not excessively high losses. ‘Modern-style’ armies would struggle to do that. I’m sure Bret appreciates how truly remarkable that is for a mostly on foot army to do.
While less impressive proportionately, the rest of Ethiopia also mobilized fairly impressively. It makes me optimistic about their future, suggests good things about their state capacity despite the insurgencies and civil wars. The Tigray War seems to have barely interrupted their economic growth.
Now of course that same looting probably played a part in the level of mobilization in Amhara and Afar regions. From their prospective I’m sure the Tigrayan army seemed like an elemental force of destruction.
Then again, the ranks of that very same army were swelled by the Tigrayan population’s backlash to the NUMEROUS atrocities perpetrated by federal Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. The contents of the article below are NOT for those of weak heart or stomach. Enough to make one wonder how much of the TPLF offensive’s near-success was owed to their enemies being unable to restrain themselves.
https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-eritrea-africa-religion-9fe9140b76da946e4fa65095a1d5b04f
The Ethiopians may be backwards in their economy and infrastructure, but they are people, after all, and people tied to fall into the Gauss current, no matter what. Thus, it makes sense that Tigrayan generals should be pretty bright and knowledgeable about how to fight war in their own country, against a peer adversary, having a lot of experience in the matter.
In fact, one-to-one, I would not be surprised to find that Tigrayan and Ethipian officer corps were better in their intellectual capacity than e.g American officers: the relative prestige and economic opportunities of the officer career are much better there than in America, so the relatively quality of the youngsters choosing the officer profession should be quite a lot better than in the US.
Relatively speaking African militaries probably tend to pull rather more from the cream of their society (though remember education systems are much worse, so the overall pool is worse). But a lot of those militaries suck. Losing an insurgency is one thing, but the Ethiopian regulars struggled to contain a much smaller, poorer-equipped force in conventional fighting too. Motivation was much better among the Amharan/Afari irregulars. You saw the same thing as is happening now in Congo where irregulars are using violence against regulars in an attempt to force them to stand their ground. Effectiveness of an institution depends more on its structure/systems than the raw IQ count it contains (also the degree to which effectiveness is even a goal, eg kleptocracies or dictatorships).
Fair points. Please note that I did, I fact, consciusly limit my argument to “intellectual capacity”, not to actual performance, as the institutions of many African militaries are really poor.
Not that the performance of the American military has been exactly super great as of late.
Irregulars being more highly motivated is nothing unusual in East Africa and the Middle East. A modern regular army is what Bret would call a “deracinated” force, separated from normal civilian society and having to build their own esprit de corps from scratch; not all nations have both the resources and the political will to do that properly, least of all in regions where people primarily stick to clan/ethnic or religious identities above national ones. Irregular forces tend to be recruited along these very same clan/ethnic/religious lines, making use of preexisting bonds in civilian society to build the esprit de corps that the regular army lacks. It’s a modern version of the “retinue of retinues” system, though perhaps even closer to so-called “bastard” feudalism of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance with larger, more consolidated retinues of salaried followers.
Isn’t the entire point of the Ethiopian war that a large chunk of the insurgency they ar efacing are from groups that used to dominate the ethiopian military? And who when they lost control of the government simply left and started fighting, leaving the central government with the problem of having to rebuild an army while fighting it.
Note that Ethiopians had a tradition of military excellence; they made up the bulk of the campaign to liberate East Africa from Italian control in WW2, with the British primarily providing mechanised and artillery support to the already-competent Ethiopian insurgents as they regained the form of the regular army they had before the Italian conquest. The Ethiopian contingent in the Korean War was famously so competent that the Americans took a good look at them and decided that it’d be a waste of time to retrain them in the American way, and the best course was just to train them in how to use American weapons and then let the Ethiopians loose to rampage the way they knew best.
Of course much of this was lost under the Derg, but note that it was Tigrayan forces that made up the core of the inter-ethnic alliance that brought down the Derg; Tigrayans probably held a disproportionate share of military expertise in the various Ethiopian forces before the civil war, and made the best use of that in their comeback in the second year of the war. I’d bet that the Tigrayans are still more competent on average than the rest of the various Ethiopian federal and regional forces, which in turn are probably better than most other armies in the Horn of Africa. Also note that the other Ethiopians barely have it any better than Tigray in terms of motorised/mechanised logistics, so the light casualties during the rapid Tigrayan retreat from their southwards salient can probably be attributed to their enemies lacking the capacity to mount a rapid, effective pursuit too (at least without falling into Tigrayan ambushes).
