This is the second part of our [your guess is as good as mine] part series looking at the Siege of Eregion from the second season of Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last week, we saw how the logistics of this sequence absolutely do not work: Adar’s army has to cover an absurd amount of territory moving at impossible speeds for infantry. Even if they could move that fast, the entire army would starve to death anyway, given the total lack of logistics. In contrast, the narrative from Tolkien’s written legendarium holds together because it stretches this war out considerably: decades of preparation, two years of initial warfare and then two years of siege, leaving plenty of time for creating supply depots, engaging in foraging operations, or securing supplies through diplomacy.
This week Adar’s orc army arrives in Eregion and begins the process of laying siege to the capital, Ost-in-Edhil: we’re going to look at the process of setting up for a siege, particularly a ‘deliberate‘ assault of the sort Adar is engaged in here. What we find is that both Eregion’s defenses and Adar’s assault are both astoundingly incompetent and slipshod. In a better story, that might be indicative of the main characters’ failings as commanders, but here, to be frank, it seems to be indicative of showrunners and a writers’ room that does not really know how sieges actually work outside of big budget Hollywood action sequences and has real trouble connecting cause and effect in their own plot. That’s not an uncommon failing, even if this siege sequence fails uncommonly.
So we’re going to be talking about about the absurdity of what Adar and Eregion are doing as well as talking about what they should be doing as they set in for a siege. This is a component of the narrative that has almost nothing written about it in Tolkien’s writings, so instead the book notes here are often going to point to situations where the right activities happen in Tolkien’s major siege sequences: the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Despite having these passages as blueprints, Rings of Power struggles and in the end fails to deliver either a realistic or a compelling siege sequence.
That seems like more than a careless error – that big CGI model must have been expensive to produce and I have to imagine it wasn’t a simple task to them modify it to add defensive walls to the city.
For those playing along at home, this means that the show’s initial design for Ost-in-Edhil, “fortress of the elves” included no fortifications.
But first, as always, sieges are also 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! I promise to use your donations to fortify my camp and then circumvallate my enemies (mostly the academic job market, to be honest). 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 have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
A Deliberately Hasty Assault
Before we jump in to Adar’s plan, I want to review an important distinction when it came to siege assaults that we’ve discussed before: the difference between what Clifford Rogers terms ‘hasty’ and ‘deliberate’ assaults.1 Often when an ancient or medieval army first arrived at a fortified settlement, be it a city or a castle, they might try a ‘hasty’ assault – a quick, sudden effort to scale the walls mostly by surprise: if you could get on the walls and seize a gatehouse quickly before the enemy was entirely set in their defenses, you could end a long siege before it began. These efforts, using ladders, ropes and so on, were typically only undertaken with a few soldiers because they usually failed. But compared to a long siege, it might be worth rolling the dice on such a hasty assault where little of the army was risked. We looked at Helm’s Deep as an example of such a ‘hasty assault’ poorly handled.
By contrast, both the Siege of Gondor and the Siege of Eregion are not hasty assaults, they are instead deliberate assaults. There are a few ways to conduct a deliberate assault, but the key is that the besieger takes advantage of the fact that time is their ally to prepare such an assault. They might fill in moats, reduce enemy fortifications with artillery (catapults or cannon), build siege towers (‘belfries’ in most medieval sources), undermine walls with sapping or build large ramps to get over walls. Exactly what part of this ‘toolkit’ gets pulled out varies generally by the size and capability of the army in question – there’s a ‘big, well organized army’ playbook for deliberate assaults and a ‘small or weakly organized’ army playbook. But in both cases, the army is taking advantage of preparation.
And Adar is absolutely engaged here in a deliberate assault. He has brought a large army and established a quite permanent camp outside of Eregion. It isn’t a well defended camp mind you (as we’ll see, Adar’s defensive preparations are ludicrously bad), but setting it up clearly took a lot of work, since everything is dug out in trenches. He has also brought a lot of catapults and intends to bombard substantial parts of Ost-in-Edhil into rubble before staging his attack, which is itself predicated on some pretty absurd landscaping and undermining the wall to gain access to the city. And indeed, deliberate assaults of this sort generally proceed in stages, taking advantage of the fact that the attacker can work steadily in safety beyond the reach of the defender’s weapons to systematically dismantle defenses.
But before we get to Adar’s incompetent siege, we need to discuss another problem: Eregion’s incompetent defense, particularly:
How Did We Not See This Coming?
Here I want to jump ahead just a moment to the point at which the defenders of Ost-in-Edhil realize they are under attack. It’s this moment here where, as Adar’s catapults are pulled into firing position within sight of the city, one of the guards on the walls orders to “sound the bells, we’re under attack!”
Now, thematically, presumably, this moment is meant to parallel Celebrimbor’s own lack of awareness: just as Celebrimbor is unaware of the threat approaching him, so too the city knows not their peril until it is too late. Except – and I feel like this may be a separate addendum on this series – that theming makes a bit of a hash of Celebrimbor’s better story in the legendarium. Celebrimbor isn’t unaware that he’s taking a risk trusting Annatar (he’s told this by wiser elves), nor is he unaware that what he’s doing is at least a little morally suspect: he does it anyway because this is a story about hubris (in the modern English sense, rather than the Greek sense). Celebrimbor, infected by the same overweening arrogance and ambition of his ancestor, Fëanor, disregards the risks, shoves wiser leaders (Galadriel, in Unfinished Tales) aside and does it anyway. The show fumbles Celebrimbor’s moral culpability by giving Sauron actual mind control powers and preventing word of the threat reaching him. Celebrimbor’s heroic but futile death is thus not tragic but redemptive: it is the payment not for his mistakes but for his sins. But that’s a point for another essay.2
But for now, that’s neither here nor there. What is here is a giant army of orcs and the really important question of why no one spotted them before this.
Generally speaking, large armies of infantry cannot simply ‘show up’ like this. Such an army on the move does so many things which are going to give away its approach that a city is likely to have at least some warning before they show up and indeed those hours or days when it is known a siege is likely but has not yet been laid are some of the most crucial. We actually watch this play out in both the Siege of Gondor and Helm’s Deep, with the book treatment of the Siege of Gondor being the most complete. Of course Denethor knows where the enemy blow will fall – he can read a map as well as Sauron – but we also see a sequence of preparations once he knows the enemy army is on the move. Now Denethor has some supernatural means to get that information, but even without them his preparations wouldn’t have been much delayed: Faramir’s scouts would know the moment the enemy started moving in Ithilien and could have had word back to Minas Tirith within 24 hours, riding hard.
What do those preparations look like? Of course part of it is signalling for help, which in the book narrative begins before Gandalf and Pippin even arrive at Minas Tirith: they see the beacons lighting while riding towards Minas Tirith. As a result, while their numbers are much reduced by the threat of the corsairs, Minas Tirith’s Gondorian reinforcements arrive long before the Witch King has breached Osigiliath. Meanwhile, the defenders also look to move as many non-combatants out as they can and Tolkien reports the trains of wagons and fleeing civilians on foot being moved out of the city. That isn’t just humanitarian: those people eat food and you do not want them as a burden (or an unpredictable, chaotic element). At the same time, as the enemy army moves forward, the people in the rural hinterland of the city are going to flee to the safety of the walls (and indeed, these must be many of the civilians Denethor is moving out of the region entirely). Most importantly, the city is going to want to absorb every last bit of food in the countryside, both to be able to last for the siege, but also to create a barren countryside to starve the attacker. In some sieges historically, such as the Siege of Antioch (1098), which we’ll return to in a moment, this included cutting down all the trees you could to deny the siege attacker the materials to build towers, ladders and so on.
The good news for the defender is that seeing a siege coming usually didn’t require some complex network of watch-post, scouts and spies (although those can still be pretty darn helpful and were used). Large armies preparing for major sieges aren’t subtle! While a small cavalry force can often ‘outrace’ the word of its coming, moving faster than rumor and refugees to surprise settlements, large bodies of infantry cannot. Not only do they move too slow, but the ripples they create in the agrarian countryside are much more intense and so far more obvious. You simply can’t conceal the food demands of 30,000 infantry moving through an area.
What would the defenders of Ost-in-Edhil see in the hours or days before the arrival of Adar’s army?
Assuming there’s no system of watchposts or messengers – a fairly typical well a large kingdom might keep an eye on its frontiers – the first indicator that something was amiss would be what I’ve termed ‘reports.’ In this case, refugees from outlying settlements would begin arriving: small groups of fleeing civilians, folks who know the landscape very well because they live there and who are unencumbered by an army’s size or baggage could move a lot faster than the core of the army. Their reports are likely to be confused: they’re not scouts and they didn’t see the main army’s marching column, but rather became aware of it as foraging or raiding parties hit their villages. So they might not know how large it was, or where it was heading, but they would know that an enemy army was on the move in the neighborhood.
I suppose a response to this is that Elves, being Elves, don’t need outlying settlements, but it’s not clear to me why that would be true. Elves clearly inhabit their forests, glades and vales in Middle Earth, they don’t just live as ultra-dense points of population in cities. And while Elves might be somewhat fantastic in their ability to subsist dense populations on fairly small footprints, its clear they do, in fact, subsist. They seem to eat the standard variety of medieval foods and of course famously bake bread. I think there’s no reason then to suppose that Eregion would be devoid of population outside of the main center at Ost-in-Edhil.
And of course, as discussed last time, if the forests on Adar’s march were really so empty as the show suggests they are, that solves the Elves security problem anyway because it would mean that Adar’s army would starve long before they could traverse the kingdom to reach the capital.
A bit closer, fires and smoke of two sorts would be significant warning signs. If an army is burning crops or village structures, smoke on the horizon might mark their passage. We actually get a scene where Sauron, still in disguise, sees these on the horizon; I think we’re supposed to infer that he sneakily doesn’t tell anything but this is a city of Elves, with famously keen eyesight so it is hard to imagine the soldiers didn’t also see this.
Alternately, the glow of an army’s campfires can be visible quite a ways away. While a human on the ground is only going to be able to see a campfire for a couple of miles, a large army needs a great many campfires (to provide heat but also to cook their food) – that might not seem like a lot of illumination, but we’re talking about societies with few sources of artificial light at night, so the glow of those campfires would stand out on most nights, potentially even over the horizon. It would thus be almost impossible for Adar to conceal his army directly across the river from the city (as he does here), particularly given that his army lights large bonfires.
Now with unobstructed lines of sight, a host of camp fires might be visible for dozens of miles. Now on our Earth the curvature of the earth limits the direct sight range to just 3 miles or so. With a decent watch tower (50ft up) that distance becomes almost 10 miles. Now there’s an odd complication here: Middle Earth before the Fall of Númenor is flat, rather than round (the ‘straight road’ to the West won’t be rounded off until Númenor sinks). Under those circumstances even a single large bonfire might be directly visible for 20 or 30 miles. I don’t have exact figures for how far away the horizon glow of a few hundred or thousand campfires would be, but my sense from the sources is that it is generally more than a day’s march, to the point that the ability of Steppe nomads to move without lighting fires – not shared by orcs who do, canonically, need to cook their food – allowed them to surprise enemies by moving over the horizon: the lack of camp fires would lead enemies to assume they had fled.
Given the slow rate we’d expect Adar’s army to move (6-8 miles per day), fleeing civilians might give Ost-in-Edhil a few days notice that he is coming, while the sight of smoke on the horizon and fires might give them something like a day’s warning (or perhaps a few hours) that he’s in the neighborhood if, for some reason, they sent out no scouts once the panicked survivors of raids in the countryside began filtering in.
What would not happen is exactly what we see: Adar’s army revealing itself as it marches out of the forest to the edge of the river just a few hundred yards from the outer walls of the city. A large army would almost invariably be detected many hours if not days before this point, even just using the Mark One Human Eyeball, much less the Mark One Elf Eyeball.
Book Note: As discussed last time, this problem is entirely avoided by the longer time frame of the war. The Elves do detect Sauron’s approaching host and a force under the command of Celeborn (absent in Rings of Power) advances to meet them: “[t]he scouts and vanguard of Sauron’s host were already approaching when Celeborn made a sortie and drove them back” (Tales, 228. By this time Galadriel and Celeborn who had been ruling Eregion, had been effectively overthrown and replaced by Celebrimbor and his smiths, the Gwaith-i-Mirdain (Tales, 227). Galadriel had left, taking her daughter with her over the Misty Mountains to what would be Lothlorien but at this point is known as Lorinand, but Celeborn had remained behind and evidently took part in the doomed defense of Eregion.). So Sauron’s host is detected, its vanguard repulsed by Celeborn’s sortie and some time passes – two years – before the fall of Ost-in-Edhil and the death of Celebrimbor. During that time, evidently, there was no shortage of warfare in the open, as both Elrond and Celeborn’s forces are active in the area, as Sauron has to hold off both (Tales, 229) in order to invest Ost-in-Edhil – a feat that, as we’ll see, Adar will fail miserably at, but it won’t matter because in Rings of Power nothing really matters.
Just Walling Around
Instead, we see Adar’s arrive arrive outside Ost-in-Edhil undetected and even more baffling seems able to encamp for some time (hours? days?) in the forest directly across the river without detection, like a TV character who only becomes visible when the camera swings around to reveal him standing, undisguised in the open in the middle of the room. Perhaps no one could see them because the terrible lighting.
In any case, Adar remains concealed in the forest long enough to establish a semi-permanent encampment there, apparently unnoticed by everyone. But the form of this encampment is remarkably poorly suited to the task. The orcs appear to encamp by clearing small parts of the forest, digging trenches in them, bracing those trenches with wood boards (from the trees, presumably) and then throwing up their tents inside of the depressions that creates. This is a remarkably labor-intensive method of encampment which is somehow more vulnerable than just stretching some canvas between the trees – after all, should an enemy reach the lip of the trench, they’d have a considerable advantage against the orcs inside the trench. We’ve mentioned this before, but in pre-gunpowder warfare, trenches are not for being in, they’re for blocking enemy movements. You want the enemy to be fouled by your ditch, not for you to be stuck in it.
And these camps aren’t linked together in some coherent network either. Rather, they seem to be strewn almost at random along the forest (although at least on the reverse slope of a hill, so they’re not plainly visible by the enemy – though as noted above, the glow and smoke of their fires would be anyway). Meanwhile, Adar constructs no defenses to shield his encampment from attack or to block egress from the city. Indeed, on this latter point, at the end of the siege, significant numbers of Elves – any one of which could have been Sauron in disguise – will successfully flee the siege.
Remember: Adar’s entire purpose here is to trap and kill a single being he knows can shapeshift and who he knows he cannot necessarily identify. For that to have even the remotest change of working, he needs to be very certain his blockade of the city is complete. Instead he fails to blockade the city at all.
