This is the fourth part of our [five? -ish? I, II, III] part series on the Siege of Eregion in Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last week, we took the opportunity presented by Adar’s absurd plan to dam a river using catapults to collapse a mountain to discuss the capabilities and functioning principles of historical counterweight trebuchets, the largest and most powerful sort of catapult. While trebuchets were powerful weapons in their day, Rings of Power, like many modern films and TV shows, presents the weapons as having orders of magnitude more range and power than they did historically, showing them used to do things that the actual weapons simply couldn’t accomplish, like rapidly demolishing a city or collapsing cliff made of solid rock in moments.
This week, with the Sirannon river protecting Eregion’s capital, Ost-in-Edhil, is now drained, the orcs begin their assault, giving us an opportunity to discuss what a more competent prepared fortress assault might look like. Now I want to note this sequence gets complicated quickly due to the appearance of relief armies, but we’re going to break this up thematically, treating the attack on the city in this post and the fighting with the relief armies in the next post. Fortunately, because Rings of Power is broadly incapable of managing cause-and-effect, the fact that not one but two entire relief armies show up unexpectedly matters not at all in the battle or to any of the important characters, which makes this sort of division of topics easier (even as it makes the show worse).
Book Note: We can essentially do just one book note for this entire sequence. We are given no details in either the appendices or Unfinished Tales on how the capture of Ost-in-Edhil was accomplished, except that it clearly fell by assault (rather than surrender) and the effort took some time: the attackers break in “at last…with ruin and devastation” and Celebrimbor is taken while fighting with Sauron himself “on the steps of the great door of the Mírdain” (Tales, 228). But that skeleton of a description nevertheless leaves room – indeed, clearly seems to actively imply the kind of slow, methodical and careful assault that is more commonly successful historically. I suspect here this is in part because Tolkien is echoing the way that historical texts, both ancient and medieval, relate the outcomes of sieges when they aren’t going to give a detailed, blow-by-blow description: there’s often an indication if the siege was long or short, if it was difficult or easy (not always the same as length) and then frequently just one or two vignettes such as the last stand of a significant figure or a notable moment of treachery or so on. Here what Tolkien gives us tells us the siege was long, difficult and ruined the city and then gives us in just a few words the vignette of Celebrimbor’s final, doomed resistance protecting the thing he cared for most, the “their smithies and their treasures” (Tales, 228), rather than, you know, the people. It is telling that this is where Celebrimbor’s final defense is held, one last statement on his character, not wholly negative but also not wholly positive either – no Ecthelion of the Fountain or Glorfindel of Gondolin is Celebrimbor.
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 carefully construct mantlets and moveable shelters to protect my soldiers as they advance, slowly and methodically towards the walls of the enemy, rather than being picked apart by arrows. 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 free time, you can get a bit more warning by clicking below for email updates or following me on Twitter and Bluesky 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.
Swarming Like Ants
With the river now drained, Adar’s next step is to launch his orcs across the riverbed in a disorganized rush against Ost-in-Edhil’s defenses. This sort of assault is extremely foolish for a number of reasons. The immediate reason is a problem of terrain: Adar has given the river time to drain but not to dry, meaning his soldiers are likely attacking across a damp natural riverbed. When we see it, we see a bed that looks to have consisted mostly of silt and sand, which is to say, quite fine particles which are, in this case, still wet. I imagine just about anyone who has ever waded across a shallow river understands the difficulties Adar’s troops – weighed down by equipment, armored and in some cases pushing siege equipment – will almost instantly be in. This terrain is going to be difficult: wet and muddy, soldiers will sink in it, where it isn’t slick and hard to maintain balance. This is potentially the sort of muddy, viscous terrain that armies in the First World War used duckboards to cross.
Adar is attempting to charge over it.
Good Luck. With. That.
The second reason this assault is extremely foolish is actually a very old one. Adar’s draining the river hasn’t removed Eregion’s defenses, the city is still walled along the riverbed (and Adar, for whatever reason, hasn’t considered now looping around those defenses but attacks straight into them). So Adar’s implausible catapult-terraforming has merely given him the opportunity to engage in a traditional fortress assault over unusually difficult terrain – he hasn’t actually prepared at all to assault the walls themselves. His catapult barrage, as noted above, didn’t damage the defenses in any way, they were focused inside the city on fragile but militarily unimportant buildings. Adar is then hurling his army, with no real order to it, against those walls.
Indeed, this sort of attack is such a terrible idea – and such a famously terrible idea – that it is not infrequently held out as the example of a terrible idea in military treatises. Here, for instance, is a famous passage of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, describing the perils of sieges (trans. Lionel Giles):
4. The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided. The preparation of mantlets, movable shelters, and various implements of war, will take up three whole months; and the piling up of mounds over against the walls will take three months more.
5. The general, unable to control his irritation, will launch his men to the assault like swarming ants, with the result that one-third of his men are slain, while the town still remains untaken. Such are the disastrous effects of a siege.
Adar has not even ascended to the basic level of competence of Sun Tzu’s idiot-general-making-obvious-mistakes in this passage, because he hasn’t yet spent several months building mantlets1 (we’ll come to these) or piling up other works and has instead after just one day launched straight to the “assault like swarming ants” part of the battle. And note the result Sun Tzu expects from this approach with better preparation than Adar‘s: “one-third of his men are slain, while the town still remains untaken.” Poorly prepared, badly thought out siege assaults generally fail; the entire reason for the complex systems of siege engineering and large, expensive siege machines was precisely that one could not simply win a fortress assault by rushing at the wall en masse.
And here we run back into the storytelling failures of this part of Rings of Power. In the Lord of the Rings, we have two sieges: a competently executed prepared assault and an incompetently executed hasty assault. Now, both end up failing because of heroic intervention (while the storywriters for Rings of Power need this assault to succeed), but what I want to draw attention to is how the way these sieges proceed illustrates character. Saruman’s attack on Helm’s Deep is, as I’ve noted, poorly managed. His army isn’t very cohesive and is unprepared for things they ought to have seen coming. Moreover they’re also unprepared to effectively assault this fortress, having banked everything on a sapping effort with blasting fire that doesn’t expose the main citadel. As a result, the effort fails due to Saruman’s bad planning: his overconfidence and lack of field-specific knowledge show up very clearly in the way his efforts fail, resulting in him being defeated by an inferior force.
The Witch King’s attack on Minas Tirith, by contrast, is very capable executed. The Witch King has prepared specific engines, like Grond, to engage specific parts of the defenses. He has left blocking forces (the Corsairs and a wing of his army in Anorien) to isolate the battle-space. He has reserves to guard against potential problems. And his assault, while necessarily swift is methodical: trenches to protect his equipment, then catapults to start fires in the lower levels to isolate the outer defenses (something Adar’s catapults do not accomplish), then towers to engage the defenders at all points, so that there is insufficient force at the decisive point (the gate) when his main effort arrives with Grond. As a result, it takes the combined efforts of several very capable commanders to stop him: Denethor, while he retains his wits, employs a masterful defense in depth, Faramir’s ability as a captain to hold his men together is remarkable, Théoden shows excellent generalship in side-stepping the blocking force to deliver his cavalry to the battle.
And yet in all of that we learn something about both the strength of the Witch King, but also his cunning and malice, because despite such capable opponents, his plan mostly grinds on as intended: the defenders are driven in, the defenses isolated, Théoden’s cavalry engaged and put into desperate straits against his reserves. We see both the Witch King’s character strengths – cunning, intelligent, methodical and deliberate – and of course his flaws as well in that it is his arrogance that leads to his death even at a moment when his plan is probably still more or less working (Aragorn not having arrived yet).
In short in both cases the way the siege proceeds is both connected logically to the material conditions of the siege – that is, it makes basic physical sense – but it also proceeds out of the character of the characters who are conducting it. The Witch King’s ruthless disregard for life is on display in his method of attack, as is his arrogance in advancing through the gate first, so confident in his victory, as is his cunning in the fact that he had a ‘Minas Tirith Main Gate Buster’ specifically prepared and ready to go for this very moment. Equally, Gandalf, Faramir, Théoden and Aragorn’s quality all emerge when pitted against such a capable foe.
The siege set piece becomes more than just a tool for special effects, it becomes a mechanism to develop characters. We learn a bit more about who these people are by the way they behave in these circumstances and then the consequences those behaviors have in terms of winning or losing the battle.
But in Rings of Power, Adar is a complete idiotic fool whose plans are terrible and go wrong repeatedly who nevertheless wins easily anyway for no clear reason. Adar has laid a siege on a city with insufficient preparation, charging his army blindly across a mud-soaked riverbed into prepared defenses without any preparation before being suddenly and unexpectedly attacked in the rear twice and wins anyway. I think we are supposed to learn from this that Adar disregards the lives of his ‘children’ in his monomaniacal pursuit of Sauron, but what we actually end up learning is that battles in Rings of Power are like rounds of Whose Line Is It Anyway: the rules are made up and the casualties don’t matter.
We don’t even learn what kind of person Adar is – beyond his willingness to spend the lives of his orcs (although we don’t see very much of this either) – in the way he attacks. Is Adar a great tinkerer and engineer, so that he would, like Saruman attack with a new technology (blasting charges)? Is he methodical and deliberate like the Witch King, dismantling one defense after another in a series of careful attacks, long in deep preparation? We get none of this. Adar doesn’t have catapults because he’s shown to have prepared them for years or really like siege engineering, he has catapults because…Hollywood sieges have catapults. His stunt to drain the river doesn’t seem to come from some established deep knowledge or interest in hydrology (though this would have been a clever thing to set up, given the equally silly role of flooding waters in Season 1 – but Adar has no hand in preparing that!) or geography.
We learn nothing about Adar, who remains a very flat character, a ‘Lord Father’ who doesn’t care much about his children and is obsessed with his war against Sauron. He doesn’t seem to believe in much, or be interested in much, or have much personality. Like Bronwyn, like Arondir, like Waldreg, like Mirdania (I had to look up some of these names) and like so many others, they kill him at some point and I felt nothing.
Making Works Work For Your Work
What ought Adar be doing? He should be doing quite a lot of work, actually – building quite a lot of works. ‘Works’ in a military context (particularly a historical one) is the word for basically any constructed element of a battlefield, particularly field fortifications. Because there’s actually quite a bit Adar can do in order to make his assault on the city more likely to succeed.
As we’ve already noted, this task would probably begin with circumvallation: building a line of defenses around the city, parallel to its walls (or around the bridges and gates, in this case) to prevent the enemy from advancing out. This matters to Adar both because it means the enemy can’t dash out and smash his catapults and other preparations, but it also means his high value target probably can’t escape.
Book Note: The Witch King does exactly this in the Siege of Gondor, using a series of trenches (filled with some sort of flaming, perhaps magical, obstruction) to circumvallate the city and prevent the defenders from easily sallying out, while protecting the catapults and other siege engines being prepared (Rotk, 105). These works are abandoned when the Rohirrim attack, enabling the men of Gondor to sally out to support the Rohirrim’s attack as it develops, but seemingly only around the gate (where presumably there were gaps in the works to allow Grond to approach the gate).
