Fireside this week! I am still a bit behind after attending the annual meeting of the Society for Military History – conferences always leave me a bit tired and slow to get back to writing, even as they also stimulate my thinking – so the conclusion of our look at Rings of Power must wait another week. Nevertheless, I thought I’d share some of the thoughts that SMH has sent percolating in my head.
For this week’s musing, I thought I might continue some of my general thoughts from the really interesting roundtable at the Society of Military History organized by Lee Brice on the nature of ancient discipline. I think ‘discipline’ is one of those concepts that is both quite important, but also ends up turned into something of a totem, where folks confuse indicators (often visual indicators) of discipline with the actual outputs they expect from discipline. And that is in part because ‘discipline’ means a set of inputs (rewards, punishments, regulations), a set of outputs (collective battlefield maneuvers, cohesion and obedience) and also the process by which the former can produce the latter.
So let’s try to pull those apart a bit.
Our word ‘discipline’ comes from Latin, disciplina. And immediately the challenge is that the normal historian’s “resort to the original language” for greater precision is unavailable, because disciplina is every bit as broad as ‘discipline’ and in most of the same ways. At its root, disciplina means ‘teaching’ (from disco, discere, “to learn,” thus a discipulus is a student (‘learner’), etc.) and so in a military concept – because this is a word that does appear outside of a military context – it means something at its root like ‘training’ – both in the sense of the act of training and also in the sense of the knowledge imparted by training.
But it clearly also comes to include something more: the result (or expected result) of training. Disciplina militaris, ‘military discipline’ thus comes to mean a code of behavior rather than merely drill, something emperors can ‘restore’ when they reform an army. And as J.E. Lendon demonstrates at length in Soldier’s and Ghosts (2006), disciplina is the thing in the Roman mind which tempers courage, zeal and ability (virtus): it holds a soldier back when he needs to be held back. And we know from other authors, particularly Polybius, that the Romans created this disciplina in part through a system of rewards and punishments, although here an immediate caveat is necessary: Roman ‘discipline’ in this sense is proverbially harsh because that is how Polybius presents it, but in actual practice we know that many of those brutal punishments he discusses were basically never used. The vision of the Roman military as swift to punish and fierce in punishments isn’t quite true, at least for the Middle Republic.
Nevertheless, one sees both in historical militaries and in modern discussions of military issues, this sort of fetishization of ‘harsh discipline,’ by which is meant punishments, strict regulations and so on, as the way to produce what we might call ‘combat discipline’ in the sense of soldiers that comply swiftly and effectively with orders.
So as a matter of cognitive hygiene, I think its worth parceling out the different sorts of discipline, because while discipline as a single idea is useful, we also want to make sure we can break it up into its component parts to understand what we mean.
First, we have a category of ‘input discipline,’ which we can break down further. First, there is ‘discipline as teaching,’ which I’d further break down into individual training and group drill (this distinction matters for the outputs!). Then there is ‘discipline as rewards and punishments’ – with much of the attention often incorrectly placed on punishments – which I might call corrective discipline. Then finally, there is ‘discipline as regulations and life habits (habitus), which is, I think, distinct from corrective discipline. This is the category for things like Roman generals restoring ‘discipline’ by having their soldiers build lots of field fortifications or restricting their diets to essentials and thus inuring them to hardship and encouraging obedience. This is a tricky category, the one where I think there’s the greatest temptation to fail to consider if the input is actually connected to the output and to instead make a fetish out of the input.1 In any case, I’d call this regulatory discipline.
Then, of course, we have ‘output discipline,’ which are the results that ‘discipline,’ broadly construed, is supposed to produce. The most prominent of these is what Wayne Lee calls collective, synchronized discipline, the ability to get units of soldiers to fight together in a synchronized, mutually reinforcing way at greater and greater degrees of complexity. That may perhaps be related to, but is not the same as obedience to discipline, the quality of an army which obeys the orders it is given, even when they are unpleasant or difficult. This latter point is something that jumps out at descriptions of the Roman army in Greek writers (particularly Polybius and Josephus): they are shocked by Roman generals’ ability get their soldiers to do uncomfortable things, like dig earthworks, carry their own supplies, eat simple rations and carry lots of tools. But note how, while obedience to discipline and synchronized discipline are often conflated, they’re not the same: a lot of early modern pike-and-shot armies had tremendous synchronized discipline, but were mutiny-prone and it was often difficult to get them to do things like haul their own supplies or prepare their own food.
Finally, we have the ‘outputs’ that get associated with discipline but which do not require it: individual combat skill and cohesion. The association is really strong because in the early modern European military tradition (itself imitating the Roman military tradition), these values were produced through drill (which also produces synchronized discipline) and regulatory discipline. But equally, we see high combat skill in societies which do not practice drill (non-state warriors are an easy example) and high cohesion from societies which lack either drill or strong regulatory discipline (hoplites, for instance).
So ‘discipline’ as an intellectual category still has value, not the least because our sources often think it does, but we should be mindful that it is more of a category than an object: a set of interrelated ideas, rather than a single practice. And in particular, that category is a set of ‘inputs’ which military leaders assume (sometimes wrongly!) reliably produce a set of desired outputs that in turn they imagine make armies more able to win battles, which is the thing they want.
On to recommendations:
First off, in my last roundup, I forgot to include yet one more podcast I did: I was on Tides of History with Patrick Wyman talking about the military of the Roman Republic (particularly the Middle Republic during the Punic Wars). And for those who enjoyed that, I am set to record a follow-up episode next week (to go up some time later than that) to cover the other side and talk about the Carthaginian military during the Punic Wars! I’m quite excited for that, because I think the common understanding of Carthage’s armies (‘mercenaries!’) is actually mostly wrong – a point on which we may return for a blog post later in the year.
Meanwhile, just yesterday we got the latest edition of Pasts Imperfect and it is a doozy of a crossover as the team behind another ACOUP favorite, Peopling the Past popped over to discuss their project and what they have coming up. Also via Pasts Imperfect, I want to shout out the Mapping Color in History database which tracks the use of different pigments in different Asian paintings. As we talked about with textiles, in a world before synthetic dyes, pigments and colors were a product of the materials you could get and those pigments mattered a lot, so this is a fascinating database of what could be used (with an outside-of-Europe perspective, no less – valuable because most of the scholarship on this topic focuses on Europe).
