Hey folks! Apologies for this coming out late – alas the pedant household has been struck by a nasty cold that has made keeping up with work this week quite challenging. No post this week, on account of it being Christmas time. May you all have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays or simply Friendly Season’s Greetings, whichever is your preference!
We’ll be back next week with some Tolkien (I am planning to post up the text of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” which I delivered this past week at the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) and then we’ll be back to finishing out our discussion of hoplites in the New Year.
In the meantime, this is normally the spot in the calendar where I do a bit of ‘year in review’ so let me indulge in that. 2025 set a new record for traffic on the blog – it looks like we’ll end up around 4.25m page views, at last dethroning 2022 which had held the record.1 The most popular post this year by far was “Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire” with more than 140,000 views. The distant-runners-up (but still doing quite well) were “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold,'” and “How Gandalf Proved Mightiest.” Meanwhile I was pleasantly surprised that the series on “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” also pulled in a decent number of readers despite being a pretty technical-in-the-weeds series without a strong ‘pop-culture’ hook. It ended up the year a bit short of 300,000 page views split over its 10 parts and subparts.
In the New Year, my plan is to get to a lot of lingering Patron requests, including the winners of the ACOUP Senate poll. We’re going to get some discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, some on of how ancient polytheism interacts with ancient states and some of mercenaries and other things. I think 2026 is probably also the year for the nearly inevitable Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV (in which you can look forward to some praise but perhaps some sharper criticism of the Paradox approach; HoI4 is a remarkable game but it has some remarkable problems too).
- All of these stats are as WordPress counts. The Google Analytics numbers are generally modestly (c. 10-15%) lower, but it’s a little harder to easily compare post-specific and year-to-year data there, so I tend to use the WordPress numbers first. But if you want the Google Analytics numbers, you can generally just downward adjust by around 15% and you’ll get there.
I’m sure the answer is “become a Patron if you want to suggest topics”, but I’m going to throw one out anyway on the off chance.
Often in stories about the Ancient world, we hear that so-and-so “founded a city”. Alexander did that; so did Pompey. But I’ve never been clear on exactly what that *means*. Where did they find farmers to live around the city? How did they get its food and water supply set up? What buildings were necessary to consider that this is “now a city”? What type of civic government and infrastructure had to be in place? How much money did it cost and who got paid?
And how often did it actually work? Alexandria lasted for the ages, but how many other “found a city” efforts ended up as flops that vanished within a year or two?
Here’s a bit of holiday cheer for you, Matthew. Your post was, for whatever reason, the final impetus for me to actually pony up and start supporting this blog that I have read religiously for the past couple of _years_ now. I like your question a lot, so much so that I intend to cravenly steal it and suggest it as a Q&A question just as soon as my Patreon contribution goes through the mill and I get whatever secret backstage pass you get for being in the conscriptii (sp?)
Hopefully in the fullness of time, you (and I!) can Bret’s answer to your intriguing query.
My guess is that there were two approaches. Alexander had an army behind him so he could tell some of his soldiers “this land is now your land”, and some of the recently conquered locals “you now live here and serve the Macedonians I left in charge”, whether the place was settled before or not. With an all-conquering army, getting farmers is an easy problem. I think the main purpose of this kind of city-founding was to get a manned fortress and a stockpile of supplies in a strategically important location.
The other way is one or more villages deciding “we are now a city” and holding religious rites appropriate to the occasion. The Etruscans for example had a ceremony where you ploughed a line around what were going to be your city limits with a white bull (details somewhere in the Aeneid and probably in Livy; as far as I know the ceremony itself is considered historical not mythical). Something like this probably happened to Rome around 750 BC – ab urbe condita can’t refer to when the hills were first settled (that was way longer back) but could well refer to the year/date when a ceremony like that was performed.
The Roman Republic certainly made a huge distinction between inside and outside the Pomerium.
Patron here backing this great proposal.
He was written something like that here:
Collections: Ancient Greek and Phoenician Colonization
https://acoup.blog/2023/10/13/collections-ancient-greek-and-phoenician-colonization/
Doing a search on “colony” on the on page search produces some other possible hits about the Gracchi or “How to Roman Republic 101.”