Those defenses in turn provide the foundation from which other works can be assembled. The first task, of course, would likely be assembling the catapults, which will have been transported to Eregion unassembled in carts and need to be set up on site. Now those catapults, as we noted last time, are not going to be deployed miles away, but probably fairly close to the walls – as close as they may be safely placed, since the closer they are, the harder they’ll hit. That in turn means the catapult firing positions may also require defenses beyond the initial circumvallation. You do see this sort of thing in medieval warfare, but I will note that protected artillery firing positions becomes really important in early gunpowder warfare, where siege artillery often had to be set within a few hundred yards of a wall to have the desired effect (well within musket or counter-battery artillery range). We’ll get to what those catapults should be doing in just a moment, but once set up, they’d start doing it while the other elements of the attack are prepared.
The next problem, of course, is the river. Simply damming the river – as we see in the show – is impractical…as we see in the show (and discussed last week). But armies could sometimes divert rivers and I’d expect any real siege of a place like this – given how hard approaching the city from any direction other than the river – might have to do this. Diverting the Sirannon would be a matter of digging a canal around the back of Adar’s besieging army (conveniently serving as a degree of contravallation) and his workers would be protected from the enemy by his circumvallation as they did so. Alternately, Adar might try to build new crossings over the river, depending on its depth and speed. Because the Elves lack any kind of artillery of their own, there isn’t really anything to stop Adar’s orcs from building pontoon bridges, perhaps braced with earth and rock fill, to crudely span the river at multiple points in order to enable assault (in addition to the existing primary bridge we see).
Now of course both when building any works over the river or crossing its dried river bed, orc workers and soldiers would be exquisitely vulnerable to the defender’s arrow fire. The solution to that is the venerable mantelet (sometimes spelled mantlet), relatively small portable shields or shelters that could be moved forward as necessary. In medieval sieges, its common to see networks of these wooden barriers, providing covered attack channels to approach walls and protecting stations of archers or siege workers from attack from the wall. Large siege engines – like rams – might have full, wheeled housing covering them to prevent the operators from being engaged from the walls. The advantage on a medieval battlefield that the attackers have is that the projectiles available to the defenders (arrows, slingshot, javelins, etc.) are light enough that a relatively thin wood or even wicker framework is enough to ‘catch’ them and render them harmless. In the gunpowder era, these sorts of field defenses have to get more robust and heavier – earth-filled gabions, the ancestors of today’s HESCO barriers – and thus immobile, requiring armies to effectively ‘dig forward’ to reach a wall, in a system we’ve already described elsewhere. Because mantlets are cheap, fairly quick to make and use a locally available material (wood), an attacking army can produce a lot of them and indeed, we tend to see these used in quantity.
You can see the use of mantlets to protect archers and artillery very clearly on the left.
Of course the jumbo-version of this approach is a ‘siege tower’ – generally called a ‘belfry’ by our medieval sources. These were large wooden towers – sometimes, but not always wheeled or otherwise moveable – constructed by an attacker. In film and fiction, these invariably have boarding bridges on the top and are used to assault walls, but that was actually a far less frequent way to use them. Instead, the normal use of siege towers was to create elevated, protected firing positions and to thus screen the advance of soldiers on the ground. Archers (or small catapults) elevated on the tops of these towers could sweep the fighting positions of the defender’s walls and towers from above, clearing defenders from the wall and thus neutralizing enemy ranged fire, allowing for a safe approach to the wall. In the case of Ost-in-Edhil, the presence of the river is going to mean that – either crossing bridges or crossing the riverbed – these towers are going to require some extra engineering, using wood boards and other constructions to create a flat, stable surface for them to move over. But that’s not a wild thing to do: we see Neo-Assyrian artwork from the early iron age already showing ramps and other constructions used to provide towers with easier routes to overawe enemy defenses.
In any case, Adar does exactly none of this. Not only do his orcs not have any siege towers to try to suppress the defenders or mantlets to protect their advance, they don’t even carry shields, meaning that every single orc is presenting a full body target to a city full of Elven archers. At least the Uruk-Hai at Helm’s Deep brought shields (in both film and book, TT 162-3)! We need, at some point, to return to the question of the lethality of arrow volleys against armored foes (particularly the Hollywood trope of huge casualties from mass volleys of arrows) but this is actually a force of unshielded, unprotected and relatively light infantry (we see bits of fur, a lot of leather, some scattered mail in their armor, but nothing uniformly heavy enough to resist war bow shot at medium or close range) attempting to cross rough terrain into archers who are on fortifications.
In short, this is an assault that would fail. Absent any kind of protection, these guys would begin taking losses quite quickly while – for reasons we’ll get to in a moment – the work of actually attacking is going to require them being within bowshot for quite a while as they work on overcoming the city walls. And while in real battlefields there is a lot that is greatly reducing the lethality of arrows – accuracy, shields, armor, distance and so on – such that only a small percentage of arrows are lethal, these orcs are charging Elven archers in the open, being hit by direct (rather than high arcing) fire, while unarmored, unshielded and unprotected, so we might expect most arrows to find a mark. And a good archer can put an arrow in the air around once every six seconds or so, so those casualties would accumulate very quickly. There is a reason no one attacks like this.
As we’ve seen in the book trilogy, orcs are not possessed of superhuman morale or cohesion – indeed, sometimes rather the opposite – and it would be extremely hard to get human infantry to maintain contact under these circumstances. Raw numbers here may not help the orcs much: it doesn’t actually take very high casualties to break the cohesion of most units; note about Sun Tzu describing an assault ‘like swarming ants’ which nevertheless fails, accomplishing nothing, despite its presumably tremendous numbers (in practice, such careless assaults are rare in warfare because they’re so obviously foolish to anyone not making a prestige TV show). And with no fortified, protected intermediate positions – because, again, no circumvallation or mantlets – once they started falling back, they’d fall pretty far back, at least all of the way out of bowshot.
Of course, this is Rings of Power, so Adar’s lack of preparation or planning doesn’t matter and instead his orcs simply push through by dint of numbers, which now brings us back to the orcs, their archers and catapults and the strange sort of ram they bring.
Orcish Machines
Nevertheless, Adar’s orcs now approach the wall, moving across a silty, muddy riverbed that still has pockets of standing water in it – I cannot stress how terrible a sort of terrain this would be to try to move an army over – and begins attacking the walls. To overcome the walls, the orcs have a small number of their own archers, catapults (that they don’t use), some ladders, and a machine that gets called a ‘ravager’ (as if that is a standard kind of siege engine) which makes no sense.
No part of this assault package is deployed effectively or makes sense.
We can begin with the archers. Now, employing your own archers (or slingers or other missile troops or even small bolt-throwing torsion catapults) to try to fire back at defenders on a wall was a standard sort of thing one did in sieges, in an effort to suppress the defenders and thus enable the rest of the army to accomplish whatever it was trying to do within bowshot. But absent any protection, archers on the ground were at a huge disadvantage to archers on the walls.
Now, the orcs here have one advantage which is that – as is common in fantasy film – the Elves have designed their wall badly. It protects the archers really only up to the waist. Instead, in practice walls were – from quite deep in antiquity – built with crenelation: alternating merlons, the raised part, with crenels (the space between the merlons) to create that classic tooth-like or zig-zag pattern you see on castle walls. In film, these merlons are often quite low, but actual merlons are generally quite high, significantly taller than a man and often feature firing slits carved in them. An archer behind a merlon is thus quite fully protected. Even when standing in front of the crenel, the archer provides a really hard target, because the parapet of the wall protects him up to the waist and the effect of the height of his position makes it quite difficult for an archer on the ground to actually hit the exposed upper-part of a man on the walls.
Meanwhile the archer on the ground is really vulnerable: the height of the walls means that the defenders are firing down, which is both going to modestly increase the lethality of their shots as their arrows accelerate downward, but also enable them to fire over shields and other protections. Of course the famous Roman solution to this was the testudo, the moving box of shields, held overhead as well as in front, but our orcs here have no shields so that option is unavailable to them. Attackers might try to even these fearsome odds through the use of mantlets to create protected firing positions of their own or siege towers to create elevated and protected firing positions, but our orcs have brought neither, so their archers are sitting ducks out in the open firing back at Elves they can barely see, much less hit.
One solution to this for the attacker is to remove the crenelation and this was actually one of the quite valuable tasks to which catapults could be put. Even if the main body of the wall was too thick and strong to be breached by catapult, the parapet (the entire raised structure above the wall) and its merlons have to be much thinner and more fragile, relatively easily smashed apart by catapult rounds impacting. That might kill defenders, but more importantly it removes the cover they would use, allowing the attacker’s archers – again, all the better if operating from a siege tower – to sweep the walls. Even if they cannot breach the walls, this is what Adar’s catapults should be doing. Rather than lighting some apparently purely cosmetic fires in the city or landscaping a local mountain, he ought to be aiming to strip away the towers and crenelation of a key section of the wall so that when he attacks, it will be much harder to defend.
Of course, he doesn’t do this and so his orcs are attacking against large numbers of Elven expert archers who are basically untouchable behind a protected parapet (however badly designed) while advancing unprotected and almost unarmored in the open without shields over bad terrain, but because this is Rings of Power, nothing matters and his forces succeed anyway.
If you look closely, you can see the attack involves moving siege towers up earthwork ramps topped with smooth wooden pathways, while supported by archers on the ground who are protected by larger wickerwork shields or mantlets or deployed in supporting towers.
The (Neo-)Assyrians were really good at siege warfare and this relief was about communicating that fact to the viewer.
All of which doesn’t matter unless he can either get over top of the walls (escalade) or through them (breach). Catapults might accomplish a breach, given enough time, but it was also absolutely possible to build walls thick and stout enough that almost no amount of catapult bombardment, even from large trebuchets, was going to produce a breach. It’s hard for me to get a good sense of if the walls of Ost-in-Edhil are this thick above the waterline, but given that Adar doesn’t even try, I am going to assume they are. They would certainly be stout enough below the waterline, since the walls would have to be quite well countersunk (that is, the wall structure continues below the surface of the ground) well below the riverbed (or they’d fall over) and either able to resist the pressure of the water (if the ground-level of the city was lower than the top of the water) or be backed by earth-fill (if the ground-level of the city was higher than the riverbed).
Adar does bring ladders to try to scale the walls. This would actually be quite tricky in practice: scaling ladders need to be the correct height. Too low and the soldiers climbing them can’t reach the battlements; too high and the ladder is in the way, making it difficult to climb off and over the parapet. That would be a particular challenge here because of the river: before the river is drained, Adar has basically no way to really know how much length to add to the ladders to account for the depth of the riverbed. But even if the ladders are correct in height, as we’ve noted before, ladders are a pretty poor way to attack a well-defended wall and pure ladder-escalade is basically always going to fail if there are significant numbers of defenders at the point of contact (as here). I assume the idea here is that the ladders occupy the defenders, but it takes a truly trivial number of defenders to defeat ladder escalade, since one man with a spear standing at the top of the ladder can defeat a functionally infinite number of men trying to climb the ladder (especially given that they lack shields or a way to damage the crenelation and thus drive the defenders away from the point of contact).
That leaves the entire attack hinging on Adar’s ‘ravager,’ which joins the Númenórean Cavalry Chain in the Roll of Infamy for bad attempts at being ‘clever’ and inventing new weapons.
