Hey folks! I am working on finishing up some things this week, so I thought I would post the text of the keynote I gave at the Prancing Pony Podcast Moot earlier this December. I’ve made some minor edits to conform a bit more to the form of a blog post, but this remains very much a speaking script, with some of the different expectations (somewhat less detail, more signposting, and a bit more rhetorical flourish, however poorly done) still there. So without further ado, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars:”
One of the folks there, Yiffan, was kind enough to sketch the impromptu history lecture and sent me the sketch, which you see above.
Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars
I wanted to talk today about the historical grounding of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and especially his legendarium, following on the theme of the moot, ‘Creating Historical Depth within Fantastical Worlds.’ In particular, I want to speak on the grounding of Tolkien’s perception of war, anchored in both his deep erudition and his own experiences. In part, that means discussing why the martial aspects of Middle Earth – the size and structure of armies, their commanders, the way they move and fight, the outcomes of their battles – feel so much more grounded and real than many other works in this genre. They feel more grounded, as we will see, because they are more grounded.
But even more I want to talk about how the vision of war in Tolkien’s world is defined by his two great sources – one great and wonderful and one great and terrible – of historical grounding. In a way it is trapped between them, caught between two incompatible visions of both war and the warrior, a collision of ‘wars’ – or, if I may be academically pedantic for a moment, a collision of culturally embedded visions (mentalités, to be even more obscure) of warfare – that Tolkien struggles to resolve in his writings. This talk is about how Éowyn finds herself trapped between the two ‘Wars’ Tolkien knew: the wars in his books and the war of his own experience, and how Tolkien navigates Éowyn through this collision to find peace at the other side. The Lord of the Rings being a work of fiction, that collision is resolved not in dry academic broadsides – of the sort you have, inexplicably, agreed to endure for the next forty minutes (I thank you for your questionable decision-making in this regard) – but rather through its characters.
And of course, in the Lord of the Rings as in all great art, it is in the struggle to resolve the unresolvable that profundity of the human experience emerges, in all of its beauty and flaws.
Thus, our discussion proper begins where its wars end: with Éowyn in the Houses of Healing.
Two Wars in the Houses of Healing
I imagine we all know the moment. Éowyn recovering from wounds sustained on the Pelennor Fields, both physical and psychological, has had her heart softened by Faramir and her spirits lifted by the departure of the shadow proclaims (RotK, 271):
‘I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,‘ she said, ‘and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, no vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’ And again, she looked at Faramir. ‘No longer, do I desire to be a queen,’ she said.
And let me offer a brief shout-out to Faramir’s gamely and adroit reply of, “That is well, for I am not a king.” The fellow is putting in the effort.
This character turn is, of course, one of the most controversial in the whole of the legendarium, long criticized on the grounds that it undermines Éowyn’s character to give her traditional feminine domesticity as a reward for her valor. To many readers, Éowyn in this moment feels like a character trapped between the modern and the pre-modern: a modern heroine who can fight her own battles with the best of them, who is yet forced to accept the pre-modern consolation prize of marriage and domesticity. I confess I have never been persuaded of this view; we should note of course that standing next to her in this moment is Faramir, the finest Captain of Gondor who is yet prepared – eager, even – to take the same reward as Éowyn, to go to govern Ithilien and help it bloom once more. That charge is not so different either from Samwise, Merry and Pippin, who all return home to become civic leaders in their communities at peace. Tolkien is not offering Éowyn a ‘woman’s reward’ but rather his version of a heroes reward.
I do think modern readers are somewhat in danger of missing the radicalism of Éowyn’s character, a case – one of many – of Tolkien being so influential that he has created a new norm against which he is judged. Éowyn’s character, of course, draws on traditions of mythical and legendary women warriors that predate him: the Amazons of Greek mythology – figures like Atalanta or Penthesilea – or Camilla (the Aeneid’s Latin stand-in for Penthesilea). Or, of course, the shield-maidens of the Norse literature that Tolkien loved so: Lagertha, Veborg, Hervor and so on. The set up for Éowyn is familiar.
It is instead in the payoff, in this moment that Tolkien defies his source material in a way that creates a new paradigm. Because as students of pre-modern literature will know, in the broad western tradition, women warriors exist in literature largely to be defeated. Atalanta exists in her story to be defeated in a footrace by Hippomenes and consequently forced into a marriage she had tried to resist (which leads into her ending up transformed into a lion when Hippomenes offends the gods). Penthesilea and Camilla’s role in their stories are as fearsome opponents to be killed and defeated by male heroes, a violent restatement of patriarchal dominance. The Amazons more generally ‘exist to lose’ in Greek and Roman mythology.
Shield maidens fare little better. Verborg appears in the Gesta Danorum, showing valor but being slain in battle. The younger Hervor, likewise, falls in battle, while Lagertha, the exception, in the Gesta Danorum slays her husband and then promptly vanishes from the story. In short, these figures, while praised for their value, generally ‘exist’ in the story to be defeated. In a real sense, these characters are often punished for violating the gender roles of their societies.
By contrast, Tolkien rewards Éowyn. Faramir openly praises her in directly heroic terms, “For you are a lady high and valiant and have yourself won renown that shall not be forgotten.” As we’ll discuss in a moment, unforgettable renown is not a small reward! Éowyn has accomplished this and unlike the heroines upon whom she is based, can then leave with her life, to enjoy the peace she has won under the same terms as Samwise or Merry or Pippin or, indeed, Faramir. In this sense, Éowyn feels far more modern than her critics give credit.
Yet I think there is something to the idea that Éowyn, in the Houses of Healing stands trapped between the modern and the pre-modern, just not in her gender, but rather in her relationship to war and death, the relationships that have dominated her thinking since we first met her in the pages of The Two Towers. She is hardly the only character so trapped and indeed we might understand the theme of the final third of The Return of the King – as one of the great works of Great War literature (I will argue until the end of time that it should stand next to books like All Quiet on the Western Front in this regard) – to be, “how can one leave war behind?” Samwise can, but Frodo finds he cannot. Faramir longs to do so and finally does. Many characters – Boromir, Théoden, Denethor – know the end of war only in death. Éowyn is, in the Houses of Healing, trapped between a pre-modern relationship to war, which offers her only death in battle, and a modern relationship to war, which offers escape.
