This is the final part of our five part (I, II, III, IV)1 series on the Siege of Eregion in Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last time, we looked at the orc siege and marveled at both their lack of works and also their nonsensical siege engines, concluding that Adar had launched a siege assault which would have failed without outside intervention had it occurred in the real world (indeed that it was the very model of an ill-advised assault as described in pre-modern military manuals).
This week, despite not one but two armies unexpectedly showing up in Adar’s rear while he is still fully engaged with the cities defenses, he is going to win his assault that should have failed even under ideal circumstances.
The resulting battle covers a lot of screen time over two episodes (s2e7 “Doomed to Die” and s2e8 “Shadow and Flame”), but it is frankly such a confused mess that not a lot seems to clearly happen: from Elrond’s arrival to the final ‘resolution’ scene with the survivors taking up hope again is a staggering 110 minutes (including cut-aways to other plots), making just this post-the-cavalry-arrives sequence almost twice as long as the entire Siege of Gondor (also including cutaways, c. 60 minutes). There are repeated ‘fake-outs’ where the show threatens – not terribly credibly – to kill major characters, a long sequence where an ogre shows up, accomplishes nothing and then dies and so on, but not a lot of actual consequence occurs.
Instead the battle moves through just a few phrases: Elrond’s cavalry arrives, triggering a battle outside of the city. This effort fails and the city is breached, which triggers a battle in the city streets. Then a dwarf army arrives, enabling the evacuation of what appear to be at least a dozen surviving Elves (including all of the surviving named characters, of course). In that brief description, this sequence almost makes sense, but the show loses basically all sense of spatial and chronological relationships in these scenes, making them even more of a confused jumble where, because this is Rings of Power, nothing matters.
However that basic phase sequence does provide us a way to structure the conclusion of the Siege of Eregion.
But first, as always, if you want to help support this project and for some reason force me to watch Rings of Power, you can support me and this project on Patreon (I am sure my therapist also accepts contributions)! And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or following me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
The Cavalry Arrives, Stops and Then Arrives Again For Some Reason
The open field battle – as distinct from the siege – begins with the arrival of Elrond and Gil-galad. The sequence of scenes that follows fails both as a piece of storytelling in the emotional sense, but also as a matter of logic and consistency. Elrond’s cavalry (and the orcs fighting them) jump around in the next several scenes (often confusingly after the story cuts away to some other plot), without a lot of reason but also in ways that are confusing even to a non-specialist audience. Regular viewers can, I think, get a sense in these scenes that the way Elrond handles his cavalry doesn’t make a lot of sense and that weakens what little suspension of disbelief might be left. While Peter Jackson had some moments, particularly in the Siege of Gondor, where he seemed to somewhat lose track of where things were, he was generally much better at this and at key points very deliberately zooms out to let the audience see exactly how many orcs or Rohirrim or elephants there are and where they are coming from. By contrast, Rings of Power is deeply inconsistent with how many of these fellows there are or where they are. Indeed, Elrond’s cavalry is going to end up somehow teleporting through Adar’s army to end up at the wall on the other side of the riverbed and go from a large host to about two dozen riders in a sharp drop that doesn’t seem explicable by massive casualties.
I considered at the outset of this series trying to draw a ‘blocks and arrows’ tactical battlemap of the engagement but found that I had so many arrows just labeled with question marks (‘how does that get there through those guys?’) that I abandoned the effort, and if I can’t keep track of where characters are with a pen and paper, I assume most audiences will struggle as well.
The scene opens with an elf horn ringing in the distance as Elrond’s cavalry arrives, another clear effort to evoke Peter Jackson’s rendition of the Ride of the Rohirrim, which this show so desperately wants to subvert that this will be its second attempt to do so (there will be what is basically a third attempt later in this very sequence). Elrond’s cavalry is clearly behind the orc army, moving over a stretch of open space surrounded by trees. And I should note that, from a historical-tactical perspective, this is basically the ballgame: Elrond is commanding an unexpected force of cavalry arriving behind an unfortified body of infantry which is fully committed assaulting the walls and – unlike the Witch King’s far more capable managed army in the Siege of Gondor – which has no reserves to call up. The moment that elf horn rings, this battle should be unsalvagably lost for Adar, whose sole concern should now be trying to get off of the field with as many of his orcs as he can to avoid annihilation.
But this is Rings of Power, so nothing matters.
Instead, astoundingly, Adar is able to recall his orcs across the mudsoaked riverbed from the wall they were attacking mid-assault and rush them through a forest to form a battle line to meet Elrond’s cavalry force (to add a fantasy element, in daylight, which should be a problem). And I want to be clear here that we know this is what they do because the show stops to show us the orcs rushing into position. This is, to put it lightly, not a thing armies were generally able to do.
Book and Film Note: I think part of the issue here may be that a ‘fudge’ from Peter Jackson’s adaptation here has metastasized. In the books (RotK 122ff), Théoden’s force arrives unheralded and largely undetected: he only sounds the horns as the charge begins (after his speech) meaning the Witch King’s army had perhaps at most a minute or two to prepare for impact and so are taken entirely by surprise. Peter Jackson, to heighten the tension, lengthens this out, sounding the horns first and then having the Rohirrim form up for a big speech while the orcs rush to line up to receive them. This is a fudge (“Why would Théoden reveal himself so early?”) but it doesn’t trip up the audience because the outcome is the same: the orcs are unable to resist the onset of the Rohirrim and crumble. Here, however, the ‘fudge’ is made load-bearing in the story and the result is frustration, as Elrond’s taste for dramatic – and Adar’s ability to respawn and teleport his orcs at will – determines the outcome of the story.
Meanwhile, the scene sequence for the Elf cavalry is profoundly baffling more in a ‘bad editing’ than ‘bad tactics’ sort of way, though it is the latter. At 24:21, we see a single horseman sounding his horn, alone in a field, then immediately following at 24:25, we see the Elf cavalry galloping forward at full tilt with a big dramatic chant. We get (at 24:31) a huge wide shot (above) of this mass of cavalry that shows way more horses then we will see in any subsequent scene, presumably moments away from impact. But then we have almost 30 seconds (quite a long time in this sort of medium) of the orcs getting into position, with Adar walking, slowly and menacingly, like they’re in no immediate danger. At 24:53, we cut back to Elrond’s cavalry now standing still in a field (weren’t we just charging? why didn’t we keep charging?) with Elrond out in front where we now pause to have close-ups on everyone’s face looking worries. We’ll come back to this, but I find the characterization of the Elf army and its command structure as baffling and incompetent. In any case, Gil-galad (because he’s here, but not in command despite being the High King of the Noldor), nods and Elrond gives his general’s speech, which is – in its entirety – “Death to our foes!”
Just a masterpiece in missing the impact of a two and a half thousand year old storytelling device. This isn’t a film critique, but it is simply amazing to watch the showrunners stall a scene like they are just learning to drive a stick shift. And yet there are they, fumbling with the clutch and the gear stick while Elrond tries to come up with something to say.
The cavalry then rushes forward in a big charge, with a big dramatic chanting soundtrack but of course we need to subvert the Ride of the Rohirrim again – showing that you can not do what another, better storyteller did in another, better story is not the apogee of storytelling – so the audience is denied the emotional release of impact and instead the orcs unveil their prisoner, Galadriel and Elrond pulls his cavalry to a half just a few yards away from the orcs to negotiate.
So, for one, obviously Elrond should not stop this charge. One of the problems that Rings of Power has, which Peter Jackson’s adaptations avoided, is that it really does treat all of the non-named characters as little more than props. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the writers that Elrond, in this moment, has a duty to his cavalry and that what he’s doing here is exchanging hundreds of lives for just one: the moral mechanics of a hostage situation do not translate to a large battle because so many lives are in the balance. Stopping the charge would be a deep moral failing, of the sort that is inconsistent with Elrond’s character both in the legendarium and in this show. This guy presses this charge home, even though it will bring him sorrow.
Of course that’s putting aside the physical aspect here which is that Elrond could not stop this charge in this moment even if he wanted to. In the show, he gives a single order ‘halt’ and the entire formation quickly comes to a stop. If you have ever attended, say, a horse race – much less a cavalry battle – you know how absurd this is: one has to shout to be heard by a neighbor over the pounding hooves of a dozen horses down on the track. This is the pounding hooves of hundreds of horses, the clanking of their armor, and the shouting of the enemy: there is no chance even with elf ears many riders could hear his loudest shout over the din (and he doesn’t even shout very loud).
This is part of why for historical cavalry things like banners and heraldry were so important. A medieval knight might not be able to hear the orders of his lord or captain once things got started, but he could follow the gonfalon banner of his small unit (the conroi): if that banner turned aside, he’d know to do so as well. If it slowed to a stop, he’d slow to a stop. But that system simply wouldn’t allow for this sort of precision and in any case every rider that isn’t Elrond has every incentive to deliver this charge.
Book Note: Tolkien, of course, understands this much better and so the position of Théoden’s banner is clearly noted in the Ride of the Rohirrim: “Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them” (RotK, 123). Apart from the striking metaphor of Snowmane outracing the white horse upon the flag, we know how the rest of the Rohirrim know to charge: they see that white horse upon a field of green racing forward, and they follow it (or they follow the banners of their own marshals and lords forward likewise; we get a reference immediately following to the conspicuous plume of Éomer’s helmet.
More broadly, this entire engagement with Elrond attacking the orc army from behind never happens in the narrative we do get for the fall of Eregion. Instead, we’re told, “The scouts and vanguard of Sauron’s host were already approaching when Celeborn made a sortie and drove them back; but though he was able to join his force to that of Elrond they could not return to Eregion, for Sauron’s host was far greater than theirs, great enough to both hold them off and closely to invest Eregion” (Tales, 228). From the sound of it, then, Celeborn led out some of Eregion’s army into the field and won a victory against the advance elements of Sauron’s force and then grouped up with Elrond’s army moving south from Lindon, but they were then blocked out of the siege.
Sauron’s army in this scenario is evidently large enough to be engaging in meaningful operational art, moving in several distinct columns: Celeborn engages and defeats the lead element, then marches to link up with Elrond but Sauron evidently has enough troops available to have one column invest Eregion and another block Celeborn and Elrond. There are a few ways an army could do this. Sauron’s army might simply occupy a strong natural defensive position on the route that Elrond and Celeborn must take to reach the city, thereby blocking the route. Such a position exists: the town of Tharbad dominates the main crossing over the Gwathló River, so a large orcish army fortified on the far bank might be in a strong enough position that Celeborn and Elrond can’t give battle (but not so strong that the orcs could simply crush them).
The other way to ‘stand off’ an army like this is through logistics: a defending force could engage in scorched earth tactics (seeking to destroy or remove all available forage), while closely shadowing an enemy army. By staying close enough to give battle if inclined, the shadowing force can prevent its enemy from sending out foraging parties and gathering supplies effectively, while at the same time, the shadowing force need not offer open battle (instead moving from one position of natural strength or fortified camp to another). This was the Roman approach to Hannibal in Italy after the disaster at Cannae in 216, to bottle him up by denying him the foraging opportunities he needed to campaign, while avoiding ever getting close enough to get drawn into another pitched battle (since Hannibal kept winning those). In this situation, Celeborn and Elrond maneuver, looking for an opportunity to shake the shadowing force or bring them to a pitched battle (to defeat them and move to save Ost-in-Edhil) but simply never got the opportunity in time before the city fell.
Once again, I suspect the showrunners may think themselves clever but if you are going to deny the audience the moment of emotional release they want, you ought to do it in a way that makes sense and pays off other details, not in a way that feels cheap.
In any case, this leads into a negotiation that goes nowhere, but provides us an opportunity to briefly discuss the odd nonsense of the organization of Elrond’s army.
Wait, Who Is In Charge Here?
Put bluntly, the composition, organization and command of this force makes little sense either in the context of what we see in the show or the broader legendarium. Once again, I noted that while Peter Jackson had relatively little screen time – far less than this show! – to work with, we actually do get some of the outlines of how the armies of Gondor and Rohan are organized, in part because details from the books like the men of Théoden’s house are preserved. Their characterization is even stronger in the books, but it remains present in the films.
Rings of Power comprehensively fails at this. What we are shown is a highly disciplined body of heavy cavalry – Elrond orders these guys to stop a charge in mid-gallop and they not only stop, they do it in unison keeping a perfect line. And that visual language of the Elves as extremely disciplined (in the synchronized sense) is borrowing visual language from Peter Jackson’s Elven infantry in The Two Towers (itself not my favorite of his additions). But this is a very odd conceit, one at odds with both the legendarium as well as the Elven society we are shown: it is an unthinking recourse to a certain set of signifiers of military skill without regard to if those signifiers make sense here.
In terms of the broader legendarium, certainly the impression we get is that Elven military culture is a heroic warrior culture that prizes individual skill at arms rather than collective synchronization. The heroic figures of Elven wars are, after all, individual aristocratic warriors, fighting on their own – figures like Glorfindal, Ecthelion, Turgon, Fingolfin or Fingon. From that kind of a society, we might expect considerable individual combat skills, especially from the hero-aristocrats, but not a neatly uniform army of interchangeable mechanical soldiers. Even in the context of the Rings of Power show, we see an Elven society split between its many quasi-independent lords: Gil-galad, Elrond, Círdan, Galadriel, Celebrimbor and though we have not seen him yet, Oropher (Thranduil’s father; Legolas’ grandfather), who all have a lot of autonomy and thus probably their own military forces. This is not a disciplined, professional army but an aristocratic collection of warrior bands.