Note that the machine is entirely unprotected, so any archer on the wall (for instance, one standing where the camera was) could in moments pick off basically every member of the crew – most importantly the two guys cranking the machine, without whom it cannot function at all.
Battering rams were generally covered for this very obvious reason.
The idea here seems to be some sort of reverse battering ram. The machine is brought up to the wall and big metal spikes attached to chains are hammered into the wall by orcs with large sledge-hammers (standing unproducted, in the open, while they do this, so a single archer could also easily stop the operation of the machine on his own). Then an orc (just two that we see!) manually cranks the machine, which looks to be a torsion system (energy stored in a twisted spring or rope) which when released hurls back a large wooden weight which violently pulls the metal spikes out of the wall, bringing some amount of masonry with them.
This is not a device that existed and I am honestly flummoxed as to why, if you had a device of this sort, you would use it this way. After all, if you have a torsion mechanism like this, instead of using it to pull chains there’s no reason you couldn’t instead use it to throw rocks (or swing a battering ram, but that you can do by hand), which would still work to shatter the masonry and do it quite a bit quicker. We do sometimes hear about siege grapples or hooks – the Roman falx muralis (‘wall hook’) used to pull down fortifications (Polyb. 21.27.3; Livy 38.5; Caes. BG 3.14.5) though it hardly seems to have been common and these tools – hooks on the end of poles – were worked by hand. I have to imagine they were probably used primarily against lighter elements of fortifications, like wooden fighting positions atop stone foundations (a common enough thing to do: it’s part of normal form of the Gallic fortification style the murum Gallicus (‘Gallic wall’) in antiquity and in the Middle Ages was a standard component of castle design, called a ‘hoarding.’). But the whole reason these things are on long poles is that they’re reaching at the lighter, upper parts of the defensive works, not the heavy, fixed foundation.
Instead, just like the better solution to the ‘collapse the mountain with catapults’ tactic – which some commenters have noted, in suggesting they might do it with late 19th century naval artillery, I was apparently still something like an order of magnitude or two off in terms of how much explosives they’d need – the solution here is very simple: orcs with pickaxes.2 If you have unfettered access to the base of the wall, no fancy torsion machine is necessary and indeed the machine does you no favors. After all, you go through all of the effort to drive a metal spike into the wall, there’s a good chance when you pull on it, it is going to tear out and bring very little of the wall with it, for the same reason that pulling a nail out of your wall does not collapse your house. But if you are just using pickaxes to chip and smash the stones until they crumble…well, that is how mining rock is done and for a reason.3
So the way you would actually do this would be that once the river was drained, orcs would go forward and – probably using portable mantlet barriers with roofs on them to approach safely – assemble a fortified wooden shelter at the wall’s base. Then orcs with pickaxes and hammers could shatter and split the stones to undermine the wall. This sort of much simpler and more effective way of defeating a wall was frequently practiced, although operating on the surface near the enemy walls was an obvious liability, since defenders might sally out and contest the work site. As a result, even more common than surface undermining – at least as far as I can tell, it appears more commonly in siege accounts – was starting a tunnel some distance from the wall and advance it underground to the wall and then collapse it (bringing the wall down in the process). Such mining warfare was an extremely common part of siege warfare from antiquity onward, leading defenders to devise means of trying to detect undermining efforts, like a thin bowl filled with water, where the vibrations of the mining effort will cause ripples in the water, alerting the defenders.4
One thing I hope comes out clearly here is how complex siege warfare could be. Systems of field fortifications, moveable shelters, siege engines, earthworks, mining and so on all brought to bear against a defender in order to degrade and eventually breach defenses that would have easily resisted a simple sudden assault ‘like swarming ants.’ Taking a walled city with nothing but muscle power was an extensively theorized problem in the pre-modern world. It is always perilous to say of any activity that every angle was considered, but surely most of them were. Sieges were rarely won by the clever application of a never-before-seen technology and far more frequently won by the methodical, careful application of very well known, frequently ancient, techniques.
Conclusions
From a historical perspective, Adar’s assault on Ost-in-Edhil is basically nonsense. He does almost everything that ought to cause such an assault to fail badly but succeeds easily because the plot requires it and this is Rings of Power, where nothing matters. Adar launches an unprotected assault with largely unarmored infantry over difficult terrain into archers positioned atop a stone wall, supported only by ladders (delivering his relatively light infantry into contact with plate-armored defenders) and a nonsense breaching machine, while his catapults do nothing to support the attack and instead sit idle. His men attack “like swarming ants,” but win anyway, because in this show, nothing matters.
From a storytelling perspective, I think the assault is also a failure. It doesn’t serve to really illuminate Adar’s character or Celebrimbor’s. We’re supposed to understand that Adar is being wasteful with the lives of his orcish ‘children,’ but in a battle where the casualties don’t matter and Adar has infinite respawning orc armies, this doesn’t matter. We’re never really confronted with Adar’s decision to sacrifice his troops except in seeing unnamed mooks mowed down in the background in a language film has used to just say “this is a battle” for ages. Adar’s orcs take basically the same losses to arrows as Théoden’s riders or Alexander’s phalanx in Alexander (2004) and those are commanders we understand (in the story, if not in reality) care quite a lot about their men. Whereas Peter Jackson’s films largely succeed in communicating character in these battles (even if they miss some of Tolkien’s details), Rings of Power largely fails.
But even beyond this, the decision to go with ‘Hollywood tactics’ misses an opportunity to do something new and fresh by drawing on the historical material more closely. As an aside, I think this is true of quite a few aspects of how pre-modern societies are portrayed: dispensing the tired Hollywood tropes of ‘Flynning‘ sword-fights and mud-brown hovels for historical fencing and appropriately brightly painted sets would do a lot to make a given project feel new and different.5
In the case of a siege, utilizing actual siege tactics offers quite a lot of narrative potential, particularly in the form of the slower-burning prestige streaming TV format, where the time pressures of film are quite a bit less and it is much easier to utilize montage and cuts to imply the passage of time. The emotional strain of a siege on the defenders was considerable: they had to watch, largely unable to interfere, while the attackers methodically prepared on stage of the attack after another. In a show built around parallel storylines, such a siege could easily run several episodes in parallel with other stories, giving us a sense of how hopeless the defense is as the attackers surround the city, fortify their positions, begin a slow, steady bombardment of the defenses, build moles and bridges over the river, set siege towers to overawe the walls, and then begin slowly crumbling their foundations with pickaxes from defended, covered shelters, all while the defenders struggle to do anything to even really slow this effort down. If you still need the sense of Adar’s callousness to his orcs, a long siege gives you an opportunity to tell this story logistically, as his orcs steadily run short on supplies and he remains brutally committed to the effort.6
Instead we get a sequence that repeatedly struggles to believably connect action with consequence. Adar aims his catapults at a solid rock face ten miles away and this somehow produces exactly the dam he needs to enable this assault. He then runs his orcs pell-mell over a muddy basin still filled with pockets of standing water, pushing a gigantic, heavy machine whose workings make no sense, and this results in such a successful siege assault that being unexpected attacked in the rear twice will do nothing to slow it down.
And that’s where we’ll turn next week: the cavalry arrives but – because this is Rings of Power – it doesn’t matter either.
- Spelled both mantlets and mantelets.
- A ram might also work, depending on how the wall was constructed. You may not think of a ram as being able to breach a wall, but if you deliver repeated heavy shocks to masonry long enough, it will start to give way and rams absolutely could be used against lighter stone fortifications this way.
- As an aside, I searched in vain for a mining machine that works like the orcish ‘ravager’ shown here, wondering if I had missed something. Of course there are a great many types of rock drills, but these, as far as I can tell, are all tools for either creating a bore-hole into which explosives may be placed or for plug and feather stone-splitting (where you hammer a metal wedge and two metal shims into the bore hole and the wedge, in forcing the shims apart, splits the stone). I can imagine stone splitting being valuable in taking apart a wall’s foundation, but a giant torsion pulling machine does nothing for this effort.
- Once alerted, the defenders might start their own tunnel to try to intercept the attackers, either engaging in small confined skirmishes in the tunnels or lighting fires to fill the enemy’s tunnel network with smoke. E.g. Polyb. 21.28.
- I might suggest some small portion of the success of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance series can be chalked up to this approach making the games feel really distinctive.
- Ironically, I just got around to watching War of the Rohirrim (2024) and while it is also a rather weak film (though better than Rings of Power) it actually delivers exactly this character note effectively as the evil Wulf lies to his men to keep then encamped outside a fortress, starving in the snow, building a siege engine – although, alas, War of the Rohirrim does not quite understand how siege towers work either.
The showrunners in an interview indicated that the siege went on for weeks; it appears this was not the impression given to any viewers. Which seems a difficult thing to screw up; intersperse night and day scenes in the city and siege works.
How does the whole tactic of using smoke from the burning city to obscure the sky so that the orcs can act during the day work at all, then? (Even setting aside the fact there wouldn’t be enough burnable material at all, as discussed last week.) Presumably, the only way it could even CONCEIVABLY make sense is if all of the siegeworks were done at night up until the final day, when they suddenly burnt the city and thus shrouded the skies right before completing their assault – but according to the posts so far, this is absolutely NOT how the timeline goes?
The alternative is that the city keeps getting burnt by every morning or thereabouts, and then presumably “respawns” by evening, burnt material replaced by fresh wood, thatch, etc. from who-knows-where. Of course, this makes no sense whatsoever, but would actually be in line with both Adar’s “respawning army” and well, the previous blog already demonstrating how the damage done to the city radically diminished between two shots set seemingly hours apart.
P.S. This made me wonder if there was any video of such a “siege timelapse” from fiction out there already. A cursory search had instead brought me to a Google Earth rendition of the Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, which I think will do for now.
“How does the whole tactic of using smoke from the burning city to obscure the sky so that the orcs can act during the day work at all, then?”
That’s what the plot demands and this is Rings of Power and nothing matters.
The ravager is what broke me when I watched the show. If I was feeling generous, I could get around the logistics issues by assuming that he geography / time frame was somehow different than the show seemed to portray. Even bringing down the mountain could be interpreted as a metaphor for using the forces of nature against the elves. But the ravager is so monumentally stupid that any attempt to rationalise, or even ignore it, proved impossible even if I still had the goodwill to try. It doesn’t just go against history and physics, but just basic common sense. Why would anyone even want to pull a wall down by yanking on a spike driven into it? What’s next, bring a wall down by giving it a nice coat of paint? Tearing it down by first pilling up rocks against it so it’s even thicker?
It’s particularly annoying because a mechanically-assisted battering ram is the sort of (AFAIK) ahistorical siege weapon which is plausible enough to make good fantasy. You could have a ram that’s so heavy that you can’t swing it back manually, you have to pull on force-multiplying pulleys before releasing it. Or it’s cranked back and the energy is slowly stored by bending steel (like a crossbow) or in twisted ropes (like a ballista), before being unleashed at once. Now those are still probably bad ideas*, but at least they’d pass a smell test. Wouldn’t make much sense to give orcs such weapons in LotR, but it might fit thematically and aesthetically with dwarves.