Also via Pasts Imperfect but worth pulling out, an open access study, “Geochemical and Pb isotpic constraints on the provenance of the Lupa Capitolina bronze statue” (2025) has shown that – to the surprise of few Classicists, but I imagine many other folks – that the famed statue of Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf at the Capitoline (the Lupa Capitolina of the title) is, in fact, not ancient. Neither Roman, nor Etruscan, but rather High Medieval, probably made with copper from Carolingian/French/Holy-Roman-Imperial Europe.
Finally, for those on Bluesky, Evan Schultheis (M.A. Winthrop University) posted a fascinating thread on Byzantine swords, with quite a lot of detail and pictures, discussing their design and development. I found it quite informative, so I imagine many of you will too!
And for this week’s book recommendation, a mix of literature and history, John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003). This is the sort of book that is both exactly its title and at the same time quite a bit more than its title. There is, of course, a necessary caveat: the reader who goes into Garth’s work hoping for a history of the First World War will be disappointed, as the narrative remains fixed on J.R.R. Tolkien and while Tolkien saw far too much of the war, he also didn’t see a very large portion of it. This is a book about Tolkien in the Great War, not Tolkien and the Great War. There was, I should note, an attempt to make a film out of this book, which turned out alright, but lost much of the power of the book in the translation to the compressed medium that is film.
It is also not just a book about Tolkien or the ‘Threshold of Middle-earth.’ Garth follows Tolkien from his youth to his demobilization in 1919, but the scope here is wider, encompassing the core four members of Tolkien’s circle of friends, the “Tea Club, Barrovian Society” (T.C.B.S.) as they emerge, begin to write and display brilliance and depth of feeling and then of course as the Great War gets to the grim business of killing nearly all of them. The book is really about the T.C.B.S. – particularly its core four, Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith (d. 1916) and Robert Gilson (d. 1916) as much as it is about Tolkien.2 The narrative is, in its own way, that single tragic line from Tolkien’s own foreward, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead” expanded into a book, and there is value in that. In the process, Garth walks the reader through the slow genesis of Tolkien’s legendarium and his development as a myth-maker, presenting the developments of Tolkien’s writing side by side both with the snippets of his colleagues writing and the narrative of Tolkien and his compatriot’s lives.
Garth’s book is, of course, illuminating for any fan of Middle Earth who wishes to understand how their favorite ‘secondary world’ came into being. The book seems to set out with the goal to trace the First World War’s influence on the legendarium and does so, particularly in its last chapters as the gloom of war quite visibly seeps into the formation of the foundation stones of the legendarium, the Fall of Gondolin and the Tale of Túrin Turambar. But I found just as valuable and striking the many short passages of works not just by Tolkien but also by the other T.C.B.S.ites Garth sprinkles through the text, a glimpse into a literary and moral universe interesting on its own. The reader may be tempted to skip these excerpts (they do come quite frequently and dense in much of the book) but ought not; they produce much of the point and poignancy of the book.
It is oddly fitting, in a book about how Middle Earth came to be, to thus feel the anticipation of the creation of something wondrous, dyed completely through with the dark shades of grief at the world of myth and poetry and possibility that was lost to the hell of war.
- But to be clear, properly employed there is an output here. The regular Roman habits of military labor meant that when it came to it, Roman armies do seem to have had soldiers more willing to build works, dig trenches and do hard labor in the service of victory. But I think just as important, these tactics – tropes of good generals reforming underperforming armies in Roman literature – are about creating an environment of shared suffering which builds cohesion and – if that shared suffering is understood to both be shared with the commander and build towards a shared goal – morale and loyalty.
- Other members of the T.C.B.S. killed in the war included Ralph Payton (d. 1916) and Thomas “Tea Cake” Barnsley (d. 1917)
I knew just from the opening paragraph there was going to be a mention of Soldiers and Ghosts lol. It really is a very interesting book, even if it occasionally over stresses its points and is tad ambitious in how it interprets evidence. It’s also very easy to read, I sure that anyone who enjoys this blog would get a lot out of reading it. It’s also rather entertaining to read the negative reviews online from people who are absurdly angry that it doesn’t describe the Roman army as the clockwork machine they expect it to be.
The breakdown of the category discipline into distinct, but correlated, parts is interesting. So often it’s just presented as a good thing that “civilized” people have but “barbarians” do not. Would be interesting to compare how the prevalence and intensity of different aspects of discipline vary between state and non-state societies.
When I was a conscript, one important external manifestation of discipline was folding up the day-cover of the bunker on your stool at the end of the day: the correct form of the folded cover was inspected by a corporal when making the roll-call.
I remember a corporal explaining to us, silly young recruits, that the folding of the day-cover was important. If there would happen a tie in a war, there would be an international commission to inspection the folding of day-covers, and awarding the victory to the side with better foldings.
This was, naturally, a multi-level joke. The most gullible guys actually fell for it, earnestly believing that a case of a tie-breaker might happen, just like in a sports match. Most guys understood this as a slightly subversive joke, that emphasized the completely arbitrary nature and insignificance of these folded day-covers: there are no tie-breaker commissions in a war, and day covers will never be inspected. The third level, of course, was the idea that the side with better devotion to details and with discipline to carry them out will win, all else being equal.
This page has a video on how to fold the day-cover, as illustration on the news that the ritual was removed from the SOPs: https://yle.fi/a/3-9041964
The third level, I suppose, must remind people about the story of the metal band Van Halen and the brown M&Ms:
https://www.metaltalk.net/chris-dale-myth-busting-the-van-halen-brown-mm-story.php
Having just recently gotten around to reading it, I think that the best of the book lies in its description of Republican Roman infantry.
The author’s supreme confidence in preexisting culture as a singular arbiter of martial phenomena, compounded with some dated notions regarding hoplite combat, makes for some difficult reading in the early sections regarding Classical Greece.
The text on the later Roman Empire makes more tolerable observations but, drawing on very scant evidence as concerns actual battlefield tactics and conditions, doesn’t do nearly as satisfactory a job of producing solid hypotheses as was done for earlier Rome; it also generally has an unwholesome note about it that strikes one as a predisposition on the author’s part to imply a nostalgic detachment from reality as motive for the West’s fall, and in this implication steers annoyingly clear of the very substantial eastern continuance and continuity which would otherwise substantially confound the described attitude that “the ghosts won”.
The notion that adaptive refinement of tactics necessarily comes in sharp paradigmatic shifts, advanced in the defence of cultural primacy for all factors of gradualistic bent, is particularly baffling and I can only suppose that Lendon read an unhealthy amount of Kuhn in the process of filling out the manuscript.