To understand how Éowyn navigates the collision of these systems, we need to understand how Tolkien himself imagined and experienced war, to understand the two great reservoirs from which his understanding came. And at last we come to our main topic, for Tolkien has two visions of war that emerge through Middle Earth, both rooted in history.
Those who know my writing will be, of course, in no way shocked that we are 1,250 words in and only now reaching the end of the introduction. Now on to Part IIb.
The Historicity of Middle Earth
When I started actually writing about Tolkien’s legendarium, I was surprised by how strongly grounded it was, historically. I had grown up on these books, having them read to me before I even could read them myself, and I had returned to them regularly, but I hadn’t sat down to work through them the way a historian would until 2019 when I started blogging on them. But I came back to them in the context of writing critiques of other fantasy worlds which claimed more ‘realism’ and yet often betrayed a far weaker understanding of societies in the past.
I expected to find similar cracks in the foundations of Middle Earth, but there are few. Tolkien’s armies move at roughly the correct speeds and his detailed accounting of dates in the appendices leave him no room to ‘cheat.’ Likewise, the political systems of Tolkien’s human societies are immediately intelligible as somewhat fragmented Late Antique or Early Medieval polities, with leaders, values customs, armies and social institutions to match their structure.
| Instance | Type | Distance | Book Speed | ‘Rule of Thumb’ Speed |
| Théoden to Helm’s Deep | Cavalry Forced March | c. 80 miles | 50 miles per day | ~40 miles per day |
| Morgul Army to Minas Tirith | Infantry with Supplies | 20 leagues (c. 60 miles) | 12 miles per day | ~10 miles per day |
| Théoden to Minas Tirith | Cavalry | c. 180 miles | 36 miles per day | ~40 miles per day |
| Grey Company to Pelargir | Heroic Cavalry Forced March | c. 300 miles | 60 miles per day | ~40 miles per day |
No small part of this, of course, comes from Tolkien’s own meticulous plotting, including day-by-day accounting of where characters are (which of course shows up in the appendices). But he has not worked out all of those details – there is little sense that Tolkien had worked out, for instance, a complete flow-chart of Rohan or Gondor’s administration, yet what we see makes sense with history. The strong historical grounding of Tolkien’s legendarium comes from Tolkien’s own deep marination in the literature of societies like the ones he describes and his own experience of war. We begin with the former.
The War in Tolkien’s Books
I imagine for at least some of you, the details of Tolkien’s education are already familiar, but let me go over the basics and then provide a bit of context for them. I should note that in this next part, I am quite indebted to the work of John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (2005); I imagine in a gathering such as this, little recommendation of it is required. I offer it all the same.
Even as a schoolboy, Tolkien was enamored with literature and languages. He himself writes, “I was brought up in the Classics” – by which he means ancient Greek and Latin literature – “and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.” Education in turn-of-the-last-century Britain remained heavily based on the Classics and a solid working knowledge of Greek and Latin (and of Greek and Roman history) was assumed for any man who wanted to present as an educated man. Modern European languages – Tolkien excelled in German, winning first prize in the subject at his school in 1910 – were also a standard part of education.
Tolkien ‘discovers’ the early Germanic languages via Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language in 1908 (Tolkien is 16 at the time) and so his love affair with Germanic, rather than Roman languages was begun, to the last the rest of his life. In 1911, Tolkien began his studies at Oxford, but initially enrolled reading (that is ‘majoring in’ in American parlance) Classics. He only shifted to English literature – Old English – in 1913. Tolkien is thus deeply familiar with the Greek and Roman Classics before he moves on to develop his prodigious knowledge of Old and Middle English literature.
Of course, the war intervened – we will return to that in a moment – but in his academic career, Tolkien produced a number of major works on English literature (in addition to producing the defining works of English literature we are discussing here). While Tolkien’s work on Beowulf, most famously “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) is perhaps best known – Tolkien essentially revolutionized the study of English’ oldest epic poem – he also worked on later medieval romances, translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the 14th century Middle English poem Pearl. Although Tolkien did not work on similar continental literary traditions, the French tales of knightly deeds (chasons de geste) or the songs of the Occitan troubadours, he can hardly have been ignorant of them and one detects allusions to them at certain points in the Lord of the Rings. When Théoden, for instance, about to ride to his glorious end, “seized a great horn from Guthlaf his banner-bearer and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder” it is hard not to hear an echo of Roland from the 11th century chanson de geste the Song of Roland, who finding himself in a battle that will claim his life blows upon his own horn so hard his temples burst. Roland’s horn, evidently made from elephant tusk, is termed the Olifant in the poem, a name which also ought to jog some memories from Middle Earth too.
As a historian, I also feel I would be remiss if I did not note the scholarly climate of historical study that Tolkien was entering into: Tolkien’s early scholarly years are happening at the same time that historians were assembling the first modern, systematic efforts to map out political and social organization in pre-modern societies. Theodore Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte (Roman History) was published in from 1871 to 1908 and won a Nobel Prize in 1902; his systematic effort to understand the Roman system of governance, Römisches Staatsrecht had been published in 1888. As always, scholarship on the Middle Ages was a touch later, but Marc Bloch’s La Societe foedale, (Feudal Society), a foundation-stone work in understanding medieval society, was published in 1940 (Bloch, a member of the French resistance, was murdered by the Nazis in 1944). I cannot say for certain if Tolkien engaged with these works directly, but given his place at Oxford he could hardly have avoided them entirely, even if he wished (and even if one imagines he might have rebelled against the relentlessly materialist focus of the historical work of his day).