But also why is Elrond in charge? Gil-galad, the High King of the Noldor, for whom Elrond is merely a herald, is riding right next to him, but in a terminal bought of ‘main character syndrome’ it is Elrond who gives the non-speech, commands the cavalry, conducts the subsequent negotiations and then leads the army. And, because this fits nowhere else, his title is ‘commander,’ a title that also feels out of place and tinny. For one, the rank of ‘commander’ is rare in armies generally (it is generally a naval rank) and more to the point is relatively recent, emerging in the 18th century (as “master and commander”)2 to describe the commanding officer of a ship too large to be left to a lieutenant but too small to merit a captain. Tolkien, by contrast, tends to stick with ranks that have their origins deeper in the past: we get Captains, Marshals and Generals, all terms with roots deep into the Middle Ages. Honestly, I think this would have been a good opportunity for a rank title in Quenya or Sindarin or, failing that, he ought to have been ‘Captain’ or perhaps ‘Lord.’
No such issue occurs in the books, though our account of this battle is extremely thin. The reason Elrond is leading the army is because Gil-galad is not present, because the war is happening in Eregion and Gil-galad’s realm is Lindon (Tales, 228). It thus makes sense that when he sends a relief army, he does not go in person, because he needs to be in Lindon ruling and probably preparing for a wider war. That said, there’s no question that Gil-galad is the overall leader of the Elven efforts and he will eventually take his army all the way to Mordor, falling in battle fighting Sauron personally beneath the walls of Barad-dûr. Were he present in Eregion, there’s no doubt that he would be leading the force.
Finally, I’ll note that over two seasons this show cannot decide the visual language it wants to use for Elven military equipment. In the first season, Galadriel went through three different completely differently styled forms of armor and Season 2 introduces two more: the steel plate Elrond’s cavalry wears (with no mail, despite the fact that Galadriel wears a mail hauberk in Season 1), which neither resembles Galadriel’s plate armor suit on the boat or her plate armor suit in the climax of the previous season, and then the armor of the soldiers of Eregion, whose armor is…rusted? They seem to wear what is clearly intended as bronze armor, but heavily corroded, with that characteristic green patina of copper-rust. This too is baffling to me: this is the – following the show’s titles – “City of Elven Smiths,” surely it should have better armor, rather than old, rusted armor made of a metal that the rest of the Elves evidently abandoned using long ago. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the bright gleam of polished metal armor was considered valuable by most ancient and medieval armies because it was intimidating: these soldiers ought to have polished their armor to a brilliant shine.
Tactical Confusion
After the negotiation scene (in which nothing much really happens), the show cuts back to the dwarf story before coming back to the siege, so while we see Elrond plan to renew his attack, we don’t see how he renews it, but instead cut back to the battle already in motion and here the showrunners have indulged in one of the most irritating tropes of battles in film: the confused, disorganized melee.
Some Elves are on foot, many are on horseback and they’re fighting somewhere in the forest, with Elrond ordering them to ‘defend the city’ and ‘to the wall!’ And what seems to be happening is that Elrond’s elf cavalry is pushing through the orc siege camp (we see him riding past tents) into the drained river. We even, to add insult to injury, see the elves’ horses get bogged down in the riverbed (where the orcs and their giant reverse battering ram had no problems at all).
We then cut to what is very clearly night on the river bank (the orcs have torches) as Adar’s orc lieutenant informs him that “the elf is faring better than we expected, his troops have destroyed five of our trebuchets.” Adar, of course, continues the effort and after a few more cuts away to other story threads, we rejoin Elrond in the midst of a confused melee in the riverbed itself.
And it is hard to know exactly how to analyze this sequence because there are so many baffling problems: it seems clear the showrunners have an outcome they want and they know they need some action sequences but no thought has been given to how those might fit into an overall battle in which combatants have to move around in obedience to the laws of physics and time.
We can start with the basic visual conceit: the repeated images of confused masses of almost evenly intermixed extras engaging in a confused series of one-on-one duels, scattered almost at random. And indeed, this is a common enough visual motif that when I describe ancient tactical systems, students do occasionally ask, in effect, “how does this system work once a confused melee develops” and are surprised when the answer is “that doesn’t happen.” The people fighting in armies, after all, want to survive and breaking into a confused one-on-one melee functionally guarantees most of the combatants will die. Such a fight would be over in mere minutes and the victory would certainly go to the side that maintained a more cohesive formation, since they would be able to swift win a bunch if one-on-lots duels. Once again, I have to note that Peter Jackson was generally better about this: while his heroes, like Aragorn or Gimli, sometimes have their moments of aristeia and plow into entire groups of enemies, the armies as a whole tend to stay in fairly clear groups in most of his scenes.
One step up from this problem is the question of just the physical terrain of this battlefield. Elrond has, apparently, pushed through the orcs in the forest, cut through their camp, pushed into the river basin and is now engaging the forces climbing the wall from the rear as they still attempt to push up the ladders. Under those conditions, where are Adar and his lieutenant even having their calm conversation? The loss of five trebuchets is a minor affair in all of this: Elrond has punched directly through Adar’s front line. If Elrond has reached the wall Adar doesn’t have an army left, because Elrond will have had to go through them to get here. I’m a broken record on this, but Peter Jackson does this better: we understand that at Helm’s Deep, when Éomer (standing in for book!Erkenbrand) reaches Théoden, that’s basically it and the battle is over, because the orc army is between them. Likewise, when Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas reach Éowyn, Merry (and the dead, filling in for book!Men-of-Lebennin-and-Losarnach, reach the gates) where the Witch King fell, that’s basically it and the battle is over, because their fight happened to the north and east of the city, but Aragorn’s force has arrived from the south and west, so Witch King’s army was between them.
And the other, other problem here is time: Elrond’s cavalry arrives seemingly at drawn. The sun is up when they come thundering along and the initial fighting scenes seem to happen in daylight. When we cut back, it is clearly night: there are torches all around and the lighting has gone back to being terrible. And Adar’s lieutenant is worried that they may not get through the wall before dawn. To which I can only ask how long have these fellows been fighting? By the ‘clock’ the show seems to set for us, Elrond’s men have been in something like continuous, direct melee fighting for something like twelve hours. One might, I suppose, argue they are elves and slow to tire but we normally figure regular humans can manage at most something like thirty minutes of this sort of exertion; longer battles likely consisted of exchanges at range and ‘pulses’ of close action as formations came together. But the decisive moments of melee fighting pretty much have to be brief for any individual soldier. Elves may be able to do more, but at no point is it suggested orcs have massively more endurance than Men and if elves had twenty-four times the stamina in combat as Men (or Dwarves, or Hobbits, or Orcs) I rather suspect we’d hear about that. The problem seems to be that the showrunners are putting the battle ‘on pause’ when we’re not looking at it, but needless to say that’s not how battles work.
In the process of this confused melee, a whole bunch of things happen which don’t matter. Elrond orders his master archer to take some sort of super-critical shot to disable the reverse-battering-ram (because one more arrow is definitely going to swing this battle), but she’s shot down before she can do it (oh no!). Why this matters given that the elves can simply walk up and stab the guys managing the reverse battering ram (or just ignore it, given that it makes no sense) is unclear to me. But then she makes the shot and there’s a huge explosion (oh no!), but this doesn’t cause the Elves to gain and sort of apparent advantage (oh no!). Then Adar sends in a large troll (oh no!) but the Elves kill him (oh no!) but he breaches the wall before he dies (oh no!), so the surviving Elves gather for a last-ditch defense of the riverbed, all twelve of them.
At the very least it would have made more sense for them to fall back into the breach, a narrow, confined space where armored heavy infantry might make a good fight of it. The intended emotional beat here is another vapid subversion, this time of the arrival of Erkenbrand!Éomer at Helm’s Deep: Elrond gazes towards the rising sun (so his elves have been been fighting, hand to hand, for twenty four hours straight) hoping for the dwarves to arrive and turn the tide of the battle, but they don’t and so his force gets overwhelmed in the open mud-pit. In part of that long sequence, Adar fights Arondir, the wood elf scout with questionable tactical sense from season 1, and stabs him twice in the chest, which made me assume that Arondir dies in that scene, but in the next episode he’s up and running around, so we can add “chest wounds inflicted by large swords” (through your useless wooden breastplate) to the list of things that don’t matter.
There is also an entire sequence where Galadriel escapes being held in Adar’s camp, sneaks into the besieged city and tries to rescue the civilians, but is recaptured. I simply want to note two things about this sequence: first it is presented as significant that Galadriel is ‘saving’ what appears to be, at most, a half-dozen people; once again the show just fails to do a good job managing scale. Second, this entire sequence of scenes, eating up a bunch of screen time, serves merely to get Galadriel from Adar’s camp, back to Adar’s camp, while removing some rings from Ost-in-Edhil so they can be delivered to Sauron, who was – immediately before this scene – in Ost-in-Edhil, the place where the rings were. In short, the entire sequence is wholly unnecessary for the story: Sauron could have recaptured the rings from Celebrimbor (as he does in the Unfinished Tales!) and found Galadriel still with Adar back in the camp with no change to the narrative (there’s also a problem with Galadriel’s subsequent fight with Sauron where the showrunners do not understand how Tolkien does ‘contests of power between supernatural beings,’ but I hope to come back to that in a few weeks with a discussion more broadly about the metaphysics and morality of Tolkien’s legendarium).
Just when it looks like Gil-galad and Elrond will be executed, the dwarf army shows up inside the city. How did they get in the city? How did they make it, undetected, to set up this firing line directly above where the orcs were holding their high-value captives?
Who knows? The show certainly doesn’t; I suppose we might guess they came over the mountain behind the city, but that just raises the question of why Elrond was expecting them to show up out in front of it and why none of the orcs spotted or heard a large body of plate-armored heavy infantry before they were lined neatly up into firing lines on the rooftops. In any case, the dwarves teleport in and attack, driving the orcs back and this enables the escape of the remaining Elves, which ends the battle. Now the confusing thing is that the arrival of a second entirely unexpected relief army, this time the formidable army of Khazad-dûm, merely enables the escape of the Elves, rather than allowing them to retake the city. Presumably because at this point everyone knows that in fifteen minutes, the respawn timer for the orc army is going to tick over and then they’ll be in trouble.
Conclusions
Book Note: The most sustained description of this event is in the Unfinished Tales and it gives us little detail about the final moments of the city, save that the city was ruined and that Celebrimbor personally led a final, doomed defense of the treasuries of the Mírdain, the artisans of Eregion (Tales, 228) where he “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,” by which I understand that Celebrimbor, at least initially, was able to hold Sauron off but was quickly overwhelmed. The Nine Rings, rather than being with Galadriel, are found in the House of the Mírdain, while the location of the Seven Rings is tortured out of Celebrimbor. Functionally no part of that actually occurs in the show: Celebrimbor is instead murdered by Sauron in his own smithy and of course Sauron hasn’t commanded the attack on the city at all, Adar has.
The final piece of the sequence is that Adar’s orcs do find Sauron in the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil and Sauron instantly takes control of them, using them to get close to and them murder Adar, which he then does, easily. Adar’s orcs have to ask Sauron, “are you Sauron?” because they do not know, which loops back to the staggering idiocy of Adar’s plan: he has brought an army Sauron can easily control and even his handpicked lieutenant is incapable of actually recognizing Sauron standing right in front of him and has to ask.
Now we’ve spent five posts and goodness knows how many words discussing the historical, tactical and operational nonsense of this sequence. Trebuchets deliver high explosive yields at modern artillery ranges, armies teleport through empty countryside and seem to require no need or logistics, Elves and Orcs fight non-stop hand to hand for a day straight and at the end of it the Respawning Orc Army just respawns. Again.
Meanwhile, neither the tactics nor the character moments of the battle matter in the slightest. Not one but two unexpected relief armies arrive behind the orcs and neither has any meaningful effect on the progress of the battle. The Master Elf Archer makes her heroic shot in her heroic sacrifice and it doesn’t matter a jot; you could take it out of the story and nothing changes. Adar fails to defend his camp, launches an ill-advised assault on the city with weapons made of nonsense and it doesn’t matter, he wins anyway. Both Elrond and the Dwarves’ arrivals are the culmination of character arcs stretching the entire season and neither impacts the story at all: if both had stayed home and let the city fall, nothing of consequence would have changed, except that slightly more faceless Eregion_Civilian_01 extras would die and slightly less faceless Elf_Warrior_01 extras would die.
Arondir is stabbed, in the chest, with a massive two-handed sword and is running around and fighting in the very next episode, which takes place at most minutes after he was left dying in the mud.
I will, for a moment, give Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire some credit: one of the emotional beats that George R. R. Martin has mastered is the one in which the fellow with the best tactics, rather than the best character, wins the battle, where the emotional blow is that storylines are abruptly cut off because someone dies and that is just how war is sometimes. But to make that storytelling work successfully, those results still need to be the result of character decisions, carefully tracked and planned and paid off: maybe Stannis deserves to win the Battle of the Blackwater, but he doesn’t because Tyrion is more clever and found a weapon – previously discussed! – to turn the fight in his favor.