A lot is perfectly forgivable in the context of focusing on a particular set of influences and putting others aside for other studies to treat in greater profundity, it’s just unfortunate that Lendon assumes so evidently that his particular focus is in fact the whole picture.
Yeah, I think that’s fair criticism. The book does oversell it’s point, but then again, almost all history books that push the author’s thesis (rather than merely summarising a chronology) do that to some extent. Does Lendon assume that his particular focus is the whole picture, or does he chose not to write about what’s outside his focus? I also don’t think that it is necessary to agree 100% with an interpretation to benefit from learning about it.
It’s been awhile, but the only place I really felt he was overstating the evidence is when he claimed (in separate chapters) that both open faced and closed faced helmets supported his thesis that hoplite warfare was about not showing fear to your comrades. If you draw the same conclusion from both a thing and from it’s exact opposite, then you’re deductions are on very shaky ground indeed.
Discipline is often a challenge in armies, but I suspect its often a “do as I say” issue (though of course cultural context matters too). Soldiers can exhibit rather insane tolerance for misery if they have faith in their commander, they don’t think it is pointless, and they think the commander is willing to share in it. Stannis Baratheon can get his men to eat rats rather than surrender because he will also eat rats rather than surrender in a culture that is very rare for elites. Mace Tyrell expecting the same would not go well… Officers who are not themselves disciplined are going to struggle to give the supervision necessary, would be being rather hypocritical, and might get dangerous backlash.
P.S. Its funny how the Baratheon brothers are all charismatic in their own way. Stannis and Renly complement each other well, just unfortunately they rather dislike each other. Birth order is also an issue, because King Renly with Stannis commanding his forces would be better given the relative political and military skill of the parties…
Of course while elites historically were often more than willing to show physical courage, they often were a bit too attached to their status symbols and comfort. As Bret’s logistics series illustrates, that can add up to a notable handicap at scale.
I don’t think it’s quite fair to portray this as “being a bit too attached to their status symbols and comfort.”
A lot of those status symbols were practical. We don’t think of it this way in our world, because clothing is cheap to the point of being disposable, but rich garments would be a sign of power in the past. Same with dining–it was a way to show power as late as the 1800s. And that display of strength could both comfort the men and intimidate enemies. If I’m in a siege and I see the enemy commander casually munching on roast chicken, it’s going to have an impact on my willingness to continue to eat rats. And on the flip side, if even the KING is reduced to eating rats…well, we’re hosed. Troops that see no hope aren’t going to fight very hard.
I’m not saying that this isn’t sometimes (perhaps often) a problem. But I think, rather than being a moral failing, it’s a tactical one. They are applying a military solution that’s valid in some contexts to a context in which it’s not valid. It’s like using a pincer movement when you’re outnumbered five to one–the tactic isn’t a bad one, it’s just wrong for this particular application.
It’s equally valid that sometimes the ruler sharing the hardships with his men strengthens them. There’s the story of Diocletian meeting with some foreign emissary while eating soldier’s rations in garb that was only marked as royal by the color (it was a soldier’s outfit dyed purple). It sends a clear message to the common soldiers that you’re one of Us, sharing the same hardships. It also sends the clear message to the emissary that you’re not some pampered court pet–you’re here to kill. This can be misapplied, though–see Sparta’s diplomacy, particularly with Athens.
I would note that contemporary Russian commanders seem to be doing a pretty good job at getting their troops into suicidal attacks, despite treating the troops awfully, not sharing in their hardship, there being no point to the fighting, etc, etc. Obviously the typical commander isn’t the type we hear horror stories of, but then, even when it comes to the scum of the earth who e.g. deliberately send their troops to die so they can pocket their pay, we don’t hear corresponding stories of fragging or widespread desertations/mutinies: the disciplinary actions seem to work rather well.
It seems possible that in a modern conflict the suicidal attack is not nearly as easy to identify from the perspective of the attacking troops. Just because the mobiks are being used to probe for weak points in a defensive front doesn’t mean they realize it until the moment they hear shells falling, for instance.
Yeah from what I read, Japanese seems to be the most extreme for this. Bret seems to not want to touch eastern cultures because it’s outside his expertise, but a comparison would be interesting.
WW2 Japanese officers might not share their men’s hardship, but they too endured their own hardship. Enduring hardship seems to be the culture of Imperial Japanese military.
One speculates that the hypothetical corrupt and brutal Russian general, if he is at all clever, has a small cadre of trusted soldiers who are well paid and privileged and kept safe from hazardous duty. Men whose job is, in large part, to make sure nobody in the rest of the army gets any bright ideas about fragging the general.
I’ve heard it theorized that russian culture in general glorifies ‘the great patriotic war’ and the sacrifices it incurred to a near suicidal degree.
That and some commentators have mentioned that troops are only handed weapons when sent on an assault or to hold a position far away from the commander.
Then there are rumors of a tier system of expendable wounded troops, then ethnic troops (chechens) and finally more veteran soldiers who are used to shoot any retreaters.
Finally never underestimate propaganda, especially since at the beginning of the war the troops entrneching at chernobyl hand not clue about the meltdown at all.
An obvious problem with fragging is that everybody would “benefit” from it but only one or a few people will take moral responsibility, and blame for it if they are caught.
There needs to be some specific kind of cohesion or anti-discipline in the troops so they it can frag its superiors. Think of it like labor union / mob inside an army. It can be fought and defeated in the same ways as informal hierarchy in a workforce can be fought.
By definition, the only successful fragging is one you do not hear about until well in retrospect, since otherwise things are unlikely to go well for the suspected culprit(s). Having said that, there was a general whose cause of death was reported by some as “may have driven a captured Ukrainian vehicle carrying three Russian officers into a minefield while escaping friendly fire from uninformed mortar teams, according to an unconfirmed source.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zavadsky
Before that, a number of news stories early in the war did describe generals and other senior officers going directly to frontline – which was treated as further evidence of disarray, communications breakdown, incompetent NCOs, etc. Since many secure communications systems did notoriously fail, and those frontline visits often got said officers killed, that view was certainly justified – the troops did see get to see top brass, and also knew they were “sharing in their hardship” by dying next to them, and this might have had an overlooked importance back then. This is rarely the case nowadays, but other factors have emerged by now.