“We’re going to get some discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse”
EXCELLENT
On founding a city – one common path, surely, must have been to decide that this hill would be a good place to build a fortress of some kind? The city would just grow up naturally around that, with demobbed soldiers starting farms, supporting markets to feed the garrison, supporting industries, recreation, people wanting to work under the umbrella of protection it provided, and so on, as it did in so many -casters in England, for example.
The blockbuster part of LWDatP for me was the observation about how fragmented the farms were. It brought so many disparate details I’ve learned about peasant farms into detail.
Also, in the context of the end of the LWDatP series, you might enjoy reading the poem Eishet Chayil (Woman of Valor), a traditional Jewish poem attributed to King Solomon and chanted aloud at many Friday night Shabbat dinners. Clearly from a very, very similar context to the one described in the series. And if modern people have forgotten how hard the spinners worked, I think this poem suggests that many of the farmers understood it quite well.
This is simply Proverbs chapter 31 and in fact quite apposite to the series – the ideal housewife not only spins and weaves, but also buys, plants and works a piece of land (in this case a vineyard).
I’m currious on your thoughts on HoI 4. It’s primarily a wargame, but with more focus on the logistics and ecnonmics than most ‘pure’ war-games have, which I think is a broadly positive descision, but I also feel like a *lot* of the decisions are, for lack of a better world, ‘clean whermacht adjacent’.
From paradox’s perspective, ‘how should the Holocaust be handled’ is an unsolvable problem. Ignoring it in a game otherwise so intricately detailed is an extremely glaring omission, bordering of soft denial, but at the same time, gamifying the process of comiting the holocaust would be correctly called horrifically disrespectful, on top of being an insane publicity nightmare if, say, some nazi-adjacent streamers final solution speed run hits trending on twitch.
The last few updates and DLC have been trending in a bit more of a pulpy alt-history direction, which I feel is an attempt to sidestep the issue.
Particularly since the Nazis themselves regarded the extermination of European Jewry one of their “victory conditions”. As late as 1945, in the Führerbunker, Hitler consoled himself with the thought that at least he’d rid Germany of the Jews.
Putting that into a game is . . . yeah, no. That *would* be genuinely anti-semitic, even if it is part of historical reality.
Yeah, it’s honestly a damned if you do damned if you don’t thing. The closest thing I could see would be to just have events pointing it out in the background (and you perhaps occasionally suffering debuffs as resources are rerouted to the extermination) but even that has problems.
There’s some specifically interesting problmes with the new german rework, which more than the others has you actually interact with the nazi as part of the Inner Circle mechanic, etc. And many feel like this was a step too far.
Maybe you can implement it as a national spirit. Constant debuff to population (the whole “killing millions of people” thing) and income drain (running death camps isn’t cheap) that doesn’t go away as long as Hitler is head of state and intensifies with foci. You can put the option to start it there, but make it clear that it in no way benefits German society or the Reich (except maybe one-time income from confiscating Jewish property) and give no negative consequences whatsoever if you do not go down the focus tree for starting the Holocaust. After all, the whole thing was Hitler’s idea and there really shouldn’t be anyone pushing you to do it if you, as Hitler, choose not to.
A debuffing “national spirit” named Genocidal Policies (or something like that) should suffice.
Seconding the request. “Someone’s gotta play the Nazis” is an old problem in historical gaming, and I’m curious to read how OGH thinks it should be handled.
I read and enjoy and occasionally forward every single post since I discovered this site a few years ago. I want to go back now and re-read the feature on archery and refresh my memory.
I shared the essay on fantasy economics and gold with a friend who works as a fantasy game design professional in the big leagues, thinking he would find it intriguing, but in fact he got fairly snippy about it and dismissed it as mere .. pendantry, I suppose. Some guys just can’t stand having their fantasy bubble poked.
To be fair to your friend, this blog hast “unmitigated pedantry” in the title. Most games, even those in a historical setting, are power fantasies with a platonically ideal “American Dream” economy anyway, far removed from any historical reality. Learning the realities of gold vs silver is interesting, but as far as game design is concerned, it really is a minor sin overall.