So what ought Adar be doing in the early days and hours of his siege? Generally speaking, there are three initial tasks for a besieging army that have to be accomplished before you can prepare for a deliberate assault and Adar needs to do all of them. He needs to first, establish a fortified camp as a base for his army, then he needs to circumvallate (‘wall around’) the enemy and then he needs to contravallate (‘wall against/away’) his own siege works.
The first step is establishing a fortified camp for the attacking army. The attacker wants to keep the army consolidated in one main camp for command and control reasons – soldiers scattered widely over a vast area are hard to control and might get up to all sorts of counter-productive mischief – and so siege plans almost invariably include a primary fortified camp. Those fortifications might vary based on the situation: Roman fortified camps are quite famous for having a distinctive ‘playing card’ shape regardless of where the Romans put them and for being quite well constructed. Medieval military camps might be quite a lot simpler, often with tents clustered on the basis of various retinues, with a basic palisade or sometimes just a circle of wagons defending the perimeter. Nevertheless, a siege camp was so important that basic fortification of the main camp was often done even before the execution of a ‘hasty assault,’ which, as you will recall, aimed to take advantage of the lack of time for the enemy to prepare (Rogers, op cit., 116-7). After all, even an army that was far stronger than a defending force might be vulnerable to sudden attack while they were unprepared (sleeping, at meal times and so on) and being in a siege meant being in close contact with an enemy for long periods, so a fortified camp was a must-have to prevent those surprises.
Of course Adar does none of this. You can see in the image above his core camp is just a ditch with some tents in it, while the bonfires of his other camps are scattered, seemingly at random in clearings in the forest. If any effort has been made to fortify this position (and no, putting your own tents in the ditch is not a form of fortification prior to gunpowder) we do not see it.
Once the army itself was minimally secure with a fortified camp – potentially several if it was a large army besieging a large city, as in this case – the next step was to make sure the enemy couldn’t easily leave the besieged settlement, accomplished by building inward-facing fortifications running parallel to the defender’s walls, a process called circumvallation, since the attacker is ‘walling around’ the city. Now this practice might strike the reader as strange – why does a besieging army that is much stronger than the besieged force (otherwise we’d be fighting a pitched battle instead) need to wall the weaker, besieged force in?
The answer is that there are quite a few reasons it might benefit a besieged force to ‘punch a hole’ in the besieger’s lines, however briefly. Moreover, the raw amount of land area the besieger is encompassing, even besieging just a castle or a small town, is substantial, making it impossible for the besieger to concentrate their forces at any one point along the time. Without fortifications, the defender’s army might thus be able to massively outnumber the attackers at a given point – suddenly and without warning, rushing out of their defenses – and break through. That might be in an effort to break out – that is, for the besieged force to escape the trap and break out back into open terrain. But equally it might be an effort to create a gap in the siege lines through which supplies or reinforcements might be moved, lengthening the siege. Finally, defenders might try to break the siege lines at a point where they see siege engines or other works being constructed, rushing out and overwhelming a small number of defenders to destroy catapults, siege towers and such.
Now in this regard, Adar has some geographic advantages and challenges, because Ost-in-Edhil, as shown in the show, is directly on the river (presumably the Sirannon), with rough heights to its rear. Now, few cities in history had such advantageous geographic positions as to have a large river to one side and a large mountain to the other, but conveniently for us one city immediately jumps to mind with almost this exact configuration and it was besieged twice in 1098 alone: Antioch. To give a sense of the geography, here we can see a map of Antioch in Late Antiquity, with the Orontes River to the west and Mount Silpius to the East:
By the 11th century, the city has shrunk significantly, with the result that less of its eastern flank was anchored in the river, but the defensive position was still formidable: the Orontes blocked most approaches from the West, Mt. Silpius most approaches from the East, confining attackers to a relatively narrow approach from the North around what would be the Gate of St. Paul. This was the problem the army of the First Crusade faced besieging the city in 1098 and then almost immediately after they capture the city, the problem the relief army commanded by the Turkish general Kerbogha in trying, unsuccessfully, to force them out again. Antioch was sufficiently big that the Crusader army couldn’t simply blockade the whole of it – the crusader army was large, but frankly not well organized like a Roman army would have been and the defenders had intentionally removed or destroyed timber building supplies around the city. Gabriel Moss put together a really solid map of the Crusader positions:
As an aside, Gabriel is – as you can tell – very good at making these sorts of academic maps and even produced the ones for my upcoming book project – a hearty recommendation from me, he knows his business.
What the Crusaders do here is set their main fortified camps on the North-West side of the city, keeping them together for mutual defense. But of course that won’t complete the blockade of the city and they do need to seal the city from resupply and reinforcements. In order to accomplish this, they build a set of forts opposite the main gates – you can see Malregard and La Mahomerie marked on the map. These were small, wooden forts – little more than fortified towers – but enough to allow small detachments to prevent anything but a determined sally from breaching the siege lines. Connecting those positions required the establishment of a more convenient crossing of the Orontes so that the far side of the southern bridge could be secured, and for this purpose the Crusaders built a pontoon bridge (the ‘Bridge of Boats’) over the Orontes to link up their positions, which enabled the construction of La Mahomerie and its defense. That reduced the supplies going into Antioch into the inconsequential trickle that could make it over Mount Silpias; declining moral eventually enables one of the Crusader leaders, Bohemond, to suborn a traitor in the city, a man named Firouz, who allowed a small contingent of crusaders to scale a single tower and from there open a gate leading to the fall of the city.
We might expect Adar here to take a similar approach: establish a fortified main camp for the army and then construct fortifications at the ends of every bridge leading out of the city, thus containing the defenders and preventing them from sneaking much in the way of supplies or reinforcements through. Instead, he seems to maintain his main camp – in a large, disordered mass – well distant from the city until his final assault, which ironically is exactly the mistake Kerbogha makes when he shows up to besiege the First Crusade inside of the newly captured Antioch: Kerbogha also blocks the bridges, but sets his main siege camp to the West of the Orontes, rather than to the East (and so much further away), with the result that when the Crusaders do sally, they’re able to quickly overwhelm his forward forces and then quickly roll up Kerbogha’s forces one-by-one moving up the line.
That said, I should note that Adar’s army is clearly a lot larger and seems better organized than the First Crusade or really any medieval siege army. During much of the Middle Ages, deploying just a couple of large catapults would have been a significant effort for a besieging army, but Adar – in a move that feels rather more out of either the Classical or Early Modern period – deploys what seem to be dozens of catapults to barrage the city. If he has the organization, resources and manpower to do that, he ought to have a lot more tactical options than the First Crusade and fully circumvallating the city ought to be little problem for him.
Which would be good because at that point he’s certainly not done. The third, optional but in this case clearly important step was contravallation. Contravallation was when an army also built a second ring of defenses facing outward, turning the besieging force’s position into a kind of ‘doughnut’ with the target city in the center of the doughnut-hole. Not every army contravallates in every situation – the Crusaders at Antioch don’t, for instance. But this was an effective and standard response to an army conducting a siege that had to worry about either raiders or a relief army showing up behind them.
Book Note: This issue – the problem of preventing relief armies from arriving – is explicitly referenced in the treatment of the siege in Unfinished Tales. There we are told directly that a combined army led by Elrond and Celeborn was in the field, but “Sauron’s host was far greater than theirs, great enough both to hold them off and closely to invest Eregion” (Tales, 228). That likely means Sauron detached a large blocking force from his army. This might prevent the arrival of a relief force by blocking key routes, but equally it might do so by harrying Elrond and Celeborn, denying them the opportunity to forage. Ancient and medieval armies could practice this sort of ‘area denial,’ since these armies relied on foraging to remain supplied while maneuvering in hostile or contested terrain. The Romans quite famously do this to Hannibal after Cannae; this element of the Roman war effort is analyzed admirably by P. Erdkamp, Hunger and the Sword (1998), alas, not the easiest book to get a copy of.
Alternately, of course, an army might simply block the logical route into the theater, as the Witch King does during the Siege of Gondor. In particular, the Witch King attempts to block Théoden’s likely arrival by placing a large force – behind quickly dug field fortifications – on the road from Rohan through Anorien, near Cair Andros. Théoden is able to avoid this force by showing some excellent workmanlike generaling: he makes a pact with the leader of the Woses, Ghân-buri-Ghân, whose people live in the area and who shows Théoden a route through the forest unknown to the Witch King, which leads around his blocking force (RotK, 117). Théoden managing to casually sidestep this force is one of his best command moments in the entire trilogy and also neatly explains why the Witch King – otherwise a very capable commander – is caught so off-guard by the Rohirrim’s arrival: he had a force watching for them and had as yet received no word they were on the way and no reason to suppose they could simply dodge his waiting army.
Conclusions
Adar, for his part, ought to know these are concerns: the entire army of Eregion is inside the city, available to sally out (it will be prevented by Sauron, but Adar cannot count on this!) and right before he invests the city3 he captures Galadriel, part of a scouting party from Lindon, a large, hostile kingdom allied with Eregion to his north-west. Should Lindon dispatch raiders to harry his rear or worse yet a relief army to show up behind him while his army was occupied with the siege of the city, that ought to spell disaster. But of course, this is Rings of Power, so this both happens and also doesn’t matter. Likewise, Adar has reason to be worried that the Dwarves of Moria might show up, as they’re longstanding friends and allies of Eregion. This also happens, but, this being Rings of Power, also doesn’t matter.
We don’t even get the sense that Adar’s assault is ever rendered ‘touch and go’ by the arrival of a relief force. It is both unsatisfying as a story element and also makes no sense – even Julius Caesar finds himself in considerable trouble when a Gallic relief army shows up behind him at Alesia and is only able to salvage the situation because he carefully prepared for this by building an entire second set of fortifications in advance. Meanwhile, Adar shrugs off the arrival of an entire Dwarf Army like it was so many bullets against Superman’s chest, despite having no idea it is coming until it arrives.
And here I am struck by the contrast with both Helm’s Deep and the Siege of Gondor. In the former, the result of the battle is a clear consequence of Saruman’s (bad) decisions. Meanwhile, the failure of the effort to take Minas Tirith is a much more back and forth thing: the Witch King’s operation has a lot of elements to deal with known contingencies which the heroes actions one by one dismantle: Théoden side-steps the blocking force, Aragorn removes the Corsair fleet and arrives with reinforcements from Gondor’s southern territories (or the Army of the Dead in the film). In both cases, there is a discernible cause-and-effect as the battle wavers one way and then other other based on the decisions being made.
By contrast, in Rings of Power – not just in its sieges, but in the whole story – there is so much that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Elrond arrives with reinforcements – as opposed to in Unfinished Tales, where it does matter that he doesn’t arrive – and so equally it does not matter that Adar has failed utterly to prepare for such an eventuality. We’ll come back to this, I think, after this series is done, but equally a lot of the important moral choices don’t matter either, which is such a mishandling of Tolkien’s legendarium and its moral vision.
Instead, the creators of Rings of Power are so intensely focused on ‘subverting’ the Ride of the Rohirrim – a superior storytelling moment on its own than the sum total of their achievement here – that they, not once but twice have relief armies show up at the siege which do not impact the story or the siege in any way whatsoever. But they fail to lay the necessary predicates – to have Adar clearly anticipate this and plan for it – to make that cause and effect make sense.
Instead, Adar’s assault succeeds not because of Celebrimbor’s hubris (would different actions by the defenders have mattered? It doesn’t seem so) or Adar’s planning or Sauron’s clever machinations, but simply because the script says they must.
And next week, we’ll look at how Adar is going to get over the river Sirannon, the most absurd example of a plan succeeding despite all logic and physics because the script says it must.
- In Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007).
- Put another way: Celebrimbor’s moral position in the legendarium is a lot like Boromir’s: they die heroically as a consequence of a great moral error they have made and the act of self-sacrifice redeems them spiritually. One of these days, I also have half a draft of an essay “Why Boromir Conquered” on how we ought to read Boromir’s death because I think Boromir is one of the most interesting characters in The Lord of the Rings and it is important to understand that Boromir does not fail, even though he makes a great error.
- To ‘invest’ a city is to begin the effort to lay siege to it.
The only mention of Elven agriculture comes from one of Tolkien’s unpublished works, the Narn i Hin Hurin – not the prose version, the alliterative poem which is somewhere in the Histories of Middle-earth which I don’t have near me. It mentions plowed fields and orchards, surrounded by rings of trees. So, we know elves are aware of what agriculture is and have farms.
I often think that if someone had gone back in time and told Tolkien about food forests he would have loved the idea.
I believe there is also ‘Of Lembas’ in The Peoples of Middle Earth, which supplies the following details:
“Now this corn had in it the strong life of Aman, which it could impart to those who had the need and right to use the bread. If it was sown at any season, save in frost, it soon sprouted and grew swiftly, though it did not thrive in the shadow of plants of Middle-earth and would not endure winds that came out of the North while Morgoth dwelt there. Else it needed only a little sunlight to ripen; for it took swiftly and multiplied all the vigour of any light that fell on it.
The Eldar grew it in guarded lands and sunlit glades; and they gathered its great golden ears, each one, by hand, and set no blade of metal to it. The white haulm was drawn from the earth in like manner, and woven into corn-leep for the storing of the grain: no worm or gnawing beast would touch that gleaming straw, and rot and mould and other evils of Middle-earth did not assail it. From the ear to the wafer none were permitted to handle this grain, save those elven-women who were called Yavannildi (or by the Sindar the Ivonwin), the maidens of Yavanna; and the art of the making of the lembas, which they learned of the Valar, was a secret among them, and so ever has remained.”
So it appears the elves would have needed some space for agriculture at least. The incredible sustaining-power of lembas, its ability to grow in minimal sunlight and its immunity to rot and spoilage presumably reduced the land area required for its cultivation, but it’s not really clear by how much. The mention of growing it in “glades” suggests that it might be able to sustain a population in forested terrain without needing to clear any space for fields, which would mesh with what we know about Lothlorien and the Woodland Realm; “guarded lands” is a bit more opaque (could be a reference to hidden valleys like Gondolin or Rivendell, possibly).
Oh this is a fascinating bit of world-building. Explains why the Elves can have some significant settlements without an overly-large “footprint”, but with enough restrictions that not everyone can eat lembas.
This is actually no longer true—we have a handful of mentions in The Nature of Middle-earth as well.