Also note that Ethiopia was one of the few African areas that actually managed to maintain its independence, beating the Italians at Adowa.
While this is an interesting example – all the more so considering how overlooked that conflict had been in the developed countries – any discussion of it is incomplete without the mention of the Eritrean intervention which made the early phase of the war so successful for the Ethiopian federal government in the first place. I recall the initial reporting on the conflict assumed the federal and Tigrayan forces were evenly matched and the war would stalemate not far from the state borders. Instead, with the Tigrayan forces having to fight on multiple fronts, their capital of Mekelle was lost in the first month of war, and they were forced to dig in the mountain strongholds. It’s taken them 6 more months from there to build up forces and go on the offensive, reclaiming Mekelle, then pushing outside of Tigray around the 10-12 month mark.
It should also be noted that the assistance of a separate Oromo insurgency – which continued to fight even after Tigrayan forces agreed to peace (although it also seems to be dying down nowadays) – was another considerable factor in the progress of that offensive towards Addis Ababa. Furthermore, multiple sources attribute the offensive’s eventual failure and the retrenchment of federal forces to the arrival of the notorious Bayraktars and their equivalents from other countries – with Tigrayans possessing no modern air defences, those had a free reign to attack whichever targets they want. The quote below is instructive:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/drone-swarms-in-ethiopia/
> “The precision-guided munitions are sure to have wreaked havoc among Tigray Defense Forces’ fire-support assets such as tanks and artillery,” says Stijn Mitzer, author of the Oryx blog, a website that investigates armed drone proliferation. “The psychological effect of drone strikes likely did much to weaken the morale of TDF fighters.” The drones also appear to have allowed the government to disrupt TDF logistics and the resupply of its front lines, with multiple drones patrolling the single tarmac road running south from Tigray and engaging any trucks detected there. They also provided an excellent intelligence picture of the situation on the ground, especially useful when dealing with a force like the TDF, which is renowned for its asymmetric warfare skills, preferring hit and run tactics.
On the logistics aspect: Adar’s army crossing at the future site of Osgiliath makes complete sense. It is effectively the “Lowest Bridging Point” on the River Anduin and major cities frequently emerge at such points. Such as London, Paris, Berlin, Rome!
I fear you are confusing the map of the best route Adar should have taken with the one he did takem Adar did not cross at Cair Andros or Osgilitih, but much smfurther south at Pelargir. The first map is the optimal route, the second map is the likely route per the show.
I would like to note that Berlin is not really a “lowest bridging point” for anything. It lies by Spree and Havel, and its historic centrum is located at a convenient bridging point of the Spree, and of a major geographic feature called “Warschau-Berliner Urstromtal”. However, there are, and historically, were, equally convenient points for bridging the Havel further downstream: Spandau and Potsdam come to mind. If anything, Berlin is more like the highest bridging point, because upstream, there is the marshy and forested Spreewald, which is not really a convenient route for pre-modern traffic.
It is always nice to get some of these kinds of breakdown of what the process of pre-modern warfare entailed. At times, with very basic summaries at a bird’s eye view that only really track the pitched battles and the sieges, it can end up feeling like so little is going on that it’s hard to understand why they might take years.
Especially when one is used to modern warfare in which actual fighting is more consistent across many more stages of operations.
I particularly appreciate the focus on how the human psychological or physical toll can still be heavy even when battles are not joined.
I do think that the “maybe Rohan was forested in those days” is at least semi-plausible. First, there objectively does seem to be a certain magically active element of ‘life’ or liveliness in the land in Middle-Earth. As I recall, a single boxful of soil from Galadriel’s garden, distributed widely by the generosity of Sam Gamgee, had virtue enough to cause noticeable increase in agricultural yields throughout the Shire; this can only be explained by this soil having a supernatural impact on the region’s fertility.
A similar process in reverse causing a formerly forested region to become arid grassland would not seem entirely unreasonable.
It might well be that the events of the First Age and its great wars, and of the departure of the Entwives, created a “slow leak” of this kind of fertility or mystical virtue from the land in areas like Rohan, so that the slow effects of this paranormal climate change did not fully make themselves felt until ages later.