> there being no point to the fighting
Former prisoners are fighting for a chance to earn their freedom. As for ordinary soldiers from outside “the two capitals” (i.e. the vast majority of them), their salary is far greater than the typical wage their region had in peacetime. This factor also combines with propaganda – just as “people believed in their own religion”, some people DO believe in even crude propaganda – especially when it helps them earn their salary. (The necessary corollary to “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”) Even getting killed can notoriously leave the bereaved family with the equivalent of years’ of deceased’s wages, all at once. (“I cannot desert because my family depends on me” is literally a reason stated in the few independent interviews, particularly with older soldiers.) Similarly, “everyone knows” that WWII was a time of suffering in the trenches which was nevertheless overcome by one’s forebears to achieve great victory, so they are conditioned to have a much higher tolerance for poor conditions.
> or widespread desertations/mutinies
June 2023 wasn’t enough of a mutiny for you? The outcome there had shown conclusively why it’s not a great idea for the leading mutineers. Before that, there were a number of reports of National Guard units refusing to fight and even managing to outright return all the way to (quite distant) home. However, they did it BECAUSE they were former riot police rather than true soldiers and their conditions were more secure – they have already been paid fairly well before the war as the key plank of the system, so even those who got fired had far more of a nest egg than a typical soldier would have had. That was one of the reasons why National Guard haven’t been used much after 2022.
I should also ask: desert to where? All the drones around the place also mean it’s harder to walk away undetected then ever before – in part because the ubiquity of hostile teams also means that areas in the rear which would have been empty in an earlier conflict now have patrols with various anti-drone equipment whenever they can be spared. Let’s just say that neither an observation drone operator nor a gunner behind the seat of a 12.7mm machine gun is likely to be forgiving to a deserter they spot – in no small part because any shortages at the frontline increase the risk of “rear” personnel like them being sent forward to plug the gap. Similarly, if getting home requires passing through areas which have been occupied since 2014, then any civilians who are still there and haven’t left in all that time are quite likely to support the very military you just deserted – if only out of the simple “other Ukrainians will consider us traitors if they ever come back” self-preservation. Those who get caught are reportedly thrown into a basement or even an open hole in the ground somewhere and kept there (often beaten and electrocuted too) until they agree to go back to the front, which rarely takes long.
To clarify – it’s not that the desertion is totally impossible, but it apparently mostly occurs as the recovering wounded slip away from field hospitals, or troops allowed to have R & R time back home* not coming back. According to a mid-2024 report, there have been ~8,000 of cases about desertion in Russian courts by then, and those typically seemed to be failures to come back from home (since otherwise a civilian court was unlikely to have been involved in the first place.)
*Yes, formally, Russian soldiers are legally allowed to return home to rest for two weeks (not including travel time) after every 6 months of being on the frontline. Predictably, this is frequently honored in the breach (particularly regarding those mobilized in 2022, as they are considered to be the least motivated and least likely to return), but it reportedly does happen. On the other hand, Ukrainian soldiers are (according to the BBC) entitled to 10 days of leave a year. That disparity may be one of the factors which explains the following (November 2024):
https://apnews.com/article/deserters-awol-ukraine-russia-war-def676562552d42bc5d593363c9e5ea0
> More than 100,000 soldiers have been charged under Ukraine’s desertion laws since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to the country’s General Prosecutor’s Office.
> Nearly half have gone AWOL in the last year alone, after Kyiv launched an aggressive and controversial mobilization drive that government officials and military commanders concede has largely failed.
> It’s a staggeringly high number by any measure, as there were an estimated 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers engaged in combat before the mobilization drive began. And the actual number of deserters may be much higher. One lawmaker with knowledge of military matters estimated it could be as high as 200,000.
> Many deserters don’t return after being granted medical leave. Bone-tired by the constancy of war, they are psychologically and emotionally scarred. They feel guilt about being unable to summon the will to fight, anger over how the war effort is being led, and frustration that it seems unwinnable.“Being quiet about a huge problem only harms our country,” said Serhii Hnezdilov, one of few soldiers to speak publicly about his choice to desert. He was charged shortly after the AP interviewed him in September.
> Another deserter said he initially left his infantry unit with permission because he needed surgery. By the time his leave was up, he couldn’t bring himself to return. He still has nightmares about the comrades he saw get killed. “The best way to explain it is imagining you are sitting under incoming fire and from their (Russian) side, it’s 50 shells coming toward you, while from our side, it’s just one. Then you see how your friends are getting torn to pieces, and you realize that any second, it can happen to you,” he said.
> “Meanwhile guys (Ukrainian soldiers) 10 kilometers (6 miles) away order you on the radio: ‘Go on, brace yourselves. Everything will be fine,’” he said. Hnezdilov also left to seek medical help. Before undergoing surgery, he announced he was deserting. He said after five years of military service, he saw no hope of ever being demobilized, despite earlier promises by the country’s leadership. “If there’s no end term (to military service), it turns into a prison – it becomes psychologically hard to find reasons to defend this country,” Hnezdilov said.
> Desertion has turned battle plans into sand that slips through military commanders’ fingertips. The AP learned of cases in which defensive lines were severely compromised because entire units defied orders and abandoned their positions. “Because of a lack of political will and poor management of troops, especially in the infantry, we certainly are not moving in a direction to properly defend the territories that we control now,” Hnezdilov said. Ukraine’s military recorded a deficit of 4,000 troops on the front in September owing largely to deaths, injuries and desertions, according to a lawmaker. Most deserters were among recent recruits.
> “The main thing is that they leave combat positions during hostilities and their comrades die because of it. We had several situations when units fled, small or large. They exposed their flanks, and the enemy came to these flanks and killed their brothers in arms, because those who stood on the positions did not know that there was no one else around,” the official said. That is how Vuhledar, a hilltop town that Ukraine defended for two years, was lost in a matter of weeks in October, said the 72nd Brigade officer, who was among the very last to withdraw.
> The 72nd was already stretched thin in the weeks before Vuhledar fell. Only one line battalion and two rifle battalions held the town near the end, and military leaders even began pulling units from them to support the flanks, the officer said. There should have been 120 men in each of the battalion’s companies, but some companies’ ranks dropped to only 10 due to deaths, injuries and desertions, he said. About 20% of the soldiers missing from those companies had gone AWOL. “The percentage has grown exponentially every month,” he added.
> Reinforcements were sent once Russia wised up to Ukraine’s weakened position and attacked. But then the reinforcements also left, the officer said. Because of this, when one of the 72nd Brigade battalions withdrew, its members were gunned down because they didn’t know no one was covering them, he said. Still, the officer harbors no ill will toward deserters. “At this stage, I do not condemn any of the soldiers from my battalion and others. … Because everyone is just really tired,” he said.