In a note on the making of lembas, Tolkien mentions “wheat-corn” which the elves are cultivating and of which Galadriel “was one of the chief inheritors.” (NoME, p. 296) More interesting is the next chapter, “Note on Elvish Economy”, where Tolkien writes that “[t]he Sindar did not practice agriculture until long after the departure of the other Eldar,” (NoME, p. 297) that “[t]he Sindar […] not under the rule of Thingol dwelt and practiced not only cattle-rearing and sheep-farming, but also grain-growing and other food crops; on which they prospered because both Doriath west and the Dwarves eat were ready to buy what they could,” (NomE, p. 298) and that “[t]he Eldar were not in the Common Eldarin period ignorant of either horticulture or agriculture. These things they had begun to develop […] long before the Great Journey; but by the teaching of Orome their practice was greatly improved.” (NoME, p. 298)
These notes are mainly interested in the First and Third Ages, but I think they actually give us some good options for what agriculture might have been practiced in the Elven kingdoms of the Second Age. The Noldor themselves were likely, at minimum, practicing grain agriculture, perhaps under the direct oversight of Galadriel, but there were also significant concentrations of Sindar in Harlindon, Edhellond, and later (though the show’s timeline is of course a mess) south of Greenwood the Great—Lindon and Eregion may well have been relying on the former two settlements (note that Celeborn is a big player in Harlindon) for the import of large portions of their food, in which case it would, in fact, have been very easy for an invading army to cut Eregion off from a major source of its agricultural imports.
Huh. I’m going to bookmark this and the preceding passage, because they cover longstanding questions that I have had.
Huh, I stand corrected, I’ll have to pick this up.
Which also answers the question of what the Dwarves ate, as well – they traded for food from the surface.
As others said, this is not the *only* mention of Elvish agriculture. But the specific part you refer to is in HoME Book 3, *Lays of Beleriand*, part 3 of the Lay of the Children of Hurin:
“and they came to a country kindly tended;
through flowery frith and fair acres
they fared, and found of folk empty
the leas and leasows and the lawns of Narog,
the teeming tilth by trees enfolded
twixt hills and river. The hoes unrecked
in the fields were flung, and fallen ladders
in the long grass lay of the lush orchards”
(lines 1794-1801)
This is the passage I was referring to, thanks for finding the reference!
In addition to what the others mentioned, in Laws and Customs among the Eldar (Morgoth’s Ring), Tolkien notes the tending of fields and gardens (tending to be done by the women, at least among the Noldor): “The nissi are more often skilled in the tending of fields and gardens…”
The “surprise” element is likely another case of the trope you’ve mentioned before, where writers assume ancient warfare works like modern warfare. Modern “infantry”, which is typically mechanized, can show up as a surprise, and there have been a number of such cases in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Potentially, the writers/editors may be counting on the audience, used to reports of large surprise infantry assaults, not realizing how unrealistic they are in a pre-modern context. Clueless or deceptive, take your choice.
The writers/directors/etc. themselves only “learned” this from other films. Next week (and presumably in a few more installments) there will be discussion of how some very obviously WW2 mechanics got dressed up in medieval sprites.
– By range, destructive effect, and employment (demolishing half the city, with nice shots showing this) obviously Adar brought some World War 1-2 artillery, disguised as trebuchets.
– The death of that female elf. It is a surprise to everyone when she very suddenly gets hit by a burst from an LMG; she survives just long enough to shoot her bazooka at the enemy tank and blow it up; Elrond and another elf are taking cover/concealment behind a berm from the same LMG. This would all make perfect sense, except for the equipment being rendered as arrows/armor/etc. and a Standard Chaotic Melee being plopped into the “empty” engagement space.
– Less direct example, but I think “battlefields are always muddy” was half the reason for the whole drain-the-river debacle.
The discriminating evidence is that (with a few notable exceptions!) directors/etc. make a complete nonsense of modern warfare, too. There is a multitude of common errors that fit curiously well together:
– Going beyond the necessary backgrounding of the organization outside a small group, to either making it explicitly disappear (the numerous “lone wolf” heroes) or the foil (“ragtag bunch of misfits” more effective).
– Evident lack of planning, especially contingency planning, instead making things up as they go along. (A few films have made excellent “boardroom scenes” in the form of mission briefings! It can be done!)
– Total-War style frictionless coordination.
– “Authority equals asskicking”. I would submit that it only happens when someone has no idea what purpose commanders serve that they feel the need to justify their authority by making them be better at the common soldier’s task.
– No division of labor, no screening/guarding/covering forces ever show up on screen. Perhaps the most famous case is in Star Wars: when the ewoks show up, there are dozens of stormtroopers in a half-circle around our heroes; not a single one is facing outwards, so that they could spot ewoks before they get into stick-throwing range. But armies in e.g. Game of Thrones get surprised routinely, too.
– Everyone, including schoolbooks, say that Ares is the god of war, nobody else. This is wrong, with the error coming in two separate pieces. One half was made by the Greeks themselves (“hoplite armies were unguided missiles and rubbish at sieges”). The other half is made by moderns leaving out that, despite making the above half of the mistake, the Greeks did recognize that along her other attributes, Pallas was a god of war.
This antipalladian view of war could be appropriate for some situations. If the polities are small, the enemy is close (less logistics endurance) and the armies are correspondingly small. Make the societies heavily stratified, and make some extremely effective but expensive weapons, to concentrate capacity into even smaller groups. Non-/pre-imperial Bronze Age, pre-Roman Gaul, early Middle Ages. There, the king wearing a copy of the Dendra panoply or chainmail, on a horse (or perhaps elephant, camel, whatever), indeed derives a significant part of his authority from personal ability to kick enemy butt. But when you have states in the neighborhood, a character with this attitude should be …rebuked by the events of the story, so to speak.
While this is a good comment, and I appreciate the link to that “militaryrealism” blog, I would like to focus a little on this part.
> It is a surprise to everyone when she very suddenly gets hit by a burst from an LMG; she survives just long enough to shoot her bazooka at the enemy tank and blow it up; Elrond and another elf are taking cover/concealment behind a berm from the same LMG. This would all make perfect sense, except for the equipment being rendered as arrows/armor/etc. and a Standard Chaotic Melee being plopped into the “empty” engagement space.
I presume the “perfect sense, except for” part is also heavily ironic. Just in case: not only is the notion of a person being able to do much of ANYTHING besides falling to the ground immediately after even a “low-caliber” burst ridiculous (some sources suggest the final twilight of “bulletproof” cuirasses occurred not because the firearms got that much better to consistently defeat them, but because the kinetic energy from an automatic firearm burst still caused grievous injuries even if the plate was thick enough to stop outright penetration) but (contrary to the Panzerfaust and the later RPG), the WWII bazookas were FAR less effective than the reputation they developed postwar. They were completely unable to destroy even the “mere” Pz. IVs, StuGs, etc. from the front, let alone Panthers and Tigers (the latter could reportedly only be engaged by shooting downwards into roof armour or even upwards by trying to lie down in a trench it was about to cross.) They ended up replaced with “Super Bazookas” after the Korean War had shown them equally ineffective against the T-34s.
https://www.tankarchives.ca/2017/12/the-father-of-all-rpgs.html
Pedantry note: the Super Bazooka was actually developed during the last days of WWII, in response to the original’s ineffectiveness against German armor. The reason why there weren’t any in Korea at the start of the war there was because of Louis Johnson’s defense cuts.
Well, yes, I meant that they were replaced in active service with the already-developed M20 Super Bazooka (weapons generally take years to develop, after all). I can certainly see now that my initial comment wasn’t very clear and could be reasonably interpreted to mean that the Korean War prompted the development of M20, and not just its widespread adoption!
According to the reference below, the only first adopters of M20 between 1948 and 1950 were some of the units deployed at home and in West Germany. As an additional reality check, it also notes that even this “super” version was apparently ineffective against the front armour of M26 Pershing (as a captured weapon, obviously), so it would have likely been similarly ineffective against Tiger IIs if it ever got to face them (and if those didn’t break down or run out of fuel more often than they were in service) or against the IS-2 (apparently deployed in Korea, but only in reserve capacity if the 38th parallel was ever breached for the 2nd time), since both of those had even stronger front armour. (And the notorious IS-3 even had superior side armour to its front armour – but was not delivered anywhere until it became obsolete.)
https://www.tankarchives.ca/2017/12/super-bazooka-improved-antitank-fist.html
And yes, what you mention about the cuts was also a factor – to the point WWII equipment had to be recovered on a large scale from the Pacific through what was known as Operation Roll-Up.
> Ultimately, 45 percent of the tanks, 82 percent of armored cars, and 75 percent of the artillery used in the conflict were recovered equipment left behind after the end of Pacific operations in WWII.
The whole ‘Ares is the only god of war’ thing miffs me something fierce. For one, it grossly misunderstands how polytheistic faiths functioned. Secondly, through misunderstanding it makes for tediously flat worldbuilding (a cardinal sin in my book).
The Greeks had boatloads of war gods, each with their own perspective on it/roles within it. Hell, even Aphrodite was a war god (Aphrodite Areia).
Ares is the god of war-as-a-disaster. For the parts of war that, say, a modern insurance company would call “an act of god,” Ares has sole responsibility. Other gods’ militant aspects are concerned with positive connotations of protection and glory and reasoned direction of the course of history. Ares is the sole god of actual war, the unreasoning phenomenon that brings only ruin and trauma.
“Ares is the god of war-as-a-disaster”
Love this description. I’ve tried for a while to articulate Ares and not come up with anything so succinct.
I’m not sure I’d agree that that would make him ‘the sole god of actual war’ though. The conceptualisation of war as solely an unmitigated disaster strikes me as very much a post-WW1 thing. Prior to the utter horror of industrialised war, many other conceptualisations of war survived healthily in the wild. ‘Strategic pursuit for intellectuals’ (Athena), ‘a fine and expected way for kings to be kingly (Zeus perhaps?), or even ‘thing we can do to get very rich very quickly’ (not sure who that’s covered by, if anyone). Bret did a great article a while back exploring different attitudes to war given to us through primary sources. Antarah Ibn Shaddad’s concept that ‘the battle was a healing’, and Bertran de Born’s attitude of ‘war is fun, let’s go do some war’.
Ares’ association with the disaster of war may explain his enduring popularity into the present day though. That and echoes of ‘manly-man-war-fighting-warrior-stuff’ that may or may not be post-hoc additions to Ares’ character.
@Ynneadwraith
Thanks; I think I actually lifted it from someone’s discursive explanation of how the original audience of Revelations’ understanding of War draws more from Ares than Mars, but I’ll never remember exactly.
But psht, elite understandings of war. Rich people don’t know what war actually is, and WWI is just the point when war got so bad that bringing your valet wasn’t enough to fix it. You’re correct that there were people who saw war all those ways, people who could afford to avoid situations that might disabuse them of nonsense.
> But psht, elite understandings of war. Rich people don’t know what war actually is, and WWI is just the point when war got so bad that bringing your valet wasn’t enough to fix it. You’re correct that there were people who saw war all those ways, people who could afford to avoid situations that might disabuse them of nonsense.
Nah, this is way off. Historically speaking it’s far more common for ‘elites’ to be at the pointy end of wars than it is today, and the same people talking about war and battle positively were _extremely_ likely to be there doing it (and often died violently from exactly that pursuit).
Would your experience of war be different as a local peasant being ‘foraged’ vs being a count in the foraging army? Sure, no argument there. But the count sure as hell knows what war actually is, and is quite a lot more likely to be stabbed or shot than the peasant.
One may wish to look at Bret’s own post about a 12th century troubadour knight’s enthusiastic poetry on the subject of battles that he was definitely in.
Interesting. I always thought of Ares as the God of the emotional side of war, the aggression, the bloodlust.
And Athena of war as similar to chess.
So Ares would be more about fighting and Athena about warring. The difference between a warrior and a soldier I suppose.
““Authority equals asskicking”. I would submit that it only happens when someone has no idea what purpose commanders serve that they feel the need to justify their authority by making them be better at the common soldier’s task.”
This is a tabletop wargame thing, I think (and also later a real-time strategy computer game thing). The player knows that armies need officers and generals. But there’s no good way to simulate their real-world function – delegated command – in a game in which the player himself has total immediate control over the actions of every member of his army.
So you end up with two possibilities; either the officer has no actual function while he’s alive, but killing him causes his unit to have a chance of routing or something; or the officer is actually just a super-duper soldier. This was particularly egregious in old-school Warhammer, which had a roleplaying game and a wargame set in the same period of the same universe. Thus there were two versions of the Emperor Karl-Franz I. In the RPG version he was a borderline senile old man whose flawed leadership and intolerance was gradually pushing the Empire into a religious civil war. In the wargame version he was a golden-armoured superhuman killing machine.
As I understand, Dungeons And Dragons started as leadership rules for commanders in the Chainmail medieval miniatures wargame, and then they had the idea to play a game with just the leaders.
The trope is clearly present in non-interactive media (literature, films, etc.). Players and writers may only know at the cargo cult level that real armies have officers, not why. I would argue this is why fantasy armies not closely based on familiar (modern) armies tend to outright lack officers. The LotR films go out of their way to show us Gothmog and Uruk-that-points-sword, but only them. The Hobbit has Azog do complex signals work. RoP is not even consistent: when the elven cavalry shows up, seemingly Elrond leads it (despite Gil-Galad being present and even wearing distinctive armor) and he magically stops their charge when Galadriel is revealed; but by the morning, Gil-Galad barks orders that Elrond follows.
The solution is simple, especially in computer games: follow the lead of Gratuitous Space Battles. There, the player positions and gives a set of orders to ships before the battle, but then has no control after pressing “go”, with the ships merely doing their best to execute the set of orders they have. (Clearly this can be elaborated on, giving the player some ability to change the set of active orders while the battle is underway.)
“Professional” tabletop wargames, as historically used by militaries to train officers, have umpires. If you want this to be a two-person thing, you can use dice-rolling (extending the way Warhammer has units susceptible to squabbling, bloodlust, etc., not just fear and routing; perhaps the peak is the snotling pump wagon, IIRC it always moves a random distance, the player only specifies the direction, thus it can cause friendly-melee(?) incidents by crashing into your own troops).
“There, the player positions and gives a set of orders to ships before the battle, but then has no control after pressing “go”, with the ships merely doing their best to execute the set of orders they have. (Clearly this can be elaborated on, giving the player some ability to change the set of active orders while the battle is underway.)”
Having read Bret’s articles about how ancient armies functioned, I always thought this would be an excellent way to run a Total War-style pre-modern military battle game. Have direct control solely over the overall military commander. Everyone else works on a set of pre-chosen instructions for the battle (i.e. ‘advance into range, then engage the unit in front of you’ or ‘hang back in reserve, then charge when the battle reaches halfway’). If you wanted, you could have your commander give different orders to units directly within a certain radius of them, or perhaps change the orders of different bits of the army with a time-lag to simulate the delay in relaying orders (possibly add in the stipulation that orders are only change when a unit is actively out of combat, unless the order is ‘retreat’).
Allow me to introduce you to Legion: Arena, then! A game that is pretty much exactly what you describe.