It did not require any mountains to sink into the sea or rise up out of the land for the Sahara to go from a savannah to a desert- yes, rainfall patterns did change, but not because someone reshaped continents. And in the Amazon rainforest we have ample example of how clear-cutting a forest (as the Numenoreans were prone to do in Tolkein’s canon) might well leave behind relatively infertile soil that would soon lose its usefulness and that would struggle to regain its old rich cover of forest.
Canonically there’s also the Brown Lands, that went from Entwife Central to “hardly anything grows here” after a bunch of battles. Though the Mordor pollution spillover wouldn’t help, there.
If I’m not wrong, the Brown Lands are the way they are because in the Second Age, during the War of the Last Alliance, Sauron burned the gardens of the Entwives during his retreat in an attempt to deny supply to the elves and men. I’d say having a supernatural entity of malice go scorched earth on it is probably a pretty good reason for a once fertile and plentiful land to become a desolate waste.
I don’t think magic is even required, just humans. My understanding is that much of North America west of the Mississippi was forested, but the Indians cut and burned it down, and continued to farm it thereafter, and it did not recover in the relatively brief (by geological standards) time between the arrival of the Indians and the subsequent arrival of Europeans. The Rohirrim would have the same effect. Likewise, my understanding is that much of Italy never recovered from Hannibal’s depredations.
I’m curious what portion of the American West you are referring to? The High Plains have been high plains for ten times longer than there have been High Plains dwelling humans, east of that you have more tallgrass prairie maintained by bison prior to human habitation, and then both east of that and in isolates within the prairie you have the old-growth forests that the US negotiated treaties with the native peoples to cut down. The west slope of the Rockies and subsidiary ranges also don’t fit.
Pre-contact North American agricultural systems also don’t work that way. Eastern Woodland (“three sisters”) farming is forest garden system that manages clearings within forests but normally depends on nearby trees for protection. There was some irrigation-dependent open land agriculture west of the woodlands in places, but no nation had the manpower to spread that over a large footprint. And managing the canoe-harvested manoomin certainly doesn’t require deforestation.
From the wikipedia article on “Prairie”:
Tallgrass prairie evolved over tens of thousands of years with the disturbances of grazing and fire. Native ungulates such as bison, elk, and white-tailed deer roamed the expansive, diverse grasslands before European colonization of the Americas.[8] For 10,000-20,000 years, native people used fire annually as a tool to assist in hunting, transportation, and safety.[9] Evidence of ignition sources of fire in the tall grass prairie are overwhelmingly human as opposed to lightning.[10] Humans, and grazing animals, were active participants in the process of prairie formation and the establishment of the diversity of graminoid and forbs species. Fire has the effect on prairies of removing trees, clearing dead plant matter, and changing the availability of certain nutrients in the soil from the ash produced. Fire kills the vascular tissue of trees, but not prairie species, as up to 75% (depending on the species) of the total plant biomass is below the soil surface and will re-grow from its deep (upwards of 20 feet[11]) roots. Without disturbance, trees will encroach on a grassland and cast shade, which suppresses the understory. Prairie and widely spaced oak trees evolved to coexist in the oak savanna ecosystem.[12]
The burr oak definitely evolved prior to human habitation in the Americas, and cannot compete in a fully forested environment. No one disputes the use of deliberate burns to prevent wildfire, this is a human practice that occurs on every continent except Antarctica, but I still do not see where you are getting your claim that there were forests all across the prairie lands that were cut down for agricultural use. Even if you meant to say the forests were burned down instead of cut, you’re still asserting that there was a forest when the humans arrived…where?
That doesn’t state that the tallgrass prairies were “forested” prior to Native American agriculture. It’s completely compatible with the Native Americans shifting the environment, at the margin, from a savanna with more trees to a savanna with less trees. I don’t think anyone disputes that they did that.
I’m glad you labeled the first image as orcs marching through the forest
I thought those were smudges on my screen and was trying to wipe them off
From my glimpses of season two (just managed to view rage reviews), it looked like the showrunners just wanted to copy the iconic optics of the Jackson movies without running into copyright problems and just fit the story to that…
Something like “Oh, the Shire gets good reviews – let’s invent those proto-hobbits”, “Oh, original book quotes do quite well – let’s give Tom Bombadil that “many that live deserve death…” completely out of context”, … “Oh, we need a ride like Arwen’s to Rivendell…”, “Oh, we need a big battle like the Battle of Gondor…”, “Oh, Elrond’s council did well, we need the elves to meet and talk – oh, nothing to say? At least the optics are good”.