> Prosecutors and the military would rather not press charges against AWOL soldiers and do so only if they fail to persuade them to return, according to three military officers and a spokesperson for Ukraine’s State Investigative Bureau. Some deserters return, only to leave again.
My understanding that russian military culture has often done a *very* good job at the entire “creating cohesion through shared suffering” bit. Basically soldiers get brutalized in their trianing period with the potentia reward of getting to brutalize others (new soldiers or the enemy/civilians) in turn.
@Kimmo “widespread desertions/mutinies”
It has been … checks … 23 months since the last widespread mutiny in the Russian military. Is less than two years not contemporary?
Just to remind everyone, the Wagner military under Prigozhin, who formed a major part of the Russian front line against Ukraine and were equipped by the Russian state with Russian tanks, artillery, etc; mutinied in June 2023. As in launched a successful armoured assault on a Russian town (where at least some of the population greeted them as liberators) and sent armed reconnaissance forces hundreds of kilometres into Russia, shooting down Russian military helicopters along the way.
Are there historical examples where anyone in the royal line (or maybe any male in the direct royal line) could inherit, irrespective of birth order?
Most royal systems in practice, I would say. Normally the deceased king wouldn’t have a lot of power to enforce his choice, so the crown would go to whichever person could credibly posture that they had the support to win a civil war (or to the winner of a civil war). It might be the eldest son who had the most advantages and simply being the eldest might be a key part of that, and there might be formal elective rules that privilege the property heirs of the king, but you generally are looking at norms rather than laws so in the end it will come down to power in most of these cases.
I know at one point some clan leadership in Scotland formally involved a kind of election where candidacy was restricted to legally recognized members of a family, don’t know how much that reflects practices in other places. It’s also the case that polygynous monarchs tend not to automatically designate the eldest son as the primary heir.
There is also Saudi Arabia, where every son of the founder inherited the throne in order of birth one by one (provided they were still alive at the time their number came up) and so you could say “did inherit” rather than “could inherit.”
There’s more than one king who tried to get more of a say in who inherits by crowning his favorite candidate and making him co-ruler.
It’s a chancy move since a number of those resulted in the younger guy pushing the older one off the throne and into a grave…
“Islam is the contrast – other than the Abbasids, dynasties are very short-lived, as ideologically legitimacy rested with the umma, not any particular bloodline.”
Was that also the case in Shia polities? I’m curious since their ideology placed a very strong emphasis on the bloodline of Ali, so I wonder to what extent that carried over into their view of royal inheritance in the secular sphere as well.
@Hector, hard to tell because there haven’t been many Shiite dynasties, as they are usually a minority in Islamic countries.
The Safavid rulers of Iran, starting in 1501 CE, claimed descent from Muhammed and this was important in rallying support against the Turk/Mongol noble families. The Safavids got overthrown in 1727 by the Ottomans and Afghans, then in 1750 a new Iranian dynasty regained power by claiming to act on behalf of a puppet Safavid. But after that no, does not seem to matter.
@scifihughf:
I know that Shia are a minority, but at this point Islam has been going for 1400 years, so there are still a fair amount of Shia dynasties out there, looking at the grand scope of things.
Just out of curiosity I was looking up the royal family of Awadh State (centered around modern Lucknow, one of the successor states of the collapsed Mughal Empire; they had a Shia ruling house although most of the population was Hindu with large Sunni and Shia minorities). Their succession looks anything but orderly, and certainly doesn’t seem to have followed primogeniture or anything like it. In one case a childless ruler adopted his sister’s son as his heir: I know Islamic law in theory doesn’t recognize adoption, but maybe it was allowed in that case since it was within the family, and in any case he was overthrown by his uncle after four months, so I guess it didn’t much matter anyway.
Thanks for the example Hector. I’m used to thinking of Moslems as being from central Asia through the middle east into north Africa, with some in eastern Europe and Spain. The millions of Moslems in India somehow don’t count 🙂
I would guess that would-be Shiite dynasties in Iran, and even more so India, have the problem that while there is no shortage of descendants of Mohammed/the first Caliphs, there is a shortage of Iranian / Indian candidates. Even though nationalism isn’t really a thing in medieval times people do care about cultural / linguistic affinity.
@Scifihughf:
Yes, it’s easy (including for South Asians themselves) to forget how many Muslims are in India: it’s such a big country that even “14% of the population” adds up to a ton of people. Including in places which didn’t end up in Pakistan or Bangladesh after the partition.
Lucknow was interesting because their ruling house actually were Iranian immigrants- the Mughals brought a bunch of Persian and Turko-Persian followers with them when they conquered the Gangetic plain, and then the Shia Nawabs of Lucknow brought over a bunch more when they started ruling the region, because they wanted to establish a center of Persian lnaguage and culture. Khomeini’s ancestors spent some time in India, I believe, and his political enemies sometimes referred to him as “the Indian” (incorrectly, I don’t think he actually had any South Asian ancestry). They did trace their descent from Muhammad and Ali, but I don’t think that’s all that uncommon among Shia elites.
The norms (at least in western Europe) were strong enough that it did not often come down to just power. They did differ over time – inheritance in the earlier medieval period was by family rather than individual, so the Merovingians had a lock on the throne – but as a collective possession, with wars between males being quite frequent. Something similar operated in England and at magnate level, and in Russia (the Rurikids).
The Carolingians had a similar system – one absolutely had to be a male descendant to be eligible. Then the Capetians started associating the eldest son as heir and co-king, and primogeniture spread. England was unusually messy (folk memory of the earlier system?), but France at most levels settled into a clear system. The Celtic west had tanistry – a designated elected heir, the empire partible inheritance below the emperor (elected, usually within the current family).
tl:dr: there was always a fairly strong ideological base determining eligibility. Islam is the contrast – other than the Abbasids, dynasties are very short-lived, as ideologically legitimacy rested with the umma, not any particular bloodline.
Plenty of elective monarchies worked that way (eg. Sweden) at least in theory.
Something similar might be found in the fact that William I of England divided inheritances between his sons, with the Duchy of Normandy going to the eldest and the crown of England to second (with the youngest, Henry, receiving enough money to buy a decent estate).
I think the way it has tended to work out is that the norm would be to favour the eldest son, but without it being a formally enshrined system, in which the king retains the option to disinherit him in favour of another son. Although I think in practice, often such a thing is employed as more of a threat to ensure compliance than actually carrying through smoothly for inheritance.