Maybe. I played an amateur homebrew for years where the currency/prices were fairly realistic (and the players could transfer funds by bill of exchange). It simplified some things. Then wrote a story featuring medieval financial shenanigans
I brought this kind of thing into my own scenarios as well – it creates some very interesting dynamics if the little farming town manages for most of the year purely on a credit system, and then once a year the cattle traders come into town from outside and there’s a sudden influx of coin. Now working on a Western-type environment based largely on Haldane’s “The Drove Roads of Scotland”.
I think the thing is it’s not really a writing issue, but an audience expectation one – I play pathfinder primarily, and the existence of platinum coins as a primary currency above level 4 in 1st edition is because of two things – making day-to-day living a bit too cheap so it works at early levels (i.e. the cheapest thing to buy, and so 1 copper is too close in notional value – to adventurers- to a modern penny, rather than have 1/100th of a standard coin be a reasonably valuable amount by itself), and because using gold coins as the standard value meant it was essential to have a higher value large denomination coin, or the party wizard couldn’t physically pick up his purse. They moved to a ‘silver standard’, essentially dividing the price of everything by 10 unless it was already measured in copper, with 2nd edition, to try to address the ‘high level adventuring parties are often carrying a small but meaningful percentage of earths entire platinum reserve as coinage’ issue, but D20 wealth-per-level scaling still makes it fall apart quickly – essentially if you want a reasonably challenging fight to be against human-ish enemies with similar, or slightly worse, equipment at low level (which makes sense, given most play is at low level) that the party can take as valuable treasure (rather than having the video-game issue of that guy in full-plate looking armour technically being a naked dude with a really weird skin condition), and that they will be able to defeat more of these people with every level up, and they will level up 20 times, the economy will look really weird as a result. DnD TRIED to solve it in 5e both as a side effect of bounded accuracy (which made these low level guys more challenging to higher level people) and with stubbornly refusing to assign any monetary value to magic items at all (the Pontius Pilate solution of washing your hands and saying ‘well it’s your DMs fault, not mine’), but kept the gold standard for regular items, and kept the systems and player expectations that would make those powerful items really expensive (as unless you are actually a real life wizard or home brewing your own items for custom treasure, you often find out what item your player is wanting to build towards by having them ask ‘how much gold do I need to save to buy X, whilst pointing you to a link to X, which is a legendary dagger that it’d be weird to find the king of the giants using a a sowing needle, so is probably just going to have to be in a shop’)
To play devil’s advocate for your friend, he might’ve interpreted it as a jab at his work or his industry at how they handle money unrealistically, or it may be something that they’re quite aware of / comes up a lot (nerd gamers do have a tendency to be rather pedantic on the topic of ‘realism’) but is a settled issue on the grounds of playability and general player knowledge.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of this one time I was reading on SpaceBattles Vs. Debates and reading a thread about Saruman vs. Westeros, people were saying that Saruman was a genius who only got beaten by divine intervention, and someone tried to say that Saruman was actually an idiot and posted Bret Devereaux’s articles about it.
And the people in the thread responded by saying that they were not going to read the blog and they insisted that someone break down the posts into something readable and digestible.
And when someone summarized the posts, the people then started saying that Bret Devereaux was wrong and that Saruman actually was a genius.
There’s Saruman fanboys?
I wouldn’t have expected that! He doesn’t seem particularly cool.
Rather surprising that someone would be so invested in considering him a “genius”.
It’s his one use of Gunpowder or something implied to be that.
I’ve seen people get defensive about how special Saruman is when it’s pointed out that the rumbling flashes of “earth-thunder” that “blast” breaches in the Rammas Echor mean Sauron is probably just as familiar with gunpowder.
The site (Spacebattles) stopped being just about Vs. Battles a long time ago and that’s all I want to say about that.
Yeah, I don’t want to talk about SpaceBattles a lot, but suffice to say that I stopped reading it because I got sick and tired of all the endless arguments that inevitably devolve into personal insults.
Heck, even Reddit doesn’t leave me the bad taste in my mouth that SpaceBattles does, there are at least a few good or at least decent subreddits for asking questions and getting information.
I meant that Spacebattles is not all about arguing and insults; there are subforums and threads that are for other things.
Granted, I stay away from the more populated ones.