““Authority equals asskicking”. I would submit that it only happens when someone has no idea what purpose commanders serve that they feel the need to justify their authority by making them be better at the common soldier’s task.”
I think it also comes up as a logical reaction to settings where there is a much broader delta of personal power than in the real world. If you have a setting where a limited number of people enjoy significantly greater power than the average, then society is almost always going to end up with the powerful people in charge, which in turn means that they’re the ones socially expected (and probably trained) to command armies.
Regarding fires, I have two questions. Neither is relevant to RoP, but they may relate to historic battles.
First, do you actually need fires in an army camp? Sure, they’re useful–people like cooked food–but I’ve read numerous accounts of armies foregoing it in order to conceal either their location or their number, both in European and Chinese sources. If the weather’s fair, and you have foods that don’t need to cook to be edible, it doesn’t seem unreasonable, especially if you plan for it. Not fun, certainly, and not something you’d want to do for long, but for a few nights it seems plausible. Even in LOTR they discuss going without fires on numerous occasions (after the attack on Wethertop they don’t stop long enough, and the orcs that capture the hobbits don’t light fires for days on the march to Isengard).
Second, did armies attempt to hide their fires? A Dakota fire pit doesn’t take all that long to build, and provides adequate heat for cooking. Given that we’re talking about a high-fantasy setting that canonically has higher technology than LOTR we can’t rule out modern smokeless fire pits either. Smoke is unburnt stuff, generally due to inadequate oxygen, and if you add enough oxygen you can limit that to the point where it’s not really visible. (You can light a match by burning the smoke coming off a recently-extinguished one, for example.) Modern fire pits do this by heating the air as it enters the combustion chamber. allowing it to burn more efficiently.
Generally speaking, you can go without fires *for a bit* but not neccessarily long-term. Though it depends on a lot of factors (weather, etc.) and it becomes more viable the smaller your force is.
One of the difficult things to discern is that an army is usually really hard to disguise that it’s around, but can be surprisingly hard to pinpoint: Largely because of you having to rely on reports and such. “There is an army around but it might be a week away or it might be a day away” is a lot more likely than people being completely unaware in the sense that the series tends to present it.
And another option is to make cooking fires by daylight. This DOES mean losing some of the daytime you could have spent marching.
How drastically is the visible range of a bonfire glow cut by full moon? And how easy it it to tell apart distant smoke from mist and haze when the latter naturally occur?
??? Which Chinese sources.
We have examples of Chinese cutting the number of fires to deceive the enemy, and there’s certainly one off examples of not cooking for a day.
The problem is essentially bread and other ancient “MRE” spoil quickly.
So, stored dumplings, bread or other foodstuffs can only last 3-7 days before they utterly spoiled. Methods of preservation all involved adding water or the like before eating.
It’s also possible to conceal smoke, but once you reach army size, it’s impossible to forage that amount of dry firewood. Not to mention foraging foodstuffs need some preparation.
I may be misremembering, but I believe there’s a mention of hiding fires in “The Art of War”, for example, as a way to deceive the enemy. I’d have to look to find the others, it’s been a long time. And it may have been for smaller groups anyway (most of my reading of Asian military literature has been on how to use a sword, so individual combat, not group).
“Methods of preservation all involved adding water or the like before eating.”
I was going to argue with you on the whole “ancient MREs spoil quickly” until I thought about this line a bit. There’s a lot of complexity here, but yeah, at the societal level of common foot soldiers, you’re right. I’m trying to work through the logic here; re-reading my post it sounds a lot more pedantic than I intend, mostly I’m trying to put my thoughts into some reasonable order.
Ancient (well, Medieval, but they had the same techniques) food preservation consisted of things like hard tack, salting meats, pickling, drying, preserving in honey, fermenting, preserving in alcohol, and the like. Some of these facilities were astonishingly large, and drying towers still exist today. It was necessary; you had to have enough food to last through the winter and well into spring. Even something like cheese and butter can be thought of as preserved foods–they were ways to keep milk viable longer than two days. So the ancient world had plenty of experience keeping food fresh.
Some of these don’t require a lot of water to render the food edible; fruits preserved in wine are pretty much ready to eat whenever you’re hungry. But those methods also won’t exactly scale, they were the province of the wealthy, folks who HAD casks and barrels of wine and honey to work with! Peasants–so like 80% of your military–were limited to dried, salted, and fermented foods, plus grain that had to be processed (which is itself dried, but we tend not to think of it that way), plus butter and cheese. Most of which, as you say, require steeping to make edible. Pickled vegetables can be eaten without much preparation, but dried food needs to be steeped at least and usually boiled after, and some fermented foods weren’t safe to eat without further preparations.
The “butter and cheese” thing provides an interesting option for provisions. You CAN subsist primarily on dairy products for a while, basically using cows to turn grass into cheese. And you don’t need fires to cook it. There are examples of sailors needing to eat cheese and hard tack for days, even weeks, during storms that were bad enough to prevent the galley fires from being lit. The downside to this is that it takes tremendous planning. Getting enough dairy products to sustain an army of 30,000 for even one day is going to require a level of logistical forethought that simply doesn’t exist within a group that sets up a ramshackle tent village in a pit. And cheeses that last aren’t something you can make on the march. They need renet, which is usually obtained from the stomachs of calves, and the cheeses require aging in fairly controlled conditions. Cheese you make on the march lasts about a day, maybe two if you’re lucky. Yogurt can last longer, but not indefinitely.
The other consideration is culture. People in the Middle Ages (in as much as it’s reasonable to discuss a group like that….Lots of nuance getting lost here) didn’t generally eat things raw. They thought it was bad for you. They may have been right–think about what their fertilizer was at the time–though their reasoning was, by our standards, flawed. Still, asking a bunch of people who think eating raw foods is unhealthy to do so for a few days is simply begging for trouble. It’ll erode cohesion pretty quickly. It’d be like asking a modern army unit to raise and eat dogs, they’re just not going to put up with it for long. And this is significant because Tolkien based a lot of his works on peoples of the Middle Ages. You can see this with Gollum–his beast-like nature is signaled in part by his consumption of raw fish (not sure what Tolkien would have thought about sushi, but we can all agree that Gollum eating fish with his bare hands beside a rocky pool isn’t sushi).
The other factor is that orcs are more beast-like than humans or elves. They can subsist on relatively bad provisions. Let’s say, for the purpose of argument (and based on the race to Isengard), that they can double the length of time they can use provisions–they can continue eating the maggoty bread for twice as long as humans are willing to. At which point they threaten to rebel and kill their officers.
So where does that leave this charge?
IF the leaders of the orc army were REALLY good at logistics AND had a large baggage train, the army could do a lightning lunge over call it four or five days with reasonable stealth.
The problem is, it doesn’t do this army any good. Everyone knows the target (well, the city being targeted anyway). So while the army may be able to use this to attack quicker than people expect, they’re still going to hit hardened defenses because the enemy knows perfectly well where, it’s just a question of when. Book Sauron could use this sort of lunge–they know he’ll attack AN army, but not WHICH army. But even there it’s risky.
I think that part of the issue is that after about a week of marching anywhere, you’re not eating food that you’ve prepared. You’re eating whatever food you can steal from the locals. If you’re exceedingly lucky you might stumble across some sort of centralised regional hard cheese-making facility, but you’d either have to be an idiot general or a genius one to rely on that as part of your operations.
You could get around this with caches I suppose, but that would require friendly territory of some sort. Not the sort of place you’re going to find yourself needing to make a lightning-lunge through. Perhaps completely uninhabited territory would do (I’m thinking like the Long Range Desert Group in WW2), meaning the forest they’ve just marched through might work (were it a lot shorter of a distance). Though deep old-growth temperate forests are probable the second-worst place I can think of for trying to preserve a food cache (the worst being tropical forests). Perpetually damp. Ground full of roots so it’s hard to bury it. At least in a bog you could sink it into the anaerobic layer.
None of this applies if you’re Mongols, your logistics train walks along with you, and you’re able to salt your own jerky as you ride. But Mongols are weird man, all things put together.
Hi, a point Dr. Devereaux makes a lot on this blog is that armies this large can’t transport the food that they eat – a generalized amount of transportable food (before the baggage train starts growing exponentially) is about 2 weeks. Beyond the first few weeks, the soldiers *must* forage enough food to feed the whole army every single day. So beyond the first couple of weeks, the food they eat is the food they forage, which is almost exclusively “fresh” food, such as (milled or unmilled) grain and livestock.
So it seems to me that an army not lighting fires is eating raw meat or cold dough. It’s not that premodern people can’t preserve better food, but I can’t see how such food is available-enough to a moving, foraging army to allow them to forego fires for more than a day or two.
“it seems to me that an army not lighting fires is eating raw meat”
Or the army forages first, and reserves its ‘iron rations’ for the final approach to siege, allowing them to be somewhat stealthier at the key point?
And eating raw meat and cold dough is not just less pleasant, and potentially less healthy (cooking kills pathogens). It’s actually less efficient because cooking makes food more easily digestible, and so you have to eat less weight of food to get the same amount of calories and protein into your bloodstream.
There’s an even worse issue with Adar besieging and assaulting a whole city to capture a shapeshifter and it’s a version of the “eagle problem.”
We know in LoTR that you can’t “just fly the Ring to Mt. Doom” for both narrative and practical reasons (detection, patrolling aerial monsters), but before the fall of Numenor book-Sauron has broader shapeshifting powers than looking handsome, including the ability to change into what Tolkien called a vampire — a large batlike monster that can fly.
Adar would/should know that Sauron could at least fly away from Eregion at a moment’s notice. The point might be different if Sauron a) absolutely had to stay in the city for some plot reason (getting the rings?) and b) Adar knew that Sauron would be pinned to Eregion before moving his army there.
Sauron retains his ability to change form after the Downfall though, losing only his ability to take “fair” form. He just never uses the ability, probably because he has no real reason to.
I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I’m very surprised that Adar has apparently not considered that Sauron could avoid Plan Kill Everything by shape shifting into one of the very orcs sent there to Kill Everything and then just “how do you do, fellow orcs?”ing his way into the army on their way back to Mordor.
This show seems so fractally bad, like every bad aspect of it just has even worse sub-aspects, which have their own terrible sub-aspects and so on, all the way down. I very much get the feeling that this series of posts is the most entertainment I will get out of it and I’m glad I stopped watching halfway through Season 1.
The expression “fractally bad” got an earnest laugh out of me, and is certainly a bigger contribution to the treasury of human culture than the entirety of the RoP show 🙂
I first saw the phrase used in response to The Last Jedi. There is something about the layered levels of wrongness.
And the phrase has a substantially longer history. I.e. “PHP: a fractal of bad design” is now over a decade old, and I’m sure it wasn’t the first use of it either.
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
Or shapeshifting into an animal, whether ‘vampire’ bat or not.
Not to mention discorporating entirely, as we argued last week, but we could posit that Sauron has sinned enough that he can no longer do that.
“our [your guess is as good as mine] part series”
Has the author yielded to Hofstadter’s Law?
“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
Appropriately enough, the author is matching the lack of planning exhibited by both the show itself and the military operations depicted in the show.
> The orcs appear to encamp by clearing small parts of the forest, digging trenches in them, bracing those trenches with wood boards (from the trees, presumably) and then throwing up their tents inside of the depressions that creates. This is a remarkably labor-intensive method of encampment which is somehow more vulnerable than just stretching some canvas between the trees […]
I have seen this kind of camp in various media here and there, and it is usually coded as “bad guys’ camp”. In my recent memory is the game Horizon: Zero Dawn, where in one scene the player character and a small warband armed with bows attacks a similar camp of ‘bandits’ with primarily melee weapons (with a very predictable outcome).
Even to me as a completely uneducated person in military theory, this immediately seems like a *monumentally stupid* way to defend yourself, for very obvious reasons. So where does this idea come from? Does it have any real world historical antecedents that make sense for some reason?
I’m not sure if it’s ever been done for camps in this fashion, but burrowing into the ground is a gunpowder era invention. It makes it hard to target you with direct-fire artillery, and it can provide some shelter from shells that land outside the trench, and if it’s zig-zagged it can catch fragments from shells that exploded inside the trench, limiting the area of effect. In the later gunpowder era, if your enemy actually gets to stand on the edge of your trench you were probably already in deep shit.
The whole siege has a vibe somewhere between Stalingrad in WW2 and no-mans-land on the western front in WW1. Lots of mud, lots of fire, and everything dominated by “big scary machines”. In this aesthetic, the orc camps sort of make sense.
Of course, why go for this look at all? Either the show runners: had no idea that static warfare could look different to this, or thought that it was the only look that would resonate with their audience. No matter which poison you pick, it doesn’t look good for them.
Not just that. Next week, the performance (range, target effect, employment) of Adar’s WW-era artillery will be the topic.
Perhaps a week or more after that, the death of that female elf will be discussed. The one who is suddenly shot with several arrows, but takes out the enemy siege engine. That’s very clearly a WW2 scene: a burst from an LMG, and a bazooka-shot at a tank. We also see Elrond and another elf hunker around a berm, taking cover from the same.
Yes, I saw your reply to @Curtis Adams’s comment above. It’s precisely because of the whole World War aesthetic that the orc camps being canvas covered trenches makes sense. Or rather, it’s consistent with that aesthetic, even though said aesthetic makes no sense from a thematic or realism point of view.
“That’s very clearly a WW2 scene: a burst from an LMG, and a bazooka-shot at a tank.”
A bazooka shot at a tank followed by the hero being shot down by an LMG would be a trite, stereotyped WW2 scene.
A hero being shot by an LMG burst *and then* taking a bazooka shot at a tank would be a parody-level scene.
This would make sense if this was something like narrow WWI trenches: you bet on the fact that the shell lands on the ground level, and all the shrapnel flies harmlessly over your trench with soldiers in it. But in the shot above, you have the entire orc camp *inside* of the spacious depression — which seems to make the situation even *worse*, as if a shell (or a magical bomb or whatsit) lands anywhere inside of the wide open lower area, now the walls are concentrating the blast energy and deflecting all the shrapnel *back towards your own guys*.
It does still provide protection from a long-distance bombardment that may miss the trench entirely, though I understand modern camps are set up on the surface and surrounded with earthwork walls, while actual WWI camps were either set up well behind the trench lines (for reserves) or consisted of dugouts with concrete-reinforced roofs (for people on the front lines).
As part of my officer training, I needed to learn some basic of field fortification construction. You can make a semi-improvised bunker relatively easily: some half a meter of earth, supported by a roof of light timber will protect you from shrapnel pretty nicely, but for a room that can withstand a hit from a 152 mm grenade, you need some more thought: a multi-layer set-up with a load-dividing layer, a cushioning of soft earth and a thick layer of big stones to get the grenade explode. Of course, you also need some water-proofing and ditching to keep the bunker dry, and a labyrinth on the door to prevent shrapnel and blast from getting in. Even then, the place is gonna be somewhat damp.