Now I would argue such ‘subversion’ is already the wrong fit for a story told within Tolkien’s legendarium, which runs on different rules than Westeros does (for one thing, armies in Middle-earth have to move at reasonable speeds). But it is also clear that the showrunners here haven’t even mastered the subversion correctly: GRRM’s storytelling works because the subversions are set up, they are the carefully laid consequences of well-established character personalities and decisions. The late seasons of Game of Thrones fell apart precisely when that careful setup was abandoned in favor of getting to the Big Scene quicker (and further ‘subverting audience expectations’ when I suspect GRRM’s end-game, should he ever finish the books, is that the final subversion will be heroic tropes played entirely straight when the remaining Starks really do save the world with the Magic of Destiny and whatnot).
The failure in Rings of Power‘s Siege of Eregion is that if you treat the mechanics of the battle itself as merely set dressing, then the decisions the characters are making stop mattering too: no decision Elrond, Gil-galad, Galadriel, Arondir or almost anyone else makes changes much of anything about this sequence. Small ‘hope spot’ victories amount to nothing, immediately reversed because the plot has somewhere to go and is staggering there, slightly drunk, no matter what. That break of cause and consequence, a problem I noted in the first season, doesn’t simply damage the usefulness of, say, using a movie sequence to teach about historical warfare, it damages suspension of disbelief and audience enjoyment.
If nothing matters, why am I watching?3
And this is Rings of Power, where nothing matters.
- We kept to the original number of parts! Can you believe it? Actually, I can, because I found myself souring more and more on this sequence as I worked through it and at this point I am quite exhausted by it. As I note below, whereas the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings reward rereading (in the books) and rewatching (in the films), Rings of Power actively punishes rewatching, because so many threads go nowhere.
- Watch the film!
- Because you made me, you monsters.
I haven’t watched the show, and reading this I’m glad about it!
But on the topic of “the confused melee” I seem to remember a description of Socrates in Plato’s symposium that seems to imply something like it. In the retreat from Delium, Socrates is described as contemplating enemies as well as friends, and not being attacked because of his confident attitude. That seems to imply that individuals and small groups from both sides are mixed together.
“There was another occasion on which his behavior was very remarkable, in the flight of the army after the battle of Delium, where he served among the heavily armored. I had a better opportunity of seeing him than at Potidaea, since I was myself on horseback, and therefore comparatively out of danger. He and Laches were retreating, for the troops were in flight, and I met them and told them not to be discouraged, and promised to remain with them. And there you might imagine him, Aristophanes, as you describe (in the comic play, The Clouds), just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like a pelican, and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well as friends, and making very clear to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stiff resistance. And in this way he and his companion escaped, for this is the sort of man who is never touched in war. Only those are pursued who are running away headlong.”
That would be after the battle is decided; one side won the melee and the other side started running away. The winning side then chases them, causing the formation to break up as soldiers move at different speeds.
Since the pursing side is out of formation, this can end very badly for the pursuers if the fleeing army isn’t panicking and regroups to counter-attack, possibly with the aid of a prepared force left behind the lines. That’s one of the hardest things for a commander to pull off, but the Mongols did it pretty regularly.
Yes, it’s described as happening in the retreat. But it still happened. (Or could have happened, we don’t know how much of the story Plato was making up, but I don’t think that while writing for an audience of Athenian citizen-soldiers he would have made up an implausible military scenario).
I suspect that it’s not possible for a group to move in formation on foot as fast as people can flee individually. So after one infantry side has won the initial battle, they have three choices. Let the enemy go, leave it to cavalry to pursue, or break from their own formation to pursue.
Given that the enemy is probably wearing a lot of money in arms and armour, maybe even carrying money or valuables, it must have been pretty tempting to take the third option. That could easily end up with confused melees happening in the aftermath.
Caveat that this is experience from LARP rather than actual battle, but this behaviour fits my experience of broken forces. We’ve broken our shield wall and pursued broken forces recklessly, and it only takes a couple of people turning round and presenting their pursuers an actual fight to make the pursuers slow down. What Socrates is described as doing is definitely saving lives, but could easily also get him killed (if the enemies commit to pushing him rather than reforming and making sure they don’t get counter-attacked, he’s basically just dead)
What’s described is a very efficient literary device to convey a lot of thing about Socrates which is consistent with his depiction in his student’s work.
1. Socrates is intelligent. He knows the counter-intuitive thing that presenting arms and retreating slowly is in its way much safer than headlong flight and he
2. Socrates has good self-control. He is able to master himself against the animal instincts to obey his reason rather than his unreasoning fear.
3. Socrates is public spirited. His armed retreat doesn’t just protect himself, it also protects his countrymen by shielding their retreat.
4. Socrates provides an example. If his fellows close by start emulating him and present a fighting retreat, they’re all better off for it.
And for what its all worth, it may very well have actually happened the way the story is told. Its no big stretch of the imagination that a famously thoughtful and intelligent guy had the self-command and smarts to figure out the basics of a fighting retreat on his own and did so during his time of service for Athens and that’s something people who knew him would talk about years later as a concrete example of his virtues. Its also consistent with the amateur nature of Greek warfare at the time that the enemy doesn’t have the cohesion or discipline to band together to attack an enemy retreating in good order rather than shy off to attack people who aren’t looking to defend themselves.
“What Socrates is described as doing is definitely saving lives, but could easily also get him killed (if the enemies commit to pushing him rather than reforming and making sure they don’t get counter-attacked, he’s basically just dead)”
Not “basically just” and you are using plural, without grounds.
The way I imagine the rout, the retreating Athenians are in a loose formation. And the pursuers nearest to him are also in a loose formation – the few faster and bolder pursuers rushing ahead of their comrades among the loose scatter of fleeing enemies who are more concerned with escaping than with striking them down.
These forerunners are looking to attack the softest targets of opportunity – Athenians who have stumbled and fallen, who are visibly wounded, looking only to escape but not to defend and to strike back.
And Socrates is not among these softest targets. Rather, he is harder than most – not visibly wounded, in a group of two sticking to one companion (Laches), showing confident demeanour. The pursuer forerunners would be inclined to see Socrates as hard target from some distance and pick softer ones.
If anyone does decide to attack Socrates, he still has two further chances:
*the attacker/s might misjudge their strength against a pair of heavily armoured and not overly fatigued men and lose the fight against Socrates and Laches;
*Socrates, observing the pursuers rallying force against him and having so far preserved his breath by escaping at steady and not excessive speed might decide to sprint at that point
My impression is that the confused melee Bret criticizes is two lines clashing, fighting/pushing a bit, then _breaking up in place_ into confused melee. What you’re talking about is a _rout_, in which Socrates allegedly held ground to re-build some cohesion about himself. These are very different things.
Plus the fact that often there _will_ be that cavalry, coming in to cut down the fleeing soldiers, who are caught between enemy infantry and cavalry. How often does Hollywood show that?
“Plus the fact that often there _will_ be that cavalry, coming in to cut down the fleeing soldiers, who are caught between enemy infantry and cavalry. How often does Hollywood show that?”
It’s pretty rare to see in media, which I think is the result of 2 things:
1. Cavalry charges are generally good-guy coded. I’m sure there are examples of bad-guy cavalry charges winning a fantasy battle, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
2. Running down and killing fleeing enemies isn’t a particularly heroic thing to do.
“Running down and killing fleeing enemies isn’t a particularly heroic thing to do.”==Yes, I recall at the conclusion of Gulf War I, the American military was very worried by the images from the “highway of death,” on which American airplanes and maybe some ground units (I don’t remember) pursued and killed fleeing Iraqi soldiers. Anyone who knows Tactics 101 (which is about all I know) knows that this is absolutely the right behavior: enemy soldiers who surrender will be spared, but those who flee should be energetically pursued and not allowed to retreat and regroup (and, in the worst case, counterattack).
“enemy soldiers who flee should be energetically pursued”
So what of the Third Geneva Convention?
Like, the reason it is controversial is because of the charge that they were soldiers retreating out of the combat zone in compliance with demands that they withdraw from hostilities. If soldiers cannot safely withdraw for the sake of ceasing to fight, when can they safely withdraw? If the answer is “never”, what are their incentives to ever attempt to cease rather than hold their ground and attempt to fight to the death against an enemy that will continue shooting at them anyway?
Like, there are conceits of warfare up until industrialisation that maybe shouldn’t apply anymore even just for pragmatic reasons of how destructive warfare is now, let alone the ethics of it.
Never mind that the logic employed here is the same that could be applied to an argument that medics and hospitals ought to be fully viable targets.
And this in response to somebody talking about the metrics in fiction of pre-modern cavalry warfare. Apropos of almost nothing, you just had to get in your two cents of how an alleged war crime is perfectly justifiable actually.
@Isator, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The invasion was condemned by the UN and resolutions demanding that they withdraw in the same month. They didn’t, instead sending more troops.
(Source: Wikipedia Timeline of the Gulf War)
On 29 Nov 1990 another UN resolution called for the Iraqis to withdraw by Jan 15 or face military action. They didn’t.
In January 1991 the Iraqis attacked Saudi Arabia, dumped oil into the Gulf, set oil wells on fire. Then the Coalition finally, after giving the Iraqis five months to “withdraw from hostilities”, sent in ground troops.
And continued attacking Iraqis who were retreating, because there was no evidence whatsoever that they had any intention of actually ending combat. Saddam Hussein didn’t formally admit defeat or that Kuwait was independent.
At Isator Levi:
Retreating soldiers are not “hors de combat” and are absolutely legitimate targets. Even if they have lost their arms, quite frankly.
How are they to avoid fighting if not allowed to retreat you ask? Simple — surrender.
Demanding that they either surrender or die is a terrible choice I hear you suggesting in horror? Well, yes, it is horrific.
I’ve seen the “Highway of Death isn’t technically a warcrime” argument before, but also: How do you surrender to an A-10?
The discussion about “Highway of Death” reminds me of a couple of things.
1) That time Geneva Call NGO launched “Fighter not Killer” app which quizzed users on what does and does not count as a war crime. I checked it out of idle interest, and one of the points it was quite insistent about was that yes, shooting at a retreating fighters is perfectly acceptable because they ought to be surrendering if they want to live.
The other point which might surprise the unaware users were the several scenarios devoted to explaining to the intended users (Syria’s then-anti-government groups) that killing women taking part in combat is fine – emphasis on “taking part” because one of the scenarios was of a battle where government forces receive artillery support, and you notice an older woman pointing to your positions with a red flag (and thus an acceptable target). There was also a combination of the two, with a scenario where the…player(?) encountered a female soldier on a night patrol, was prompted if shooting at her was acceptable (yes), then after that she ran and lost her rifle in a bush and there was a prompt if shooting now was acceptable (still yes.)
https://time.com/3905026/war-crimes-app/
2) Yoko Taro’s 2014 high-fantasy (but also dark fantasy) game Drakengard 3 – a prequel to the original Drakengard, which the FAR better-known Nier spins of off. As anyone who knows anything about those games is aware of, Taro’s works enjoy messing with the moral assumptions of typical fantasy and video game narratives and Drakengard 3 was possibly an apotheosis of that particular thinking, with the protagonist effectively an out-and-out villain, a mass murderess even before the events of the game, let alone throughout it (which ties into Taro’s initial belief as a game designer that the amount of lethal violence perpetrated in a typical video game requires a psychopathic protagonist). The in-game narrative effectively serves as her “redemption” arc ONLY because the opposition are literally doomed to end the world if they live long enough, due to the very entity which revived them in the first place. (A Flower which will consume the world once it re-emerges through any one of them – including the main character – and is also said to stem directly from the “Watchers” – i.e. angels of the setting.)
That opposition are her so-called “sisters” or “Intoners”, who are actually based off women criminals and rebels executed the same day the main character was, which is also something all but One of them have no knowledge of. They don’t even know they were first executed and then revived, due to the entity-derived false memories and just think of themselves as one family mysteriously blessed with demigod powers – which most of them try to use for good as they understand it, and in all but one or two cases, their (brief) rule is shown as markedly superior to that of the old feudal rulers they have overthrown soon after awakening. One, the most important sister, literally instructs the others in the “Seven Words” that their unprecedented power could only have been granted to them for the sake of the people they serve, that they “must not overlook the elderly, the young, or the weak” and need to develop the prosperity of the nation, establish houses of learning across the land, a rule of law that can judge all on equal footing, etc. (As well as exhortations to be ready to “find new lands” and “wage war for what you believe”, to be fair.) Interpretations may vary, but I can’t help but think of that plot as a metaphor for how in an industrial society, one can take actions that are moral, immoral (the third sister does eventually go full Mengele) or in between – but all of them are generally enabled by the power which carries irreversible costs over a much longer timescale then the intended action would.
Anyway, one of the more confronting aspects of the main game is the initial encounter with the fourth sister (literally Lady Four) who keeps trying to flee and begs for mercy (while her soldiers keep willingly throwing themselves in your path – one aspect of their divine powers (the “Song”) is the fanatical devotion which builds up practically subconsciously in mortals’ minds from simply being in the vicinity, without them even intending for that to happen) but of course, she has to be killed and so she is cornered and dies, her battle song’s Japanese lyrics (“I must always kill my fleeting heart/For one day I will finally disappear/There is nobody who can see me in this darkness/I am crying all alone.”) adding to the moment. (And at this point, you do NOT know about their origin or world-ending nature yet – because the main character is concealing it from her young pet dragon and therefore from us, as part of a ploy where she is mistreating him and presents her quest as being purely power-hungry in the hope he’ll willingly devour her after she is done killing the rest and ends up as the final avatar of the Flower.)