*They’re bad, IMO, because battering rams work by being heavy things that move slowly (rather than light things that move quickly), meaning they have a large momentum but comparatively little energy, so there isn’t so much to be gained from mechanical advantage. Also, because they’re big and heavy, there’s generally enough room to get lots of muscle power directly on it without extra contraptions. Making them more complicated would, at best, reduce the rate of impact and, at worse, make them easily brake in the face of the enemy; all for relatively little gain.
“You could have a ram that’s so heavy that you can’t swing it back manually, you have to pull on force-multiplying pulleys before releasing it.”
Treadmills work for this. They were used to power cranes in the Middle Ages. Legs are much more powerful than arms (how often do you lift your entire body weight with your arms?), and you can scale these up to take advantage of multiple people. Use these to lift the ram and have a release mechanism that slams it into the wall, and you have a plausible ahistoric weapon that would never the less be within the realm of possible applications of period-appropriate technology. It would give showrunners a chance to kill a bunch of orcs while having more and more swarm in to take their place. Or light the wheel on fire and have orcs replacing it, showing the disregard for deaths on the side of the attacking army.
Alternatively, there’s a river right there. Water wheels were a thing since somewhere around the 4th century, and it’s not that hard to build one that delivers repeated blows. And at least windmills (which use the same technology, just with wind instead of rivers) were built to rotate, so building movement into the system isn’t implausible at all. Have the orcs assemble this thing, being picked off but always having fresh orcs to take their place. The Elves are confused because they don’t understand what they’re seeing–until the thing starts beating the stones out of their walls. You get your fancy technology, your surprise, your massive orcish casualties, and don’t need to rely on obviously stupid ideas.
Either option would take a long time to build, sure, but if you have an infinitely respawning army and an entire forest to work with, they’re not totally outside the realm of possible. Certainly we see sillier ideas in fantasy all the time! Or they could just capture some of the stuff in the countryside they move through. A scene where the orcs and their commander consider a water wheel for a moment, then move the pieces and make an auto-battering-ram, would take a minute of screen time and some pretty basic set pieces, yet would make the scene vastly superior.
> Water wheels were a thing since somewhere around the 4th century, and it’s not that hard to build one that delivers repeated blows. And at least windmills (which use the same technology, just with wind instead of rivers) were built to rotate, so building movement into the system isn’t implausible at all.
This actually brings me to something I considered asking last week. Would it have been plausible for a besieged city to somehow connect a trebuchet’s counterweight to a watermill, or even a windmill? A way to lift the counterweight and thus generate the potential energy required to fire it in any way other than muscle would have been quite useful – not least because it addition to freeing up manpower for all kinds of other purposes, it could have had allowed virtually 24/7 fire, and thus a decent way to be a nuisance to enemy camp at night (all the more so if that kind of construction would have allowed for somewhat-better-than-usual range, and if your engineers could additionally figure out the aiming problem (i.e. a rotatable base, which is locked in place with something like giant railway spikes when the trebuchet is about to actually fire so that the kinetic energy doesn’t just spin it around?)
P.S. Speaking of trebuchets – I mentioned Flame in the North before, and I feel like readers here might enjoy the way it depicts trebuchet tactics.
> Your deduction is correct and you soon arrive at a wide square, one probably used in the past for drilling troops or practicing infantry manoeuvres. Now it is dominated by a forest of timber arms and metal counterweights, row after row of mighty trebuchets. Small cranes load rounded stones into them, whilst teams of men turn their firing mechanisms or adjust their positions. At any one moment one of them is being released, swinging its long arm round to loose its deadly cargo towards the lower city with an ungainly elegance. Around the edges of the trebuchets disciplined squadrons of Novgardians – wearing the armour of guards, or the plain clothes of work teams – move in a ceaseless flow. The noise of clashing metal, spinning wood and barked orders all crash against your ears.
>…You show your seal to the nearest trebuchet operator and ask to be taken to the man in charge of the artillery. He takes you to a small canvas tent at the very centre of the trebuchets, outside of which a steely eyed man gives orders to a gaggle of subordinates who run to and from his side. You push your way through them and he turns his face – all rigid planes and sharp angles – towards you. He is bald, with a pencil-thin moustache.
> “Why are these siege engines not on the walls?” you inquire. “Surely you cannot expect to hit what you cannot see!”
> “Sir,” he responds, spitting out the word, “if the trebuchets were on or near the walls they would quickly be destroyed by the enemies’ far more numerous catapults. Hence we have withdrawn them to this position. With all due respect, sorcerer, perhaps you should use your powers to assist us!”
> You can understand the commander’s terseness, the deep bags beneath his eyes indicate many sleepless nights and even as he finishes talking to you a dozen voices begin to clamour for his attention. Will you:
At that point, you have the right choice and two wrong ones.
> “Give me a map of the lower city,” you demand, “and I’ll give you the position of every siege engine the enemy has.”
> “MAP!” bellows the commander, and instantly one is thrust into his hand by a quavering subordinate. He hands you a pencil and unrolls the map upon a small field-table in front of him. “This better not be a waste of time,” he growls under his breath.
> You focus on your spell, dislocating your consciousness from your body. Lose 3 STAMINA. You shift your perception higher, the city falling away beneath you as you climb to a lofty vantage point. You look out over the walls; into the lower city. It is a daunting sight indeed to see the lines of siege towers and catapults that nestle between or loom over the smoking rubble. Even more are under construction, scaffolding rising up around them like the bark of unnatural trees. You hold your spell for as long as possible and mark their positions in your mind, focusing on where they are in relation to those few buildings and landmarks which remain standing. You have a good memory, and when your spell fades you quickly move to the map, annotating the key positions rapidly.
> The commander takes it from you when you are finished and hands it to an officer beside him. “Have this copied and given to each engineer who controls a trebuchet. Do it quickly, the enemy may move their weapons at any time.” Then he addresses you: “I hope to the Gods that I haven’t just made my tactics based on the whims of a charlatan. So I’ll thank you later, when we’ve won this war.”
> It seems that only results will convince the commander, but you are nevertheless sure you will deliver them. Having done what you can, you carry on into the district.
Alternatively, you can pay “20 gold coins” (yes, Coinage is not the strongest side of this work) to the city urchins so that they would HOPEFULLY update the artillery teams with whatever could be glimpsed from the walls (i.e. sacrificing money but preserving your life force/healing stash – assuming they actually do it rather than attempting to spend it in possibly the last few hours they are still alive) or you can magically enhance your strength to load trebuchets faster, but…
> “Watch this,” you tell the commander. You stalk over to the side of an unloaded trebuchet where three men are struggling to lift a heavy stone projectile from the ground. You cast your spell, pure energy burning through your veins and muscles. Lose 5 STAMINA.
> With one hand you pull down the firing arm of a trebuchet and with another you grasp the boulder and load it into the pouch. You tug the release lever back and the contraption whirls into action to send the stone arcing over the city walls, like the flailing arm of a mighty giant. Men cheer and applaud around you, but the commander gives you a stern stare. “Take a look around,” he barks, “There are fifty trebuchets here. Your magic put a single load into a single one! You can stay and ‘help’ if you like, but it won’t be enough.”
> He walks off back to his tent. Disgruntled with his lack of gratitude you carry on into the district.
(This description may not get the mechanics of a counterweight right, but it’s the thought that counts. I should also mention that different options cost you different amounts of time before the ultimate assault on the city begins, and unless you have already found a way to flee, you would be forced to the walls.)
http://www.ffproject.com/flame.htm
Major problem with using a watermill or windmill to pull down the trebuchet arm and raise the counterweight (or pull back a mangonel arm against the torsion springs) is going to be starting and stopping. The mill rotates a shaft more or less continuously, so you’ll need some kind of clutch mechanism to engage and disengage from the trebuchet arm at the right time.
A delay in starting to pull back won’t hurt, but disengaging at the right time is kind of crucial. If the mill pulls back too far it will break your expensive piece of siege artillery 🙁
Ships (I think) use capstans for similar purposes. Were these around in the Middle Ages? What kind of load could they take? Plausible if not actual for Ye Olde medieval fantasy?
Interesting engineering discussion! I agree that having a clutch mechanism seems like the tricky thing. The other one is to get the right “gear” ratio (really, the ratio between axle and wheel in a windlass-like mechanism) so that the water wheel is strong enough to raise the trebuchet’s arm, but not so heavily geared that it takes all day to do so.
I’m not convinced that these are more difficult problems to solve that those involved in a windlass or cranequin crossbow, although doing it at a larger scale brings its own set of problems. It might be that such finely tuned engineering is not so well suited to a machine built on-site in siege conditions. Not to mention giving the enemy a big fragile target, and severely limiting your options for where you can place the trebuchet in the first place.
Starting a water wheel wouldn’t be a problem at all, as long as the wheel isn’t built directly into the river, you can control the start of the water flow easily by sluices, gates, etc.
For stopping at a precise point, I could imagine the water wheel pulling on a winch with a fixed-length rope, ant the at the end of the intended movement pulling out the rope together with the bolt fixing it to the trebuchet-winding-mechanism (which includes some ratchet mechanism to avoid premature firing).
None of that would break historical plausibility, but I’m not sure if it would generate an actual advantage over 5 or 6 people in a treadmill .
They were invented in the 14th century, from what I’ve been reading. That said, systems of pullies, winches, drums, and things were around before then, and my naval history isn’t sufficient to know where “capstan” starts and “pre-capstan” stops. Anchors, it turns out, are really, really heavy and ships need ways to multiply force to lift them.
I don’t think you can have an auto-firing trebuchet–loading and unloading a soft container like a sack isn’t something easily automated. But the firing part I think wouldn’t be a huge engineering problem, nor an out-of-context one. Polybolas were a thing well before the Middle Ages, after all, and the mechanism by which they auto-release could, I think, be modified to this purpose. Even if you have to reset things manually each time, having it auto-fire and using water or treadmills to pull back the trebuchet would allow you to throw greater mass, which is the important thing.
(As an aside, I think we should see more of things like this in LOTR properties, especially with Orcs. Sauron is a student of Aule and loves engineering; let’s see him ENGINEER stuff! Instead of faceless hoards that win by Zerg Rushes, let’s see the orcs using some of de Vinci’s designs, or some neat applications of Medieval technology. People in the Middle Ages weren’t stupid, and some of their machinery was fairly complex; let’s see that put into action!)
The real problem is going to be maneuverability. Trebuchets aren’t exactly agile things, but once you add something the scale of a treadmill to it the thing is stuck in one position. And water wheels also require, well, water–not an issue here, but it won’t always be available. Makes both particularly vulnerable to attack, though if you can get more range that may mitigate this somewhat. At least it’s plausible enough to think that someone engaged in a campaign for super-high stakes would custom-design something like this (building mockups of fortifications was a thing), but it’s probably not something that would see much use outside of specialized situations.
I have seen some restored (and in use!) windmills up close, and while they do not have clutches, they do have disconnects, and brakes on the input side.
While you cannot stop an internal combustion engine to change gears, you can bring a waterwheel or a windshaft to a halt, connect/disconnect it, and then let go of the brake.
When seeing that “Ravager” in Roel’s reaction video, I immediately went “How are you stupid? Let me count the ways.” and got up to seven. With the screenshots in this Blog, I found an eighth. As far as I can see, Bret has listed 2 of my 8 reasons in the article, so here’s the full list:
0. You can’t get the wood.
(I’ll discount this one to just make the point that even if you *had* the wood this would still be stupid). The force required to move several tons of stone at the bottom of a wall is an order of magnitude higher than that to launch the usually much smaller stone projectiles that historical torsion catapults launched. That force would rip a catapult made of normal wood and normal sinew apart.