No wonder, most of the internal logic and worldbuilding fell apart, and nobody thought of the logistics of orc armies.
“So I want to clarify at the outset here when I supply ‘book notes,’ my system for deciding between the various different bits of information in the legendarium is as follows (along with how I’ll cite them):
Information in The Lord of the Rings (RotK, particularly the appendix) comes first, as this was a finished, complete work in Tolkien’s lifetime.”
Well then I’m going to point out that your previous nitpick about there being no way a numenorean monarch would go with such a small entourage is about the creators using the exact same number that Tolkein used in ROTK. You scoff at the absurd notion that Miriel would go into a dangerous area with only 300 cavalry but canonically Isildur with far more reason for caution went into a more dangerous area with only 300 soldiers. The creators went with the Tolkien number and you assumed they were wrong because the Tolkien number differed from rules of thumb you took from Medieval Europe.
Which segues into the important point that while Middle Earth has many similarities to Medieval Europe, the rules of Medieval Europe were never all applicable to Middle Earth. Biologically impossible creatures exist (the Earen, the Uruk), climatologically impossible weather occurs (Mordor existing, only one volcano, Forochel by Eregion), demographically impossible population changes happen (the depopulation of Eregion, economically impossible activities occur (the underground dwarven kingdoms, Laketown, a depopulated Gondor encircling Pelannor with a wall in a decade). But lord forbid the social structure vary one iota in the fact of massively different conditions!
“And of course, Adar himself is an elf, and so might be able to access the city personally in a way that his servants cannot. Notably, later in the series, even while Adar is clearly in arms assailing an Elven kingdom, both Galadriel and Elrond take Adar’s statements seriously; they don’t dismiss them out of hand, the same as they might the statements of an orc.”
ROP follows in the Peter Jackson trend of going with the “orcs are corrupted elves” interpretation. Adar is an orc, just an early one. But hey, it’s an easy enough mistake for a casual LOTR fan to make. 😛
“Adar, however, has been doing both war and trickery for quite a long time”
Well canonically according to Tolkien there were no war involving the orcs in the period you think Adar was a leader so Adar would have about as much warmaking experience as a North Korean general circa 2023.
And this is where I run out of steam and stop reading. You are engaging in smug nerd gatekeeping of the worst sort. I dont even like the ROP big battles stuff but their handwaving doesn’t appear much worse to me then everybody else’s, yourself included. This isn’t informed criticism, it’s an expert smugly nitpicking based on their personal interpretation..
I’m symbolically pausing my patreon membership.
“using the exact same number that Tolkein used in ROTK.”
Can you quote what you’re talking about? I recall nothing in RotK about Isildur going somewhere dangerous with 300 soldiers. Unfinished Tales has a chapter on him, but that was after the defeat of Sauron:
‘but Sauron was vanquished, and the people of the Vales had been his allies in victory. He had no fear, save for weather and weariness,’
“Only” two hundred knights and soldiers, with few if any horses. And few archers: “No more than twenty, it is said; for no such need had been expected. [Author’s note.]”
So it turned out to be dangerous but was not expected to be.
“canonically according to Tolkien”
Canonically Adar didn’t exist. I gather that RoP implies Adar was a leader during actual war periods.
” a depopulated Gondor encircling Pelannor with a wall in a decade”
The Rammas Echor was probably built 1000 years earlier. Denethor II had it repaired, not built from scratch:
‘I would say that you are over-late in repairing the wall of the Pelennor.’
‘So the men of Gondor called the out-wall that they had built with great labour, after Ithilien fell under the shadow of their Enemy.’
“smugly nitpicking”
You seem to do be doing exactly that, except without even being accurate in your nitpicks. Bret by contrast is accurate and informative.
The death of Isildur is in the appendix of ROTK. And going into orc country after the defeat of Sauron is much more dangerous then going on what you believe to be a diplomatic mission to potential allies when you aren’t even aware that Sauron is still alive.
“Canonically Adar didn’t exist.”
Canonically *during this time period* there were no major orc wars.
What’s wrong with Laketown, and where are you getting that timeline for the Rammas Echor from?
Oh no. Does this mean I actually have to watch season 2 of Rings of Power now?