The modern surface-built camp with constructed prefabricated walls is popular because it is much nicer to live in and allows for storing vehicles easily. However, it is only doable if you don’t really need to worry about sustained aerial or artillery bombardment. So, it is good for occupying Afghanistan but not for real peer-to-peer war.
It’s a sort of thing that, done properly, you’d do if you were worried about your camp being bombarded by modern artillery, I think. It would also help against attackers armed with firearms.
In the examples I recall from Horizon, I think at least the camp builders had the excuse that they were excavating a thing, though that has the problem that they’d have had to move their tents from where they were originally into the trench as the excavation proceeded. And they posted sentries atop the trench, though of course you eliminate those by surprise.
While I admire Bret’s patience even watching enough of this drivel to critique it – I didn’t make it to the end of season one – I’m gonna offer a defence of tents in trenches here. While we know Orcs can endure sunlight they don’t like it, and seem to have had a preference for subterranean dwelling places. Maybe they’re just more comfortable bivouacing at the bottom of a trench.
Yes, I was going to mention that too – if Orcs dislike sunlight so much that they fight at night and march through the night, it would make sense for them conceptually to dig out holes (individually) or trenches (for entire groups) to sleep in and cover them with not just cloth but wooden boards and what not to block out as much light as possible. (I say conceptually because I am deeply uncertain on the logistics of that.) HOWEVER, the screenshot presented to us appears to show the kind of a forest clearing which would in fact be exposed to way MORE light than simply stringing up layers of cloth beneath the tree canopies, trench or no trench?
Meanwhile, since the Orcs march at night, then those massive bonfires we see shown at night-time in another screenshot are dubious. Dr. Devereaux DOES mention in one of the posts that armies need to stop marches about halfway through to eat – around noon for historical armies, so that would presumably be in the middle of the night for Orcs. However, such a stop would have to be as short as possible, with fires as small as possible – and if they could do it without lighting a fire (could they?) they obviously would have. The large bonfires at camp would then occur somewhere around morning and/or evening, but not at night. (And they would most likely avoid keeping any campfires lit for warmth if they sleep during the day – if they can tolerate night-time temperatures well enough to march through them, they shouldn’t be bothered by sleeping in daytime temps. )
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/12/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-iii-on-the-move/
Technically, this actually WOULD make Adar’s army quite a bit harder to spot from a distance – though probably still not to the extent of ambushing the city, and not with the campfires we actually see portrayed in the show anyway. As another comment had astutely pointed out, this really seems to be fractally bad.
It’s just occurred to me how profoundly odd it would be fighting a war against an army that marches at night while you march in the day, compared to our world at least.
I expect you’d have next-to-no instances of battles developing as foraging parties unwittingly blunder into each other, as they’d be foraging at different times of the day. Same for blundering into each other on the march.
What you would have, I’d expect, is a far higher rate of one army discovering the encampment of the other army while it’s sleeping. I’d expect this would promote making your encampments really, really well fortified (with a really solid sentry rota). Even more reasons that RoP’s worldbuilding is junk.
Oh, and pitched battles would be way more likely to occur around dawn and dusk I’d expect as those would be the main times both armies are active. You might end up with a fair bit of jockeying around to force a battle at a time that’s favourable to you (say, morning if you’re an elf that wants to fight a load of tiring orcs…or vice versa).
I was also thinking you might have an odd thing where armies sort of leapfrog around the countryside, where armies are sort of aware of each other but keep moving in alternate steps overnight/during the day. However, I’m not actually sure how different that would be to the status quo where armies don’t quite know where each other are anyway.
HZD isn’t the best example, given that guns are still in use and there are giant robots with laser weapons, so there is still absolutely a use for digging trenches to take cover. Secondly, I believe (correct me if I am wrong) you are talking about the mission where Aloy and the Nora take revenge for the Proving massacre, in which case the camp *did* have a fortified outer wall/palisade that Aloy destroys, allowing the braves to charge in.
That is a good point about it being coded as “bad guy camp”. As for where the idea comes from, it is the language of movies and film. Trenches are a key part of showing a “siege” and they build them wider than historically so that they can move cameras and other equipment around, as well as for safety reasons. You don’t want a trench or dugout collapsing on your highly paid actors. Dr. Devereaux has pointed out in previous posts that so much of the visual language for war, combat, and battlefields has come from WW1, as it is the first modern war that had a lot of film and pictures of it. It has since become an ourobouros, with later films usually earlier films as a visual shorthand and the end product becoming increasingly divorced from reality. It is, as pointed out above, the coconut effect.
There is also something to be said for how “insular” Hollywood has become, with few writers, showrunners, and actors having experience outside of Hollywood and related industries. There are very few actors who have experience in a field outside of acting. The same with writers. That lack of experience means that the only experience they have to write and direct with is other movies, and the lack an understanding of the *why*. As an example, an earlier movie might have dug very wide trenches because they had bulkier equipment and needed space for extras to move past. A later movie, not having those constraints, doesn’t understand that wide trenches with no switchbacks are not a good idea from a realism standpoint, but only knows that the previous movie did it, so they must do it as well.
Proofreading:
“a fairly typical well a large kingdom”
I think this is meant to be “a fairly typical large kingdom”, but I’m not sure
“making it impossible for the besieger to concentrate their forces at any one point along the time”
-> along the line
“declining moral eventually enables one of the Crusader leaders”
-> declining morale
Actually, now that I think on it, I’m sure there would people who would attribute the treachery to declining morals, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant here.
And one more, in between your first and last:
are quite a reason reasons it
In “a fairly typical well a large kingdom” I believe “well” is meant to be “way”.
> By contrast, in Rings of Power – not just in its sieges, but in the whole story – there is so much that doesn’t matter.
This summarises it so well. It’s the fundamental reason why having sensible geography, time scales, strategies and so on is so important in fiction. It’s not so much for us nerds who like the attention to deal, but because it enables things to have consequences. When it’s not clear where anything is, how long stuff takes to happen, and wars don’t follow any logic, then it doesn’t feel like anything impacts anything else. How can we care when messengers get intercepted or Elrond fights a delaying action, when armies can teleport and commanders make random decisions anyway?
This is not so much a failure of world building (although RoP does a huge disservice to JRRT’s world) or character building (although that too is almost entirely absent), it’s an abysmal lack of plot building. It’s like there’s no object permanence: things cease to exist when a scene ends only to reappear in a new form when the next deus ex machina is needed. In the words of Ryan George’s Scrip-Writer-Guy things only happen because “the script says so”.
I think it’s sort of like what you sometimes encounter in modern superluxury houses, whether on the beach or in the mountains, which are not so much “machines for living” as “machines for viewing”: the house is designed to showcase spectacular views from each public room and the master bedroom, but it’s wearing if you spend any time there–I assure you we don’t own such a house–because nothing flows. So many fantasy shows and movies seem primarily designed to produce spectacular scenes, but with no coherent plot to connect them.
> So many fantasy shows and movies seem primarily designed to produce spectacular scenes, but with no coherent plot to connect them.
Agreed, even films like Gladiator II did that a little, but RoP does it to an exceptional degree. Every conversation was delivered as a Big Speech, every fight attempted to be the awesomest ever, and every scene tried to be a big climax. Just as in other walks of life, rushing from climax to climax as quickly as possible ends up with them being disappointing for everyone involved. You’ve got to first build up engagement and anticipation before you can pay off releasing the tension.
Maybe we can call this kind of story telling failure “premature ostentation” lol?
> In this case, refugees from outlying settlements would begin arriving: small groups of fleeing civilians, folks who know the landscape very well because they live there and who are unencumbered by an army’s size or baggage could move a lot faster than the core of the army.
This reminds me: the Helm’s Deep series rightfully points out that the film’s Theoden effectively moves the civilians of an already fortified city located well behind Hornburg much CLOSER to danger. Possibly the most important reason suggested to excuse that is to provide a more important speaking role for Eowyn without making her fight (yet). Thing is: couldn’t the narrative have achieved that by initially locating Eowyn between Fords of Isen and Helm’s Deep, where she would supervise the evacuations from whichever settlements might have been there (as the series on lonely cities tells us such settlements had to exist, even if I’m unsure if any were ever named by Tolkien) to Hornburg? The presence and authority of a royal could easily be shown to make these proceedings go smoother and so help the overall effort.
> That reduced the supplies going into Antioch into the inconsequential trickle that could make it over Mount Silpias; declining moral eventually enables one of the Crusader leaders, Bohemond, to suborn a traitor in the city, a man named Firouz, who allowed a small contingent of crusaders to scale a single tower and from there open a gate leading to the fall of the city.
Do we have any indication of what happened to Firouz afterwards? I have seen claims his own brother was killed by the Crusaders, but did he himself survive to profit from his deal and what was left for him to do if he did?
The LOTR may have been limited by budget constraints. Peter Jackson had really high standards for sets and props in that movie even for brief scenes.
I was thinking that putting the orcs in a hole in the ground would limit the amount of background scenery you have to account for in establishing shots. Which would save some money, if they were concerned with saving money.
But from what I’m hearing, its budget approaches that of the LOTR trilogy. For a TV show.
OGH has questioned this in past posts. Where did all that money go? It’s certainly not showing in what’s coming out of the writing room.
I think Bret may have hit upon one potential financial hole: re-doing CGI assets because they’re seemingly incapable of looking forward in the plot and thinking ‘this city needs walls’.
Perhaps it’s just a singular oversight. People make mistakes, after all. Though somehow I doubt it.
They might as well not have bothered anyway, what with the whole WW1/2 style fighting. Those wars famously didn’t involve sieges of walled cities. It’s not even consistent with itself.
While you generally try to move civilians away from fighting if you can, you *do* often also move them into fortified positions: It’s one of the things they are *for* after all. It depends on how much warning you have, if you’ve got to send them somewhere, etc.
The post I mentioned explains extensively why this argument does not hold – starting from the fact that Edoras is already fortified (even if not as well as Helm’s Deep). In brief, it can easily hold off any raiders on its own, attempting to rush it with the full army and ignore Helm’s Deep would leave Saruman’s supply lines wrecked and lose him the war, while splitting the army between Hornburg and Edoras sieges COULD have worked, but not on the timetable Saruman is forced into.
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
If anything, leaving the population of Edoras where it is allows for a scenario where Saruman’s forces fail to win the war even if they win at Helm’s Deep, as their force could have been left so bloodied as to struggle to mount another siege, particularly as the Rohirrim would have inevitably mustered more troops to defend Edoras in the meantime. Sure, the Witch-King would have still won at Minas Tirith in this case and proceeded to march down to Rohan (unless Frodo and Sam still somehow manage to reach Mt. Doom in the absence of Aragorn’s distraction at the Black Gate – vaguely plausible if Sauron gets too preoccupied with conquering everything at once?) – but that is STILL a better scenario for the Rohirrim then a defeat at Helm’s Deep with Edoras’ population inside it. Meanwhile, massively increasing the population of Helm’s Deep vastly increases the risk Saruman’s host manages to starve them out (particularly relevant if the Witch-King’s campaign ends up delayed by even a month or so).
Having Eowyn already out in the field supervising evacuations in the area between the fords of Isen and the Hornburg during the relevant time period would mean removing her from Edoras and from the presence of the events involving Gandalf and Aragorn restoring Theoden and riding out with them from Edoras.
But they really do kind of want Eowyn to be around for that, because she’s the closest family Theoden has left and because otherwise she doesn’t meet Aragorn until Helm’s Deep.
“One of these days, I also have half a draft of an essay “Why Boromir Conquered” on how we ought to read Boromir’s death”
I’d certainly like to read that. I’d hope a lot of others would as well.
I certainly would!
I’m inclined now to dig up a whole forum post of people talking about the fact that Boromir deserves more positive recognition.
Hell, even for me, the first time I saw the movie, my first thought when he was coming back to his senses and horrified at what he had done was to assume it was another trick (up until how he died trying to defend Merry and Pippin and then confessed his sins to Aragorn).
In my defence, I was ten.
That reminds me of my father, in his freshman year at Yale, having come from public high school where he had never encountered any actual literature: the first reading in English class was Henry IV Part I, and my father wrote an essay saying that Prince Hal was obviously not believable, because people don’t change their behavior. The professor kindly told him to read to the end.
In the film (not the book) he actually has the greatest honour & recognition a nobleman in feudal times could get – he is first of Gondor to offer allegiance to Aragorn as King. That honour is usually reserved in coronations to the greatest nobleman in the Kingdom (in case you’re wondering, in the recent English case that honour went to William as Prince of Wales).
Second.
It’s a good notion, and would enable Prof Devereaux to jump back into an area always worth exploring, which is that past times had different moral and spiritual universes as well as physical ones. Reflecting that, Tolkien provided his world with a very clear spiritual and moral system derived largely from his own English Catholicism, in which the key battles are internal and evil is not really an opposing force but a flaw within the essential purity of the universe (starting very literally with Melkor/Morgoth).
Therefore Boromir and Frodo fail as Western action heroes, neither defending their charges at the last nor striking the final fatal blows against the enemy, but succeed in their greater struggles. Boromir redeems his sins (and knows it – in the books his dying words include ‘I have paid’ and when he ends be saying he has failed, Aragorn kisses him and tells him few have won such a victory). Frodo’s victory was largely won before entering Mordor – by repeatedly showing mercy to Gollum he won his greatest, spiritual, victory, and as a result of that and his second victory (having the determination to get to Mount Doom) he creates the possibility for the lesser evil (Gollum) to destroy the greater evil (Sauron).
I’ve often thought the only worthwhile additional adaptation of the original Lord of the Rings would be one diving into these kind of things more, and it’s sad that the RoP writers clearly have no feel for this. I dread to see what they make of the fall of Ar-Pharazon if they ever get that far. No doubt Galadriel with flashing blade will have to find or touch a McGuffin to get Eru Iluvatar to do his thing.
Great post! You come across as really frustrated by the lousy world building.
I really appreciate your focus on how the mess of the world building impacts the emotional meaning of the story. It reminded me of The Emperor’s Last Groove where the world building is chaotic (not just in terms of physics, but like, why is the empress running around her kingdom with only one servant?) but because the characters succeed or fail based on how well they learnt the moral of the story, it works as a story.
I’ve noticed that while we used to complain about bland, soulless, Hollywood films, recently a number of big producers, such as Amazon or Disney, are frequently failing at producing even *that*. Instead we get incoherent messes, that implies to me some management failure. Like they can’t settle on a steady premise, they instead try to include every possible idea and wind up with a horrible mess. (Thinking of Ms Marvel, The Book of Boba Fett, etc).