1. Extra Failure Points.
Compared to a normal torsion catapult, the “Ravager” has a bunch more fastenings that the force needs to travel through, and if even one of those fails, the whole machine flies apart. The worse would be the attachment points for the chains on the log – you need the chains to be taut before release to preserve your energy, which means they need to be adjustable in length, which means the fastenings on the log side need to be openable somehow (and yet strong enough to withstand the force to move tons of stone)
2. Useless Log.
What function does the log part of the machine serve? It introduces more failure points, it adds extra mass to be accelerated and extra friction from sliding over wooden rails, meaning the forces have to be even more ridiculously oversized for this to work.
3. Skilled Labor…
If you don’t want your anchors in the stone to be pulled out immediately when we release the trigger, they need to be placed properly inside the stone to transfer the force. This will require an anchor shape, angle and depth specific to the stone and construction of the wall to be pulled apart, they can’t just be hammered in any old how. Which means you need specialized masons at work to put these anchors in, instead of rank and file soldiers.
4. … right under murder holes. (Bret caught that one)
The fact that the persons you expose to arrow fire are valuable masons just makes this worse.
5. Newton Hates Your Wheels.
Assuming the anchors are placed correctly and work as intended, the release of the torsion arms means the machine and the stone in the wall are pulled towards each other. Except the “Ravager” has *wheels*, which means it will move a lot more easily than the stone. If you want the stone to move instead, you will need to anchor your machine to the ground, and very, extremely deeply so, because we’re talking about forces capable of pulling several tons of stone out of a wall. Good luck finding stable anchoring in mud.
6. Slooow.
To recap, to make this machine work, we have to anchor it deeply into the ground, then *two* orcs wind it up, then the masons hammer the anchors in and adjust the chains. Then we get *one* pull on the wall from that. Then the masons have to inspect the wall, possibly exchanging the anchors if they’re bent out of shape, and then we can repeat the whole process. The winding up is the most ridiculous part, and with two orcs, I’d be surprised if they managed even reach the one-release-per-hour speed of a trebuchet.
7. Shattered, Not Moved. (Bret caught that one)
The purpose of the torsion energy storage is that it can release all the energy in a single, sharp shock, which for the purpose of moving stone is like placing a chisel on the stone and hitting that chisel with a hammer. Which is the way to shatter stone, not move it. So what we’ll get at best is ripping out shards of rock down to the depth we hammered our anchors to, and then we have to try again. That’s why even as a mining machine it’s a complete waste of time.
8. Self-Disassembly.
The good news is that a lot of that doesn’t matter because this machine will never manage a second shot. When the trigger is pulled, the machine will launch all the following things at high speed, because that’s what a torsion catapult does: One massive wooden log, several massive stone shards and all the metal chains driven into the wall. It will launch these things at *checks notes* itself, because it’s a torsion catapult pointing the wrong way. And we have no way at all of controlling the trajectories of the stones or the chains, and especially the chains will whip around, killing *everything* within a good distance of the machine before smashing it to pieces. Why were you building a machine to launch stones at yourself again?
And all time they had a barrel of hi tech super-nitrated explosive next to it.. Could have blown up the wall in no time.
The fact that they create this senseless machine that has to store massive amounts of energy to function, but then can’t figure out a way to have the character *use* that energy to destroy the machine is just the height of incompetent writing.
The heavy log does serves a purpose, actually. (Whether the showrunners intended it or not, I do not know.) The machine needs to produce a quick sharp yank, quicker and with stronger force than what the torsion mechanism can provide. So what it can do instead is accelerate a heavy mass, and it is the inertia of that mass, suddenly stopping when the chains go taut, that yanks on the stones with enough force.
If we were to reverse it to make a (somewhat more sensible) powered ram, it’d have to work the same way: you wouldn’t apply the ram against the wall or gate then use the torsion mechanism to “push it in” (that would just push your carriage back), you’d set it back a bit and use the torsion mechanism to *launch* it so that it impacts it at speed. Like a giant captive bolt.
This also means that the force on the wheels isn’t that great, probably no greater than for a normal catapult.
The law of conservation of energy strikes again!
In the spirit of pedantry, I believe it is actually the law of conservation of momentum (a.k.a. Newton’s 3rd Law) that is the real problem.
Conservation of energy isn’t really an issue, since they have effectively unlimited energy, in the form of muscle-power from the inifinitely-respawning orc army (chemical energy in the orcs’ bodies convert to potential energy as they crank the ravager back, converts to kinetic energy when it’s released).
It’s both of them, really. Supported by a light infantry screen of several engineering fact-sheets about material properties.
I’m sure other commenters have said things like this in the past better than I can, but one thing I really appreciate about this post series is how constructively it contrasts with the far more complimentary analysis of the LoTR films, and how the successes of those can be traced to Tolkien’s deep knowledge of actual pre-modern culture and warfare. Not only does it prove that it’s possible to tell a good story without sacrificing realism, but IMO it makes your criticisms of The Rings of Power much stronger than if they were coming from someone with the attitude of “this fantasy stuff is all just juvenile nonsense, let’s tear it apart for laughs”.
My respect for Tolkien’s works was magnified several times upon reading Bret’s series covering the two sieges, and learning that not only were the tactics reasonable (which isn’t too difficult a thing to get right), but also that the timings and movements of the forces across the landscape of Middle Earth were actually more or less accurate to those of pre-modern armies. Most authors don’t even think about how many days it actually takes to move 10,000 men and their baggage train and space their plot points accordingly. Tolkien not only thought about it, but he got it mostly right, and then *didn’t call specific attention to it* in his writing. Another author may have been tempted to spend a page or two on some needless exposition from a character about ‘how they oh-so-cleverly calculated the logistics, and isn’t the writer so smart?’ Tolkien does not. He just does the research, arrives at logical numbers, times the events accordingly, and if you know enough to appreciate that, then you do so. If you don’t, then you don’t.
Unfortunately, there is also a case to be made that what you call “needless exposition” here MAY well have taught a generation or two of subsequent writers to pay attention to these things had it been included. Granted, it may well not have, but it’s still a point worth considering.
It may also have been unnecessary at the time he was writing. There had just been a World War, so anyone who was in the army would have been intimately familiar with how far an army can march in a day and what provisions are necessary to feed them (and the dire consequences of not calculating that in advance).
Perhaps, but I cannot help but think of these Angry Staff Officer essays, about the battles in The Wind In the Willows and in Avengers: Infinity War.
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/02/20/warfighter-toad-hall/
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2019/03/31/military-lessons-learned-from-the-battle-of-wakanda/
I don’t think Kenneth Grahame had any military experience; he just tried to have his combatants act sensibly rather than surprisingly.
The fact that Tolkien had all this worked out, and then the producers of this show made no attempt to build off of that, even to the point of poor plotting and story-telling, can only speak to the lack of respect these producers have for the source material. Given that that source material in this case is one of the most renown works of the Western canon, that really says something about the attitude they have toward their own project.
I think the fact that some of the bigger flaws are explicit attempts to subvert things from LOTR (the relief armies arriving and getting defeated despite Adar not actually bothering to prepare for them was an attempt at a subversion of the Ride of the Rohirrim) shows their disrespect for the source material plenty. Which IMHO is the biggest offense – they not only bungle the story, several elements of that are actually entirely deliberate, not merely incompetence.
As Bret will probably mention next week, in Unfinished Tales, Sauron has enough excess troops to fend off the relief armies of Celeborn and Elrond, while still investing the city…
What I find interesting about the “nothing matters and Adar wins because it’s predetermined” aspect here is that it’s not like writers/directors usually know anything about fighting, but I feel like Hollywood typically delivers much clearer storytelling in a fight scene than in a battle – whether or not the fight itself is well choreographed or shot. A character could win a fight because they’re stronger, or faster, or more skilled, or smarter, or more resilient, or more invested, or because their enemy is too arrogant, or because of dumb luck, or because they have more loyal friends … whatever! … but I feel like even a minimally competent production will usually come up with a “story point” other than “the winner won because that was what was needed to advance the plot,” and actively demonstrate that in the fight and, if possible, have prepared the ground for that. (And if not, then often the futility/randomness of violence itself is often thematically on the table.)
To a point, although to me it’s notable that works that get plaudits for their fight choreograph (e.g., Daredevil) don’t necessarily do this. There’s a scene in which Daredevil gets cut to ribbons, including getting dragged across the floor by a blade hooked under his ribs, and just keeps going because the script says there’s another minute or two to fight and the human body can take limitless punishment until the preordained conclusion arrives.
Something like Atomic Blonde’s extended fight which, yes, is absurdly long but maintains a cohesive throughline where damage received meaningfully impairs performance? Very much a rarity. History of Violence’s approach is even rarer.
Although to some degree John Wick’s influence has been changing that, sure.
In defense of Daredevil (and here I’m talking about the show from a few years ago), I think his unrealistic ability to fight while seriously injured is a deliberate choice rather than filling time. The flashbacks to his father establish, clearly stated, that his father could take more injury and keep fighting than his fellow boxers. And then we see DD himself do the same outside of the ring. And, more generally, comic book characters can often do unrealistic things even if they don’t have superpowers; it’s part of the genre.
Yeah my understanding is that it’s a deliberate choice. Matt Murdoch as almost a superhero-iteration of an old-school Catholic flagellant. As Brett points out in the better examples from LoTR, we learn something of his character through the fight scenes.
Like Bullseye (!!!) I would posit that “ability to take an absurd amount of punishment” is a core trait of the Matt Murdock character in the show (and I believe the comics, though I’m not as well versed) and meant to be thematic in that Matt often seems as though he wants to go through physical trauma. (I haven’t seen the new season – don’t have Disney+, but I believe the specific fight you’re referencing is from S1 of the Netflix show? Fighting the Japanese guy with the blade on a chain?)
But my comment wasn’t meant to say anything about realism, only internal story logic. Every fictional fight ends the way it does because that’s what the writer wanted to happen for story reasons – it’s a tautological point, really. But a prototypical martial arts movie will be explicit that the fight is a contest of skill and our hero will win because he really does have the best kung fu. By contrast, has Harrison Ford ever played a guy who’s supposed to be a great martial artist? But he’s won a lot of movie fights, generally because his character – be it a doctor, a POTUS, a CIA analyst who was a Marine cadet before breaking his back – is an everyday guy who can take a punch and throw a punch and he’s fueled by righteous indignation. (Indiana Jones is a slight deviation here, since he does routinely engage in physical adventure, has the whip skills and whatnot.) The Atomic Blonde equivalent of what our host is dissecting on Rings of Power would be if, in that long staircase fight, Charlize Theron’s character got sucker punched because she wasn’t paying attention, obviously didn’t know how to use her gun, and looked to be throwing some very ineffective strikes, but every once in a while would land a devastating roundhouse kick because her character has to win the fight somehow.