And as a scholar of military equipment in particular, I have to note that Tolkien, drawing carefully on the language of these medieval works, is remarkably adept at recreating in words a relentlessly Early Medieval military material culture: maul hauberks, partially enclosed helmets, broad shields that splinter and long spears from horseback. The internet has, since then, placed the wealth of human knowledge about arms and armor at the fingertips of every writer and yet few if any modern writers are so precise.
Tolkien thus spend his life marinating in the literature produced by pre-modern societies: Greek, Roman, Old English and Middle English in particular. And it is clear to me that in the process he developed an intuitive understanding of how these cultures imagined their worlds, how they thought about society, about politics, about their own values. It is why his Secondary World feels so real and true; he understands the societies on which it is based at a depth few ever manage. And how they thought about war.
Pre-Modern Éowyn
And it is here we meet what we might call out ‘First Éowyn,’ the pre-modern Éowyn.
The worldview that comes out of epics like the Iliad or Beowulf should feel immediately familiar to a reader of The Lord of the Rings. Naturally, across such a chasm of cultures, there will be differences but heroes in these epics are presented as primarily chasing renown, which they accomplish by competing with each other in deeds. War, of course, is the principal stage upon which this competition takes place, but not the only one. But this headlong pursuit of renown is almost invariably tied up with death: there are few ‘old heroes’ in these stories and those that do appear – like Nestor in the Iliad – appear as much as pathetic figures as anything else. No one really listens to the advice of Nestor in the Iliad (only Telemachos listens to him in the Odyssey), an old blowhard who has outlived his renown and thus much of his value in these societies – they listen to Achilles, to Agamemnon, to Odysseus, men in their prime who are still performing great deeds.
This connection of death and renown is explicit in the Iliad, through its central character, Achilles, whose menis, (‘wrath’) is set out as the poems theme. In Book 9 he reveals that, unusual amongst men – he is, after all, a demigod – he has two mortal fates. “For my mother, the silver-footed goddess Thetis told me of the two-fold fates bearing me to death. If on the one hand I remain here, fighting about the city of the Trojans, I will lose my return-home, but my renown [kleos] will be imperishable. If on the other hand I return to my beloved fatherland, I will lose my great kleos, but long shall my life endure, and the doom of death shall not fall upon me.” (Iliad 9.410-416) Achilles, the consummate hero, naturally chooses to remain and although the poem ends before his death, every reader or listener would have known that Achilles, by choosing to remain and defeat Hector, the mightiest Trojan, had both achieved that undying renown (we are, after all, still talking about him), but at the same time, had doomed himself to die beneath the walls of Troy.
Likewise, of course, Beowulf. While Beowulf’s superhuman strength – he has a nasty habit of breaking his own swords, he is so strong – defines many of his fights, the defining aspect of her person is the one the poem ends on, that is he lof-geornost “most desirous of fame” (3182). Lof – praise, fame, renown – serves much the same role as Greek kleos (or Latin laus or gloria), as the central thing for which heroes compete. Thus, episodes like Beowulf’s accounting of his exploits upon arriving at Heorot (399-424) before his boast to defeat Grendel and his prickly response when Unferth tries to play down his exploits (499-606). Renown, reputation for great deeds was all.
But heroism and death are linked in Beowulf as they are in the Iliad. Deep into his old age, when a dragon strikes his kingdom, Beowulf we are told was “too proud to line up with a large army against the sky-plague” (2345-9). Instead he takes only a small band and when most of these abandon him in fear, he confronts the dragon alone, declaring, “I risked my life often when I was young. Now I am old, but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open.” (2510-15). When Beowulf’s one stalwart companion, Wiglaf rushes to his aid, he encourages Beowulf, “Go on, dear Beowulf, do everything you said you would when you were still young and vowed you would never let your name and fame be dimmed while you lived” (2663-66). Beowulf, of course does go on, in a fight he knows full well will claim his life, yet render his renown imperishable. How could a man who is lof-geornost do otherwise?
These characters and their motivations, of course, have their attitudes rooted in their own societies and time. War was not constant in these societies, but it was regular, an occurrence that cycles in and out like the seasons, a society which wholly lacked it was incomplete, perhaps even dysfunctional. Participation in war in these societies was, after all, often an essential part of the transition from boyhood to adulthood for young men. It is easy for us to miss how central this could be for these societies.
By way of example, we might take Aeschylus. Aeschylus, if you are not familiar, was an ancient Athenian playwright, a writer of tragedies – the higher, more prestigious form – and was by far the most famous playwright of his generation; arguably of any generation. He was the only playwright whose tragedies continued to be restaged in festivals after his death, the equivalent of the very greatest writer-director of his day. We have the text of Aeschylus’ funerary epitaph, engraved on his gravestone. It reads (in translation), “Beneath this stone like Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing lands of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, and the long-haired Persian knows it well.”1
No mention of his plays, his many first-place finishes in theater competition at religious festivals. But Aeschylus fought at Marathon, the most famous battle of his age and thereby won the renown of which his tombstone boasts, that Marathon can speak of his fighting skill and his Persian foes remember it.
For the men of the ‘military class’ – defined differently in each society – war also never fully left them. Few heroes of the Trojan War ever come home: both Achilles and Hector die on the battlefield. So too, of course does Beowulf, mortally wounded by his last triumph, the slain dragon. And Roland likewise does not survive his famed and doomed last stand at Roncevaux Pass.
That was not merely story convenience. The citizen-warriors of Greek city-states (called poleis) continued to serve when the polis went to war deep into old age. Socrates, born c. 470, fought at Potidaea in his 30s, at Delium in his 40s and at Amphipolis, likely nearing 50. Military age for an ancient Greek polis ended only around 60. Likewise, knights did not ‘retire.’ Their status as warriors was an essential part of them that continued deep into old age and could only be laid down if they took up another equally totalizing vocation, by taking holy orders as a monk. A knight too old to fight was a pathetic figure, not an aspirational one.