Her “Prologue” (a tiny DLC reusing main game’s locales – all the other sisters also got one) both fleshes out her character by focusing on the conflict she feels between her duty to serve her sister and her people and the resentment from feeling none of them struggle as hard as she does and rely on her for their dirty work – AND it attempts to retroactively balance out that moment by featuring a fantasy version of the Highway of Death. That is, Four is told of a fleet of elven sky pirates on airships who are already leaving the Intoner Lands, but decides they are too much of a threat (“Who is to say when they might once again bear their fangs? We must completely eliminate any potential threats to One.”) and so burns all of them down from dragonback.
This is presented in the narrative as an extremely evil moment, with One’s dragon repeatedly asking her to back off, only to be repeatedly disregarded (including with a line, “War is as much a conflict against yourself as it is a battle against the enemy. You just need to ask yourself what it means to be on the right side.”) and it altogether successfully justified her fate to most. (Not that video game players in general lack the desire to search for whatever excuse they need to make their primary characters look as good as possible.) Yet, as pointed out above, her actions were entirely in keeping with the present-day laws of war. (Besides maybe the fleet’s mothership, which included the pirates’ children and their mothers onboard – though it was still a cannon-armed ship attempting to shoot back in the sky rather than land and attempt to surrender on the ground – not that the game’s systems ever included a code for surrendering, at any rate.)
P.S. And needless to say, her actions were certainly far more justifiable than the much better-known case of female-ruler-ordering-dragon-carnage which occurred about 5 years later at King’s Landing – and I recall THAT character still maintains some fandom (not even counting those children named after her, who are apparently now going through their first grades.)
@skulgun
> How do you surrender to an A-10?
You throw away your weapons and move towards the nearest enemy forces flying white flags.
And if they’re only suddenly wanting to “surrender” when A-10s show up overhead, then what does that tell you?
But if your reaction to all of this is that it’s simply horrific then, yes, it is. War is horrific. Be careful about choosing to engage in one.
Most fights got very 1-sided after one side started running away. There are some exceptions, such as when only part of an army routs, or the “rout” was in fact a stratagem, or when retreating soldiers manage to regroup. (Socrates plus a couple of buddies won’t turn the tide, but a bunch of stubborn hold-outs might salvage something.)
Apparently fighting could get really confused when an invasion got into a city or military camp and started grabbing valuables. If the defenders were still resisting, things could go very badly for the scattered and burdened looters… This sort of thing gets mentioned repeatedly in ancient accounts of “how army X snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”
The Mongols were helped enormously because most of those retreats were pre-planned feints.
The battle of Lund is a good example, since that kind of thing happens at least twice. (for both sides!) the result is one of the bloodiest battles in Scandinavia with 50%+ casualties on both sides.
I’m so depressed cause orc rebel against Saruon in doomed struggle would work so good tragedy wise and fit the world very well.
Instead…… this.
Could have had Sauron manipulate the good guys to weaken his rebel then surprise I win. Actually get into his manipulator and I’m smart backstory.
I very much wonder whether your critiques have been brought to the attention of the writers and show-runners of the Rings of Power and if so what their response has been. I’d imagine it would be as laughably cringey as their script writing but might be good for a laugh.
Do we know whether there is a Series 3 coming up to take apart further?
This show was pre-approved for either 4 or 5 seasons with a ridiculous $100m budget for each.
What a waste of money.
Amazon has too much money…
Ironically, Invincible is running out of money+time (mostly the latter, to be fair), which is making its animation quality go down. Yet that’s probably the most hype series Amazon has right now.
There has been a high level shakeup within Amazon, the head of the movie and TV unit resigning. At the moment season 3 seems to have been confirmed, but with the audience dropping off consistently throughout seasons 1 and 2 there’s speculation that season 3 will be the last.
Right. And that will likely make S3 even worse than the first 2, because they planned all that more time to finish whatever story they think are telling.
I’m not sure that they’ll suffer as much loss of quality as a normal storyline would, though, because when your storyline is basically “a series of random vaguely correlated events” anyway, cutting stuff out of the middle or even failing to write the intended ending may not get in the way as much. And forcing the creative team to stop and rewrite from scratch in a hurry might actually produce a BETTER result, when the overall plot seems like it was already done by “hey, ChatGPT, write me the plot of this TV season.”
Yes, I take your point.
If I was so inclined as to give this siege any kind of defence, and I’m not sure I would, it’s that it at least tries to show the different beats of a siege- rather than the typical Hollywood approach of a siege being just a battle with a big wall in the middle. There’s the bombardment/preparation stage, followed by initial assaults, then there’s a relief army, and finally a concentrated assault and the sack of the city. Now each of those elements are individually garbled. And the continuity of space, time (and respawning orc armies) is so bad that the flow is also mostly lost. But at least there’s a hint that a siege of a major city is different to a pitched battle, and that’s something that’s often lost (*cough* Gladiator II or the sieges of King’s Landing in GoT *cough*).
This makes me think that, maybe, the outline of the story was decent; and not just because it draws from Tolkien, I mean the first step of adapting the legendarium. But was then destroyed in production by some combination of teams not communicating with each other, script rewrites, bad editing, and an overly teleological approach to narratives.
“it’s that it at least tries to show the different beats of a siege- rather than the typical Hollywood approach of a siege being just a battle with a big wall in the middle.”
Can you give some examples of such Hollywood sieges? I remember Kingdom of Heaven has a somewhat proper siege.
“here’s the bombardment/preparation stage, followed by initial assaults, ”
The bombardment part seems to be indirect fire to destruct the city like in WW2 sieges rather than medieval sieges though.
“then there’s a relief army, and finally a concentrated assault and the sack of the city. ”
Those two beats rarely happen together. Most sieges would end after the “then there’s a relief army” part.
> Can you give some examples of such Hollywood sieges?
I already gave two examples… That’s not to say Hollywood always does sieges as pitched-battles-with-a-wall-in-the-middle, but it is very common. If you want more examples: Jackson’s Helms Deep or The Northman.
> Most sieges would end after the “then there’s a relief army” part.
Some, of course, but “most”? I’m not sure. It wasn’t all that rare for relief armies to be defeated, or otherwise repulsed. I don’t know if someone has done a statistical analysis to see just how often one happened over the other, but I suspect a blanket “most” is unwarranted. Anyway, I was going by the broad narrative of the story, which requires the relief army to fail something that is not inherently implausible.
I agree entirely that the bombardment phase is more Stalingrad and less medieval. I’d have much preferred them undermining or building earthworks or circum/contra vallation. And a much better sense of how much time has passed. The show obviously does a lot wrong, but that it shows some preparatory steps before a big assault is a very small mark in its favour. Criticism lands stronger when it fairly recognise the positives (no matter how minor). Otherwise it’s just a diatribe and a rant which, while fun to read, verges on hollow rage bait.
If the attacker has adequately demonstrated that they are capable of winning the siege conditional on it not being lifted by a relief army, but the defenders held out because they knew/hoped that a relief army was on the way, and they saw the relief army being defeated, then the siege would usually end promptly, whether with organized surrender or by treachery.
Free spelling/grammar check:
cities defenses -> city’s defenses
capable managed army -> capably managed army
taste for dramatic -> taste for the dramatic
horses then we will see -> horses than we will see
everyone’s face looking worries -> everyone’s face looking worried
cavalry to a half -> cavalry to a halt
Once again, I noted -> Once again, I note
a terminal bought -> a terminal bout
Losarnach, reach the gates) -> Losarnach) reach the gates
seemingly at drawn -> seemingly at dawn
gain and sort of -> gain any sort of
and them murder -> and then murder
require no need or logistics -> ???
“Just when it looks like Gil-galad and Elrond will be executed, the dwarf army shows up inside the city. How did they get in the city? How did they make it, undetected, to set up this firing line directly above where the orcs were holding their high-value captives?”
Isn’t it obvious? They’re dwarves; they tunneled into the city, duh. That’s why it took them so long to arrive.
Really the idea of dwarfs tunneling under siege lines belongs in a much better story, one where time and space are consistent.
To be fair, having just watched the episode in question, Galadriel quite specifically mentions a secret dwarf tunnel (that’s how she got into the city).
Lovely series. And far better than this turd of a show deserves. But I sadly do have to make one pedantic correction. You said, and I’m quoting.
“That said, there’s no question that Gil-galad is the overall leader of the Elven efforts and he will eventually take his army all the way to Mordor, falling in battle fighting Sauron personally beneath the walls of Barad-dûr. Were he present in Eregion, there’s no doubt that he would be leading the force.”
This is incorrect. The final, personal combat with Sauron on one side and Gil-Galad and Elendil on the other is on the slopes of the Orodruin, (Mount Doom), not at Barad-dûr. The siege takes years, and eventually presses home enough that Sauron leads a sortie to escape. He manages to break out, and the siege force chases him and he winds up making a final stand at the mountain.
I bring it up because the sequence never entirely made a lot of sense to me. I would have thought Sauron would want to personally escape eastwards and out of Mordor entirely if he managed to break out of Barad-dûr. Mordor might be lost, but he’d still be alive, and the Last Alliance can’t stay and occupy it forever, can they? And at the absolute worst, he can set up shop somewhere else and try to start taking over the local men and orcs there.
But if you look at a map of Mordor https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2015/11/tolkiens-annotated-map-of-middle-earth-transcribed/ (Here’s a link to a more general map, but it has enough details for this) Mt Doom is to the southwest of Barad-dûr, and in the wrong direction if he wants to flee to that open space in the east of Mordor.
I can think of two reasons why the final stand might end up there, but the book doesn’t have enough detail to really make anything clear. Firstly, he is being chased almost immediately after he breaks out. He might not have had much choice and needed to evade the Last Alliance’s forces in the immediate term and never got an opportunity to swing around in his eventual destination.
Secondly, it is established that The Ring is most powerful at the place it was made. And Sauron still has it for all of his other reverses. He might have had some plan of how to use it or use the mountain itself as some kind of last ditch effort, and wanted The Ring at its absolute peak for whatever he was trying.
I think either of your two reasons would make a lot of sense. If I had to pick one, it’d be the second – whether Sauron had a plan or was desperately grasping for anything that might work, he wanted the Ring at peak strength.
What source are you using? LotR proper only says that “Sauron overthrown by Elendil and Gil-galad, who perish.”
The Silmarillion says “But at the last the siege was so strait that
Sauron himself came forth; and he wrestled with Gil-galad and Elendil, and they
both were slain, and the sword of Elendil broke under him as he fell”
AFAIK, there’s no source mentioning he fell on Mount Doom, save the films, which open with him doing so.
Wait, I forgot that Elrond brings it up at the Council. Though why and how the combat ended up there is unclear.
For completeness, it’s also mentioned in one of the footnotes in Unfinished Tales, but I don’t know how good of a source you consider that to be. Footnote 11 for The Disaster at the Gladden Fields reads:
All three had fought in the War of the Alliance, but Aratan an Ciryon had not been in the invasion of Mordor and the siege of Barad-dûr, for Isildur had sent them to man his fortress of Minas Ithil, lest Sauron should escape Gil-galad and Elendil and seek to force away through Cirith Dúath (later called Cirith Ungol) and take vengeance on the Dúnedain before he was overcome. Elendur, Isildur’s heir and dear to him, had accompanied his father throughout the war (save the last challenge upon Orodruin) and he was in Isildur’s full confidence. [Author’s note.] – It is stated in the annals mentioned in the last note that Isildur’s eldest son was bon in Númenor in the year 3299 of the Second Age (Isildur himself was born in 3209).
There’s been a lot of discussion in these posts about the respawning orc army in the show, and how that seems to warp the plot and action. However, going back to Tolkien, Sauron is a character that ‘respawns’ and knows it, and we should actually expect Sauron to plan with that ability in mind.
The circumstances of Sauron’s death fighting Elendil/Isildur and the aftermath permanently (except for one brief Hobbit-inspired action) ends elf-human cooperation, and in exchange Sauron just has to take a nap while all that boring slow grind of human civilization degrading happens. Certainly he would have preferred to defeat the Last Alliance, but when he knew he couldn’t he switched to making it the *Last* Alliance by bringing the leaders into personal combat and eventually by giving them the Ring to quarrel over. He flees in whatever way he thinks will tempt Gil-Galad and Elendil to try to be the ones who catch him.
“eventually by giving them the Ring to quarrel over”
But there wasn’t really a quarrel, and the combat didn’t end human-elf cooperation. There was effective cooperation 2000 years later, when Gondor came to the aid of what was left of Arnor and the humans and elves there. What ended cooperation was the lack of elves or humans to cooperate with: no elves live south of Lothlorien after Edhellond (in Gondor) is abandoned (_also_ 2000 years after the Last Alliance), while humans are nearly extinct in Eriador, apart from the Dunedain/Rangers (who do cooperate with the elves) and Bree (which doesn’t do anything) and the Shire (taking hobbits for ‘humans’, and they don’t do anything either.)
No hint in Tolkien that Sauron was using ‘respawn’ as a deliberate strategy. We do know that his previous respawn (after Numenor) left him unable to take fair form again, and that his next one took like 1000 years (when Shadow first falls over Greenwood.) Also, I don’t think Sauron could even conceive of any tactic that would deliberately deprive him of the One, let alone leave it in the hands of his enemies, and let alone doing so _at Mount Doom_ where it could be easily destroyed.
I won’t speculate as to whether the ethnic cleansing of all of those regions you list was the result of active measures or just ‘self-deporting’ populations after the end of the Last Alliance made them feel unsafe living around each other, but I will argue that it began immediately and was completed within about one normal Elf generation.