The quest reward for one of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG campaign books (Barony of the Damned I believe) was, in fact, land and a keep, as suggested by our esteemed host in the essay on gold. It was also quite explicitly pointed out that the land was barren and infested with monsters and the keep was in disrepair, because the undesirability of the fief was the whole reason why the Duke could afford to just give it to your party to begin with. Further, it would take the GM some thinking to incorporate the fact that your PCs hold a castle into his next campaign, which is probably why simply giving your PCs money is easier from a development standpoint.
As for gold itself, one of the games that values gold currency properly is, strangely enough, Fallout: New Vegas. The Legion mints gold and silver coins and the gold coin is by far the most valuable item of currency you can come across. I’m not entirely familiar with gun costs in real life, but I reckon that 6 aurei for an AR-15 is much more reasonable than, say, Fallout 2, which features the usual thousands of gold coins for a weapon.
It’s actually a reasonably common thing in adventures partially because its a good “and then…” kind of story hook generator.
I remember reading an adventure that involved a civil war and noted at the end of that the king would probably be strapped for cash and any rewards would probably be in the form of medals, land, or titles, etc.
I get your friend’s perspective, and I think there’s more going on than just a bruised ego. Frankly I don’t think the essay is entirely fair. It’s accurate, to be sure, but….well, there’s a difference between an economy and a representation of an economy, and that difference matters.
There are two competing issues that are at play here (among others, but these are two big ones).
On the one hand, there’s a desire to accurately portray whatever you’re trying to portray. You want to show things as they are, as much as you can within budgetary and time constraints. The more realistic you can make things, generally, the better, as it limits plot holes, facilitates suspension of disbelief, facilitates engagement, etc. (Unless you want to go full Hitchhikers’ Guide and intentionally throw vercimilitude out the window and into a supernova, anyway.)
On the other hand, you want people to understand your work. The creator isn’t the only thing in the equation; the audience is as well. And we’ve spent the past hundred years or so building up a language that allows the audience to know “Okay, this is a Medieval-esque setting” and thus both set expectations and allow the creators to hand-wave a bunch of stuff they don’t want to deal with. The director of “Gladiator” doesn’t need to waste a bunch of time detailing how Romans fought for a throw-away battle that’s ultimately irrelevant to the movie; he can use the tropes to code the battle as “Romans vs Barbarians” and get on with making the meat of the film, trusting that the viewer will understand. This is also why computer hacking is the way it is in movies; it’s not realistic, but it’s not intended to be, it just stands in as a representation of the thing.
Money is one of those areas where reality is unrealistic. Modern people simply do not understand how gift economies work, or how you can have economic activity at all without money being the primary feature of that economy. We don’t, in other words, grasp pre-moneyed economies at all. Money is the foundation of our economic lives and how we view things to an extent most people don’t even realize (look at how gift-giving is often discussed, especially the “Just give them money so they can buy their own” line of argument, to see what I mean). To make a movie or game that relies on historically accurate economics you would have to first teach the audience those economic principles. Not necessarily impossible, but unless you’re making a game where this is a primary mechanic it’s expensive, difficult, and ultimately pointless.
So game developers rely on those shortcuts. Gold/Silver/Copper money isn’t intended to be realistic, it’s intended to signal to the audience “This is a Medieval-esque setting”. We as the audience, after generations of training, have accepted this trope as a valid signal, and it allows the game developers to focus on things that actually matter to the story/stories they’re trying to tell.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. For my part, I find this trope inoffensive. I treat it, not as actual coins, but as notional money that exists almost entirely in the abstract and on paper, an idea not entirely alien to the Medieval mind. It wasn’t uncommon in the past for people to nominally owe X amount of money, but to pay it via other means–I’ve read ransoms for kings that were “X lbs of gold or the equivalent in wheat and cloth”, for example. And adventurers aren’t normal in any pre-industrial setting anyway. They don’t stick around long enough to start gifting cycles or become involved in the community. So the fact that they deal with resource management weirdly is not terribly surprising.
So from your friend’s perspective, the article is likely missing the point. It’s arguments are all about things not related to what your friend is actually doing–which is representing a concept in a way amenable to audience understanding in an efficient manner, using long-established tropes.