We meet this same historically grounded vision of war in early on in Éowyn. Indeed, as we come to know the character, it dominates her thoughts. As Éowyn pleads with Aragorn to take her down the Paths of the Dead and Aragorn reminds her that she has – again – been chosen to lead Rohan in the king’s absence and against the possibility that he and Éomer might not return, she responds, “Shall I always be chosen?’ she said bitterly, ‘Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?” (RotK 62; emphasis mine). When asked what she fears, she responds, “A cage…to stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire” (RotK, 62; emphasis mine). Éowyn at this point seeks to take part in that competition for renown; chiefly she fears being forever barred from it.
And that comes inexplicably linked with her own attitude towards death. When Éowyn declares to Aragorn, “I do not fear either pain or death,” (RotK, 62) it is not an idle boast. She is, in effect, attempting to make the same choice as Achilles: to choose the short, glorious life over the long life lived without renown. When Éowyn confronts the Witch King she stands “faithful beyond fear” not because she thinks he can win – she promises merely “do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may” – but because for someone seeking a glorious death, the Witch King holds no fear (RotK, 127-8).
And even in the Houses of Healing, Éowyn holds to this vision of war. When Gandalf describes her as “waking…to hope” she responds “At least while there is an empty saddle of some fallen Rider that I can fill, and there are deeds to do. But to hope? I do not know” (RotK, 158-9) To Faramir she declares, “And it is not always good to be healed in body. Nor is it always evil to die in battle, even in bitter pain. Were I permitted, in this dark hour I would choose the latter.” Shortly thereafter, we get an even clearer statement from Éowyn , “I cannot lie in sloth, idle, caged. I looked for death in battle. But I have no died, and battle still goes on” (RotK, 264-5; emphasis mine). I think it is easy to miss but we must stress Éowyn is in these pages actively seeking death, because she can see no better ending, no better conclusion than that of Beowulf or Achilles.
We recognize the deep and self-harming depression in Éowyn’s death wish, but this is the script her culture has for her to achieve renown: she must ride into war and not out of it again. That perspective feels real because it is grounded in Tolkien’s own deep erudition of the literature of the kinds of societies Éowyn comes from – and the answers they have to her struggles and pains.
But, of course, Tolkien had another experience of war. This experience.
Tolkien’s Modern War
Once again, I imagine a fair bit of this is known to many of you but I think it is worthwhile to cover the details.
On June 28, 1915 J.R.R. Tolkien, 18 days out of his undergraduate education, applied for an officer’s commission ‘for the duration of the war.’ It is worth, I think, offering a bit of background here, as Great Britain came to the First World War in something of a different position than the powers on the continent. The continental European powers had, by 1914, adopted armies along the lines of the Prussian army that had won the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), which had led to the formation of Germany. Under that system, these countries prepared very large reserves in peace time: young men were processed through the military, given basic training and after a few years’ service discharged to be called up when war came in their millions. Rapid Prussian had won them the Franco-Prussian War and so this system was designed to keep the whole male populace in readiness for such a war.
Consequently, when the war broke out in August, 1914 the continental powers fielded massive armies: nearly two million Germans, one and a half million Russians, one and a quarter million Frenchmen, and half a million Austrians. By contrast, Great Britain – protected by the Royal Navy and as concerned with colonial wars than European ones – had maintained a small, well-trained professional army and kept civilian society largely civilian. The initial British deployment to France at the start of the war, the British Expeditionary Force, was thus supremely modest in size (albeit unusually well-trained): 115,000 men. It was almost immediately apparent as the fighting began in the Battle of the Frontiers that this would not be sufficient.
Secretary of State for War, Herbert Kitchener created what would be the ‘New Army,’ a larger all-volunteer force to fill out the ranks and enlarge the British force to fight the kind of warfare in the trenches it was now facing. The initial plan was for 500,000 volunteers; more than five million men would fight in the British Army during the First World War. These were not the experienced, professional soldiers of the early BEF (the ‘old contemptibles’ they called themselves) nor were they reservists drawing out familiar and long-stockpiled weapons from depots laid in long preparation for just such a war. Instead, they were the flower of British youth, drawn by patriotism to a war for which they were unprepared, to be fed to ravenous Ares by their hundreds of thousands.
It was into this rapidly expanding force that Tolkien was commissioned, with the war already very much underway. Enlisting ‘late’ as he had wanted to complete his studies Tolkien reported for training on July 19, 1915 and on the 4th of June, 1916, Tolkien was shipped to France to the Western Front.
He had arrived just in time for the great testing of Kitchener’s New Army (some elements of which had already been in combat for a year), a planned joint Franco-British offensive along the Somme River. The French role in the attack had been downgraded because the German assault on Verdun (begun February of that year) had diverted French reserves, but this equally meant that the attack at the Somme would have to go forward no matter what and had to continue, no matter what went wrong: German attention from the straining French lines had to be diverted. The battle, which began on the first of July, 1916 and ground horribly on until the 18th of November, was, of course, a famous and terrible failure.
Tolkien, deployed with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, arrived near the front on the 27th of June, by which point the pre-assault artillery barrage had already begun; preparatory barrages in WWI could last days or weeks. Tolkien’s unit was in reserve for the first days of the battle (begun July 1), but his close friend and T.C.B.S. fellow (Tea Club, Barrovian Society)2 Robert Gilson was killed on the first day of the battle, by shellfire; he would not be the last of Tolkien’s boyhood friends the war claimed. It was artillery that did most of the killing; infantry did most of the dying. Tolkien’s unit worked burial detail for the first days of the offensive as they waited to rotate forward.
Tolkien himself moved up to the front with his battalion on the 14th of July; battles in WWI ran for months and the bodies of those slain two weeks earlier remained in places on the field. An attack that night to capture the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle failed with heavy losses – Tolkien and his fellows watched as other elements of the 7th brigade tried to take the ground, were thrown back and then were sent to try themselves; Tolkien’s job as a signal’s officer was the hopeless task of trying to maintain the wire that enabled cable communications. Another assault on the 15th, with no more success had left another British unit, a Warwickshire battalion, stranded behind enemy lines, so the Lancashire Fusiliers set to the bloody, muddy work of blasting their way with grenades through the trenches to relieve them. By the 17th, the village had fallen; it had cost the British 5,121 men to take a tiny village that before the war had a population of just a few hundred and in any case had been bombed out of existence long before they arrived.