> a core trait of the Matt Murdock character in the show (and I believe the comics, though I’m not as well versed)
I’m currently reading through all of the comics on the Marvel website, in order starting from 1939. Daredevil was introduced in 1964, and, as of early 1968, doesn’t have this trait. (At least, no more so than the other heroes. And injuries as serious as what we see in the show just don’t happen, to anyone, in the comics I’ve read so far.)
I haven’t read a Bullseye comic yet. I did see a Bullseye movie, and it was a stinker. Unworthy of my name!
I haven’t read the relevant comics, but I believe the modern characterization of Daredevil, both as leaning heavily into ninja stuff as well as Catholicism/guilt stuff, is due to the Frank Miller run in the ’80s.
I don’t think Indiana Jones really is an exception to the rule you identify about Harrison Ford characters winning fights, so much as he’s an amplified version of it. He’s still not exhibiting some kind of masterful kung fu fighting skills. He’s just even more so the guy who can take a punch and throw a punch. This is amplified in that he’s the guy who’s got the grit to keep fighting with everything he’s got until his body gives out from the gunshot wound in his shoulder, and the cunning to make good use of his environment to take down opponents that would otherwise be unmanageable (spike a tank’s sponson gun with a rock in the barrel, lure the invincibly strong huge Nazi who’s beating him silly in a boxing match into the path of an airplane propeller). But he’s not exhibiting some kind of masterful ability to never take a hit.
My comment wasn’t so much about the realism (Atomic Blond’s fights are incredibly unrealistic. John Wick, even more so), but the way even Good Fight Scenes often lack sensible narrative progression.
If getting dragged across the ground by a blade under the ribs doesn’t take you Matt of the fight, what would? Likewise, while the blade under the ribs does impair Matt, there’s not a clear link between the impairment he displays and the specific injuries he receives.
I don’t disagree that the average level of fight or battle scene in Hollywood (and TV) writ large is much higher than what’s been described here for RoP, but I do think there’s a lot of storytellling “left on the table,” as it were, because your average fight scene doesn’t have a clear link between the damage a character takes and resulting impairment.
That is: realism aside, there’s rarely a clear “Took a blow to the thigh, am now hobbling and can no longer kick.” sort of progression to things.
You could be right about the thematic intent or component in Daredevil specifically; if so, it went over my head whenever I saw the show, half an eon ago.
I haven’t seen Daredevil (or really any Marvel, let alone DC(EU), media for the longest time) but the few clips I have watched strongly suggest to me that the fight scenes in it were “inspired” by the Korean* Oldboy in much the same way as Star Wars (A New Hope) was “inspired” by Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Watch arguably the most famous scene from it to see what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwIIDzrVVdc
* Technically, Daredevil and Oldboy are actually both “comic-book movies”, since the latter is an adaptation of a Japanese manga of the same name (its script literally written by the original mangaka.) I suspect the absolute majority of viewers have no idea, since not only is the film set in ROK with Korean cast/crew, but its style is so grounded and visceral and unlike what one generally expects from such adaptations. However, knowing that certainly explains a lot about the structure of its narrative logic – while I understand perfectly well why it is considered a classic, I don’t wholly share that assessment for reasons which would likely go into spoiler territory if discussed here.
P.S. I forgot to mention that the narrative reason for the resilience which the titular character of Oldboy shows in that (and other) scenes is because he was kidnapped and imprisoned in a “hotel” room with no company besides a TV for 15 years, so with absolutely nothing to do, he eventually both began training every day with the moves he saw on that TV in the hope of taking revenge on his captors (which he is doing right there in the scene above, since the fight is actually taking place inside that same “hotel”) and he also learned to effectively “depersonalize” at will, regularly describing his actions in third person and effectively not feeling pain when he does so.
That entire intro is actually available on YouTube (for now), although it is sadly lacking in (non-Korean) captions.
Partly this is because of a feature of how narrative has treated dying since the dawn of storytelling: people always live until they choose to stop. This of course is not how actual violent death works, but it’s a key outlook that people expect from stories (and it does seem to be the case that dying can work this way in some circumstances).
I’m not sure how well that holds up against competent literature (though I suppose you could make an argument that as most stories are made up, everyone dies when the storyteller tells them to).
I don’t particularly come away from the Scottish Play feeling as if MacBeth was invulnerable until he decided he wasn’t (even if he thought he was). His death if very effectively foreshadowed. Achilles did not choose to be killed by Paris (nor Menelaus by Hector in the cinematic version). The Witch King was surprised by Eowyn. Commodus fully thought he would win his duel with Maximus, as did Feyd with Paul Atreides.
Though I will concede I did have to wade through a large number of people who *did* choose to die, either literally or through engaging in a fight they knowingly can’t win.
Hector chooses to fight the invulnerable Achilles and dies. Similarly Theoden chooses to challenge the Witch King (and Gandalf the Balrog). Boromir chooses to take on insurmountable odds to save Merry and Pippin. Gollum throws himself into Mt Doom. Othello, Romeo and Juliet die by their own hand. Duncan Idaho sacrifices himself to save Paul and Jessica in both book and film.
Gollum falls into the Crack of Doom inadvertently while prancing about and gloating. It wasn’t a deliberate act.
I’ve seen it posited that Gollum fell into the volcano because Frodo (using the ring) compelled him to do so. There was an earlier scene where Gollum was following Frodo and Sam and Frodo gripped the ring (didn’t put it on, but did hold it in his hand) and commanded Gollum to depart (which he did, but only temporarily) that also included language something like “Should you seem to claim it, you shall be cast into the Fire!” (Which he did, and was.)
The same theory holds that it is then that Frodo succumbed to the ring, by using it for its intended purpose.
*seek. Seek to claim it.
Your examples are mostly cases where the thoughts of the dying character are not revealed to the audience. What I’m talking about is a tendency in heroic narratives where the dying thoughts of the character are shown, directly or indirectly; in those cases characters have tended to endure pain and harm until they reach a limit where they have been convinced to stop enduring. It is also normal in narratives of non-violent deaths to have this ‘choice’ shown, in many cases with completely unconscious people responding to family or friends communication some sort of permission structure for dying.
These ancient storytelling habits are standard consumer expectations even today, and in fact you regularly see people experience emotional responses to real world events through this lens.
@Endymionologist Ah, you’re talking about the whole ‘gives a poignant speech on their deathbed, cut short at the perfect narrative point by their expiring’ stuff.
There is a fair bit of that about too. I suppose it was the ‘always’ part of ‘people always live until they choose to stop’ that I took objection to. There are enough counterexamples to deny it being a universal approach to death in storytelling, but I’d never claim there weren’t a suspicious amount of people who are effectively plot-invulnerable until they choose that they won’t be anymore.
@Kevin I thought about that one, but I didn’t want to commit as I couldn’t remember if that was how it occurred in the book as well as the film (it’s been way too long since I read LoTR). But if so, then that’s another example.
@Lightdefender Now, you see, this is why I adore Tolkein’s take on magic. It’s a real shame you don’t see it more often. It’s less ‘shoots bolts of lightning from their fingertips’ and more ‘command that something happens…and it comes to pass’.
The fight with the Balrog is a great example. Gandalf states the famous ‘you shall not pass’…and the Balrog does not pass. Is this evidence of Gandalf’s victory in a magical duel? Was he simply goading the Balrog into taking the wrong step? If Gandalf hadn’t challenged the Balrog this way, would the bridge have given way beneath it? Does it ultimately matter?
Lovely plausible deniability. Very ‘god works in mysterious ways’.
“… the orcs begin their assault, giving us an opportunity to discuss what a more competent prepared fortress assault might look like.”
Pretty much sums up this entire series, really. I’m enjoying this one very much, possibly because it’s a relief to have something to get annoyed at and baffled by that isn’t an existential crisis.
I now have the bandwidth to watch the series on line, but I find the critique far more interesting than the show. Looking forward for the Friday updates.
Obligatory typo catch: The link for Ecthelion is bad with stray letters. This works:
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Ecthelion
It strikes me that these tactics are not drawn from history or Tolkien, but from Warhammer. The “tactics” of a pell-mell, wacky contraptions that cause more damage than they physically should, and winning by sheer dint of numbers… that’s a WAAAAGH!
Of course, Warhammer’s orcs are superhumanly strong, durable, and cohesive. It takes ludicrous casualties before an orcish army starts to consider withdrawing, and that’s not because the troops start to fear for their lives, but because it’s not fun anymore.
Adar and his boyz belongs in the Old World, not in Eregion.
True…. The Orcs though historically don’t win in sieges through prolonged assault in WHFB. Dumb ideas like catapulting yourself over the war get revealed to be dumb and ppl are atonished at goblin Doom divers, who are lethal to creatures but not fortifications.
Grimgor for example would “retire” because it’s no longer fun as the Dawi hid behind walls.
Gorbad Ironclad and Graum are the two green skins who have taken fortified cities and well, Gorbad undermined Black Crag. Black Fire Pass were sieged and died to overwhelming numbers , as the Orcs just waltzed through them (the pass is too wide and inhospitable to station large armies on stand by or wall off effectively, although Tarmurkan diverted due to the defences )
Averheim gates and walls were “battered” down by unusually accurate catapult fire , allowing a breach to occur at the gates which led to it’s fall. Remarkable…. If Averheim defences are the same as in Karl Franz era.
Against Nuln and the destruction of the Great Bridge, Gorbad brought forward a navy to land troops and build a bridge to cross. Granted, this IS Orc siegecraft so the bridge actually comprised of the sunk boats linked together with wooden berms to form a crossing that would had been extremely hazardous:)
You know. All the things that Rings of power DIDNT do……
More like 40k orkz. Dey win cuz dey da greenest and da orkiest. Which is another way to say they pop up from nowhere after previous battles let their spores disperse, their weapons have the desired effect largely due to psychic power of the WAAAAAAGH and there’s no grand strategy involved or objectives to accomplish, this is just one more scrap for da boyz.
That’s pretty much how WHFB orcs work, too. I picked them because they make more sense to compare to a pseudo-Tolkien series like this. I imagine whatever AI they used to write their script for them scraped a lot of old Warhammer army books.
One of my overarching complaints of Rings of Power is that it keeps trying to make a long story short. The Fall of Numenor takes 1,700 years, with generations of Numenorians increasingly fearing death and loving their own wealth eventually producing a people willing to listen to Sauron, worship Morgoth and invade Valinor. Here there will be maybe a year all caused by At-Pharazon’s coming coup. Sauron took a long time to build up his power base before he was ready to invade Eregoin and conquer Middle-Earth; I assume Rings of Power will have Sauron invading Lindon in a few months. It took years for Celebrindor, the smiths and Sauron to learn how to make rings of power; this show has Sauron just suggest maybe they should use mithril.
This is another symptom of the show’s infuriating impatience (along with the many other errors listed elsewhere). This siege should take months, maybe years with the proper preparations, but Rings of Power is so inpatient the siege has to be done in days. Even if you took all Bret’s posts back in time to when Rings of Power was being storyboarded the showrunners would say doing this at all historically accurate would take too much time.
And they could add in proper prep if they just planned. Peter Jackson made crystal clear in Fellowship and Two Towers that something huge and terrible was being assembled and heading towards Minas Tirith.
(Sorry to rant about the story instead of about history. Umm, yeah the Assyrians were good at sieges and maybe Sauron will learn from them.)