I think the game that gets closest to what Brett described is a H game made in RPG simulator that used trade points as an abstraction for item value.
Copper coins are still useful since they are a dense way of storing and converting TP, but aren’t necessary.
TP has the downside of being slightly unintuitive in a game and having wasted points after a transaction.
We live in a very monetised culture, even though most transactions are not priced (negotiated in money terms: families are essentially communistic, while governments and large corporations are internally command). But there is money and there is coinage – money precedes coins by millennia, as Brett notes. We transact more through credit than coins – as Romans and medieval people did, only using computers rather than paper, papyrus or clay. there is no reason an rpg cannot run on the same lines.
Your friend is the one in the wrong, in my honest opinion.
I am not a big fan of fantasy but I think trying to make fantasy economy functions similar to real life economy is pointless. For example the Dwarves focus very much on mining gold while most real life pre-modern societies must focus foremostly on agriculture. How can the Dwarven economy function? How could they have the idea of an entire society living inside mountains and undergrounds instead of farmlands in the first place? Because it’s fantasy. And that’s why fantasy people have a lot of gold to throw around.
I think the Tyranny of Fantasy Gold is one of the most useful articles for gamers out there. I wish I could force more people to internalize it and incorporate it into more games. Because a pre-capitalist, favor-based economy is not only more historically accurate, it’s also *extremely gameable*. It could solve so many issues with character motivation and wealth acquisition while removing the more tedious aspects of logistics and coin counting.
Although an issue with it for RPGs is that the classic “adventuring party” (itinerant violent sorts) represent pretty much the kind of people who fit _least_ well into a favour/credit/status based economy. Sure, you’ll let Jim who has lived in the village for his whole life settle up at the end of the month – but you sure as hell won’t let grim-faced Strider do that, cash in advance thank you very much because like as not he’ll be gone tomorrow.
“We’re going to get some discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, some on of how ancient polytheism interacts with ancient states” – ooh, I am very much looking forward to both of these! Happy New Year and I hope you all recover in short order ^^
Tolkien! No one has mentioned we’ll have TOLKIEN again! I came for the Siege of Gondor in May 2019, and have stayed to read each post since then (I confess to skimming a few). I am always interested in our host’s discussions of Tolkien and the various expressions of his work on both large and small screen adaptations. Can’t wait!
Agreed! I quite enjoyed the smackdown of “Rings of Power” and its ridiculous battle sequences in this past year.
I was lucky enough to hear Dr Devereaux’s talk on Eowyn at the Prancing Pony Podcast moot and found it excellent and very interesting in drawing parallels (as usual). Good to know it will be made available here. As I only attended the moot online I wasn’t around for the several *hours* (I understand) of informal extra talk he gave on demand covering other subjects to moot attendees, just in the hotel seating area, quite outside the acheduled programme!
I was there in person, and it was amazing!
I am incredibly interested in Bronze Age Collapse, can’t wait for the post. Is there any recommended reading on the subject?
I enjoyed “The End of the Bronze Age: changes in warfare and the catastrophe c. 1200BC” by Robert Drews, which I think was recommended here?
Would love to see a post or two on House of the Dragon, if possible. And I hope you get better soon!
Hope you feel better soon! Looking forward to the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Eowyn post!
On the Tolkien front, I would LOVE to see you break down the Nirnaeth Arnoediad from The Silmarillion in the same way you did Helm’s Deep and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, but I recognize that’s a topic for a very niche audience and my odds of getting it aren’t high.
That would be something to see, but do we have enough detail in Tolkien’s writings to really analyze that battle in that same depth? My recollection is of a very scanty narrative. Not much to work with.
J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote the following in the ‘FOREWORD’ of The Lord of the Rings, concerning the piece: ‘…The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault…’
Also: ‘…I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are by all others specially approved. The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short…’
(UK 19th impression hardback, 1988, Unwin Hyman Limited)
The Lord of the Rings (or at least the original book) is entertainment, and its primary concern is entertainment – the author says so right there, in their own words, in the Foreword, and for good measure has the humility (and to my mind strength of character) to say there are ‘defects’.