My suggestion would be background viewing while you are doing some weekly household task. I strongly suggest not watching episodes back to back, the inconsistencies and “Huh? Why would you do that?” choices become too glaringly obvious. I’ve seen it suggested that RoP is written for the phone generation who are assumed to be only half paying attention, the other half focused on social media.
Only pay attention to the character scenes with Celebrimbor and Sauron/Annatar in Eregion, although Durin in Khazad-dûm and Adar have some moments too. There are some good actors in this show, and occasionally they have a chance to shine without ridiculous action scenes and CGI overlays.
Maybe the siege of Eregion would make a good drinking game? Anyone?
The problem is that if you make the game where you take a drink any time the characters are unrealistically incompetent or something happens that would not happen IRL, you’ll die of alcohol poisoning, and if you make it where you take a drink any time someone does something sensible you’ll die of thirst.
But, seconded on what to pay attention to, although Elrond gets some good moments, and the interactions between Elendil and Tar-Miriel are very solid.
Re. moving a large army quickly through wilderness, the Ur-example is probably General Sherman’s Carolina Campaign in early 1865. Crossing rain-soaked rivers and streams and swampland that was considered militarily impassible, and averaging 9 miles per day at that. This was possible because Sherman at this point possessed an army of supremely experienced veterans who had mastered rapid pioneering.
Orcs have a liquid equivalent of elvish lembas or mannish cram in their orc-liquor. Taking that into account might amplify their logistical range somewhat.
I would suggest a timeline longer than 1 week for Elrond’s scouting party to get to Eregion from Lindon. Aragorn states that it takes him about 2 weeks to get from Bree to Rivendell, and Lindon is about that far from Eregion. Additionally, they are forced to take a detour on the way (this is also very confusing if you look at a map, as it’s unclear what river the gorge belongs to and how going around means passing through the barrow-downs (if they even are the barrow-downs? “Downs” means low treeless hills, and that scene takes place in a forest.).). Assuming an elven scouting party travels no slower than Aragorn, Chief Ranger of the North, it would take about two weeks and change. This gives Adar slightly more time to move his army (although not nearly enough).
One thing that stands out to me from this description is that it provides an idea of what exactly the structure of Gil-Galad extending his power across Middle Earth during Sauron’s absence in Numenor could be. That one always puzzled me; my first thought would be extending a population to occupy territory, but that didn’t seem to line up with other details. Whereas if it was a matter of Gil-Galad developing a network of depots that could allow him to deploy forces from Lindon to Mordor, that would seem congruous with Elf numbers, other lore descriptions of the norms of Elf warfare (they seem to greatly favour hidden strongholds), and how an army could gather in the far west and move rapidly and nigh unstoppably right up to Sauron’s borders.
And he can’t quickly see to the task of rooting out and destroying this network (which may not be as well defended by Elven soldiers as one would like, although the possible use of Silvan forest irregulars might help to offload a lot of that burden from Noldor heavy infantry), because not only does Sauron need to rebuild his diffuse armies, but a powerful kingdom of Numenor successors has formed in his path and needs to be dealt with first.
Gil-galad depots: ooh, interesting! Yeah, I’ve wondered what “extending his power” could have meant. Though I guess the other obvious idea is simply having everyone in the zone swearing fealty/alliance/help to him.
I think Thranduil would have conceivably been on board for a while, and Galadriel could almost certainly be relied on to have common cause. However, I was also considering the potential that it could go beyond mere alliance and more like establishing a fully planned out network of operations and communications, so that there are forces covering the area in coordinated fashion as to both deny access to Sauron and create a highway for deployments from the west.
Besides, the more eastern Elves are probably the ones you want to actually ensure the secret hideaways are well provisioned in similar manner to the point of how real ancient armies need to get settlements on the way to provide the food. It’s just possibly less burdensome to manufacture lembas to an extent that even a large force could survive off of.
I must say, unlike seemingly every other reader, I was never a huge fan of Tolkien – partly because my initial exposure to LOTR as a child was a heavily condensed translation which did not leave that much of a mark (for what it’s worth, I have fonder memories of The Morgaine Cycle or The Edge Chronicles or perhaps even Taren the Wanderer over either that version or The Hobbit), and partly because the rendition of combat in films made me cringe heavily: I knew so much of it felt wrong, even if I wasn’t always sure why. Thus, while I am sure the Gondor and Helm’s Deep series are some of the most popular on this blog, I have ignored them until this week, since reading this new series without familiarity with the preceding LOTR posts seemed untenable. Needless to say, those have taken up much of my free time for this week, such that I only got around to seeing the comments here now!