I’ve often noticed this and call it a movie that can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be. Or 4-5 different movies fighting in a cartoon furball, with different ones gaining temporary prominence before being pulled back down by the others.
It’s what happens when a franchise ends up becoming too successful, character, plot and setting become secondary to defending the brand with target demographics.
That’s largely a separate issue (although it has a tendency to create related messes).
Generally, successful “initial” stories have several interwoven arcs. The main characters grow as persons, thus the good side wins the war, thus the main characters win their rewards (marriage/fame/nobility/etc.), while the villain is defeated and often killed. Metaphorically: they create some spectacular combustion by starting from a pile of fuel and turning it into smoke and ash.
Now, if studio execs see that the story did well, they start the project for Same Thing 2. Surely, with these iconic characters, it cannot go wrong! Generally speaking, three things can happen here:
1) Scriptwriters dutifully try to set the ash on fire. They respect the events of the first film, and go looking for dramatic tension everywhere they can. They can largely fail (result: boring), bring together peripheral scraps (contrived, slow-paced because the arcs don’t interact, insufficiently similar to the first film), or set up new foes (incoherent — surely if the Bigger Bad existed, it would have cast a shadow across the first film; at least a mention, but possibly as an outright justification of why the heroes had to face the villain, namely that the authorities were occupied with the Bigger Bad).
2) Scriptwriters realize that 1) is a losing proposition, and/or the execs are heavily reminding them that the now-dead villain is possibly the most iconic character. They retcon half the first film, and thereby demonstrate that nothing can possibly matter from then on. (To a decent approximation, things are interesting to the degree they are consequential, i.e. to the extent they change the status quo. If the status quo is restored by will of author, especially if the author is trying to escape the consequences of past events e.g. the villain having died, the possible space of actions shrinks to “inconsequential” and “will be retconned away the next time around”.)
3) Prequels! If applicable. They also have some 1)-flavored difficulties, and the 2)-flavored problem of invulnerable plot armor on any characters known to make it into the original. They also have to dance around the question of motives and “activation energy”: if the heroes and/or villains are already involved in some energetic hijinks (the plot of the prequel), and have substantially similar motivations as they will later have, how come they didn’t solve some arcs of the original film then and there? To be slightly vulgar: if the hero got the girl in the original, and he isn’t a child in the prequel, how come he didn’t already get a (probably different) girl by the end of the prequel? How does an energetic reaction produce “fuel” rather than going straight to smoke — by not happening in the usual world, but in a chemical plant.
if the hero got the girl in the original, and he isn’t a child in the prequel, how come he didn’t already get a (probably different) girl by the end of the prequel?
That’s the girl who got killed off in the first scene to motivate the hero to get involved (again) in the first place!
Lightdefender, does the original show:
– him grieving over his dead wife;
– him being motivated in part by personal vengeance, as opposed to other considerations;
– talking to in-laws, former suitors, etc.;
– unless the films are back-to-back, by traditional expectation at least one child?
If not, then declaring by authorial fiat that extra #32 was actually his wife:
– turns the hero into a sociopath who doesn’t care about even the people closest to him (similar applies to relatives, friends, etc. of the dead wife);
– turns the girl in the original into “replacement goldfish”, stripping her of her uniqueness and of most of her personality being meaningful (something something “commodity”);
– takes the tension out of the will-they-won’t-they arc of the original, since he already has;
– preemptively stunts audience investment in prequel girl, since apparently neither the characters in the original, nor the scriptwriters, were going to care about her.
And now I’m surprised no one has done _The Worm Ouroboros_ as a series of series.
I don’t disagree, but perhaps you are being a bit too cynical. After all, it’s not as if there has never been a worthy sequel. Dune 2 comes to mind. The second and third installments of Lord of the Rings. If you wish to exclude continuations of the same story, then Top Gun Maverick, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Thor Ragnarok, Toy Story 3, and The Dark Knight were all better than their predecessors. So it can be done.
I think it’s easier if the franchise isn’t *too* successful (that is, it isn’t really a franchise yet, just a series of movies). Once it’s a hit, it becomes progressively harder to capture lightning in a bottle.
One way is to make the next in series darker and more mature. This is what Star Wars did (before they ruined it again). Batman. Hell, Puss in Boots. This is obviously cliche, but that’s no barrier to success if done well.
Another way is to use predecessor characters. Mom and Dad’s origin story (Ant Man) or the Mentor was the Hero Then (Star Wars 1-3). This can set up the “Original” characters without robbing them of narrative drama. Sequential characters work too (Star Trek the Next Generation).
You can, of course, just rewrite the continuity if the original is old enough that the current generation audience has forgotten it (Mad Max, Battlestar Galactica). This does fail at least as often as it works (Blade Runner, Star Trek), but it isn’t impossible.
Just harder.
It occurs to me that the children TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender did manage to stash fuel depots for a subsequent story.
Which were then never used and, twenty years later, almost certainly never will be. Sometimes, you ust can’t win.
There were a series of comics that used some of the big ones.
I would say there’s some stories that are well-set-up for sequels and some that aren’t, and which category a story falls into has relatively little to do with whether a sequel will be attempted.
For instance, James Bond can and has run basically forever; there can always be a new Soviet plot or criminal organization to foil, with a new cast of characters to meet and a new girl to have a fling with. Star Trek likewise; it’s a big galaxy and the Enterprise always has new worlds to explore and the Klingon Empire still exists.
Doctor Who has the advantage that it can hit refresh on the main character every few seasons, and companions come and go.
The Lord of the Rings, meanwhile, proved excellently amenable to prequels (not this one) but I feel would be a very weak place to start for sequels; the main characters have resolved their arcs, the big bad is banished forever, and they all lived happily ever after. You could technically tell a story about Aragorn dealing with the Easterlings, but it would be a very weak one.
There’s also of course the Marvel approach of actually planning things for a big series, but you could in a sense say that’s one story (albeit made up of many smaller ones) and they finished it with Endgame, and everything after Endgame is the first sequel. I still like Marvel movies, but the post-Endgame movies feel kind of lost and directionless.
Demarquis & guy:
A common categorization of (sub)plot types is MICE.
M: “milieu”. The HMS Beagle (in spaace!) always has more settings (natural, manmade, or social) to explore. From arrival to departure (or deciding to “go native”).
I: “information”. Detectives and Dr. House always have more puzzles to solve. From becoming aware of the question to solution (or giving up), albeit the detective genre has a convention of significant “padding” before the murder even happens.
C: see below.
E: “event”. “Something is wrong with the world” and action is taken to right it. From the protagonist joining the effort to success (or defeat). Violence is the most popular form; it’s limited by plot armor (or needing periodic replenishment of the protagonist pool) — and if the heroes grow, limited by either outscaling the opposition or requiring un-foreshadowed threat growth. Firefighters and hospitals always have more patients, but run out of variety. “Apparently it was a bad idea to turn all the chi into chi-oh-two” doesn’t easily extend.
C: “character”. The protagonist is dissatisfied with the state of the social fabric around them and wants to change it. From becoming aware of this to success (or giving up). Because this is the least …nerdy… plot type, almost all stories include it, but it has the least “replayability”. You probably don’t want James Bond to become a polygamist, or to have to pay child support.
Obviously, I mean the above only in general. “Mentors always die” because the villain is too important for real jobs to take precedence, but the hero needs to be sovereign — except, of course, plenty of works do something more interesting. Likewise, just because the heroes get married in film 1 doesn’t preclude sequels, even ones with very C-type plots. Heck, it’s setup for some utterly standard ones. Or you could just as well do something weird — pursue the villain to a different culture, then have difficulty choosing which place to settle in, because the different members of the team, and the relationships between them, have different logistical and/or conceptual difficulties in the different places. (“By Zeus! On the one hand, our time machine broke and we recruited a local into the team. On the other hand, these barbarians don’t see the distinction between a sworn brother, an eromenes, and a wife. Nor do we have marketable skills, and for some reason they refuse to dine us at public expense for having defeated the villain.”)
“1) Scriptwriters dutifully try to set the ash on fire.”
That is a wonderful phrase. I’m going to have to find a chance to reuse it.
(I see there is a sequel series to Shogun in the works. After they used the entire book in the first series. I can’t imagine how anyone thinks that will work.)
Possibly they’ll take inspiration from some of the Japan-related events mentioned in James Clavell’s other novels?
I think we’re going to find out whether the first series was better in many ways than the original because good writers were inspired and supported by the strong dramatic framework of Clavell’s original to improve upon it, or because they were simply better writers in toto than Clavell.
My mention is on the first option, so I strongly suspect Shogun 2 will be a disappointment.
They have a lot of actual history to shove into the sequel. After Sekigahara, the real Englishman (Will Adams) stayed on in Japan for 20 years. He became a significant advisor to Tokugawa Ieyasu, gave advice on diplomatic relations with the Dutch (at Dutch East Indies) and the Spanish (at the Philippines and South America), married, and at his death left property behind to both his Japanese descendants and the family he left behind in England and never returned to.
Also: Osaka Castle survived the early Tokugawa years in hands Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s nephew) nominally neutral on the Tokugawa shogunate but ultimately suppressed as disloyal..
So plenty of action and story lines depending how the show runners want to work with.
I suspect a general problem with these massively expensive projects is the kind of management failure you indicate, though I think that kind of indecisiveness is really coming from the fear of risk; the industry is more dependent on hitting home runs than it used to be, so any time you have a big, gaudily expensive project it HAS TO BE a home run, so …
There’s also the dynamic that at Amazon and some other producers, people who don’t have any history in Hollywood are probably getting more involved than they would have thirty years ago. Doesn’t explain Disney, though.
Whether there are other dynamics on the film side I don’t know, but the mechanics of how people learn to make competent television were very tied up in the mechanics of a rolling production making 20+ episodes a year for a broadcast network. As TV vet John Rogers puts it, “we’re eating our seed corn”. Some of that is eminently logistical: in 1995, a rookie writer on a TV staff would actually get to be on set watching episodes get made. They’d get to watch THEIR episode get made. The producer and director would come over and say things like “hey, this scene you wrote will be hideously expensive for XYZ reasons, please come up with something else to achieve the same story beat.” They learn how to write for a production. The typical modern streaming/cable model has writers completing their scripts before shooting starts and most if them are then done working on that season of television. They don’t get to actually learn how to do the job better unless somebody goes out of their way to give them feedback.
On a more artistic level, a tremendous amount of “TV” not actually on TV now is produced in a way that makes me feel like nobody involved respects my time, and I think that’s a direct consequence of writers not having imbibed the discipline of needing to write a standalone hour with commercial breaks. All the great works of the HBO golden age 20+ years ago were masterminded by people who had cut their teeth in that environment. I’m not saying shows need to hew to a particular structure, but that they have to FEEL STRUCTURED. Not like an episode took a leisurely path through 15 minutes’ worth of ideas because that’s how many episodes were in the season order.
Something to keep in mind about TV from the broadcast era is that it was made in a MUCH more competitive environment. Streaming services can commission a new show on the off chance that people might want to watch it because they can show an effectively unlimited number of shows in the same “slot” – network TV did not have that luxury.
The TV executives at Amazon aren’t tech people though, they’re TV people. They know what they are doing, for certain values of “know.” Now, my vague impression is that ROP is a Bezos vanity project, but even within that context you might reasonably expect more input–unless the execs are as overwhelmed by the scale of the project as the showrunners.
An interesting thing people might not know is that showrunners can have much, much more control that you realize. I don’t work on scripted TV but I know editors who work on comedy, and the response of showrunners to network notes is often to laugh and throw them in the trash.
Meanwhile, people on YouTube are getting lots of high-quality practice. And I do think it’s showing.
Who knows, maybe the next generation will hold YouTubers to a higher standard than TV shows. Would be quite a change, eh?
If you mean the film “the Emperor’s New Groove,” the Disney film about the scheming sorceress trying to take over the Inca-esque empire (and today I learned that if you Google “the Emperor’s Last Groove” generative AI will just talk like it’s the “New Groove” movie and apply descriptions of “New Groove” to the title “Last Groove”)…
I do think that at least one of the messes of the plot makes sense when you consider that Yzma needs to eliminate the emperor Kuzco covertly and can’t trust minions to identify “the llama who’s actually the emperor but I turned him into a llama” from just any other llama. Kronk is, at least for the bulk of the film, loyal enough to trust with that; most people aren’t.
She’s also been the scheming vizier for a long time, as I recall, and probably has de facto control of the government to the point where she can slip away for a week or two and be confident she’ll still be in charge when she gets back. She probably eliminated most of the competing centers of power within the imperial government while Kuzco was sitting back enjoying his royal privileges and/or literally a child.
World building and character actions in The Emperor’s New Groove are probably also primarily explained by the fact that it’s a zany comedy.
Like, you wouldn’t reasonably apply something like the last post’s use of a map to analyse the shortcomings of logistics towards the “wait, how did we get here first?” scene.
Maybe; but the film was pitched, written, and almost completed as a serious epic along the lines of more standard Disney animation before being hastily reworked into a comedy when the studio realized that the only part that was working for audiences was the cast. I don’t think we can know at this point what plot messes were introduced by the change and what plot messes created the need for the change.
Wow, they really pulled that pivot off. I never would’ve guessed.
Funnily, some behind-the-scenes discussions have suggested that a lot of gags in the film flowed from, essentially, the creators going “sure, why not?” A specifically cited example was the scene where Yzma avoids falling to her death thanks to the fortunate arrival of a trampoline salesman.
People have actually gone on record as saying that the completed version of The Emperor’s New Groove was essentially working without a script, so I feel fairly confident in saying that not one iota of what comes out of Rule of Comedy had its origin in the script for Kingdom of the Sun.
The only thing that seems to have survived across iterations is Yzma in the broadest outlines, and Sting having enough creative input to get a couple of the songs he wrote recorded even without a movie to put them in and being able to veto a version of the ending where Kuzco’s relocated holiday home still has a big environmental impact.
“(and today I learned that if you Google “the Emperor’s Last Groove” generative AI will just talk like it’s the “New Groove” movie and apply descriptions of “New Groove” to the title “Last Groove”)…”
Wow, bleak.
On the difference between ancient and modern definitions of hubris, Spencer McDaniel had a relevant post some years back.
Oh, the post you linked has SO MUCH more to offer besides that! I am so glad to discover it now, thanks to you. I particularly enjoyed this takedown of Freud:
> The so-called “Oedipus complex” is an idea that was originally proposed in 1899 by the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (lived 1856 – 1939) in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. In case you have been fortunate enough to have not been taught Freud’s ridiculous blather, according to Freud, all young male children secretly harbor jealousy and resentment towards their fathers and lust after their mothers.