So? Learning about military history from Bret via an exegesis of The Lord of the Rings is also entertaining.
Very well. Since we are (at the time of writing) still within the period for festivities, riddles, and games of the Yule celebration (or ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, for those who go that way) just how reliable a source (if we treat it as real) is the ‘Red Book of Westmarch’ published by Mayor Samwise Gamgee and family? Mayor Gamgee had politics in Hobbiton locked up for at least seven mayoral terms and was presumably a mover and shaker outside of that. And we get a self-aggrandizing piece (The Red Book of Westmarch) where Mayor Gamgee claims he went away and and single-handed defeated a legendary super-giant spider which nobody else could have beaten, and where claims about the mighty deeds of his cronies Meriadoc and Peregrin also pop up – and, incidentally, the wealthy industrialist, who had been looking to modernise The Shire, and whom Mayor Gamgee and his cronies violently overthrew, gets character-assassinated.
Was it really a man from Rohan who killed Saruman, or did Mayor-to-be Gamgee and his cronies murder Saruman and his personal assistant and then invent a story about how they turned on each other?
As Doctor Devereaux frequently says, we need to question the reliability of sources.
Ha! My thoughts exactly. And by the same token, I would love to see a good interpretation of the social dynamics that led to what should, frankly, be known as the Mordor genocide. Establishing some facts beyond elven propaganda would be a very useful exercise in close reading and questioning source biases.
Worth nothing, both stories (the Gamgee coup and the Mordor genocide, not to mention the dodgy return of the “king” story, the Hobbit “exploits” and of course warmongering efforts to drag initially peaceful Rohan into a pointless war) are all linked by the same shadowy character, the aptly named Gandalf the Grey….
One can certainly go down that route, but it will not lead to a conclusion of “It’s all fake”. The question of actual historicity is one historians do face, and they have a developed a toolbox to deal with it. The most important tool is the simple question: “If it’s all made up, why did the author include these *inconvenient* details that just make the lie harder to sustain?” And the answer is that the invention has to be tailored to the observable truth as not to be easily disproven.
Some actual historical examples:
Why would Ramesses the Great, if he invented a glorious victory against the Hittites, invent one where he flubs the operations so that his troops get caught during the march and unable to support each other, and where he completely fails to actually reach any operational goals because his lack of siege-craft? Answer: Because the battle happened that way and the commanders of the divisions are at court and able to independently attest that these things happened.
Why would the Apostles, if they invented a prophesied Messiah for their new religion, invent one who comes from Nazareth, even though the prophecy clearly states the messiah comes from Bethlehem? Answer: Because Jesus was a real figure who did come from Nazareth and did all his preaching in its immediate area, something all his contemporaries, including his *brother*, would be able to independently attest to.
Turning to Lord of the Rings, we can thus ask the question about the “dodgy return of the ‘king’ story”: Why would the hobbits, if they invented a story of returning a king on a distant throne, choose to have that king be a character well-known in Breeland and even include a prediction that this king will return to restore Arnor? This puts the Breelanders, who do live within travel distance of the hobbits and are thus available as independent sources, into a position where they could disprove the story if it was a fabrication.
We can thus feel reasonably sure that the political and military events of the Red Book actually happened, given that the authors feel safe to predict that the political changes will be independently verifiable within the reader’s lifetime (in the form of the King coming by). Did Aragorn really give that speech atop the Hornburg and did the “wild men” really stand in awe at his bearing and heritage? Probably not, but that he was at the battle and that the battle did happen, we can feel more sure of.
Already written, it’s called “The Last Ring-Bearer.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
Yes – read and approved! 😀
There is also a good piece by David Brin somewhere, along the lines of how a great story would involve underground orcish resistance in hiding…
“If you showed a modern Russian ‘The Lord of the Rings’ he would immediately sympathise with the orcs and write a book about how they were the good guys and the hobbits were Nazis” sounds almost too on-the-nose to be true, but reality is notoriously lacking in subtlety.
IIRC Meriadoc and Peregin were Master of Buckland and Thain of the Shire. I would think it gets the power dynamics quite the wrong way around to call them the cronies of Gamgee, rather than the other way around. Which makes it quite curious that they are given less central roles in the narrative than he, especially given that they were clearly the dominant figures in the Shire’s civil war.