Tolkien was back in the line in October for an attack on the 21st, which succeeded in the small ways that assaults in the First World War could: a little ground and a few prisoners taken and heavy losses on both sides. Since Tolkien had arrived, his battalion had lost sixty men dead, four hundred and fifty wounded and another seventy four missing (out of a notional strength of roughly 1,000), a casualty rate of almost 60%. The Lancashire Fusiliers were kept in existence as a unit through the offensive only through continuous replacements. Having been in and out of the front lines since June, on October 25th, Tolkien fell sick with trench fever, communicated by the lice that lived in the trenches. The sickness saved his life. Not all of his friends were so lucky: fellow TCBS member Geoffrey Bache Smith was killed by shrapnel in November during the closing days of the battle.
As Tolkien himself famously notes in his preface, “to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” It is striking that it is in the aftermath of this experience – Tolkien himself played down any notions that he was writing Middle Earth ‘in the trenches’ – it is in the aftermath of this experience that the first long, coherent part of the legendarium comes together and it is one of the bitterest and most tragic: the Fall of Gondolin. One cannot help but sense in the lost innocence and spoiled purity of Gondolin, that Tolkien had lost a great deal too.
Far from the heroics of the tales in his books or of Eowyn’s dread hopes, his experience of war had been more like Bilbo’s experience. Like Tolkien, Bilbo at the Battle of the Five Armies comes to battle reluctantly, for a fight he had hoped could be avoided, and he is swiftly incapacitated – struck down by a stone rather than by trench fever. When he returns to health, he finds not glory, but simply the list of dead friends: Thorin, Fili and Kili.
Robert Gilson (KIA Jul. 1, 1916), Ralph Payton (KIA, Jul. 22, 1916), Geoffrey Smith (WIA Nov. 29, d. of wounds Dec 3, 1916), Thomas Barnsley (KIA, Jul. 31, 1917).
Also like Bilbo, when the next war came, aged, he could only stay in Rivendell and wish good luck to the next generation that must bear the peril and wait anxiously for their return. Of his sons, Michael Tolkien commissioned as a lieutenant in the British Army in 1941; Christopher joined the R.A.F. in 1943. Mercifully, both survived.
Tolkien’s deep reading of ancient and medieval literature had equipped him to understand pre-modern societies in peace and in war: how kings and captains lead, how their armies are formed, what castles and fortresses are for and how they are made, what values and words hold them together, but his experience in the First World War of course shaped him also. In some cases, in trivial ways – as noted Tolkien knows, intuitively, how fast men march because he had been a lieutenant responsible for drilling and marching men.
But he also comes with a different, modern vision of war. To me, this has always come out most clearly in two passages: the dread that the defenders of Minas Tirith experience, watching Sauron’s army prepare their assault, complete with artillery and trenches of fire, unable to intervene to stop them, which seems so clearly to evoke the dread of bombardment and assault in the trenches of the Western Front. And of course, Frodo’s sad reflection at the end of his journey, “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.” The Return of the King, in particular, clearly stands as one of the great works of the Great War. Tolkien’s deep and long marination in the literature of ancient and medieval societies, his mastery of their traditions, equipped him to write about societies like theirs, and wars like theirs, with a masterful understanding of their world; his experience of the First World War prepared him to understand those conflicts in a way his historical subjects rarely could.
Resolving Éowyn’s War
And at last, we can return to Éowyn in the Houses of Healing and perhaps understand her better, caught not between the woman and the warrior (Tolkien will let her be both), but between the two wars in Tolkien’s life: the glorious wars of heroes doomed to die he found in his books and the brutal, all-consuming horror that he was doomed to survive. This contradiction comes together in many of Tolkien’s characters, but strikingly in Éowyn.
When Éowyn wakes first she is surprised to see Éomer, “for they said that you were slain. Nay, but that was only the dark voices in my dream. How long have I been dreaming?” (RotK, 158) Frodo, too, has dark dreams of the horrors of his part in the War of the Ring that never quite go away and one detects here an echo of what many in his generation experienced, of wounds that “cannot be wholly cured” (RotK, 299). Éowyn has ridden out heroically, she has stood in battle heroically before a great foe and triumphed. Yet, in her words, “I looked for death in battle. But I have not died, and battle still goes on” (RotK 264-5). She sought glory and achieved deeds of the greatest valor, but has found only real war: she looked for the beaches of Troy but has found the mud of Flanders; all the glory of deeds bled away leaving death as the only future she can see.
Faramir seeks to offer Éowyn a way forward, the way Tolkien himself must have found, a way past war and glory and death to something greater – peace. It is a distinctively modern vision which imagines that the end of war might yet be found on this side of the grave. We, of course, already know that Faramir – who loves not the bright sword for its sharpness – has grown past the heroic, Homeric view of war and now he tries to draw Éowyn forward. Faramir declares to her, “you and I have both passed under the wings of Shadow, and the same hand drew us back” (RotK 266). Éowyn at first refuses, “I am a shieldmaiden and my hand is ungentle” (RotK 266) – and even seems to wither once the Shadow of war departs (her chance at a glorious death with it; RotK, 270). But in talking with Faramir – who is open in praising that she has “won renown that shall not be forgotten” (RotK 270)– she is able to find a way beyond war: not into domesticity. Notably, he does not demand that Éowyn lay down her heroic status – unlike Aragorn, he does not offer her pity, but praise – her renown, her status as a hero is reaffirmed by Faramir, not rejected. But unlike her Greek and Norse forebearers – or so many of Tolkien’s childhood friends – she can enjoy that reward at peace on the other side of war.