I do think the Jackson movies kind of play up Elrond’s bigotry, but that depiction does tie Isildur’s handling of the Ring at the end of the war to that bigotry. I would also point to the fact that it is actually impossible for anyone to intentionally destroy the Ring (and Gandalf believes even Maiar cannot successfully make that choice) as evidence that Sauron is not actually concerned about losing the Ring permanently.
My assertion is not that Sauron doesn’t care about being defeated; he would prefer not to lose and die, but he doesn’t consider losing and dying a failure, just a less desirable opportunity.
” the ethnic cleansing of all of those regions you list was the result of active measures or just ‘self-deporting’ populations after the end of the Last Alliance made them feel unsafe living around each other, but I will argue that it began immediately and was completed within about one normal Elf generation.”
I have no idea what you mean. What regions? I mentioned Edhellond, where elves continued for 2000 years, and there’s no evidence of Gondor being the reason they left. And Eriador, where humans continued for 2000+ years, and elves are not why they’re almost extinct now. (Contrast with Great Plague, possibly caused by Sauron, and the depredations of Angmar, definitely an agent of Sauron.)
Tolkien is a bit confusing about the Ring. Gandalf says, after interrogating Gollum, that Sauron had thought the One destroyed long ago, and only learned from Gollum that it hadn’t been. There are also lines about Sauron not conceiving of it; perhaps he had been balancing “I thought they couldn’t but I can’t sense it anywhere”, or he thought Men couldn’t but elves might, or he distinguished “toss the Ring in right after Sauron’s defeat” from “sneak it into a Mordor filled with Sauron and his armies”.
And in one of the letters, Tolkien says
‘At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted.’
with a clause suggesting that maybe one could resist if it somehow teleported to Mount Doom at full health.
“Jackson movies kind of play up Elrond’s bigotry”
More like “invent it out of whole cloth.”
Typos
> looking worries.
> pulls his cavalry to a half
“Instead the battle moves through just a few phrases:”
phases
” Galadriel and Elrond pulls his cavalry to a half”
halt
“…Actually, I can, because I found myself souring more and more on this sequence as I worked through it and at this point I am quite exhausted by it.”
Understandable, and I for one thank you for your service and sacrifice, good sir! It might’ve been a grueling experience to write (and watch the show in order to be able to do that), but it’s been an absolutely amazing and even more hilarious read. I’d say it’s been infinitely more enjoyable than the show, but I’m not even sure if that’s even a compliment, so let’s just say it was an enjoyable read and leave it at that 🙂
It’s funny, with the issues with logistics and respawning Orcs and everything, and the instantaneous reforming in the middle of an assault, this army would make much more sense if it was a Warhammer Vampire Counts-style Undead army. No logistics to worry about, the respawning is diegetic, and vast quantities of troops act at the will of a single Necromancer.
I have wondered for a while what the historian thinks of undead armies – but I’d assume they have no real parallels. I’m aware he did cover the zombie apocalypse trope a long time ago, but they seem a very different breed of threat from the undead of fantasy.
The performance and possibilities for undead armies depend utterly on the rules around them.
E.g. what zombies can do depends very much on whether they’re subject to physics or not.
Do they dehydrate and become brittle? Or do they just move like they’re actors with makeup? Does losing a leg mean they crawl, or is the leg still there spiritually?
Do they suffer problems due to daylight, religious icons presented forcefully (which ones?), salt circles, garlic, silver, crossing water still or running, etc. And what problems?
e.g. if undead are not prevented from crossing water then river bottoms become their highways.
So I’m not sure what you can say about them, unless the rules get established and then either followed or broken.
It should be noted that river bottoms are often full of very slick mud, thick layers of sediment, unexpected deep patches with turbulent currents that are difficult to navigate, fish that might try to take a bite out of you, and other things that would make navigation treacherous. Walking long distances along a river bottom is unlikely to be faster than walking the same distance along a river bank, even if you don’t need to breathe.
“Walking long distances along a river bottom is unlikely to be faster than walking the same distance along a river bank”
But likely stealthier.
Warhammer has a couple of instances of the undead walking underwater, but yes, it’s mainly for the surprise factor. (one novel has a necromancer infilitrate Marienburg”s canals while the defenders are focusing on stopping his army on land…)
One might blame film school? We’ve recently experienced serious differences with those behind the cameras and ourselves on a project, about which we are very clear as to what we want and we don’t want. What we don’t want are extended, compositional takes that aren’t the action we are documenting. I.e. this isn’t a fiction film, a drama, but a documentary. They camera people kept defaulting to long takes of scenery and sky, close-ups of lovely plants, etc. Instead of the musicians in action, the gathered people and their actions. The documentary is about them. But the camera people wanted to play stunning composition instead. It took forever to get it in their heads.
In a large-scale motion picture project, the camera people are very specifically told exactly what they’re supposed to be taking shots of, and every shot is carefully and laboriously staged. And shooting a scene can often cost several hundred dollars an hour or very easily thousands, so they don’t get to just take close-ups of lovely plants or whatever just because that’s what they want to take a picture of.
No, the problem here is that the planned sequence of scenes that were written in advance by a screenwriter or some such did not make sense as written into the script. The desire for visual spectacle on the camera may help explain, but is not a complete explanation.
Clearly the dwarves *dug* their way inside. They have massive, specially trained badgers to do their digging.
When they announced that there would be a new series set in Middle Earth, I hoped that they would dial the epicness way back, since we have seen enough of that on the big screen, and tell a more intimate story. My idea was something like Cheers but at the Prancing Pony. The main characters are staff and regulars, but occasionally have to deal with ruffians and adventurers coming through. It would be more of a dramedy than a sitcom, as threats from the wider world touch the tavern, however lightly. This is a show that I, personally, would watch. I never thought it would be to anyone else’s taste, so I never bothered pitching it to someone who could have actually made it happen. Maybe I should have.
Or, dropping the comedy aspect, it could be set during Saruman’s takeover of the Shire, showing how things get worse and worse, and end with the Scouring.
A long time ago, I once did a “secret LoTR” campaign in the old Dragonquest system. The players were a group of non-state peoples whose lands were being landed in and pillaged by tall men from across the sea. The goal of the campaign was very limited; provide enough of a nuisance to these sea-kings that they decided to set up their port and thus focal point of extraction about 50 miles down the coast instead of smack in the middle of their people’s lands.
I never explicitly said they were fighting the Numenoreans in their later days but before the downfall, but my players figured it out pretty fast.
The major ‘franchises’ seem allergic to episodic storytelling. See also: throwing away a perfectly good planet of the week space western setup in The Mandalorian.
The thing that’s been fascinating is reading all the “here’s how this should go-” bits I’ve kept thinking back to, of all things, a Warhammer 40k novel, Storm of Iron.
It is, obviously, set in the grim darkness of the far future and features demons, genetically engineered supersoldiers, and an empire that’s largely identical to when it was founded 10,000 years ago, so I can’t claim any hard realism, but it seems like it follows a very competently executed siege.
Of note, there is a scene where the Chaos Space Marines do indeed throw wave after wave of their own men at the walls – but, they’ve done this by forcing poorly-armed slaves to assault the walls, and have done so as a ruse to make the commander of the outer walls panic and reveal the locations of the guns on the walls so they can begin a more methodical programme of targeting them with their own.
Other tools noted appear throughout, too – undermining, a system of parallels to deliver firepower, sallies against that, stealth and treachery all feature throughout. And the methodical aspect of the siege means it frequently switches between slower character scenes as everyone reassess their position and the action as the next attempt at forcing a breach occurs. Throughout the whole thing, the Iron Warriors, the besiegers, are acutely aware of the possibility of the Imperium sending for relief and the need to both stop them from doing that and the need to prepare for the seeming inevitability it will happen, aware they don’t have the luxury of time.
You might like it! I’m very surprised it’s so – again, accurate isn’t a perfect word, but plausible.
Maybe Im missing something, but my impresssion is that Warhammer 40K is not even a passing aquaintance to realism, and isnt even trying to strike up a conversation.
E.g in your example people with more advanced technology than ours are besiging walls, which is something that has not really happened for around a century in our timeline. So while it sounds like the emotional beats are similar to a medieval seige, would they not be nonsensical in the technological context?
Warhammer 40K’s technological context is well…. schizophrenic, to be simple. Not only is magic a real factor, but technology is highly idiosyncratic, and a combination of various factors makes it unreliable. The end result is often a deliberate kind of anachronism or weird mishmash simply because the various people have a very idiosyncratic tech base. Just in general even in the relatively civilized days of the 30K period, we’re dealing with a society that fundamentally does not understand most of the tech it utilizes, or has only partial or incomplete understanding of it.
That said they *also* have sci-fi superstrong (and in some cases explicitly physics-defying) materials. Though not neccessarily everywhere.
” there is a scene where the Chaos Space Marines do indeed throw wave after wave of their own men at the walls – but, they’ve done this by forcing poorly-armed slaves to assault the walls, and have done so as a ruse to make the commander of the outer walls panic and reveal the locations of the guns on the walls so they can begin a more methodical programme of targeting them with their own.”
This is so plausible that it is literally happening in modern warfare as we speak – it’s pretty much standard Russian infantry tactics in Ukraine. Read Jack Watling’s RUSI reports for more detail.
Surely, the obvious answer is that the Dwarves executed a subterranean assault. Combined with the observation that nobody keeps scouts (thus armies can surprise cities) the suddenness of their appearance is only to be expected.
Strangely, LotR is at least a missed opportunity to dampen enthusiasm for the “everyone is surprised when the cavalry saves the day” trope. Because the good guys are the ones who are getting besieged, both attempts to lift the sieges need to succeed. On one occasion no blocking force exists due to incompetence, on the other it does, but both its existence and its circumvention are cut from the adaptation (thus misleading commenting military officers about the Witch King’s comprehensiveness). Principally, a show would need the good guy army to lay a siege (or press an army) to make it plot-appropriate for a relief force to come, be spotted, and repulsed.
Well, Faramir’s doomed charge against Osgiliath should count for that.
I suspect this incoherence is the end result of the way many blockbuster films (and I guess TV shows) are done now.
Everyone looks at Marvel’s box office and wants to imitate them. So they use their interpretation of “the Marvel method”.
The Marvel method that worked was using multiple films *that could stand alone*, but also with tie ins that rewarded watching them all.
However, what people got from it is “whatever Marvel is doing, do that.”
The current Marvel method appears to be that the “showrunner” controls everything. So the director is told what to film with no idea of how it fits into the final film.
CGI sequences are bought and paid for before they have the base stuff on film.
The film is then put together in the editing room. The CGI may fit, or it may not – and then has to be redone at the last minute.
It’s focus grouped and then changed as a result. I suspect they have to do a lot of CGI to put it in front of a focus group, since otherwise it’s unwatchable. So that stuff may end up getting thrown out too.
This explains why it’s incoherent, because the director films lots of stuff, and the editor stitches it together.
The watchers either complain a lot (like OGH), or they see explosions! and don’t care about dialog or character (or even plot) because there’s only a bad translation into their native language anyway.
Watch a martial arts film with no sound and no subtitles sometime. How much do you get other than “one guy is fighting another for some reason (or lots of guys)?”
To be fair, a lot of things I tune out the action sequences, because they’re bad, or boring, or just fluff. So if I were in those focus groups with cheap placeholder CGI, I wouldn’t mind much.
An action sequence should advance the plot, or reveal character, or preferably both.
A sequence where “stuff blows up” and neither happens is a waste of money, good only to sell TVs with.
I wonder if like a commenter noticed upstream, the sequences are planned by a film school graduate who wants to film stuff that’s the result of an exercise in composition.
I don’t remember exactly how this happened on the show, but the outcome of the Battle of the Blackwater is a little more complicated than the summary here, including a surprise relief army, though none of it is counter to the point here about cause-and-effect. Tyrion’s chain/wildfire defense is necessary but insufficient to stop Stannis because as Tyrion realizes to his chagrin, the chain turned Stannis’ wrecked fleet into a bridge, and Stannis commands such uncommon discipline and loyalty from his troops (not the only instance) that they’ll follow him across the decks of a burning fleet. It’s the surprise arrival of the Tyrell/Lannister army, itself the product of a surprise alliance, led by somebody wearing the murdered Renly’s armor, that causes Stannis’ men to break. In the next book Tywin basically refuses to acknowledge that without Tyrion’s efforts King’s Landing would’ve been lost before he arrived, because he sees his activities as the decisive action (and because he hates his son). Still, all of that is building on stuff that was shown or alluded to before, and plays out logically.
This season of Amazon’s other, now much better fantasy show, The Wheel of Time, has been thin on warfare but I wonder if Bret will get around to assessing the latest episode’s assault on the village of Two Rivers. Trying to avoid spoilers, but generally much more coherent than Rings of Power’s first-season village assault by a similar mix of humans and nocturnal humanoids. It never felt as thinly-populated as RoP, where you keep wondering where the rest of the army went and why the fate of civilization rests on only 12 people on screen.
I couldn’t help muttering to my wife “that village needs a ditch” and rolling my eyes at the archers being given the “nock / loose” commands like they were musketeers.
It’s been a long time since I read the books, but I’m pretty sure in Jordan’s actual work, they do dig a ditch and line it with stakes, although the Trollocs manage to get through it.