But then, we don’t have even a copy of the Red Book ourselves, just a novelisation written by Professor Tolkien that was clearly much influenced by the sensibilities of 20th-Century England.
Descriptions of Hobbits and the Shire in particular could not more obviously have “I am a Giant Anachronism” written all over them.
What is your point here—that we should not discuss areas of “defects” among ourselves just because the author’s intention was entertainment? Please clarify/?
What does enjoying entertainment look like?
Reminds me of an incident in my past. My friends and I went to a bar together–NOT a karaoke bar, just a normal bar. For some reason we started singing drinking songs, the kind where the chorus is sung by the group, often badly and typically drunkenly. A few strangers joined in, with their own songs. One of my other friends objected on the grounds of “We’re here to have fun!” The group doing the singing informed her, politely but firmly, that we WERE having fun, and would continue to do so regardless of her opinion, thank you very much.
As for what you wrote of Tolkien’s thoughts on his works, I will counter with his essays on fantasy writing and his letters to his son. I forget which, but in one case he described his son, who was in WWI, as being “a Hobbit among Orcs”; that certainly implies that Tolkien accepted that many would draw inspiration from the stories. Of course neither your nor my views on Tolkien’s views are accurate. I forget the term, but the Catholics have a term for when you pick and choose verses from the Bible to make it seem like it says what you want it to say, and that’s what we’re doing here.
I forget the term, but the Catholics have a term for when you pick and choose verses from the Bible to make it seem like it says what you want it to say, and that’s what we’re doing here.
“Eisegesis”, but that’s not specifically a Catholic term, as far as I know.
“Prooftexting” is a more modern term for this practice, but again, it’s not specifically Catholic.
I didn’t mean to imply that others didn’t use it. I know that Catholics do–went to a Roman Catholic grade school and this was something that was discussed as a theological error, if not an outright sin. Plus, we’re discussing Tolkien, so Catholicism was in the back of my mind. My intent was merely to provide information to facilitate finding the term.
There is also an epistemological issue here. I grew up Catholic, still study Medieval monasticism (the SCA does weird things to you), and became a Pagan (not getting into it, suffice to say I found the reasons convincing). I can speak with some knowledge on those to religions. Since I never studied the theology of other religions, I lack any justification to comment on them. The virtue of intellectual humility demands that, since I don’t know, I have an obligation to not comment on the subject as if I do. It’d be no different than me commenting on electrical engineering–my area of expertise is paleontology, and I’ve never had any interest in electricity.
As an aside, the assumption “If someone says Group X does Y, they mean that only Group X does Y”–and, more generally, taking the most extreme interpretation of an argument, often only weakly supported by the text if it’s supported at all–is a peculiar one, if not originating online than certainly perpetuated online. It’s certainly characteristic of online debates, and one reason why they are so hostile. While it’s not always fallacious, it very frequently is. It’s usually far more plausible that what the person meant was….Group X does Y. Their argument is most likely limited to what they say, in other words.
In RCIA class, I often heard the term “Cafeteria Catholic” used, to illustrate the folly of treating the faith like a buffet where individuals could just pick and choose, accept and reject at will.
FWIW, it was letter #66, of 6 May 1944:
Man, I wish more creative types understood this sort of thing.
Bronze Age Collapse! I did a paper on that for a history class in college, so I’m excited for your take. How many weeks will be devoted to the Sea Peoples?
Congrats to the Professor for being quoted in WAPO today, here’s a Free shared to the article: https://wapo.st/49jQsZn — “How ancient Sparta explains 2026”
It *should* be a Share, no paywall, if the process worked the way it should. Sometimes there are glitches in WAPO’s “Share” feature. Might be forced to jump thru some registration hoops, tho, or some other nuisance.
(Sigh)
I realize it’s the Washington Post, so expecting anything actually original is a bit much, but it would be a much more interesting article if it talked about the Spartiates’ apparent decision to not allow new people into the mess and its linkage to Sparta’s decline and then paralleled it with how modern Western elites seem very determined to draw up the ladder after them, instead of sticking with the usual “The far-right loves Sparta” thing.