Tolkien has, in a sense, gifted Éowyn with his modern conception of war, enabled her to see beyond war to the possibility of enduring peace and to the promise of a life lived for “all things that grow and are not barren.” In Éowyn – though not only in her – he has reconciled the war of his books with the war of his life.
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A beautiful and poignant piece of scholarship! Thank you for sharing this.
I think Éowyn’s speech is rich in Christian values:
1) War alone is not enough to achieve glory once the Shadow has disappeared.
2) Now is the time to “love all things that grow” instead of “singing songs of death.”
3) From queen to healer, because serving others is one of the most important sources of “glory” in Jesus’ teaching.
It is not just about two different view on war is also a switch form a self-centered view of the world, how do I get immortal glory, to a comunity centered view, what should I do now to help others?
I suspect that Éowyn’s character is somehow linked to the Christian theme of the knight who renounces glory and wealth to serve God.
Éowyn’s story is a story about convertion and deep changes in the character values and motivations.
I was going to say something similar: Eowyn in particular and the view of war in general draws on a long tradition of christian thinking.
I suspect that Éowyn’s character is somehow linked to the Christian theme of the knight who renounces glory and wealth to serve God. There are several saints who follow this path.
I believe that Éowyn’s journey in the book is also a story of conversion and profound changes in the values underlying her character and how she sees the world.
It is not just a matter of two different ways of looking at war, but also of moving from a self-centered view, “How can I achieve glory?”, to one based on the community, “What is needed now?”.
Several themes dear to the Christian message emerge in Éowyn’s speech:
1) War alone is not enough to bring glory if it is not directed against evil. Now that the Shadow is gone, the warrior is no longer needed. I would dare to say that what was needed was never a warrior but a protector, and now that the Shadow is gone, a protector is no longer needed.
2) Violence in and of itself is not a source of legitimacy and justification.
3) Now is the time for “love all things that grow” instead of “songs of slaying.”
4) From queen to healer, because serving and caring for others is one of the most important sources of “glory” in Jesus’ message.
I’m not sure if the first message went through, so I apologize for the double post.
“she looked for the beaches of Troy but has found the mud and of Flanders”
What word is missing here between “and” and “of”?
This was my question as well, I’m curious about the mud and *what* of Flanders.
In general, I would expect the phrase to have been “the mud and blood of Flanders”.
There has been a lot of those there over the centuries.
That would make sense. I was wondering if it was something like “the mud and nerve-wracking boredom” (as opposed to the heroic glory of the beaches of Troy)
Indeed, it was originally ‘mud and blood of Flanders’ but I edited it to just mud on the plane to match beaches which I thought had a better flow and evidently failed to delete the ‘and’ in my electronic copy.
Blood (I expect)
Cross posted, and I meant to add that a common use of the phrase (the unofficial? motto of the Royal Tank Regiment, in various forms): “Through mud and blood to the green fields beyond” rather nicely sums up Eowyn’s journey.
And (last reply to myself, promise), while Eowyn and Faramir (and Sam) find those ‘green fields beyond’ in Ithilien or the Shire, for Frodo it requires a different journey: “it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
Which is, of course, also the dream of Blitzkrieg: unimpeded armoured advance, and resulting rampage, throughout the enemy rear, Rommel’s 1940 advance to the Channel, Soviets’ break through the Romanians in Stalingrad and the Americans’ 2003 run to Baghdad being perhaps the most classic examples.
The double meaning is, no doubt, intentional.
Manstein, not Rommel.
Bravo! I’m sorry I couldn’t attend in person.
It seems that the ancient heroic model of the warrior transformed during the 20th Century into musicians. Like Neil Young singing, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” or Jethro Tull’s, “too old to rock and roll; too young to die.”
Maybe through the idea of the warrior poet?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WarriorPoet
If memory servers me true, even the shade of Achilles, when visited by Odysseus in the underworld, was proud and happy to hear of the renown won by his son. So presumably the best to be hoped for was to win renown in your youth, have sons who won renown in your old age, then perish in some heroic fashion before the indignities of old age grew too undignified.
In Herodotus (1:30), he lets the sage Solon give Tellus the Athenian as the example of greatest happiness a man can find:
“And that comes inexplicably linked with her own attitude towards death;” I think that you probably meant “inextricably” as you had just finished explaining that very link.
I always find it touching when Bergil says “Almost now I wish that there was no war”. We meet him again only briefly after the siege and never find out whether he would still include that “almost” (I suspect not, especially after the sorts of scenes he’s witnessed working for the Healers)– but I still think of that line as Tolkien’s tribute to the innocent lads of 1914.
A big one for me that you brought out with your writing on the topic of “Creating Historical Depth within Fantastical Worlds” was how the different military decisions by Sauron vs Saruman highlight the extent to which Sauron is serious and knows what he’s doing and Saruman is not. It’s fascinating that the descriptions of military engagements can reveal so much about characters that don’t even feature much in them.
“Rapid Prussian had won them the Franco-Prussian War”
Should “mobilization” be between “Prussian” and “had”?
“Rapid Prussian” sounds like a good name for a cocktail.
Pretty sure a “Rapid Prussian” cocktail would lead to swift *de*mobilization, at least for the imbiber.
I would make a Rapid Prussian by stiring dark rum, jaegermeister and espresso personally, if nothing else the taste would perk one up in the short term.
Schnaps not Rum
Reminds me of the ‘Villa Diodati’ invented for all-night essay crises: one shot espresso and one shot absinthe. Once you’ve downed it, the essay doesn’t seem so horrible after all.
Maybe Rapid Prussian was the nickname of a particular Prussian hero.
I get that you are being factitious, but there were indeed “Hurrying” Heinz Guderian and “Marshal Forwards” Blucher. That said, the former came far too late to be really Prussian (or be much of a hero) and the latter died 50 years before the Franco-Prussian War, so…
There’s a beautiful Swedish poem called “Jag vill möta…” (I want to meet), by the poet Karin Boye, who tragically committed suicide at a young age. There are a few English translations, and I highly recommend them. It’s about a young person who “was armed in a mail-coat cast of shame.” It ends with a declaration that they want to meet life’s forces “weaponless”. That poem always reminded me of the change in Eowyn. Again, I highly recommend this poem, but be aware that the English version does not keep the perfect structure and rhymes the original has.