Indeed they do! And they even have a reserve force (of cavalry), and catapults with explosive ammunition (but that’s created using magic)…
Honestly one of the better battle sequences in WoT – great stakes, cool tricks, good exploration of morale and tactics. Robert Jordan had many flaws but his battles were always really cool as a reader.
Jordan, notably, had some military experience of his own, though in Vietnam, and I think it shows up a bit here and there, especially depictions of the One Power.
For all his flaws as a writer, Jordan knew a fair bit about warfare, and the outcomes of his battles almost always fit the form talked about in this article of character decisions and sound tactics leading to rational outcomes.
I watched most of the first season of that, and didn’t see a single woman tug on her braid! Obviously not the actual Wheel of Time.
The braid-tugging and skirt-smoothing got worse in the middle books of the series, so I suppose it’s coming…
I tried the first episode, as I recall, and am afraid I thought little of it. Would you advise me to give it a more generous chance?
It’s one of those shows that may not satisfy either superfans of the books or people who’ve never read the books. (I started the series in the ’90s when it was supposed to be a trilogy and abandoned it about 10 years later when it hit book 7 with no signs of wrapping up, but at least the story ended with book 14.) The story and post-apocalyptic worldbuilding of the show don’t really gel until the third season, so that’s about 20 hours of setup. There’s a lot of magic use, but the combat is largely small-scale to this point, though various large-scale battles develop later in the novels.
“(there’s also a problem with Galadriel’s subsequent fight with Sauron where the showrunners do not understand how Tolkien does ‘contests of power between supernatural beings,’ but I hope to come back to that in a few weeks with a discussion more broadly about the metaphysics and morality of Tolkien’s legendarium).”
To be fair, I think this was always the weakest part of the Jackson films too. It’s just a very hard dynamic to capture on screen! Very much looking forward to a longer post on this though, it’s something that always fascinates me.
The problem–and the fun–of Tolkien is that it’s really hard to wrap your head around some of these concepts. It’s fun, because if you’re into this sort of thing it allows for near-endless exploration; Tolkien really thought this stuff through, and his letters and legendarium demonstrate that. It’s problematic, because Tolkien is really, really subtle with some of these. That makes it both easy to miss, and incredibly difficult to put on the screen. You can have Galadriel reject the Ring, but how do you show that THIS is the moment she repents from her rebellion against the Valar? How do you show that she’s being offered a parallel to the choice of Feanor and making the one he couldn’t? How do you show the eons of fighting against not just Sauron but Morgoth that’s coming to an end here, knowing she’s going to lose everything she worked most of her long, long life for at that moment? And that’s just one scene! You could say something similar for most scenes in LOTR, much less the legendarium!
“It’s just a very hard dynamic to capture on screen”–Yes, probably most of us have had the experience of being cowed by the moral force of another human being, such as a powerful and respected boss or an influential and inspiring professor. But the kind of dominance exercised by such figures is hard to capture solely with visual images. This ad, funnily, does a half-decent job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KscChA1DxAk
Its part of the Martin narrative that Tywin isn’t the master politician he wants people to think he is that his chosen narrative of the battle doesn’t have a place for his son gallantly and shrewdly executing his subordinate role of holding Stannis in place for Tywin’s master stroke. It would enhance Lannister prestige generally to include that detail but Tywin won’t because despite his claims to be all about the family its really all about Tywin. Weterosi martial culture thinks of the hammer as more important than the anvil and would give him top billing for the result but he can’t even muster the grace to spread the glory that much.
If it had been Jaime or even Lancel in Tyrion’s place, I expect they would’ve gotten more credit. As glory-hungry as Tywin is, that particular detail was probably more about his hatred of Tyrion.
Tywin in general is a lot less of a master manipulator than most characters think. Not just in the sense that he makes mistakes, but in that a lot of the stuff that people attribute to him isn’t actually, on closer reading, something he did or even wanted. There’s a fairly interesting “Shadow Tywin” that looms over a lot of proceedings and it’s difficult to disentangle the actual Tywin from it.
Galadriel is also given the “Commander” rank back in S1, if I recall correctly, leading a squad/section of no more than a dozen troops. So it’s clearly a very malleable rank structure these elves have. But, as you said once or twice, nothing in Rings of Power matters.
Galadriel’s full title is “Commander of the Northern Armies”, which presumably means she at least theoretically commands a significant portion of the elven kingdoms’ military might, which is backed up by the fact that she’s in the war councils and can demand a meeting with the High King on her arrival in Lindon with full expectation of getting one right away.
Presumably the elven armies are not very busy or she wouldn’t be able to retain the title while regularly leading a squad into the deep wilderness to hunt a guy everyone thinks has been dead for like a thousand years.
FINGOLFIN MENTIONED! WOOHOO!!
Most proud and most valiant of the elven kings of old!
Related to the Silmarillion, do you have any thoughts on the description of the five great battles in the Wars of Beleriand? Each of these battles seems to take place over the course of days and hundreds of miles of frontage. To me, that seems more like the First World War than premodern campaigns. How do you interpret these battle narratives and the overall operational picture?
The copper-patina on the armor definitely makes zero sense, but I wonder if the troops of the City of Elven-smiths could be using copper-plated steel for the visual effect? Did anything like that ever happen historically?
I googled this a little bit.
About the only method I could find mentioned before electroplating was to chisel grooves into a hard metal e.g. iron, then hammer the softer metal into those grooves. Apparently copper was used in this fashion on iron to make it easier to add gold on top of the copper.
Not sure if they would go to the effort of copper-plating and then *not* gild the result.
I don’t think this could be done for the whole piece. I’m not sure that was possible before electroplating was developed. Possibly you could fit a sheet over it with extra thickness where the grooves were and just hammer the whole thing. Don’t know how successful that would be.
And there’s ‘blued’ steel, but that is mostly about rust protection.
Very very often! You can’t bond gold to ferrous metals, but you can bond it to copper alloys, so if you wanted to make something strong but gilt, say an armour buckle or an elbow guard, a common technique was to coat the ferrous metals in copper alloys, then gild the copper. Many documents from the 14th and 15th centuries mention armour and buckles of gilt copper, and the 1296 rule of the armourers of Paris mentions gauntlets with coppered scales. I talk about two low-tech ways to bond copper alloys to ferrous metals in an unpublished paper.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, of South Park fame, gave a lecture at the University of Colorado about screenwriting. One of the tools mentioned in that lecture was writing down your plot beats as short sentences and linking them with “therefore” or “but.” And if you cannot link your scenes, then your plot has no consequence and your audience will be bored and not care.
Obviously this isn’t true of all movies and all stories but it’s a basic screenwriting tool that the writers of ROP could benefit from greatly.
Perhaps Adar brought the day/night switching device the aliens used in Plan Nine from Outer Space.
Also, I fully expect the final Game of Thrones subversion to be that GRRM dies, his literary executor finds the file for the final manuscript… And it’s just “Ha ha, I’m too busy cashing my royalty checks to finish this series!”
I for one am glad you’ve had a chance to get this out of your system.
I kind of like the idea that the elves gear is ancient and covered in a patina, it makes them seem like ancient immortal beings from another age.
I recently realized talking to my 85-year-old father that he considers the 1980s and 1990s to be “nowadays” and “the present” and “recently” when talking about cultural trends, and he considers media from these decades to be “new and current” and celebrities from this era to be “young kids”.
With this sort of perspective, I can easily see a millennia old elf thinking that they don’t need to polish their armor because they “just did it” three centuries ago, but to them it feels like it was just last week.
There’s “I don’t need to get a new set of armor” and then there’s “I don’t need to prevent rust”. I can see the first, but not the second for a competent warrior no matter how ancient.
The older warrior is probably *more* into polishing, sharpening, etc. As this is something he can do well without thinking.
“The older warrior is probably *more* into polishing, sharpening, etc. As this is something he can do well without thinking.”
There are old warriors and there are warriors who don’t take care of their gear, but there are no old warriors who don’t take care of their gear.
Leaving a stable oxidation patina of verdigris on copper or a copper-alloy is probably the only viable multi-century method of protecting it from chloride damage. They could do magic instead, I guess.
Wax is an option that would have been available to them.
If the oxidation was done intentionally I would buy the argument. I’ve done a bit of silversmithing and patinaing is absolutely something you do in jewelry, including brass, bronze, and copper jewelry. (Some jewelers use urine to do it, eating and drinking various things to affect the chemistry and thus the color. Makes sense from a biochemical and metalworking perspective, but not from a 20th century cleanliness perspective.) The thing is, while modern silversmiths and jewelers can geta way with splotchiness, ancient aesthetics would demand more uniformity. You just don’t see random splotches in ancient stuff. Precision was hard, and thus impressive, in that era; in our era precision is extremely easy, while a lack of precision indicates something was made by a human.
The other thing is, you still need to protect it. The oxidation is either malachite (if it’s green) or azurite (if it’s blue). These are not particularly hard materials. And they’re going to grow in ways that are going to reduce their already low strength. Not much of an issue for a ring or necklace, which isn’t supposed to experience much in the way of stress anyway. For a bit of armor, on the other hand, it’s a major issue. Just rubbing against other bits of armor would be enough to damage the patina.
I could see them justifying this regardless, at least to some extent. Elves, remember, have that whole draw toward the sea due to Ulmo. Intentionally making armor blue, either in whole or in places, would be a way to reflect that. And we’re already willing to accept that 1) elves make things better than humans, and 2) film armor is mostly for show, so we can handwave the strength issues. But it’d have to be intentional–something someone obviously did for a purpose.
The far, far, far, far, far, far, far easier and cheaper way to do all of this, of course, is a tabard. You could literally get away with buying cheap tablecloths–or even bolts of fabric from a fabric store–cut a hole for the head, toss them on the extras, and not worry about armor as much. It’s Medieval, not ancient, but so’s the armor they’re using so we’re not exactly worried about anachronisms here. You can make them whatever color you want, and if you want a design a bit of spray paint and some cardboard is all you need. They wouldn’t even have to hem the things, the increasingly frayed look would add to the visual imagery showing the battle was long and grueling.
‘ there’s “I don’t need to prevent rust”. I can see the first, but not the second for a competent warrior no matter how ancient.’
Pretty much everything in Tolkien, made by people who aren’t totally mundane humans, seems to last forever without maintenance. (I dunno about orcs.) Lots of weapons and musical instruments have survived for over a century in Smaug’s lair. I doubt trolls were polishing Glamdring and Sting. The Barrow-blades, made by Dunedain of Cardolan, are in perfect condition when Tom gives them to the hobbits.
So in this case, “I don’t need to prevent rust” seems perfectly kosher for an ancient elf or dwarf warrior. The necessity was removed by the elf or dwarf smith.
Except that this explanation rests on the premise these arms and armors *not rusting* because of their craftsmanship. Which yes, if the armors of Eregion weren’t rusting, then they wouldn’t need rust prevention. But they are clearly, visibly rusting – that is the one piece of pictorial evidence we have about them. And it’s not even like an even patina that could speak of some kind of deliberate effort, it’s very much the uneven coverage coming from a lack of care.
“But they are clearly, visibly rusting”
Ah, didn’t realize the discussion was about on-screen rust. Welp. Another show deviation from Tolkien, then…
I liked the detail, for instance, in Bodrov’s Mongol (2007), that Jamukha is endlessly sharpening his knives.
Or, to quote GTA 3: “I’m a businessman, and this is my business.”
Now you have to do War of the Rohirrim.
Except that could easily be done by merely repeating over and over again: “The plot once again fails while trying to apply Peter Jackson’s ideas from the Battle at Helm’s Deep/of the Pelennor Fields to the situation at Edoras.”
huh thought i made a comment.
but god yeah they utterly wasted the Doom and tragedy of a Orc Rebellion against Saruon though, been fun and epic to work with it, especially if it was tied with Saruon showcasing his manipulation chops by manipulating the Elvish Kingdom’s to war against his Rebellious Orc Faction.
Instead… this.
I had a thought in my head for the great part of this series that I want to share. I apologize in advance if this comment is the length of a blog post in itself.
But what if at least some of the ways in which war is portrayed, whether it is in RoP, LotR, GoT, or any other media, are actually done like this intentionally; and specifically for a didactic reason?
War is bad. War is in fact a really really terrible thing, one of the worst experiences that a human can go through, and something that should absolutely be avoided at all cost unless no other alternative is possible. I think (I hope) that this is something that all readers here, in the 21st century, can agree on.
This idea that “war is a bad thing” was brought to the eyes of most people on the planet through WWI and WWII footage, which, as the blog mentions repeatedly, many battle scenes are still being inspired by, even if it is very anachronistic for the setting. So I wonder, could some of this anachronism be actually intentional? What if the idea that the director wants to convey to the audience is not that of medieval or fantasy armies fighting a medieval war, but that of a 21st century army fighting in a 21st century war? Even if the visuals on the screen are swords and catapults and city walls, the scenes instantly evoke the idea of trench warfare, artillery, urban fighting.
The medieval war is portrayed as cruel and barbaric, because modern war is a cruel and barbaric business. The orc trebuchets are shoddily made out of logs and ropes, because that evokes exactly this image: these are cruel and barbaric tools, used by cruel and barbaric people (the orcs) to do cruel and barbaric things (siege the city). “We” (as in, 21st century humans) don’t do this kind of thing anymore, because we know that it is cruel and barbaric. This conduct — warfare — is something that we have left behind in a darker, more primitive past; it should be as absurd to a modern viewer as the reverse battering ram is to an engineer.