Not exactly royal but the Habsburgs did so in extremis. In 1619 the archduchy would have by strict primogeniture passed to the brother of the dead Emperor Matthias, but the family had earlier agreed to choose a younger cousin instead. The same thing happened in 1848 when Franz Josef was chosen to succeed his uncle despite there being someone ahead of him in the line of succession (his own father).
That said, both occasions were when the succession was unclear because the ruling Habsburg had no legitimate sons, more or less in a time of crisis and I’m told there was a special sense of “the greater good” among the Habsburg house which enabled its older men to come together and make such drastic decisions, so this was not so much a historical example of what you’re asking for as an emergency response. I do not doubt that had the ruling Habsburg had a legitimate son, he would have been heir by default.
Stannis also has an actual priestess/sorceress/prophetess in his retinue (whatever you want to call her), who pretty clearly has actual supernatural powers, which is going to be an automatic ready-made source of charisma.
re: The first footnote, to what degree would Roman (or medieval) commanders have shared in the suffering, and to what degree would the soldiers have wanted them to? My only reference is historical fiction, and I feel like this is a subject I’ve encountered more in fiction related to later periods than the ones typically covered here, but the trope seems to suggest a fine line between a) appreciation that the commander isn’t living it up while the soldiers suffer and b) discomfort or irritation that the commander is trying to be “one of the men”.
Hardship is a bit relative; Roman armies were rarely reduced to the “eating rats” level of deprivation and so commanders wouldn’t expect to have to do so. But commanders often visibly expelled excess servants (note the word excess, there) and ate the same food as the soldiers whenever they were trying to instill discipline.
That’s going to be case-by-case. I’ve had some good bosses who held themselves to the same or more work hours that they held me, but the worst bosses I’ve ever had went out of their way to treat themselves badly to justify being cruel to their subordinates.
Che Guevara comes to mind here (in a political context, not a military one, i’m thinking of his time as Finance Minister of Cuba and effective head of the Cuban economy). By all accounts he had an insane work ethic, working long hours at his desk job and then taking the evenings and weekends to cut sugarcane on the newly nationalized state farms. This didn’t actually make him a success at his job, more the opposite- his whole approach to running the economy was that people should be happy to work 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, for the good of society, just because *he* was fine doing that, and if they weren’t OK with it then that meant they were contaminated with capitalist values. (I’m saying that as someone who is very much pro Cuban in general, but I have no hesitation in saying that Guevara was too far Left even for me, and not just in this area).
I know that in the 1700s/early 1800s a commander suffering alongside the troops wouldn’t have been considered normal. Reading diaries, letters, and the like from the time, it was considered a hardship for the officers on a naval vessel to eat the same foods as their men. Midshipmen in particular ate rats because it was different from the rations the men ate (and they had recipes for them, which one day I’m going to try). And I can’t really speak to Rome at all. But peoples of the Middle Ages (in as much as we can say anything about such a diverse group) seemed to hold similar views: the nobles SHOULDN’T be treated the same, and SHOULDN’T suffer the same, as the men.
Part of this is the idea they had about where different people ranked in the social order in the Middle Ages, which bled into the 1700s. The king didn’t eat better and live better merely because he was a higher rank; he was considered nearly a higher order of being–if not actually a higher order of being, then on the verge of it. This gets into a lot of really complex Medieval thought–I was first introduced to it by reading historic alchemy texts, and through de Vinci’s thoughts on where organic fossils came from (“fossil” just meant “thing that was dug up” at the time), which shows you how deeply embedded into the way people thought this whole concept was. So it would make as much sense to your average Medieval fighter that the King would share his hardships as it would for a pig to take up arms, or for a rock to wander over to a stream to get a drink of water.
On the flip side, warrior-aristocracy was expected to fight. That was their whole purpose in society. And combat, however large your retinue, isn’t going to be comfortable all the time. There’s a story in the 1800s of a man having his arm cut amputated without making a sound. When the next patient began screaming the first picked up his own severed arm and smacked the man with it, telling him to behave properly. I can’t verify the truth to it, and it’s much later, but it shows the attitudes involved–a king crying in pain would have been considered shameful.
There is a story of Emperor Maximilian I (who was highest-ranking man in all of Christendom, being the literal Emperor) besieging Padua with a joint French-Imperial army. The French knights refused to storm the town on foot with Maximilian’s landsknechts when ordered to do so because as far as they were concerned, they were too good to fight and die shoulder to shoulder with the landsknechts, who were commoners. The siege had to be lifted as a result when the town could not be assaulted because the German knights took the view of their French comrades.
That said, the (then brigadier) James Mattis was in Iraq in a foxhole in the middle of the night talking to a lance corporal, which was remarkable precisely because no one would have said anything if he stayed in a private room behind the frontline with a personal aide. As such, this may not be a matter of medieval social order, or (peacetime) social order at all.
Wasn’t there a Roman general who executed his own son breech of discipline? Early/Middle Republic.
I assume you mean Torquatus?
Would very much like to hear your take on the Carthaginian military!
Me too!
Brett,
Not sure if you got a chance to listen to this, but In Our Time had a episode about the Gracchi brothers:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0029jjb
Just putting it out there in case anyone else might want to listen.
Interesting read. The first thing I think of when I think of discipline is “restraint” which is touched on some here. Discipline is taking an enemy prisoner when you’re ordered to even though you’re angry and want to kill him. It’s standing in line rather than rushing out in front seeking personal glory. It’s picking the salad instead of the pizza.
“But I think just as important, these tactics – tropes of good generals reforming underperforming armies in Roman literature – are about creating an environment of shared suffering which builds cohesion and – if that shared suffering is understood to both be shared with the commander and build towards a shared goal – morale and loyalty.”
What I feel that many people don’t seem to get is that “discipline” is a relationship, a three-way one between the leaders, the followers, and the followers with each other. Too many people seem to have this simplistic view that discipline is the leader (general, teacher, parent) imposing their will on a number of subordinates. In reality, obedience must be given, it cannot be taken.
How one does that will depend on the specific cultural circumstances.
Nice to see a work of Tolkien studies recommended this week. When I interviewed a Tolkien scholar, I seemed to remember that he spoke very positively of Garth. Would be interesting to see a comparison of JRRT’s war experience with the other Inklings’, or with another fantasist like Dunsany’s.
I have read Garth’s book and hope to talk about it in a little more detail, but in answer to your last point, I know that there is at least one work comparing the experiences of Tolkien and C.S Lewis in WWI, but I don’t know if there are similar works concerning the other Inklings, or other fantasy authors who served.