I’ll reiterate just how well those series have aged – in fact, parts 3 and 4 of the Helm’s Deep series now look eerily prescient. All of those points about the different ways to create a fighting force, how a better-equipped force can lose to one with stronger morale stemming from superior cohesion and perhaps most of all, how a “technically superior” form of military organization can fail badly when transplanted into a society which does not support it now hit very differently in the light of what we have seen in major military conflicts post-2020. The post on pre-battle speeches from the same series is another one which I certainly did NOT expect to find in the discussion of LOTR, and the insight that soldiers before battle crave not the empty calories of rah-rah rhetoric but logical explanations of why their side is in the stronger position is as stunning to one overly immersed in popular media (I was struck by just how comparatively DRY the linked Catiline’s speech was next to the motivational speakers’ exertions we are commonly sold as battle speeches nowadays) as it is obvious in hindsight.
The series had also demonstrated that a lot of the things which annoyed me so much in the films weren’t there in the book: while I knew even from my abridged version that Denethor was a far more complex and tragic feature than the power-hungry madman of the film, I didn’t realize the Army of the Dead was such an “I win” button only in the film, or that the “skirmishes before the big battle” scenes actually made so much more sense. Hence, I am tempted to read the proper version of the book for the first time in years – even if I suspect my other misgiving about the series will hold. That is, while LOTR is undoubtedly the wellspring of virtually the entire fantasy genre as it’s been defined postwar-present, its other legacy had been to effectively flanderize it into tales of Good defeating Evil, often through literal Fate/other forms of divine intervention, of the world being “permanently fixed” once the big villain is slain. And while other commenters on here often point out that Orcs in the literal Tolkien text are substantially more complex than what popular culture had flanderized them into, it’s also hard to deny that the concept of an inherently lesser enemy race which can be slaughtered largely without guilt had been normalized by LOTR far more than anything else. (As opposed to the other trope of “Evil is to be opposed because it’ll literally destroy everything otherwise”, which seems to owe more to Lovecraft. While Sauron’s goals of eternal tyranny are hardly nuanced, they at least don’t require his supporters to be brainwashed puppets or nihilists.)
To my knowledge, few stories in the genre since then appear to have tried chronicling more grounded conflicts which cannot be resolved by the “Good” side killing everything opposing it and require a settlement which leaves nobody witnessing it truly happy, but is necessary for future prosperity. Granted, Game of Thrones drew much of its appeal by promising to do just that – while D & D receive a lot of flack for a reason, their decision to lean into that stylistically with the name change (so much more prosaic than the inherently magical and “Good vs. Evil” A Song Of Ice And Fire, where “Ice” is the literal omnicidal force!) – but still failed to escape those trappings as “Ice” became more and more important in later seasons as the narrative shortcut it always was, with the final season shortchanging everything. After that, the works which even try seem to get progressively more and more obscure.
P.S. Perhaps, this is a good time to mention “The Last Ringbearer” (technically, the original word is the same as “Ringwraith”, except that the story’s position is that the Nazgul were only ever “wraiths” in Aragorn’s propaganda), which is a book from 1990s that takes advantage of Russia’s loose copyright law to reinterpret LOTR as propaganda written by Aragorn and other winners of the war – one started by the elves and Maya like Gandalf because the industrialization of Isengard and Mordor threatened the grip their magic allowed them to exert over the premodern society. At the very least, it seems apropos for the post centered on logistics of Rings of Power to contrast it with a story whose very opening paragraphs of give more than lip service to the concept!
https://ia801304.us.archive.org/16/items/TheLastRingbearerSecondEdition/The%20Last%20Ringbearer%20Second%20Edition.pdf
> Is there a sight more beautiful than a desert sunset, when the sun, as if ashamed of its
whitish daytime fierceness, lavishes a bounty of unimaginably pure soft colors on its guests?
Especially good are countless shades of purple, which turn the dunes into a charmed sea –
don’t miss those couple of minutes, they will never happen that way again … Or the last
moment before sunrise, when the first light of dawn interrupts in mid-movement the staid
minuet of moon shadows on the lacquered hardtops – for those dances are forever hidden
from the uninitiated, those who prefer day to night … Or the never-ending tragedy of the
hour when the power of darkness begins to wane and the fuzzy clusters of the evening
constellations suddenly turn into prickly icy crumbs, which by morning will rime the
bronzed gravel of the hamada?