During the Second Age, IIRC, the Last Alliance of Elves and Men took THREE years to assemble, gather at Rivendell, and train/drill before marching on Mordor, and then spent months fighting at Dagorlad and then, wasn’t it seven YEARS besieging Barad-Dur?
What a contrast between genuine Tolkien writing and shoddy Tolkien fan fiction like Rings of Power.
“leading defenders to devise means of trying to detect undermining efforts, like a thin bowl filled with water, where the vibrations of the mining effort will cause ripples in the water, alerting the defenders”
That reminds me of a story about ancient Chinese defenders using a kettle drum set in a pit to listen for mining. They tested it on Mythbusters and it seemed to work quite well.
You know, it’s ironic that Hollywood focuses so much on pitched battles (uncommon as they were), which it loves to depict (ahistorically) as a back-and-forth of clever stratagems, while simultaneously ignoring or completely misrepresenting sieges (super common as they were), which ARE often depicted in the sources as a back-and-forth of clever stratagems.
This kind of thing always amazes me. With the amount of money they spend on these shows, surely they could afford to have some of the writers read a history of siege warfare or something.
To quote MST3K – “they just didn’t care”
They aren’t trying to grab audience share from history textbooks, they’re trying to grab audience share from Game of Thrones and Elden Ring and probably also things GRRM wasn’t involved in. In general, people are better at what they’re doing than they seem to be, and also terrible.
Case in point: Whatever you think of the plausibility of GRRMs writing, everyone seems to agree that the show started to make a lot less sense after they ran out of GRRM to adapt.
While GRRM may not have understood much about how historical warfare was actually conducted, at least his battles advanced the plot or supported his literary theme. And his world-building was incredible, right up there with Tolkien. There’s stuff going on “between the scenes” as it were that the reader has to be really paying attention to catch. For example, did you know that while Stannis is laying siege to Winterfell, if you plot the weather in each of the scenes happening elsewhere in the book, it turns out that all the winds are circulating in a giant cyclone centered on Winterfell? That’s genuinely impressive.
Noting remotely like that going on here.
Trying to think of examples in film where Hollywood Tactics were used intentionally to show the commander’s flaws. I think Troy used a slippy assault to show Agamemnon’s arrogance over his wiser commanders. Anything else? Surely Game of Thrones must have done this a few times.
There was that siege of the Tully castle, Riverrun, where Jaime and Bronn point out that the Frey heirs screw up the placement of their earthworks and the like. Of course, the fact they actually BOTHER with those in the first place (even if not in the right manner) still makes them substantially superior commanders to Adar.
Ironically, I even think there is a case to be made that outside of the narrative logic, Black Walder and Lothar Frey are actually superior commanders not just relative to Adar, but relative to JAIME HIMSELF, who in the following season proceeds to…simply march a force arranged in neat squares right up to Highgarden (a walled city on top of a hill). A force with zero siege engines, assembled or disassembled, in sight (but plenty of cavalry that’s going to be largely useless in such a siege/assault)…and then just take it over immediately ANYWAY? And of course, some of the earliest posts ever written on here point out just how awful Jaime’s generalship actually was in a battle where we are SUPPOSED to think of him as a good commander doing his absolute best.
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/11/collections-the-preposterous-tactics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/
P.S. If the argument in defence of Jaime’s success at Highgarden is that the defenders’ will broke on sight of this army and they decided not to wait for them to finish building siege engines – well, it equally does not work for the simple reason they could have had sent a raven AND GET A LITERAL DRAGON OR TWO TO SHOW UP well before Lannisters/Tarlys would have completed siege preparations from scratch. And of course, the grain basket of Westeros (which could never have supplied half the places it’s claimed to supply due to the length of land routes involved, but that’s another matter) obviously had all the food they needed to hold out until Daenerys received their message and flew to them, so that doesn’t work either.
P.P.S. While I know that this blog is justifiably averse to “listicle” format, a Collections which finds some way to rank the commanding abilities of GOT characters could be quite interesting – particularly if, as I suspect, there are going to be massive gaps between the way the show/book thinks of them and the way Bret Devereaux thinks of them.
The consistent throughline of Jamie as a character is that he does not think things through, to an extent that makes him consistently stupid situationally even though he is somewhat intelligent and educated. He is intentionally a mirror to Eddard Stark, with the same self-righteous confidence that everything will work out for him, but because Jaime allows himself to be used by others the people using him often ensure that things do work out (well, partway, and then they convince him that things went in his favor).
I don’t know how that explains Highgarden mechanically, but narratively it’s consistent that if you send Jaime to do something for you he gets lucky, and if there are any consequences they’re confined to Jaime himself. Even the incident that sets off the whole story doesn’t really have negative consequences for Cersei, things very clearly don’t fall apart for her until Jaime is out of pocket.
Very over the top examples, but there’s the Discworld with Lord Rust (and the entire aristocracy around him), most notably in Jingo. Also Zapp Brannigan from Futurama, although he’s doing more “Hollywood’s Hollywood Tactics” compared to which the likes of the average late-season GoT commander looks sane.
You mentioned undermining the wall, and it reminded me – orcs should be good at that! They live underground, and according to The Hobbit, “They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves”.
Agreed! It would also have been a good reply to the “orcs weakened by sunlight” bit. They could hide out in the tunnels during the day.
I mean, the story tension just writes itself. I have no idea how they didn’t do it, even if they were going for the dumb ‘surprise the audience’ thing.
Have the orcs besiege the city, but largely make clumsy unsupported assaults that fail. The only odd things they start doing is beating war drums 24/7 and making a general cacaphony (trolls would be useful here), and digging holes. Celebrimbor, in his arrogance, dismisses them as hardly a threat. To paraphrase Theoden “They will break upon this fortress like water on rock…but I do wish they would stop that infernal racket”. Perhaps he orders his elves to play their horns louder, so at least he can listen to sweeter sounds. Continue like this awhile (though you might want to do something for tension here), until all of a sudden, in the dead of night, the drums stop. Perplexed-looking elves peer into the gloom, until one of them hears orcish voices and pickaxing beneath their feet. A look of dread passes over their face. “They’re underground. They’re underground…THEY’RE UNDERMINING THE WALL!” he shouts, before the supports give way and the wall crumbles down around him, unleashing a tide of orcs into the ill-defended breach, losing the city.
Shows that Celebrimbor is suitably arrogant, and his arrogance rubs off on the other elves who aren’t prepared to repulse an attack they thought was beyond their clumsy opponents. Shows that Adar is playing off that arrogance and casual underestimation of orcs as unintelligent. It also shows that he is both savvy in having the orcs make noise to hide the sound of their digging, and and callous towards his ‘children’ by sending them on poorly-organised assaults he knows will fail. It still preserves a ‘surprise the audience’ thing as you very rarely see undermining on film so it feels novel, and gives a nice little moment where the penny drops in silence, and your heart drops with it.
It’s far from perfect (having Celebrimbor being quite so arrogant doesn’t quite fit his character), but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we got.
Oh, and if you wanted to continue the Sauron-the-manipulator thing they had going, have Sauron-in-disguise be the elf entrusted to do the scouting. Have him whisper in Celebrimbor’s ear that he sees no clear commander present, so they’re probably just a headless band of reavers that are well out of their depth. Have him spot that the orcs are up to something, hidden behind their palisades, but not tell anyone. You could even have him kill a scouting companion who saw it with him and pretend that orcs did it, reinforcing his evil.
That at least softens Celebrimbor from ‘arrogant to the point of stupidity’ to ‘still arrogant and dismissive, but fed poor information by someone he trusts’.
Tunneling under River is impossible.
They magicked up walls from S1. No reason they couldn’t magic up a couple of low hills from one angle of approach (to stay above the water table).
Risky but far from impossible.
Your hopefully below the water level and it doesn’t flood because fixing it evolves plugging the holes from the outside.
tell that to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who lead the operation to dig the first tunnel under the Thames in London
But not in medieval times. If no such tunnel could be completed until 1843, 18 years after it started, I think it must have been impractical for an ancient or medieval army conducting a siege.
Brunel also only had 36 people tunnelling at the same time. Meaning that Adar could have more Orcs tunnelling at the same time, plus Brunel’s innovation was the tunnelling shield, not in the actual excavation process, so they presumably used picks and shovels.
Can we ascribe any of these discrepancies to this occuring some 3,400 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings? Maybe Adar and Celebrimbor are idiots because no wars have been fought in living memory. (At least orcish living memory, the elves being much older.) Against whom would they have fought to develop experience, since the only other power on the content seems to be the Dark Wizard, whose land is many months of marching to the east (unless you have teleporting armies)?
(It’s always a mental challenge to see this as 3,400 years distant from the time of Bilbo and Frodo, since the arms, armor and equipment don’t seem to be significantly different. It’s a little like seeing Zeus in shiny plate armor in Clash of the Titans (2010).)
Adar, at least, is a veteran of Morgoth’s wars, so he should know his buisness. I’m not sure about Celebrimbor, but the defense is actually being commanded by Sauron.
Admittedly, given how events play out Sauron may have intended to lose.
There were tons of battles and wars in the Silmarillion though, and at least some of the elves (Galadriel definitely) would have been old enough to remember what crenellations looked like. When you have the collective experience of millennia-old beings, the standard should be pretty high.
War of the jewels, war of wrath, a few kinslayings and the eldar are immortal
Adar, Celebrimbor and Galadriel all lived through the entire First Age and its wars. It’s not wholly clear when Gil-galad was born (not least as the sources are inconsistent as to his parentage) but he fought at minimum in the War of Wrath. So they should all have thorough knowledge of warfare from first-hand experience.
The dwarves, perhaps less so, but their intervention in the siege is by far the most (arguably the only) competently executed manoeuvre in the whole affair, even if it was both silly in portrayal and ultimately ineffective because Plot.
Elrond also explicitly (I the show at least) has relatively little military experience and is a lot younger than the other elves. Albeit his foster-dad was Maglor so you’d imagine he may have a sound theoretical knowledge. This does make it strange that Gil-galad puts Elrond in apparent command of the battle, rather than say, Glorfindel, or indeed himself (Elrond’s protestations that Gil-galad “shouldn’t be there” for reasons of danger being ludicrous in a context where GG is one of the greatest warriors of all time, wielding a Ring of Power, and whose martial culture expects its leaders to lead from the front. Of course, he later gets successfully grappled by a random orc, because ???)
I would note that The Silmarillion depicts the introduction of dwarves to the Eldar of Beleriand as already being quite experienced in and equipped for war, because in the ages prior to that they’ve developed a habit of going to war with just about everything they have grievances with, including frequently one another.
Noldor seem to be depicted in terms of having a good capacity to figure out war even without practice in it, with everything from them having equipped themselves for violence even in peaceful Aman as tensions rose up to the fact that the first time a Noldor army encounters orcs it completely devastates them.
I think there’s a certain idea that they would be good at building exceptional fortifications just from theoretical consideration and a yearning and capacity to build those things to the best of their ability.
I would love for you to look at the sieges in Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar saga. There are two sieges – one is the siege of Crydee, and the other is the siege of Armengar. Both seem competently executed, but I’m not an expert.
I’d also like to see these!