So I wonder if some of these scenes are not actually set up in this way, at least partially, because this is the goal: not to depict a historically accurate vision of medieval (or faux-medieval fantasy) battle; but to show the horrors of actual modern day warfare. Which I hope I don’t need to point out is *not* a thing that was left in the past in many places around the world.
If media showed wars as they really happened in the past, before the modernization of war in the 20th century, perhaps the viewer could get the wrong impression. If the viewer saw generals in a camp discussing supply lines, organized columns of infantry marching in a tight formation, and knights in shiny armor, maybe they would get the idea that *modern* war is not actually so bad. That it is something that is simply a man’s day job, as it used to be for a large portion of the population for centuries in the past. Something that one might even find individual pleasure and glory in.
If movies are going to be historically inaccurate about warfare (and to be fair I wouldn’t expect them to be accurate in the first place, their purpose is to entertain a broad audience, not to convey accurate facts that withstand expert analysis); then I would rather war be shown as something terrible, dysfunctional, messy, that ends with immense suffering for both sides. Yes, historical wars have not been fought this way, because historical commanders and soldiers are reasonable people who do not want themselves or their friends and allies suffer. But I think it is also important to show to a modern viewer, who statistically probably has no personal experience with warfare at all (and I am very happy to live in a time and place where I can say this!), that war, modern, medieval, ancient, fantastical, really is something brutal and horrible in and of itself. And that might be even more true especially in the current deteriorating political climate around the world.
The problem is that if Rings of Power is attempting to show that “war is bad” or “the horrors of actual modern day warfare” then the writers / directors are just as incompetent as they are in other aspects of story telling. RoP warfare is almost always consequence free for the named characters (eg Arondir getting stabbed in the chest and not bothered about it). Nor has the show made any serious effort, for example, to show how the surviving villagers from season 1’s orc attack and volcanic eruption are coping.
And it’s not like there aren’t previous examples that could be copied if that is what RoP actually wanted to do. Paths of Glory was made all the way back in 1957, or for a medieval example Ken Branagh’s Henry V film in 1989 and the aftermath of Agincourt.
And All Quiet On The Western Front!
im sorry I could not hear you over the sound of apparently… 70 on going conflicts going on in the world today. va quick google search.
21st century nothing, we have no unified anything, no unified theorem, about literally anything. the only thing all humans share in common is this.
We live, then We die.
So not good defense argument for bad media.
I do think that a lot of these shows/movies are drawing on the world wars for their visual language, though I’m not sure how deliberate it is. It may be because they’re recycling tropes from older movies, which drew more consciously from those wars (in part because many of the people making them were veterans of the world wars).
Also, if your goal is to show that “war is bad”, it’s hardly necessary to resort to anachonism. An accurate depiction of what “foraging” entailed in pre-industrial warfare would quickly disabuse the viewer of any notion that war is good.
“The orc trebuchets are shoddily made out of logs and ropes, because that evokes exactly this image: these are cruel and barbaric tools, used by cruel and barbaric people (the orcs) to do cruel and barbaric things (siege the city).”
I don’t know if that was the intent, but if it was, I disagree rather strongly with it. Visually associating the cruelty of war with primitive and “barbaric” technology creates a comforting distance for us living in our “civilized” society, when in reality the cruelty of war and the level of “civilization” of a society are basically uncorrelated. Trebuchets were very precisely-engineered machines made by very intelligent and civilized people, and none of that made things any nicer for the people inside a city when its walls were breached.
Highly doubtful. These are tv people.
“then I would rather war be shown as something terrible, dysfunctional, messy, that ends with immense suffering for both sides”
I think it’s quite fair (and truthful) to portray war that way, but I’d disagree with you that film-makers (or makers of other cultural products) ought to try to portray a normative message that “war is bad”. It’s perfectly possible for something to be terrible, dysfunctional, messy, involving tremendous suffering for both sides, and still to be *worth it*. I don’t want film-makers, novelists, writers etc. to be promoting the message “war is bad” any more than they promote the message “war is good”: they should be truthfully showing both the costs and the benefits, including showing the political changes that come about in the aftermath of the war, and letting the reader or watcher decide if the war was worth it or not.
If that’s what they were going for, Tolkien beat them to it and did a much better job. There’s a lot of speculation that the Dead Marshes were meant to look like the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack, which Tolkien had seen firsthand in World War I. Middle Earth is a world where magic and dragons are very much weapons of mass destruction, wiping cities off the map and leaving the earth scarred for generations. In earlier drafts about the fall of Gondolin, the Orcs drove tanks. And the heroes ultimately win the war against Sauron by destroying the ultimate weapon instead of wielding it.
Well, the Brown Lands certainly remind me of the Red Zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
“The zone rouge (English: red zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War. The land, which originally covered more than 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles), was deemed too physically and environmentally damaged by conflict for human habitation. Rather than attempt to immediately clean up the former battlefields, the land was allowed to return to nature. Restrictions within the Zone Rouge still exist today, although the control areas have been greatly reduced.”
Certainly not a chemical weapon attack. Bodies are remarkably well-preserved in bogs. Yes, it’s presenting the aftermath of a huge and destructive war and metaphysically damaging the place instead of just physically, but Tolkien doesn’t do allegories. It’s a natural consequence of such a war that happened in-setting for reasons that make sense in-setting, for just reasons that have no equivalent IRL. And it’s massively destructive even though it’s just. That’s just how life is sometimes.
The problem is you still need it to be plausible. By all means emphasise how awful war can be. It honestly probably wouldn’t be that difficult – simply show the fact that it’s a fairly hard march most days, with rations that aren’t necessarily reliable, while the quality of the cooking depends more on your ability to cook than anything. Maybe toss in a few scenes of particularly enthusiastic soldiers (that in the actual battle, their overenthusiasm causes them to make mistakes that get them killed) and show just how miserable, difficult and dangerous combat actually was. Then show the nobility prattling on about how glorious the fighting is. That, if the actually battle clearly makes sense, would achieve the aim of not glorifying war while keeping everything grounded, not what RoP did, which was wreck SoD.
As many others, I suspect – and expect, really, provided it ever ends – that A Song of Ice and Fire will both play the heroics straight and subvert it. The children of destiny will save the world heroically, everyone will set aside their wars to do the saving… and then three weeks later the wars will start again, because loyalty is fleeting even to legendary heroes.
“As I’ve noted elsewhere, the bright gleam of polished metal armor was considered valuable by most ancient and medieval armies because it was intimidating: these soldiers ought to have polished their armor to a brilliant shine.”
If I recollect properly when Frodo and company run into Noldor in the FOTR they (the Noldor) glow in the dark. In the first age Noldor arms and armor are often described glowing, or adorned with crystals and such that cast light. I suspect Noldor cavalry say in full charge would in fact glow rather menacingly in active harsh white light, let alone reflections from burnished armor
Of course the Elven-blades Glamdring, Orcrist, and Sting glow when orcs are nearby, and The Hobbit even describes this as a fact of Elvish weapons generally:
“The elves were the first to charge. Their hatred for the goblins is cold and bitter. Their spears and swords shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them”
Now you can produce a good dramatic siege with tension and feeling, everyone remember “Masada”. Which as it sticks, mostly, yes is does get a bit silly in places, to the actual progression of events is a tad more realistic. The RoP isn’t even close!
I think it might be interesting to compare this siege from the RoP with the siege of Gondolin, as described by Tolkien in the Book of Lost Tales (Part 2, Chapter III, The Fall of Gondolin). It seems that even in this early work Tolkien described many of the elements of medieval warfare that the RoP failed to show, such as scouting, siege engines, retinues and so on.
As far as Martin subversion goes, it generally goes like this:
1. A character makes a choice with negative consequences.
2. Those negative consequences are clearly shown barreling down at said character.
3. Said character goes “Oh shit! The negative consequences of my actions!”
4. Said character tries to dodge the negative consequences of their actions.
5. Martin slams this escape hatch shut. Said character is now fucked.
The important thing to note here is that the negative consequences don’t come and smack the character out of nowhere, they are CLEARLY telegraphed. The subversion is that in many stories, characters are able to dodge these consequences with some kind of ass pull of plot twist. Martin’s standard subversion is just letting things play out straight, not put in some asspull out of nowhere and the clearly set-up negative consequences don’t get twisted away.
This isn’t anything that original on Martin’s plot, it’s fairly standard tragedy plotting, using well-worn tropes, it’s just that fantasy writers generally don’t use tragedy tropes and Martin does.
Exactly. The best “subversions of expectations” are when the things the story is tellling us are at odds with what genre conventions say should happen. Hence they aren’t really subversions for people who are paying attention and approaching the story on its own terms, which encourages a deeper engagement with the story.
Bad “subversions of expectations” are when the story actively goes against the things it was telling us 5 minutes ago. This discourages deeper engagement, because anything could be overwritten at any minutes.
Yes, exactly, a lot of people act like Martin screws his characters out of nowhere, when in most cases the main twist is that there isn’t a twist. It’s just that readers are so used to there being a twist that will save a main character’s ass at the last moment that just by playing things straight things happen unexpectedly.
This also allows Martin to occasionally do a normal fantasy “main character saved at the last minute” asspull without it feeling cheap since the reader KNOWS that those things aren’t guaranteed (and they’re often heavily foreshadowed as well).
Also some people go overboard and say that Martin just goes out of his way of avoid tropes of all kinds, which no, it’s just that Martin throwing a bunch of ancient tragedy tropes into a fantasy story comes as unexpected to a lot of fantasy readers.
I’d actually say the one exception there is actually Ned’s execution: While Joffrey being a psycho had been setup that’s a case of something being fairly shocking since the setup had mostly been in pointing towards several “ways out”.
I’ve always felt the best kind of twist is the one you figure out roughly 2 seconds before the reveal.
Typo: “but in a terminal bought of ‘main character syndrome’”
Should be “bout.”
“Elrond’s cavalry arrives seemingly at drawn.”
Should be “dawn”
As much as I hate to defend any aspect of how this show handles its battle sequences, I’m going to.
Point of order here: in between Elrond arriving with the cavalry and the beginning of the night battle sequence, we’re also shown Adar and Elrond engaging in negotiations, and it’s probable that said negotiations took at least a little bit of time to set up. In other words, the show’s timeline isn’t: “Cavalry arrives at dawn, twelve hours of fighting, nightfall,” it’s more like “Cavalry arrives, Adar reveals Galadriel is a hostage, Elrond wastes several precious hours of daylight on failed negotiations, fighting starts in the afternoon and goes on into the night.”
This still isn’t great, but it’s not quite as bad as painted here.
I haven’t bothered watching that show, but judging from the stills, how could you see ANYTHING in that perpetual darkness Sauron must have cast over the scene. No wonder that no one notices approaching amies, and Elrond seems to have no idea where he is most of the time. *grin*
For what it’s worth on the game of thrones note (at least in the book) it’s made relatively clear that despite Tyrions big wildfire reveal doing immense damage to Stannis’ fleet and the men on it, that Stannis is still on track to win, just because the odds are so overwhelmingly in his favour.
The last we see of the battle from Tyrions point of view as he lies wounded is that the city guard inside the walls have essentially lost heart to fight, and are unlikely to be able to make another sortie, while Stannis is able to ferry troops from his main army, still essentially untouched, across the river to make an assault on already weakened gates.
Instead, it is the timely arrival of Lord Tywin’s army, which joined part of the Tyrell host and arrived just in time to take Stannis in the rear, that leads to the kind of mass panic, flight, and surrender that one would expect in such a case
Funny that you mention Winds of Winter when we got a new Epic of Gilgamesh before it.
New epic of Gilgamesh?
Did they dig up some sumerian tablets and find the rest of the story?
We have hundreds of thousands of untranslated clay tablets sitting in storage. They wouldn’t need to dig up more.
Not a lot of people interested in studying ancient Mesopotamian languages so they can spend their lives painstakingly translating clay tablets.
And not a lot of jobs for such people, either.
I feel like that’s the more critical thing. Start offering folks free Sumerian lessons and a guaranteed job translating tablets at £50 a tablet and I’d expect you’d find quite a lot of folks actually are quite interested in translating them.
A little piece of the rest was found. It’s not particularly recent, already studied over a decade ago, but considering aDwD came out in 2011, it counts!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/comments/om9bgr/a_new_chapter_of_the_epic_of_gilgamesh_is/
The dream-sequence-like lack of care for continuity, time, place, causality, etc. makes me wonder if the script was written by an LLM.
You’re not the only one. Or possibly the plot outline was written by some egotist who used an LLM, refuses to admit it, and refuses to allow changes.
Are there recent international examples of well-done ancient / medieval / high fantasy battles and sieges, movie or TV? I know this is an English language blog, but there’s an international commentariat and these days it isn’t so hard for us English speakers to get access.
In particular, does the apparent correlation between script quality in battle sequences and script quality overall (or attention to detail, or thought out consequences) hold for international media? Is WeChat and whatever equivalent is used in India full of pedantic military history geeks complaining about the latest blockbuster?
With the caveat that I haven’t seen rings of power, don’t intend to, and only know about this through Dr. Devereaux’s blog, here’s how I think the siege of Erigion could have been done about a million times better.
Step 1: Flesh out some of Adar’s Orc lieutenants a bit more. Further, make one of them stand out. Call him Gorthog or something similar, and make it clear that Adar relies on him a fair bit. He should be unambiguously orcish, with a huge scar on his face and one eye missing, but always wearing this tattered hood that partly covers his face.