“Den vackraste visan om kärleken
blev aldrig satt på pränt
den blev kvar i en massgrav i Flandern
med en fattig Parisstudent…”
Wonderful article! I am glad somebody is defending Eowyn and Faramir, they be getting so much hate these days.
I have not thought about Faramir. But I know other have interpreted Éowyn as accepting being feminine. On the other hand her story can be interpreted as finding a new purpose in life when she can’t fight anymore. Such an interpretation makes sense considering the author’s own experiences and literary influences.
Heh, suddenly I imagine an odd kind of Peter Principle inherent to that ancient world conception of renown in war; the desire to be good enough to live to the point where one is accomplished but more likely to be killed in the fight, which can give way to being good enough to reach a level at which you can neither do well nor withdraw with dignity intact.
The ‘good news’ for a pre-modern warrior who seeks a glorious death is that you can nearly always increase your chance of death by fighting more recklessly and taking more risks, and as you keep getting older and older, if you keep fighting anyway, you will almost certainly eventually find some young whippersnapper thirty or more years your junior who absolutely can take you down in battle just by being stronger and healthier than you.
There are exceptions, but it’s not a strict instance of the Peter Principle.
I posit that one can read this aspect of The Lord of the Rings as part of a literary tradition trying to resolve a contradiction inherent in the figure of the warrior-aristocrat: On the one hand, to gain his dominion and the legitimacy to rule it, he has to act as a warrior, seeking war and personal renown. On the other hand, once he has dominion, he needs to act as a statesman to ensure prosperity, which means avoiding war and selfish acts.
While not every culture produces the 1.8 million word Mahabharata to attempt to square those two positions, we can still see that they are aware of it. Beowulf has to explain himself as to why he choses to act in his final moments not as a king (who should have taken the entire army to ensure the dragon dies) but as a warrior who desires individual glory, it’s not just inherent assumed. And in the Song of Roland, in the opening we are treated to two council scenes in which the voices for peace are explicitly called out as being the wise ones, and that Charlemagne, in listening to them, is making the right choice, even though he won his title of emperor by conquest.
Tolkien for his part is not subtle about where he puts his thumb on this scale, that the role of peace-making statesman is more worthy and admirable than that of the glory-seeking, foolhardy warrior. Not just in his “hero’s reward” as laid out by Bret being the opportunity to *stop* going to war, but also in many other examples, starting with of course of the inherently non-belligerent hobbits being the true heroes of the story. But note also how the Rohirrim are treated as implicitly lesser than the Gondorians for their glorification of war and generally belligerent nature. And how it’s part of the moral judgement of Denethor that he preferred the warrior Boromir over the statesman Faramir, and by doing so brought tragedy to the house of Stewards.
@AlienSystem,
Just to clarify, the Mahabharata is about many things (the text itself boasts, “Whatever is spoken about virtue, status, pleasure, and salvation may be seen elsewhere; but whatever is not contained in this [story] is not to be found anywhere else.'” That’s certainly one of the moral conflicts it dramatize, but there are others.
Also, as long as it is, it wasn’t composed all at once, and of course exist in as many versions as there are people telling the stories, there’s no “custodian” of the text. (Which doesn’t make the later additions any less legitimate parts of it, just like in my view the Pericope Adulterae and Comma Johanneum belong in the New Testament regardless of when they were written).
Thanks for a new Tolkien post! I recently re-read The Iliad and I think it ridicules heroism. Achilles’ very name means “he whose people live in pain”. Homer depicts Achilles doing all kinds of evil, while Hector is shown as an ideal father and husband. The final chapters are a delerious dream where Achilles single-handedly defeats an army and its leader Hector after chasing him around the wall three times. That kind of thing only happens in the tales of the defeated.
Medieval people weren’t that impressed either. In 14th C England and France Hector of Troy was one of the “Nine Worthies” (male), the other two classical exemplars being Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. None of the Greek heroes made the list.
(And Penthesilea, who also fought for Troy, was usually one of the not-so consistently defined female Nine Worthies.)
This has more to do with anti-Greek bias in both the medieval Latin church (explicit) and in the Aeneid (implicit).
First, the actual society that remembered the Iliad as a story within their own cultural framework did not see it that way, and this includes a lot of people who were thoughtful and not at all stupid. Just because something would seem like a parody to you doesn’t mean it seems like a parody to people educated to see the word differently.
As to the delirious dream, you may recall that earlier in the Iliad we have the sections with Diomedes, which end in an even more ‘unrealistic’ fashion. Within the cultural framework of the story, it is simply a fact that some of these mythical Greek heroes are demigods who can do things like slay giant monsters that could rout an army themselves. Weird to us, I know, but we live in a much more rationalistic culture where “once upon a time there was a son of the gods who could bench-press several literal tons” is only accepted as pure fiction that lacks plausibility and versimilitude… which of course doesn’t stop us from writing stories with resonance that focus on them.
Well, if we today really think Gods move human bodies and return spears once they are thrown, who has lost the plot?
When you actually read The Iliad (and most people who comment it have not), and you are open to the idea of a physical and spiritual world, it is still possible to see, even for us victims of a dumbed down modern education.
I’m a bit confused by what you’re trying to argue here. What are you claiming that we “don’t see” because we’re “victims of a dumbed-down education?”
I read the Iliad about fifteen years ago, so it’s a bit of a blur, but I’ve read it.
What I’m trying to argue is that we cannot see that many acts in The Iliad are spiritual, that is, exist in the mind only. For example Athena represents wisdom. When Diomedes is saved by Athena, he is not saved by a physical super being. Instead he is saved by his own wisdom.
I was thinking the spiritual is hard to see because our education ridicules every form of spirituality. We also didn’t read The Iliad when I was in school, just very small snippets of it.