The description of sending unsupported infantry charging against a wall just makes me think of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table against the castle of French taunters. One wonders if the orcs were told off by the caretaker for artlessly smacking their Ravager against the carefully preserved city walls.
The Royal Society for the Preservation of Historical Fortifications and Underworks sent Adar a strongly worded letter for vandalism.
And, allegedly, a pipebomb. Though it had the Society’s seal on it, and a note that said “put holes in this!” we are currently unable to confirm or deny that it was strictly related to the Society.
The link to Echelion leads to an empty page
One thing I often see in media depictions of sieges is that the defenders are sitting ducks while the attackers bombarding them. In fact, both sides would try to undermine the other. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Yuan Shao built siege tower to shoot down at the defending Cao Cao. Cao Cao then constructed trebuchets to shoot down Yuan’s towers. Yuan Shao tried tunnelings and Cao Cao responded with counter-tunnelings…
Early stone castles had very thick walls and small entrances. The defenders often gave up, unable to endure the strain of sitting passively listening to the attackers gnaw away at the wall. Later designs featured multiple gates and designs which enticed the attackers into traps, allowing a more active defence.
I hadn’t heard that. Can you name any particular sieges where this “give up after passive listening” happened? Interesting.
IIRC mentioned in Charles Oman on Medieval Warfare. I’ll hunt up the detail but will take a while.
Walls are made as thick as they need to be, based on what can be afforded, how long there is to build and what threats they are expected to face. That pattern is pretty much consistent from before the rise of stone castles at all through until their complete displacement by star forts and similar primarily earthen designs.
Gates, sally ports, and the like are placed where they can be and where they can be usefully used. A large castle built by a state in a strategic location could have sophisticated defenses, plenty of ways in and out and a substantial garrison to make use of that. A small tower built for the protection of a single family might have nothing more than a stoutly built back door – even if it was constructed in the same year.
I’ve not really seen anything to indicate a substantial change on either of these fronts over time. Designs obviously did vary, but other questions seem much more important than a simple matter of “allowing more active defense”: money, staffing, purpose.
And of course, I’ve never come across a medieval text on siege craft discussing the idea in these terms!
Are there any examples from history where the general was completely incompetant, and ordered this sort of assault? There must have been some, right? Otherwise Sun Tsu wouldn’t have needed to put in that warning about “idiot generals.”
Pickett’s Charge?
Even Pickett’s Charge was preceded by a two-hour artillery bombardment precisely in hopes of suppressing the Union artillery.
Sort of, sometimes people would try to launch a hasty assault just in case the defenders hadn’t been preparing. Those *usually* weren’t successful, but if they were you’d basically ended the siege in one fell swoop so it could be worth it to try.
I guess it’s quite telling that to explain how Saruman is foolish Bret needed an exegesis of Clausewitz’s (drink!) lengthy military theory, but to explain how Rings of Power is stupid, it’s enough to quote Sun Tzu’s manual of “Here’s the really basic stuff about leading armies, you dummies” without even needing textual interpretation.
Also, dear Bret, I really have to blame you for changing my media consumption habits. Now I can’t watch or read stuff without analysing the depicted warfare and militaria for realism. You made me discover that the Chinese have their own version of the Effigy Problem where they turn the multi-layered historical armor into something one-layered and silly in their movie designs.
“Don’t just charge your army at the enemy’s walls, only a complete idiot would do that.”
-Sun Tzu
Bret,
There were a few minor typing errors, but this is the only typo that stood out to me:
(standing unproducted, in the open, > unprotected
The siege makes more sense when you consider it from a narrative point of view beyond the fact that Adar has to win. The sad reason Adar stupidly pursues his misguided quest at the expense of his troops and all reason, is to parallel Galadriel’s equally stupid pursuit of Sauron in season 1. At least that provided the show’s only moment of genius and levity: her bosses responding to her heroism by promoting her out of everyone’s hair to a place and position where she can do no further harm.
The Peter Principle calls that a “lateral arabesque”.
One thing that this has brought to mind is how hard it actually is to demolish a stone structure pre-gunpowder. (or even pre high explosives, arguably) you can hope to burn the wooden supporting bits, but if the thing is self supporting you basically have to take it apart piece by piece.
That said, speaking of mining, I’ve seen this used in a couple of fantasy novels and I know it was used in actual mining, but was the “Light a big fire next to the war and throw water on it so it cracks the stone” method (whose name in english i can’t remember right now) ever used? Or did the mortar-construction mean that was less effective than when used on bare stone? (I presume there’s other issues with making a big enough fire, etc.)
> “Light a big fire next to the war and throw water on it so it cracks the stone” method (whose name in english i can’t remember right now)
Wikipedia says it’s “fire-setting”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-setting
There is a story in the Roman histories about Hannibal removing a boulder obstacle while crossing the Alps by building a bonfire next to it and then pouring vinegar or wine over the rock, causing it to split apart. I think historians are still arguing over whether or not this is believable. But at least we know the trope was out there!
I am surprised no one has tried to replicate this trick, it should be relatively easy and not very expensive nowadays.
The tests have been done, apparently its mostly as lime stone an marble are weak to acid.
Healy , John. 1999 Pliny the Elder on Science and Technology, oxford university press.
pages 131-133 apparently.
I understand what you usually did in these situations was mine under the wall entirely, putting in wooden supports on the roof as you did so, then set fire to the wooden supports so it collapses.
The reason is works in mining is that the localised thermal expansion of the rock from the fire already creates stress fractures because the stone (being stuck under an entire mountain of other stones) can’t expand, and then the rapid cooling causes those fractures to widen. In a wall, especially a wall that uses large amount of mortar, the expansion of the stones not only produces less stress (because there is less mass on top which is more easily lifted), most of the stress fractures will take place in the comparably softer mortar.
Not to mention of course that lighting and keeping a fire going at the base of a wall is just like a lot of other strategies a waste of men because of all the things the defenders have access to to make the base of their wall a hostile work environment.
I’ve seen “you basically have to take it apart piece by piece” as a counter to people arguing “isn’t it amazing that the pyramids have lasted so long”. (Which is frequently followed by ” must be aliens”.)
Basically, after a couple of false starts (see: Bent Pyramid), the Egyptians found a design that can’t fall over because it’s not much more than a big pile of blocks with sides at less than the angle of repose.
This would work. Its used by paleontologists to get delicate fossils out of rocks–hit one side with a torch, then dunk it in ice water. It’s surprisingly gentle, in terms of preserving fossils. Which is really amusing when you’re looking at a blowtorch and an ice bucket and hearing the cracking, but it works. And fire-cracked rock is one type of artifact, apparently obvious once you know what you’re looking for (I can’t see it, but I don’t deal with people).
The problem is how these walls were built. They’re not one rock, they’re thousands–and usually built in layers, so there’s an out layer of relatively smooth stuff and inner layers of jumbled rough-hewed stones held together with mortar. This matters, because you need to break a huge number of those rocks in order to do much damage. And the interconnected nature of the inner rocks (due do the jumbled nature of their placement) means that forces are going to spread in unpredictable directions. You would need to do this over and over and over and over again, all the while protecting your people from arrow fire and burning-hot sand and the like, as you can’t cover this without suffocating your own people.
If the rocks are wet it helps–steam expands and cracks them–but most of these walls will have been in place for a while. Not likely to have sufficient water to pop. The mortar might, I’ve had fun experiences with that before, but again, the effect will be localized.
Eventually, sure, it would work–the physics demands it. But it’s much more efficient to tunnel under the walls and light the fire there, or to break the walls via blunt force from under protection, stuff like that.
I think JRPG fantasy does the whole “actually realistic bright colors” well, even if by accident.
The TV mini-series “Masada” (1980?) I think gives a pretty good depiction of a pre-gunpowder siege. Has this been noted yet?
At the assault on the Alamo, the Mexican army used escalade tactics to a large degree and succeeded because the Texian defenders were spread very thin along the perimeter of the mission walls. Also, there was very little parapet or crenelation atop the walls and buildings that formed the Alamo’s perimeter, so the Mexican soldiers not attempting to scale the ladders or climb rubble to reach the top of the walls could sit back and fire on any defender exposing most of his upper body if he tried to shoot at the attackers or defend against a ladder climber. Texians had to mostly stand up to reload their guns and to lean out over the parapet to fire downward or grapple with a ladder meant exposure to Mexican fire from below.
As for walls with only parapet and no crenelation, popular in fantasy, besides the Alamo (which not being designed as a fortress had little even of parapet), a high profile historically important case is Shuri Castle.
The forgotten East Asian nation.
On 6th of May, 1609, Japanese attacked the castle on their first day of arrival.
Since the walls had parapets only but no crenellations, gunfire easily cleared the walls and they were successfully scaled.
“
Mantlets! Those are heavily featured in Bannerlord sieges! I’m never sure who put them there though…
“such a siege could easily run several episodes in parallel with other stories, giving us a sense of how hopeless the defense is ”
And if somebody doubts that such a story can be epic on a Hollywood scale — well, go and read Roger Crowley’s description of the siege of Malta in “Empires of the sea”. I promise, Helm’s deep will sound boring after you’ve read that.
I will admit, I think there is some basis for depicting a more fanciful means of breaking down fortified walls in the original text. In the books, when they come upon the besieged Orthanc Gandalf observes that the Numenorean construction makes the tower nigh indestructible even in the face of Ent assault, but supposes that if Sauron had time he could devise a means of getting through them. Likewise the prose around the siege of Minas Tirith, which notes that the city’s outermost wall is made in a similar manner to Orthanc (and lacking the time to work on them is why the Witch King would concentrate efforts on using Grond to penetrate the gate).
But that’s probably why you’d first want that siege to actually have Sauron on the other end of it, and then to still have some means of breaking down a nigh indestructible wall with more credibility than this oddly designed engine.
(And I think preferably something more grounded than straight up magic, since I would like that kind of thing to emphasize Sauron’s origins as a Maia of Aule. I actually think that makes the depiction of getting Orodruin to erupt is kind of a pity; there’s potential to make that really resonate with the character and the compelling idea of Sauron building up his power from a base of very little, it’s just that the idea of how to portray that and execution are ultimately lacking).
> orcs with large sledge-hammers (standing unproducted,
unprotected
It’s funny, know essentially nothing about warfare, even I can notice that Devereaux didn’t bother to mention one ugly detail: after charging across a saturated riverbed, you get to charge *up* the bank outside the city — which will be the canonical “slippery slope” — to the base of the walls.
> doomed resistance protecting the thing he cared for most, the “their smithies and their treasures”
It’s also what Sauron’s target was:
“At last the attackers broke into Eregion with ruin and devastation, and captured the chief object of Sauron’s assault, the House of the Mírdain, where were their smithies and their treasures. Celebrimbor, desperate, himself withstood Sauron on the steps of the great door of the Mírdain; but he was grappled and taken captive, and the House was ransacked. There Sauron took the Nine Rings and other lesser works of the Mírdain;”
Not sure I’d conclude Celebrimbor didn’t care about his people from this.
“orcs are not possessed of superhuman morale or cohesion”
Not intrinsically, but being backed by a powerful Ainur could give them that. Of course, Adar is not a Saruman, let alone a Sauron or Morgoth.
(The attack on Minas Tirith also benefited from supernatural anti-morale debuffs from the Nazgul.)