Step 2: When we first learn that Adar is planning to march on Erigion, have him stress to Gorthog and the rest of his officers how important it is to find Sauron and warn that he is known to change his appearance. Gorthrog should assure Adar that the orcs will have no difficulty finding Sauron.
Step 3: Give the orcs several axes of advance. Make it clear that orcs from everywhere are converging at a staging point to march on Erigion.
Step 4: When the elves under Gil-Galad hear that Adar’s army is on the move, something about Adar’s reputation should give them pause and make it harder to form a consensus to intervene. Maybe he has some defenders who think his war is just (even if it’s a bit weird that he’s leading an army of orcs).
Step 5: At Erigion, have one of the characters tell Celebrimbor that Adar’s army is “less than a week away, according to the latest reports.” Defensive works on the city are being built but not yet complete. They have some important decisions to make, but…
Step 6: surprise! The orcs got here early. A bunch of small, skinny orcs with no armour emerge from the forest with about as much warning as Erigion gets in the show and rush the bridges. The gates are open and the garrison is unprepared, so some of the orcs get into the city. Celebrimbor fails to respond effectively, so Galadriel and maybe Elrond if he’s there have to take the initiative and rally the troops to fend off the attack.
Step 7: Celebrimbor sends Elrond out to mess with the orcs but orders Galadriel to stay in the city. It’s clear his confidence is rattled and he’s more and more reliant on her. Elrond gets some scenes where he looks like a badass ambushing orcs, but also notices that there are *an awful lot* of orcs around. His forces make contact with Gil-Galad.
Step 8: Adar arrives with his main force. His orcs quickly begin blocking off the bridges. The elves on the battlements see the scaffolding of trebuchets in Adar’s siege camp (which should look very impressive from the walls). The elves marvel at the speed of his preparations. As the first rocks begin to hit the battlements, Adar tells Gorthrog he intends to bombard the city until the walls collapse and that he has all the supplies they will ever need arriving by river. Gorthrog praises him effusively for his intelligence, and seems to genuinely mean it.
Step 9: Elrond and Gil-Galad lead the elven cavalry up behind Adar’s army like in the show, but find enormous field fortifications blocking their way (if show runners want every battle to look like WWI, this would be a great time to indulge in that instinct). The elves deploy their own siege engines (which should look really cool) and start bombarding the orcs, while Gil-Galad sends Elrond to bring more supplies because “this is going to take a while.” Cut to Elrond bringing elven carts through a mountain pass (can I coin the term “Chekhov’s mountain?”)
Step 10: The situation in Erigion is dire. Show scenes of elves being blasted off the battlements by trebuchets, and show the walls themselves begin to crack. Celebrimbor has an idea for how to stop the orcs, but Galadriel has reservations.
Step 11: The elves block the river with rocks using magic somehow. Make it look super elfy, like a long ritual involving white light or some shit. A mountain collapses, crushing a bunch of orcs in river barges and blocking the way for the rest. The orcs start loudly worrying about food, perhaps referencing the “meat on the menu” line from the film’s.
Step 12: Galadriel and Celebrimbor watch the river drain. A few orcs try to cross the riverbed, but are quickly brought down by arrows from the garrison. Galadriel is still worried but Celebrimbor is (too) confident. The trebuchets seem to have stopped momentarily.
Step 13: Adar is on the verge of panic at this point, knowing his orcs probably won’t be able to hold off Gil-Galad and take Erigion without supplies. Gorthrog gets more assertive, and this is about the point the audience should notice something weird about him. He reminds Adar of a machine called the “Ravager.” Adar is initially confused, but then seems to recover his composure and order it deployed.
Step 14: Surprise! The ravager isn’t for the city walls. Orcs suddenly use the machine to cause an avalanche in the mountain pass Elrond is using to bring up supplies. Cut to elves being crushed by rocks. Cut to Elrond riding to high ground, where he sees orcs marauding throughout the country side, burning nearby villages. He reports back to Gil-Galad, but we don’t hear what they talk about.
Step 15: Back in Erigion, the orc trebuchets are shooting again and the battlements are a wreck. The orcs surge across the riverbed, heedless of casualties, with a bunch of ogres leading the charge. The elves try to stop them with arrows, but are driven from the battlements by trebuchets and crossbows. The ogres smash the wall and the elves retreat into the city.
Step 16: Gil-Galad launches a last-ditch cavalry charge against the orc defenses. This is a good time to subvert the charge of the Rohirrim because it fails, but Elrond is able to get through with a few dozen elves. His rescue mission for Galadriel plays our more or less as in the show. Galadriel tries to evacuate as many elves as she can, while Celebrimbor makes a last stand near his forge.
Step 17: Adar kills Celebrimbor and the orcs occupy Erigion. They can’t find Galadriel. Adar concludes she must have fled into the mountains and sends some orcs after her.
Step 18: Orcs catch Galadriel, Elrond and the civilians fleeing up the mountain. The few remaining warriors try to hold them off, but it’s not looking good. Then in the nick of time, the dwarves appear and save them.
Step 19: Back in Erigion, Adar and Gorthrog are in Celebrimbor’s throne room. Adar is frustrated that they still haven’t found Sauron, and berates Gorthrog for breaking his promise to find him. Gorthrog reveals that he has been Sauron the whole time (have him turn away, take off his hood, and turn back. He’s Sauron, so the process should look effortless). He kills Adar (who is too shocked to put up much of a fight) and takes control of the victorious orcs.
There, I wrote that in the bathroom on vacation and probably messed up the sequence of steps but I bet it would still be a better story.
“Actually, I can, because I found myself souring more and more on this sequence as I worked through it and at this point I am quite exhausted by it.”
The dearth of footnotes really illustrates that.
I don’t expect this show to be able to match Tolkien, but like as a big battle scene this is getting dunked on by parody stick figure webcomics in terms of plausibility and coherence.
Now we have to see Bret Devereaux’s “The Siege of Azure City.”
Actually, yeah, Azure City does a lot of things this battle doesn’t.
– The enemy army does not arrive out of nowhere. A rider manages to catch wind of them and then arrive a day ahead. Also, the reason it didn’t trip any early warnings is because the villains were using covert teams specifically to eliminate the normal warning system (regularly-placed towers that use magical means to relay messages between one another).
– The villains use catapults to break through the wall, but with the twist that the catapults weren’t tossing stones, but giant metallic elementals that were more than capable of ripping through masonry. In this way, the story takes a standard medieval tactic and then shows how the presence of magic could reinforce it. (Also shown: Vaarsuvius’s giant pikemen, the various AOE spells breaking up formations, and, in the book version, flying zombies.)
– The commander sends a large chunk of his soldiers on a ladder-scaling assault that seems very unlikely to succeed… and it doesn’t. The ladder climb because he’s a racist asshole who is deliberately sacrificing a chunk of his army out of a petty grudge. The actual important assault is carried out at places where the wall is weakened. There’s even an explicit justification for why the enemy army is going for a direct “hasty” assault rather than a drawn-out siege: Xykon is an impatient nutcase who would get bored.
– The positioning of the battle actually makes sense. Burlew even pointed out in the commentary that he made sure to regularly “pull back the camera” to establish what a given army was doing and where a given character might be. This was kept to very consistently; I think there’s maybe one instance where a character “teleports” to someplace outside of where you’d expect them to be.
– The hobgoblin society does ignore logistical considerations, but this is played as a joke on their obsessive loyalty and a sign of Redcloak’s dickishness rather than authorial laziness–one bonus strip outright says that the only way they could conduct a campaign like this is if they totally gave up on self-preservation. Meanwhile, the fact that the Azurites actually do have to abide by logistics and politics is a running theme of the battle; nobles desert because they don’t like the current leader, for instance.
“– The villains use catapults to break through the wall, but with the twist that the catapults weren’t tossing stones, but giant metallic elementals that were more than capable of ripping through masonry.”
RoP could have done this with trolls. The orc armies are always that–orcs. Trolls exist as engines (moving things) or single-use troops. Made sense in Moria, where there was only one troll in the area, but for something like this siege it would make more sense to have multiple trolls. (Even the Siege of Gondor should have used the trolls better–you see a bunch moving equipment around, then they vanish in the movie.) We know that Ents can rip apart rock like it’s dry dirt, and trolls are corrupted Ents, so having them ripping apart the city walls is reasonable within the context of RoP. It would present a large enough threat to warrant targeting the trolls specifically as well (we see it in Moria and Minas Tirith).
Toss a few trolls into the city and let them cause chaos while you assault another part of the city. The trolls are probably going to die, but they’ll weaken both the defenses (by pulling people off them to deal with the trolls) and the walls (by ripping them apart from the inside), allowing the guys outside to finish the job more easily.
The trolls in Siege of Gondor were the first through the gate.
Granted, but they were a momentary threat that quickly ceased to exist (and the trolls only existed so Gandalf could make his brief speech, vanishing immediately after). Where were they when Rohan was charging through the orc armies? Or when Aragorn’s fleet arrived? Or when Pippin told Gandalf about Denathor’s madness? Or when the Witch-King descends to kill Theodin?
I will grant that some of these scenes can’t include them (trolls won’t climb up flimsy, lashed-together ladders!), but in cases of large shots of open battles, like Rohan’s charge, they should be present and a serious threat. You DO see this at the Battle of the Black Gate, where a troll squashes Pippin, so this is not an out-of-context problem for either Peter Jackson or the RoP team. And at least in LOTR it wouldn’t take much, just a shot of some horses wheeling around a troll to show the trolls weren’t forgotten. In RoP they could be much better-developed as components of an orcish army.
To be clear, the comment about Jackson’s movies was a fairly minor aside. I’m mostly happy with them–there are problems, sure, but they’re good adaptations. Most of my comment was aimed at RoP.
“trolls are corrupted Ents”
Point of pedantry: Treebeard says that trolls were made in _mockery_ of Ents, as orcs were made in mockery of Elves. I suspect LotR was written during a fluid period in Tolkien’s ideas: in writings from before LotR, orcs were made from slime and such by Morgoth; after LotR; they were briefly corrupted elves, then corrupted ?men?beasts?Maiar-spawn? Tolkien was never happy. I think we see a glimpse of that later idea also in LotR, when Frodo tells Sam he thinks evil can’t create, only warp. Ultimately, the origin of trolls is unknown; Appendix F basically says as much, and I’m not aware of any further HoME writing.
Trolls were definitely strong, though whether they would survive journey by trebuchet is another matter. Also, I don’t think they were nearly as big and strong as Ents. Pippin was able to kill a hill-troll at the Black Gate.
Tolkien himself didn’t make much use of them in war. Some are mentioned as wielding Grond, but not mentioned again in the battle of Minas Tirith. A couple carry the makeshift bridge that Durin’s Bane uses to across an abyss. A whole bunch emerge from the Black Gate, armed and maybe armored:
> Taller and broader than Men they were, and they were clad only in close-fitting mesh of horny scales, or maybe that was their hideous hide; but they bore round bucklers huge and black and wielded heavy hammers in their knotted hands.
but there’s never much detail about having super-strong soldiers handy.
Description makes me think “somewhat larger than a human can be, like 7-8 feet” vs. the 14+ feet of Treebeard.
Tangentially, the troll-foot that Frodo stabs in Moria is “toeless”.
I wanted to like this series when it first came out. I’ve read the Fellowship trilogy many times over the years, but I’ve never been super into the deeper lore. I wouldn’t have minded if they took some creative liberties—big or small—if the stories were actually interesting. I’m glad the good professor is watching it and writing about it, because his blog has saved me from even thinking about giving it another shot.”
The sequence with the cavalry sounds particularly off for how it can be both a furiously pitched battle and Adar and a lieutenant can discuss it is though they’re directing the action from afar. That and “they’re doing better than we expected”… how much time have you had to form an expectation of them at all?
That and how I feel at a loss to understand how they’re supposed to have disabled any trebuchets.
The same way they disabled the Ravager, obviously, by shooting an arrow at the barrel full of dangerous unstable explosives stored in the plot hole next to it.
You know what would really subvert my expectations? Showrunners thinking through a plot.
c.f. The Wine Tasting, a Rian Johnson film (33seconds, 2018): https://youtu.be/5S4Ss5bK-ws?si=uokfLRDu2Nqlf2_G
FWIW Treebeard does say that Trolls are not as strong as Ents:
To be fair to Elrond, while “Death to our foes!” may not be the best possible pre-battle speech in the abstract, I think it’s hard to improve on it in a context where you’ve already let the enemy know that you’re about to attack them from behind.
One thing I find interesting about Tolkien is how, for all that his magic system can be a bit soft, he scrupulously keeps to a consistent physical, psychological, AND moral logic in his stories. Usually his armies and battles follow the principles of realistic battle, and when they don’t it’s usually because there’s magic and the outcome bends around that in a way that makes sense. At the same time, his characters make sense as characters, get cool moments as characters, and the impacts they have on the story fit with what they are capable of and what decisions they make about how to use their power. And finally, there is a moral stance to the whole story, that power and the pursuit of it accomplish nothing of worth even if you want to use your power to do good, that evil is ultimately self-destructive, and that what matters most in the end is the goodness of ordinary people just doing their best. You can look at almost anything Tolkien actually made through any of those three lenses, and it will generally make sense.
And yet somehow, with such fine material to work with the people parading his corpse fail to make a story that holds up under any lens I can think of. It honestly doesn’t even seem like it has the Michael Bay quality of being entertaining if you turn your brain off.