Thank you for bringing up Dunsany; I hadn’t thought about him in this context before, but he served in the Second Boer War, WWI, and, later in life, in the Home Guard during WWII (which C.S. Lewis did as well).
Very nice little entry this week! Thanks for the insights and links. And Ollie is a Prince!
Given the message on the blanket, I think Ollie might think of himself as a minor household god.
What is the phrase on the blanket?
From Patreon:
“”Watchful Academicats” and then in Latin “we are even better than Lares and Penates” – the latter being the Roman household gods).”
Hope I’ve haven’t transgressed the unwritten law…
(Dinsdale!)
Was thrilled when I saw my favorite blogger’s name show up on the latest episode of Tides of History! Really enjoyed it and looking forward to the episode about Carthage too!
> At its root, disciplina means ‘teaching’ (from disco, discere, “to learn,”
Brings a new meaning to Disco Elysium.
> At its root, disciplina means ‘teaching’ (from disco, discere, “to learn,”
Brings a new meaning to Disco Elysium.
Your part on breaking down and understanding words reminded me of this.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/a-humans-guide-to-words
Essay sequence on how words can be misleading.
Also. Here is an article that starts off talking about the production of Ultramarine blue in medieval art.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat
“There was, I should note, an attempt to make a film out of this book, which turned out alright, but lost much of the power of the book in the translation to the compressed medium that is film.”
Just in case, I think it’s worth noting that here is a (rare?) instance where our host is somewhat more positive on a film than the average viewer or critic, rather than the opposite. According to the Wikipedia link provided, “On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 51%, based on 198 reviews, and an average rating of 5.8/10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Tolkien has the period trappings and strong performances of a worthy biopic, but lacks the imagination required to truly do its subject justice.”[26] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.[27] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A−” on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave it a 76% positive score.”
You can say all of this still easily meets the literal definition of “alright”, of course, and it wouldn’t be strictly wrong, but for comparison, here is the general reception of a recent release which we all know our host liked much, much less.
“On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 71% of 380 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The website’s consensus reads: “Echoing its predecessor while upping the bloodsport and camp, Gladiator II is an action extravaganza that derives much of its strength and honor from Denzel Washington’s scene-stealing performance.”[119] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 64 out of 100, based on 62 critics, indicating “generally favorable” reviews.[120] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “B” on an A+ to F scale (down from the first film’s A), while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it a 77% overall positive score, with 64% saying they would “definitely recommend” it.”
Or even…
“The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes calculated that 84% of 489 critics reviews for the first season were positive and the average rating was 8 out of 10. The website’s critics consensus reads, “It may not yet be the One Show to Rule Them All, but The Rings of Power enchants with its opulent presentation and deeply-felt rendering of Middle-earth.”[140] Metacritic assigned a weighted average score of 71 out of 100 based on 40 reviews, indicating a “generally favorable” response.[141] Particular praise went to the visuals and designs, while the overall structure, slow pacing, and reliance on mystery box–style storytelling were criticized.[144]
For the second season, Rotten Tomatoes calculated that 84% of 170 critics reviews were positive and the average rating was 7.25 out of 10. The website’s critics consensus reads, “The Rings of Power’s sophomore season discovers new virtues while retaining some of its predecessor’s vices, overall making for a more kinetic journey through Tolkien’s world.”[142] Metacritic assigned a score of 67 out of 100 based on 25 reviews, again indicating a “generally favorable” response.[143] Critics broadly felt that the series’ production value remained high in the second season, with praise for the visuals, design work, and McCreary’s score. The season was also seen to be more confident in its storytelling than the first, though some critics said the series still had pacing issues and too many storylines.”
Not to defend either of the above, of course, but I do think it provides an illustrative reminder that as lively as the comments here can get, we are still in quite a bit of a bubble, and for now, few of even the discerning experts know or care about the reasons which have justifiably caused virtually-universal opprobrium of those two “intellectual properties” amongst the commentariat here. Maybe it’ll yet change in the foreseeable future, maybe not just yet, but either way, knowing is half the battle.
P.S. Lines like “dyed completely through with the dark shades of grief at the world of myth and poetry and possibility that was lost to the hell of war” made me think of The Return – Uberto Pasolini’s recent, ultra-grounded adaptation of The Odyssey which omits all the obviously fantastical exploits (in part because it clearly wouldn’t have had the required budget anyway, unlike Nolan’s upcoming extravaganza) and focuses entirely on the final stretch, from Fiennes’ Odysseus washing onto an Ithacan beach to slaughtering every suitor vying after his wife Penelope (sadly omitting the aftermath with suitors’ relatives attempting to take vengeance as well). The reason is because it goes all-in on depicting Odysseus as PTSD-ravaged, to the point he is barely able to speak for much of the film, and we have a scene of him sitting and staring into the fire as the poor Ithacans unaware of his identity share the rumours they heard about the sack of Troy.
It’s impressive acting – even if one of the earliest Firesides made a rather persuasive (even if hardly unopposed) case PTSD didn’t really exist before 19th century or thereabouts. Though, no matter where you fall as far as that debate about ancient lives goes, there’s plenty of other reasons to both like and dislike it. I fall more on the “dislike” side in large part because a seemingly minor reinterpretation of Homerian character dynamics renders a major, long-running subplot virtually nonsensical, even though I see the merits which apparently garnered it the approval of a majority of viewers.
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
The PTSD in the 2020 post is narrowly defined, using a diagnostic definition for a condition that develops in people who spend multiple consecutive days adrenalized with battle-stress. Soldiers, or rather veterans, prior to the modern era, simply couldn’t have that experience; an army that spent a full week in a single pitched battle would probably starve to death, for one thing. A pre-gunpowder soldier on the march is in a very emotionally stable environment, more than most situations humans can find themselves in, and many battles at that level of technology are an engagement of a few hours or less.
PTSD-adjacent symptoms in the ancient world are something you would expect to see in civilian survivors of war more than soldiers. Individual cases of extended trauma in refugees, from shipwrecks, in prisoners and the enslaved, or even people in abusive partnerships. Plagues often left survivors with traumatic emotional mental damage, to the point that most of the features we now associate with ‘slow’ zombies show up in European plague diaries long before ‘zombie’ enters the vernacular. I would expect a sailor driven by storms and other crises from terror to terror over a long enough voyage would encounter several events where he felt completely stressed out for many consecutive days.