> ….This whole notion has absolutely no scientific evidence to support it and Freud basically just made it up. Freud lived back in the early days of psychology, before Ivan Pavlov and before Karl Popper when basically all you needed to say to call something “psychology” was essentially, “You know what, I have no evidence to support this, but it sounds about right to me.”
> Just to give you an impression of how wildly unscientific psychology was during Freud’s time, one of Freud’s closest friends and colleagues was the German otorhinolaryngologist Wilhelm Fleiss (lived 1858 – 1928), who honestly and sincerely believed that the nose was actually the location of the mind, not the brain. Fleiss was a certifiable nutcase, but his ideas were highly influential on Freud. Freud took from Fleiss, for instance, the idea of “innate bisexuality” and even called Fleiss “the Kepler of biology.”
> The field of psychology has obviously come a long way since Freud’s time and Freud’s notion of the “Oedipus complex” was long ago discarded, but, for some reason, Freudian psychoanalysis is still popular among literary critics, even though it is complete nonsense. It also remains popular among members of the general public.
In fact, the entire blog seems like a gold mine of material – and I suspect a lot of other readers would feel the same. Unfortunately, its future seems unclear nowadays, for reasons which (according to the latest post on there) seem somewhat connected to the subject of the most recent Fireside here. Whatever future holds for that blog, though, its past and present already offers a lot in its own right. While the average post there seems somewhat shorter than on ACOUP, it’s also started out 3 years earlier, so there’s quite a lot of material there to peruse.
Since I’m limited to a single link as usual, I think I would rather spotlight his criticism of “The Hero’s Journey” – which also contains a discussion of how Campbell’s myth was popularized by Star Wars, and how either of the two (fail to) emulate Greco-Roman myths.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
> I would rather spotlight his criticism
Spencer McDaniel identifies as female, so it’d be “her criticism”.
Well, the name seemed masculine and when I wrote that comment, I could find no mention of pronouns on the most visible parts of the blog (although they are present on BlueSky, now that I have had a look.)
Now that this is clear, I might as well take this opportunity to note another example of her work which I think would be relevant to readers here – particularly since its discussion of The Library of Alexandria complements the corresponding section in “Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words” on here really well.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/05/carl-sagan-was-really-bad-at-history/
For an acerbic, detailed, well-supported takedown of Freud as (non)scientist, see Frederick Crews, Freud: The Making of An Illusion (2017).
He’s being too harsh on Freud. He helped birth a brand new field: it is not crazy that most of his theories about that field were wrong. We wouldn’t expect a scientist during the early days of discovery of Quantum Physics to get much right.
Regarding the Siege of Minas Tirith, an interesting question is, how would it have played out if Aragorn had not arrived (or had arrived a day later)? The Rohirrim had not, to be sure, won the field, but they had considerably discomfited the army of Sauron and killed its commander, and the forces of Morder (unlike in the movie) had not entered the city. Could Gothmog still have taken the city that day? Could a sortie from the city have destroyed the catapults and siege towers (the latter more in evidence in the movie than the book, as I recall), while the Rohirrim retreated in good order behind their shield wall to gates now replaced by barricades impenetrable to forces without the magical power of the Witch-King?
“It was even as the day thus began to turn against Gondor and their hope wavered”
Eomer’s fury had overshot himself, the Rohirrim horses were stymied by mumakil (giant elephants), and Gothmog was sending reinforcements from captured Osgiliath. “Some now hastened up behind the Rohirrim, others held westward to hold off the forces of Gondor and prevent their joining with Rohan.”
And there was a sortie: “But the horsemen rode eastward to the succour of Éomer: Húrin the Tall, Warden of the Keys, and the Lord of Lossarnach, and Hirluin of the Green Hills, and Prince Imrahil the fair with his knights all about him.” Still things were turning dire (my quotes are in reverse order). And this was _before_ the black sails had its morale effect (then reversed by Aragorn’s banned being revealed.)
“Now there’s an odd complication here: Middle Earth before the Fall of Númenor is flat, rather than round (the ‘straight road’ to the West won’t be rounded off until Númenor sinks). Under those circumstances even a single large bonfire might be directly visible for 20 or 30 miles.”
If I remember my Silmarillion correctly, Fingolfin could see Fëanor’s ship bonfire even from across the Great Sea!
very dumb, who the hell is in charge of things like this? its been decades upon decades of telling stories like this in mediums youd think people would already know. blegh.
Honestly, I think that may make it worse. There’s an element of “photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy” at work here. In many cases, the first generation of fiction-writers and story-tellers to depict warfare in modern speculative fiction were themselves authors with experience in the military or as historians, or enthusiastic amateurs who studied military and historical affairs out of a passion for that kind of knowledge. But at this point, those people are dead and gone, and we’re down to people who very often are imitating other imitators and simply do not know enough to contextualize what they want or figure out physically sensible ways to portray it happening.
Plus, our experience with war is VASTLY different from the past. 1918 was well over a century ago; all modern experiences with war include high explosives, direct and indirect artillery, mechanized logistics, and more and more include radio communications. We simply don’t know how to fight a war that doesn’t involve that stuff anymore. Tolkien did because of his history background, but even there you can see adjustments, such as Sauron’s instant communication with the Nazgul when the Ring was destroyed (explained in-universe, but still a reflection of modern concepts of war).
So we’re working on a copy of a copy of a copy, and with a translation key that’s wrong anyway!
You remind me of a review I read once of some 1950s science-fiction B-movie, that noted that the military scenes were well-written and acted – because many of the writers and actors had been in active service a decade previously.
One of the reasons why Allen Grant comes across so well in the Jurassic Park movie (the sequels and spinoffs are trash, but admittedly sometimes entertaining trash) is because Jack Horner was a major player in the movies and Grant was based off Horner. And Satler’s “We’ll discuss sexism in survival situations when I get back” is absolutely a line any of the women in paleontology I’ve ever met would throw out!
Turns out having people who know what they’re doing writing the parts that relate to their professions generally makes things more entertaining, not less.
There’s also a trend among modern directors to literally assemble their movies by picking scenes from past movies they want to emulate. I remember the glory days of DVD behind-the-scenes videos watching mid-range directors say “I want scene X from movie Y here, but with a little twist and a different color cast.” (Sometimes its an homage, sometimes it’s a ripoff; sometimes it’s George Lucas referring to WWII movies, your mileage may vary.) So they communicate with the language of visuals of previous movies and you definitely get the copy-of-a-copy effect as they emulate what audiences are supposedly familiar with rather than anything resembling reality.
That may represent what Ross Douthat was talking about as “The Decadent Society”–art not as original expression, but purely a montage of past work, because the artist has no hope of surpassing what has already been done.
I mean, the greatest action movie probably ever but certainly in decades was released in 2015, so I don’t think that’s it.
I haven’t watched it, and don’t plan to, but from this series it kind of sounds like the problem (or at least a big problem, out of many) is that the plot acts as though being a prequel is a replacement for causality. Things don’t happen because the logic of the world causes them to unfold that way and eventually reach the state of affairs in the classic movies, things happen because the world MUST reach the state of affairs in the movies and that’s treated like it’s as binding on the characters as it is on the writers.
This description brings me heavy flashbacks of the Wicked novel.
For those not aware – the Wicked which just had its highly successful run in the cinemas and is now one of the year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees – represents half of a 2001 Broadway musical, which is TECHNICALLY based on a 1995 Maguire novel – itself a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. Yet, the novel and the adaptation have little in common besides a few basic ideas (i.e. the future Wicked Witch of the West being university roommates with the future Good Witch Glinda and the Cowardly Lion being just one out of many talking, sapient Animals, who used to have near-full rights but the Wizard finds oppressing them a convenient way to marginalize opposition to his own usurpatory rule) and their relationship with the original L. F. Baum also differs substantially.
In essence, the novel treats the text of The Wizard of Oz very oppositionally, to the point the closest comparison might be Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers film vs. the novel – or perhaps “The Last Ringbearer” vs. LOTR. In spirit, it can also be compared to the post-Watchmen “grimdark phase” of superhero media, with the Wizard not only running a very explicit militarized dictatorship but the land of Oz being generally poor, unequal and permanently drought-stricken as well as riven by racism – not just towards the Animals, but darker-skinned people in general. In turn, the Broadway adaptation and its film rendition THEN end up “Disnefying” the story of the novel MASSIVELY – with the result somewhere in between the Baum novel and the Maguire novel.
The whole thing leaves me with very mixed feelings, because on one hand, I generally prefer narratives that are more subdued and serious (which DOES not inherently have to mean “darker” – I’m certainly no fan of Zack Snyder’s shallow tripe, for one thing) and the Maguire novel is undeniably far deeper than its adaptations. The future Wicked Witch, Elphaba, is reinterpreted as a Hypatia-like figure (at least, in the popular understanding of Hypatia, which isn’t fully accurate as pointed out below) and this allows for a lot of ruminations on the nature of religious faith, morality, consciousness, colonialism, woman’s role in not (fully) industrial society, etc. which are practically absent in the musical, mostly in favour of rather saccharine “girl power”.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2018/08/06/who-was-hypatia-of-alexandria-really/
At the same time, the Wizard is just so evil in that book that even the decision by her and her sister (the other witch) to attend the academy in the first place looks massively compromised – since we are later told they attend it well AFTER the family had already witnessed the swampland natives her father was preaching to effectively ethnically cleansed (Wizard’s army arrives to force those people off their land into camps so that prospectors can search for rubies there) – and her and Glinda’s hope that they can use science to persuade the Wizard face-to-face that Animals are just as wise as humans and deserve the same rights looks obviously baseless in the light of her experience in the swamps. (There is also the implausibility of her even surviving in the swamps as a child when, unlike the musical, she actually DOES dissolve in water and finds even raindrops or her own tears painful in some eerie scenes.)
However, Maguire decided that since he wrote a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, he HAD to show an audience with the Wizard hiding behind his mechanical tricks, no matter how little sense it makes in the context he created. Moreover, effectively the only reasonable thing to do once she and her sister finally become “Witches” (quotes because like in the aforementioned “The Last Ringbearer”, magic is massively toned down relative to the initial work) is to fight him as much as possible – and while they do attempt this at first, Maguire was evidently too scared to make them do it EFFECTIVELY (so we just get a foiled assassination attempt on a secondary character and a seemingly bloodless revolt in the Munchkinland with little effort to build on it, respectively) and soon makes them effectively tread in place, only setting up Baum’s book events (flying monkeys, the broom, the origin of the Tin Man, etc.) while otherwise waiting for their canonical deaths – because again, a prequel still has to be a prequel, and making either of them at least attempt an effective campaign on behalf of the Animals, swamp people and others the Wizard wronged was evidently beyond Maguire’s capabilities. The narrative attempts to justify this with tragic flaws and even a literal prophecy of doom, but none of this feels remotely convincing.
Hence, my mixed feelings, since while the musical and its adaptation sacrifice much of the book’s depth, they also avoid the aforementioned glaring flaws, creating a rather shallower yet much more cohesive narrative – one that is more organically tied to the Baum story as well, and with everyone in the slimmed-down cast getting a clear role and character arc. (The Maguire novel ended up using most of its supporting characters to illustrate the idea that most people would find ways to justify open authoritarianism as long as they themselves are doing fine – which is a fine choice, but grows a little repetitive when it’s at the conclusion of MOST character arcs.) While in a perfect world I would have wished for a film adaptation able to combine the best of both, the version we got is still the one I’m rooting for on Sunday, for the simple reason that I saw every other nominee besides Nickel Boys and I’m Still Here, and all of those left me disappointed to some extent. (Besides Dune: Part Two, which has earned my outright enmity.)
This is unfortunately not really a forum I find best suited to engage in a whole sidebar about the subject of Wicked, but I would at least say that I personally find the book’s approach the characterisation and general tone to make the idea that Elphaba is ineffectual in opposition to the Wizard consistent and kind of cathartic in the way it plays around with a sense of constant denial of catharsis.
Possibly this is emergent from a personal perverse attachment to narratives of somebody seemingly having a grand destiny, but in their own person and some of the bad luck of their circumstances they’re too much of a fuck up right until the point where something stupid kills them off before they managed to do anything with it.
Douglas Adams might be regarded as a master of reaping that kind of bathos.
In any case, if the needs of prequel are a constraint that the book needs to work backwards from, I regard that as hardly much different from any other creative limitation that challenges a writer to make lemonade out of it.
“The orcs appear to encamp by clearing small parts of the forest, digging trenches in them, bracing those trenches with wood boards (from the trees, presumably) and then throwing up their tents inside of the depressions that creates. This is a remarkably labor-intensive method of encampment which is somehow more vulnerable than just stretching some canvas between the trees – after all, should an enemy reach the lip of the trench, they’d have a considerable advantage against the orcs inside the trench. We’ve mentioned this before, but in pre-gunpowder warfare, trenches are not for being in, they’re for blocking enemy movements. You want the enemy to be fouled by your ditch, not for you to be stuck in it.”
You don’t even mention the fact a trench is bound to collect water, and let me tell you, you do NOT want to sleep somewhere that water might pool.
Oh man, that brings back memories! Went on a Cub Scout campout with the kids, and had to borrow a tent (we had a tent, but due to a miscommunication we did not have tent poles). Turned out the tent had seen better days. And there was an unexpected rainstorm that night. And I was on the downstream side. Woke up at 1 am in an inch of water. At 3 most of us had given up even trying to sleep, and had the coffee pot going. Half of us weren’t in shoes because our feet were already wet and shoes would just make matters worse.
For one night? Kinda fun–we got to show the kids that sometimes life is rough and you just grin and get through it. For a week? Nope. For a siege? I have a strong feeling the elf in charge would suddenly start doing his best pincushion impression!
I would love for you to analyze the war in Darkness At Sethanon like this. The book is part of the Riftwar saga – Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness At Sethanon. Forunately the books really good. I have a feeling that the society portrayed there is a lot closer to the actual Middle Ages than A Song of Ice And Fire.
How long would it take a city to build walls and defences? Is it something they could conceivably rush up in a hurry, if they noticed they were under attack from a long time in advance from a slow moving army? Or does it require decades? I ask because that’s wha5 i do in strategy games when possible.. leave my cities defenseless to save maintenance costs, then rush-buy walls in cities under threat. Probably just a silly game mechanic but… souds kind of like what the romans did? If Caesar could build quick walls during a siege, whats stopping the city from doing the same thing?
Depends on the kind of wall. If you just want the kind of wall an army has on the march, you could throw it up in a hurry, assuming you have a supply of wood. Stone walls are a multi-year project and a major investment.
The walls Caesar is throwing up are wooden, and intended mainly to delay the enemy long enough to sound the alarm and assemble the army, so they don’t need to hold for more than maybe thirty minutes at most. City walls are intended to decisively repel forces that outnumber the defenders of the city (since if the defenders have numerical parity they’d try a field engagement) and breaching them if they’re too defended for a hasty assault requires major engineering operations.