> It was at such a midnight hour that two men glided like grey shadows along the
gravelly inner edge of a sickle-shaped gap between two low dunes, and the distance between
them was exactly that prescribed by the Field Manual for such occasions. However,
contrary to the rules, the one bearing the largest load was not the rear ‘main force’ private,
but rather the ‘forward guard’ one, but there were good reasons for that. The one in the rear
limped noticeably and was nearly out of strength; his face – narrow and beak-nosed, clearly
showing a generous serving of Umbar blood – was covered with a sheen of sticky sweat.
The one in the lead was a typical Orocuen by his looks, short and wide-faced – in other
words, the very ‘Orc’ that mothers of Westernesse use to scare unruly children; this one
advanced in a fast zigzagging pattern, his every movement noiseless, precise and spare, like
those of a predator that has sniffed prey. He had given his cloak of bactrian wool, which
always keeps the same temperature – whether in the heat of midday or the pre-dawn chill –
to his partner, leaving himself with a captured Elvish cloak, priceless in a forest but utterly
useless here in the desert.
> But it was not the cold that bothered the Orocuen right now: listening keenly to the
silence of the night, he cringed as if with toothache every time he heard the crunch of gravel
under the unsteady feet of his companion. Sure, to run into an Elvish patrol here, in the
middle of the desert, would be almost impossible, and besides, for the Elves starlight is not
light at all, they need the moon … Nevertheless, Sergeant Tzerlag, leader of a recon squad
of the Cirith Ungol Rangers Regiment, never relied on chance in his work, and had always
tirelessly repeated to new recruits: “Remember this, lads: the Field Manual is a book where
every jot and tittle is written with the blood of smartasses who tried to do it their way.” This
must have been how he managed to lose only two men during the entire three years of the war, and in his own estimation he was prouder of that than of the Medal of the Eye, which
he received last spring from the Commander of the South Army. Even now, home in
Mordor, he behaved as if he was still on an extended raid on the Plains of Rohan; although
what kind of home was it now, really? …The remnants of the South Army, bottled up in Morgul Gorge, had laid down their arms, and the Elves and the Gondorians drove them somewhere beyond the Anduin; a crazed mûmak from the defeated Harad battalion had trampled his field hospital, wounded and all, into bloody pulp; it looked like there was nothing else to save there and it was time to head home, to Mordor.
I don’t want to make a whole essay out of it, I’ll just opine that I think there are a few points of your misgivings on which the books are at least a bit more nuanced.
YARD, I think you should simply try reading LotR, not try to figure out whether you’ll like it or not.
There is also a *lot* of fantasy that is not simplistic “Good vs Evil” or “happily ever after”.
Two points, your distances seem to be short. By my measurements, The distance from Mordor to Eregion is about a thousand miles (as the crow flies), while from Lindon to Eregion is about 450.
In A-RoP, the city is on the south side of the river. Adar is attacking from the north.
One interesting problem that Tolkien created for less competent writers following in his footsteps (both in his setting and elsewhere) is the idea of fantasy world maps as a thing that should be there without a firm understanding of why. I don’t think it’s a huge failing of fantasy writers to not always have a great sense of how historical military campaigns worked, but it’s worth remembering that the reason why Tolkien made a map was because he did, and because of that knowledge it was a tool that he engaged with and a tool that those of his fans who were so inclined could too. Including a map when you don’t know how to write plausible campaign timelines is like putting a rug over a gaping pit; it might look nice if nobody interacts with it, but if they assume that it’s backed up by anything of substance it’s only going to lead to suffering and embarassment.
Regarding the matter of Adar’s nonsensical strategic actions, my guess would be that the showrunners initially planned to have Adar aiming to destroy Eregion for some reason that actually makes sense (possibly out of genocidal hatred, or to eliminate a threat to his orcish “children”) and probably actually shot large chunks of the show on that premise. But then, fairly late in the process, someone decided to change Adar’s strategic goal to “kill Sauron” (possibly they decided they wanted Adar more sympathetic than he had orginally been planned to be?) and either they didn’t care that this made nonsense of his actions or it was too late to redo the entire plot into something that made sense.