Note that as years have passed, professional critics have become very disliked as viewed as sellouts by more and more people, and also aggregator sites have been manipulating user reviews more and more. This isn’t limited to film. Same as calling into question the biases of ancient writers, we must look at contemporary ones and check if they unduly emphasise/downplay/omit/misrepresent whatever facts we have available, or if they don’t even mention anything factual.
Also, the professional critics don’t have the expertise to know just how badly Gladiator II gets its history wrong or Rings of Power gets premodern warfare wrong. (Rings of Power also managed to become part of the culture war, thereby giving critics other reasons besides quality to give it a good rating.)
Speaking of Book Recommendations – I would like to note that the Kindle version of “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour”, which was recommended in a Fireside nearly two years ago, is currently on a MASSIVE discount on Amazon, costing something like $1.99! I am not sure how many readers will see this message before the discount expires, but better to make an attempt regardless.
And of course, I should note I found out about this via “Military History Kindle Daily Deal Subscription Thread” on Board Game Geek – which I itself found purely because it was linked in the comments of a much older Fireside! Hence, it’s probably only common courtesy to link it here myself.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1129607/military-history-kindle-daily-deal-subscription-th/page/500
I’m listening to the linked podcast Rome, Carthage, and the Punic Wars: Interview with Dr. Bret Devereaux and Bret says “There are 13th, 14th, and 15th century mail shirts that you could put on and would protect you today sitting in museums. I mean, don’t, please. Do not destructively test the historical mail.” I had the opportunity to visit The Wallace Collection last summer, and there was an educator in one of the rooms with a collection of actual period armor encouraging visitors to come try it on. I don’t remember if any of it was as old as 15th century, and we certainly weren’t destructively testing it, but it was nonetheless a tremendous experience.
Dr. Devereaux, if you’re reading this you my my wholehearted thanks for this visit to the Wallace Collection. It was perhaps the highlight of our vacation, and it wouldn’t have happened without acoup. My wife and I were in the Marylebone area of London for lunch and had about an hour to spare before a scheduled visit to Buckingham Palace so I checked the map to see what was nearby. We were a block from the Wallace Collection, which I only recognized on the map because of your references to it here. It was amazing. We went back a few days later and spent a whole morning there.
Just listened to that podcast and it was great. Didn’t say much that I didn’t already now (from reading it here if nowhere else), but hearing things again from a different angle is always nice.
I just watched a silly YouTube video Tube video competition between US Marines and civilian mountaineers. Over and over my brain kept saying, “but those Marines would kill you”. Boot camp, infantry training, military stuff isn’t so I can dig forts or put up fences. It’s so I can kill a human being.
I feel as though this is a comment overlooking the extent to which being able to fortify in the field can be a means to an end of killing opponents, or indeed a means to the same end that even killing is only a means to.
But what happened to Christopher Wiseman?
Christopher Wiseman served in the Royal Navy during WWI and survived; he was the “one” referred to in Tolkien’s quote, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” According the Tolkien Gateway website, he went on to become the headmaster of Queens College in Taunton, England. I remember reading that he and Tolkien grew more distant over the years, although Tolkien named his third son, Christopher, after Wiseman, and there is a letter that Tolkien wrote to Wiseman only a few months before his death in 1973, reminiscing about their youth. Wiseman outlived Tolkien, passing away in 1987.
“Discipline” in the British army has two contexts. It’s one of the six core values and is described like this:
“Doing things properly and setting the right example
All teams need discipline. Discipline is vital in our line of work; it means that orders are carried out and everyone is confident that they will not be let down by their teammates.
Self-discipline is the best form of discipline – doing your job without being told. It depends on high personal standards that will earn you the trust and respect of your teammates. It gives you the courage to make the difficult choices that you will face in your career.
Discipline helps you control fear.”
It’s also a term used for specific ways of behaviour, normally self-imposed or at least self-monitored – light discipline is not showing lights at night, noise discipline is keeping noise and movement to a minimum, and so on.
And it’s used in the crime and punishment sense; there’s a distinction between “administrative action” which is a penalty for doing something wrong but not criminal, such as having dirty equipment, and “disciplinary action” which is a punishment for breaking the law.
Someone turned up evidence a few years back that apparently confirmed that J. R. R. Tolkien and a couple of friends had actually visited Lichfield (in the UK) in 1915, in the shape of signatures which appeared to be theirs discovered in an old Samuel Johnson museum visitors book.
The mention of the John Garth book in this fireside reminded of this piece of trivia.
I’m not sure how to do links in these comments, but at the time I post this a (UK) Google search for ‘Tolkien Council of Lichfield’ gets something in the vicinity.
Here is the top search result I got.
Finally returning to share my reflections on Tolkien and the Great War. This comment comes quite late, but I was very struck by the book when I read it, so I still wanted to share my thoughts. (I have already made two unsuccessful attempts to post this; hopefully this one will be more successful.)
I found Garth’s book to be one of the most enlightening books about J.R.R. Tolkien that I have read. I already knew a little about Tolkien’s early life, but I had not heard of his friends in the T.C.B.S., or the details of his time as a student at Oxford or his service in WWII. I had read The Book of Lost Tales, which contains Tolkien’s writings from this time period, as edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher, as well as other volumes of The History of Middle-Earth, but Garth’s book put those writings in context, both chronologically and in terms of the circumstances of Tolkien’s life.
The other insight that I gained from the book, even though it is not a point that Garth makes, is that Tolkien’s own motivations, in some ways, echo those of later fantasy authors who have written in reaction to Tolkien (or, more accurately, the way that imitators of Tolkien came to dominate the fantasy genre.) Some of these are people who draw on their own cultural heritage to shape their stories, as opposed to the “generic fantasy Europe” that served as the setting of so many books; in similar fashion, Tolkien’s original wish was to create “a mythology for England,” and his earliest stories were tied to specific places in England that he knew. Some write works pushing back against the stereotypes of epic fantasy and good versus evil; one point that Garth does make is that Tolkien’s writings can be seen as pushing back against those authors who, in the wake of World War I, felt that the distinction between good and evil had become meaningless, whereas Tolkien’s writings argued that good and evil still had meaning, and that art and literature could still carry a moral message.
My wife and I saw the film Tolkien when it came out. While we did not find it terrible, and it had a few good moments and memorable lines, it strays fairly far from the facts found in Garth’s book (I seem to recall hearing Garth call the film “90% fiction” in a podcast interview). At the same time, the filmmakers were quite restricted in terms of what material they could include about Tolkien’s own writings, since the film was made without the endorsement of the Tolkien Estate.