Cities do make defensive improvements when an army is approaching; they might construct protruding wooden fortifications called hoardings for a better firing angle than the walls themselves allow, and they’ll patch up bits where the wall is crumbling.
I remember hearing somewhere that a mason doesn’t live in the house he builds, his children do. The idea being that it takes a *really long time* to build a house of stone.
Cathedrals often took a century or two to finish. Of course, that’s with interruptions for wars, running out of money, lots of decoration etc. But it’s still not our experience, where a building that takes ten years makes people say “What’s taking so long?”
Not sure if we have records for a fortified town or city in ancient times, since they tended to grow bit by bit anyway.
The Romans could set up a fortified camp in an evening, but that would have a relatively small ditch and barricade.
https://acoup.blog/2021/11/12/collections-fortification-part-ii-roman-playing-cards/
On a larger scale, yes a ditch and barricade could probably be set up around a city rapidly. But if you want to keep out an army with siege equipment, you need deeper ditches and taller walls made of stone.
Château Gaillard, a castle in Normandy built by Richard the Lionheart, is perhaps the record holder, taking only two years to build from 1196 (CE) to 1198. It was also very very expensive. A more typical castle of the time, Dover, took twelve years, 1179 to 1191. Krak des Chevaliers, a Crusader (Hospitaller) castle in what is now Syria, took about thirty years, 1140s to 1170.
Castles though are smaller than towns or cities, so the length of the walls needed for a city would be much longer, increasing the construction time.
Oh yes we do.
The walls of Themistocles´ Athens were built in a matter of months. While Themistocles was fobbing off Spartan envoys with delaying tactics.
The tyrant Dionysius built a long and powerful city wall in 20 days. Diodorus Siculus, 13:8:
“As a result, contrary to expectation, the wall was brought to completion in twenty days. It was thirty stades in length and of corresponding height, and the added strength of the wall made it impregnable to assault; for there were lofty towers at frequent intervals and it was constructed of stones four feet long and carefully joined.”
This was the very wall that nearly two centuries later defied the might of Rome for two years and was eventually taken by surprise not attrition.
And now compare the canon (in appendices) timeline for attack on Ost-in-Edhil.
Celebrimbor and other Elves were alerted to the breakdown of their friendship with Annatar by the magical link through their Rings to One Ring. In 1600 SA.
Actual military attack came over 90 years later – 90 years for Celebrimbor to prepare.
And when it did come, it took at least two, maybe four years. Another opportunity for Celebrimbor to prepare. Like, fortify a previously open city. Aurelianus, who built the walls of Rome, did not build them in a day, but he ruled a total of only five years.
I imagine it’s easier to construct a city wall because you have a whole city full of people to call on, but twenty days for a complete city-girdling stone wall of notable strength sounds short to me and I’d be curious how good the sourcing on that is.
Correcting the link: it is book 14 section 18:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/14A*.html#7
A “Stadion” being 600 “feet”, with no surviving exact measurement of a “foot”. Assuming it refers to the human pedal appendage I doubt it was less than 20cm or more than 40cm (using metric to avoid confusing our foot with old Greek foot). If it was based off someone’s actual foot it’s probably on the shorter end. My own foot for reference is slightly more than 27cm, and I’m probably taller than most of the old Greeks.
So 3600-7200m. If circular, the diameter would be between one and two kilometers. Reasonable size for the city in question?
“Stone” density ranges greatly; 1.5-7.6 g/cm3. Most of the high end is in ore-bearing rocks. Assume those aren’t used, so 2.5 as a reasonable middle ground.
3600m length x 3m height (probably minimum for a reasonable wall) x 0.5m thickness (outer facing) = 2.5t/m3 = 13,500 tons of rock to be moved and shaped and moved again. Note I’m only counting the bits above ground and the outer face of the wall. No towers, no foundations. The shaping is done probably with bronze tools…
“Brought to completion” is vague; was it started sometime earlier and then hurried up to finish?
I can’t see it being done from digging the foundation to finishing the facings in twenty days. I doubt you could fit and feed the workforce required. The city would not have the number of masons; it has to do other things too. If you’re not a mason it’s killing work. I’ve done a little bit with my father on his house; it’s hard.
Wikipedia’s article on the guy says the total fortification program (part of which was a citadel) was 27 kilometers in length, took five years to construct, and would have involved moving more than 300 tons of stone per day. That’s more in what I’d intuitively expect the time range for a city fortification project to be. I suspect some portion of a preparatory phase took twenty days and the story got garbled before reaching the source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_I_of_Syracuse
Numbers in ancient manuscripts are among the most commonly mis-copied, and 20 days is far too short for such a work. Compare the rush restoration of the walls of Constaninople – thrown down by an earthquake and rebuilt in record time to withstand an imminent siege: 60 days according both to chroniclers and contemporary inscriptions. Fifty-seven towers had been damaged as well as long stretches of wall but of course much of the material would be on-site and re-usable and the foundations still there.
Dionysius’ wall did probably not remain unchanged by the time of Marcellus’ siege. Notably the sources describing that event discuss how Hiero had ordered Archimedes to improve the defences of the city, and some of the ruins of fortifications there are considered his work.
“so the length of the walls needed for a city would be much longer, increasing the construction time”
Increasing the construction time in labor-hours. But a city also may have more labor to throw at construction. At constant population density, double the radius means double the circumference but four times the population, so 2x the labor per meter of wall.
And wall techs vary; you might use rubble-fill, or rammed earth.
Caveat: More unskilled labor. This doesn’t matter much for digging a ditch, but for a stone wall, your construction speed is capped by the amount of masons you have who can plan the construction and dress the stone, not by the amount of hands that could carry it into position. The other issue is material: You need either stone or wood in large amount, and the supply for that does not meaningfully increase with city size. Not to mention they will be found some distance away and the roads will only admit so many carts per hour.
It makes me suspect that Dionysius’s wall mentioned in the other comment wasn’t the shiny all-stone perfectly-polished thing the Romans encountered two centuries later, but something more rough that was then improved over subsequent generations without people updating the original legend.
“…but for a stone wall, your construction speed is capped by the amount of masons you have who can plan the construction and dress the stone, not by the amount of hands that could carry it into position.”
How much would fence building impact this? Some areas build fences with stone, which gives the people involved at least some experience with stoneworking, at least as far as building walls was concerned. Would that help?
Also, what’s the nature of these walls? Medieval walls were frequently roughly-hewn rock held together by thick mortar. The outsides needed to be a bit more carefully constructed, but the interior of the walls could be built by random people bashing rocks into roughly the right shape with hammers, and relatively unskilled labor putting the mortar in place. Some archaeologists tried this, in the castle they built in France recently, and while more experience certainly wouldn’t be bad, after a day they were meaningfully contributing to the construction.
“The other issue is material: You need either stone or wood in large amount, and the supply for that does not meaningfully increase with city size.”
It might if you’re desperate enough, because cities are *built* of stone or wood – how frequent are the sieges in which houses are pulled down to provide building materials for fortifications?
“Dionysius’s wall mentioned in the other comment wasn’t the shiny all-stone perfectly-polished thing the Romans encountered two centuries later, but something more rough that was then improved over subsequent generations without people updating the original legend.”
It feels to me like the best way to square the description given of it with practical realities would be that it was an earthen wall with a wooden frame and stones only forming an outer layer? What the Romans described as “Murus gallicus”, and which was mentioned in the initial Helm’s Deep post as the apparent closest equivalent to Edoras’ defences.
There is also the comparable “Murus dacicus” (Dacian wall), whose description outright mentions that it was inspired by Roman and Greek methods, making it all the plausible candidate. Granted, that the same article also notes “A properly built Dacian Wall would be both labor-intensive and time-consuming” – but then it mentions that a “typical wall” of that style “would be about 3–4 meters thick and 10 m tall”, which is clearly not what was constructed, at least not initially (particularly since “thirty stades in length” seems to work out to around 6 km), and a lower, thinner wall would be correspondingly less time-consuming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murus_Dacicus
Apparently even Sunomata Castle wasn’t actually built in a night (and was apparently basically ditches, a palisade and watchtowers.)
Of course, Eregion in both book and show alike has access to two things no historical city has ever had: supernaturally gifted Elven craftsmen (it’s a whole city of them, that’s the point) and, even mote importantly, dwarves.
And as Gimli helpfully point out in the Two Towers (book), give him a mountainous area, a hundred dwarves and a year, and he can build you an unassailable stronghold.
It may not be realistic in our sense of history, but the ability to create very significant fortifications in a short time for an Elven kingdom allied with Dwarves may still be in line with Tolkien’s own worldbuilding.
In the Siege of Antioch, why could the Crusaders disregard the southern side of the city, i.e. “St. George Gate” and the Road “to Daphne”? Your description of the siege as well as wikipedia only mention the north and west entrances to the city being cut off, but here I see a big gap in the siege allowing to support the city.
According to “A History of the Crusades” by Steven Runciman the Crusaders didn’t, but that side of Antioch is very rough terrain and the roads to the north and west were more important. The siege began in October 1097, the Crusaders did eventually block off the southern side in April 1098.
That is correct, with the so-called Tancred’s tower.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, I think that Bohemond ended up attacking the city from the mountainside!
On the topic of hostile infantry armies just decloaking before your city walls, the Sack of Skalitz at the start of Kingdom Come: Deliverance always had that feel to me.
Now, I can totally believe that sometimes the first thing a commoner would notice of an impeding war would be a foraging party showing up at their doorstep. (But even then, a smart commoner will often have some situational awareness — after all, anyone can see the shine of campfires against clouds.)
But Skalitz is a (somewhat) fortified town with a small castle on top, which strongly implies that there is some military aristocrat in charge of it. Someone who has a budget for horses, scouts and the like, as well as strong incentives not to be caught with his pants down as he is, with the enemy slaughtering most of his subjects — the very subjects which would be drafted into his fighting force — before he has even realized that he is at war.
I am sure that such fails have totally happened from time to time, aristocracy is not known to especially select for competence. But the game kind of presents this as a baseline of how medieval warfare worked: sometimes you only become aware of the enemy blitz as they march over the last hilltop, and have to race to block the town gates before they reach it. And that paints a very silly picture.
If I am not mistaken, Skalitz was attacked by Cumans, who were Steppe nomads (and thus cavalry). This is exactly the case of “a small cavalry force can often ‘outrace’ the word of its coming, moving faster than rumor and refugees to surprise settlements”.
Every time the topic of circumvallation and contravallation si discussed, the case of Alesia and almost Alesia alone is brought up. Why is that? Is Alesia the most perfect exemple? The most complete fieldwork? The most documented?
Even the wikipedia page for “Investment” almost only quotes Caesar, but for a Byzantine military history book from Brill. How actually rare was both circumvallating and contravallating during a siege in the premodern era? What makes Alesia stand out so much from the rest?
Bret has an example from the Early Modern period in his Fortifiactions series – the Siege of Breisach, where the besieging army circum- and contravallated in the same wall, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a more usual solution than two completely separate wall systems. And of course there are factors which might make a general decide not to put the effort into two complete sets of fortifications: Lack of enough army organization (which left the crusader efforts so small), whether you actually expect a relief army to show up (Caesar clearly did, and was proven right) and whether you feel confident about the routes the relief army might take (Caesar in the open green lands of Gaul apparently did not, or he would have focused his efforts on those routes).
I would suspect it’s mostly that it’s the best-documented. It’s not often that the commander of an army writes a detailed report on a siege, and it’s not often that a primary-source document survives. Probably a lot of sieges skimped on contravallating, because that’s only really necessary if a major enemy force is operating outside the city.
Both would also only be necessary if there was going to BE a siege. What I mean is, if you knew going in that failure to defeat the enemy army in the field would necessarily result in losing the city, it wouldn’t make much sense to put up a vigorous defense; it’s better to surrender the city before the siege weapons start pounding at your city. This would obviate both contravallation and circumvallation by not having the siege in the first place.
If your hasty attack wins, you can also ignore both. If you win entirely, well, you’ve won, so building defensive structures doesn’t make sense, just use the existing one. Even if you don’t entirely win, you may push your way into a portion of the enemy’s defensive structures, so again you don’t need to do much. If you’ve got a defensive wall that I have taken over, I’m just going to use your wall for contravallation. And it’s not going to get much mention, because I just assigned an underling to put his guys on the wall; not really anything worth mentioning.
A famous early modern battle involving contravallations is the Battle of Narva. A huge Russian besieging army of 30-35k men had invested the Swedish-held city and created works facing in and out, knowing that the Swedish King, Charles XII was just about in range with his field army. Fortunately for them the King had only been able to scrape together 9-11k tired troops.
Unfortunately he was a great commander and they were useless. The Swedish army appeared on November 19 and the next day, in bad weather, assaulted the Russian siege lines despite their enormous inferiority in numbers and positions. They punched into them, smashing the initial regiments stationed tere and simply rolled up the rest between the two lines before assaulting and over-running the main siege camp, forcing the Russian commanders to capitulate in one of the most unlikely victories in history.
Not only does Caesar describe the siege works at Alesia, but Napoleon III paid for them to be excavated! So its a rare siege where we can bring written and archaeological evidence together.
It’s not incredibly obvious, but not only was the design and fortifications of Ost-in-Edhil changed between seasons, but the geography itself was also altered. The relative positions of the city, the river, and the mountain were changed significantly from season 1 to season 2, presumably because (again) they didn’t do enough forward planning.
I feel like that at this point, the unexpected twist has become the prestige (fantasy) drama version of the jump scare: Effective in the moment, but cheap and easily overused, and ultimately detrimental to most stories.
“I want to review an important distinction when it came to siege assaults that we’ve discussed before: the difference between what Clifford Rogers terms ‘hasty’ and ‘deliberate’ assaults.”
This is a common military distinction used for all sorts of things – defence, ambush, attack, harbour occupations etc. The distinction is that hasty things happen without any significant planning first, so you’re going on previous training and doctrine alone. There’s no gap between “the commander decides to do the thing” and “the thing starts happening”. Deliberate things have a planning phase.
This is distinctly non-canonical but I find it fascinating to consider the possibility that Sauron (perhaps Morgoth as well, to an extent) basically needs humans to settle a region before they can move an army of orcs across it. It’s totally plausible to me that elven subsistence systems just don’t accommodate the needs of large numbers of orcs, whereas human subsistence systems create a ton of grain stores you can slurp up as you go.
I’m not sure I’d call anything in Rings of Power even a “big budget Hollywood action scene.” The budget doesn’t look that big – plasticky armor, single digit Final Fantasy CGI, poor choreography… I’m guessing the alleged billionaire budget is some sort of money laundering scam…?