Well, you can say that the actions of the gods are all metaphors in the Iliad, but I’d want to see some real evidence that the ancient Greeks (either of Homer’s time, or centuries later) themselves thought of the gods that way.
There are many passages in the Iliad and elsewhere in original Greek mythmaking that work very well if we assume the gods are physical beings that have bodies and act in the world with supernatural powers, and not so well if they are metaphors.
Quite frankly, I think the simpler hypothesis is that most ancient peoples actually did believe the gods were real individuals that could physically walk around in the world, and additionally could exercise supernatural power either while present in person or remotely through some combination of divine knowledge and numen, a concept mentioned in Dr. Devereaux’s earlier articles on polytheism.
We, today, may find it easy to think these gods are metaphors because internally we are convinced they are entirely not real, but the ancient Greeks behaved as if Zeus and Ares and Athena and Aphrodite and so forth were real beings with real power of action in the world.
@thinking_turtle,
I’m neither especially knowledgeable or especially interested in Greek culture, literature, religion or mythology, but this has to be the…..strangest take I’ve ever seen.
I mean, do you think that religious people today, or in the centuries between then and now, didn’t or don’t believe in their gods either? Because I can assure you they do, they don’t just see their gods as metaphors for wisdom or whatever.
I think most gods were originally anthropomorphic personifications. The Abrahamitic God developed out of a composite character. However, this is not to deny other people their religious belief. Most of humanity probably feels a need for that. Anyway, religious belief is certainly real and was equally real to the Ancient Greeks.
The Abrahamitic God developed out of a composite character
I’m aware of that (and also that similar evolution in how people conceptualize deities also happened in South Asia and probably elsewhere in the world), but that doesn’t really address either 1) whether some of these concepts of deities might have referents in reality and 2) whether the people who came up with these concepts believed they had referents in reality.
I don’t know enough about the ancient Greeks to say, but given what we know about religion and culture generlly, historically or today, I’d be very surprised if they *didn’t* think that their gods really existed.
I think the great majority of them actually did. There was an Ancient Greek philosopher who was a Pantheist Monotheist but he would have been a rare exception.
People both believe in the literal existence of their gods and simultaneously that the gods are metaphores that represent various aspects of human experience. Note also that the gods oppose each other–that’s why they are participating in the Trojan War in the first place. Achilles character and fate may be social commentary (it’s all about how his rage killed so many good men, after all), but at the same time, you can’t resist fate, so try to be the best warrior you can.
i.e. the entire comic book superhero genre.
I think the word “hero” originally meant “demigod” in Ancient Greek.
What do people think of this blog post by Peter Gainsford? He argues that the word hero didn’t mean at all the same thing to the ancients that it does to us, and that none of the characters of the Iliad are heroes by our definition.
Yeah exactly. In our times we depict superheroes as real, not as fantasies.
By contrast, I think ancient Greeks were well aware that bold tales are best taken with a grain of salt. And that anger and strife within one’s warband do not bode well.
This seems like kind of the opposite of truth. Essentially everyone is very clear on the point that Superman isn’t real, and you literally never see people publishing nonfiction in which they talk as though Superman was real.
By contrast, the ancient Greeks absolutely did believe that (for instance) Zeus was real, and showed every sign of likewise believing that, say, Hercules and Achilles had also been real once.
@Simon_Jester I’d say Zeus is a spiritual being. A leader inspired by Zeus is a good leader who will govern well. So Zeus’ consequences are real/physical, but Zeus as the cause is spiritual.
So I do not think Zeus is a physical being. That does not diminish him by the way.
Well, of course YOU don’t think Zeus is a real physical being. But that doesn’t mean we should project that kind of thinking onto the ancient Greeks, who probably didn’t share your exact philosophical outlook.
Describing it as a “parody” of heroism is obviously going too far, but on the other hand the narrative of the Iliad clearly disapproves of Achilles’s actions, which is why the poem ends with Priam talking him down and moving him to piety
Agreed, and I think that’s one of the enduring qualities of the Iliad. It isn’t a complete parody of heroism, but it’s not a Bertran de Born ‘war is fun let’s go do some war’ romp either. It has a depth and nuance that allows one to consider what argument it is trying to make with multiple different viable interpretations.
Was Achilles meant to be viewed as a hero? A cautionary tale? Both at once? Both at once, but to different audiences?
And that permeates the text and all of the characters within. What about Hector? Or Priam? Or Agamemnon? Or Menelaus?
Well Hector defended his country against conquerors who would kill and enslave them all so he can only be interpreted as a hero, now as well as in the past.
Paris, who had a wife, kidnapped a woman – who also had married – that lead to the war, is less of a hero.
In Greek, a hero is a revered ancestor, very much dead. As long as Achilles ancestral hearth is active he will be revered there. I think it’s a cautionary tale, as Achilles is an evil man who slays good men, although I believe mostly in his fantasy.
@NVA In the ancient world a normal marriage was a ritual kidnapping. It is hard to explain Paris’ stealing of Helen in another way. You can’t walk into Sparta and walk out with Helen, her possessions and her maids.
Now, when you’re looking to justify war, you come up with reasons, and I suppose that’s where Menelaus claim comes from.
I am not sure if Ancient Greek marriage ceremonies could be described as “ritualised kidnappings”. There being some stories of high-profile bride kidnappings don’t have to mean it was the norm.
@NVA While I agree that Hector appears to be the most unambiguously heroic to our sensibilities (and potentially also the Greeks), it’s also worth noting that he lost. Not that I’m saying that particularly tarnishes his heroic reputation…but I suspect his renown would have been greater had he won.
The main thrust of the ‘are they a hero or not’ question for me is with characters like Menelaus. From where I’m sitting, he’s a warmonger who’s terrible treatment of his wife led to the deaths of thousands of Greeks and Trojans, and who left most of the actual fighting to heroes of greater reputation and skill. He also has the ignominy of being effectively cuckolded by a princeling whelp (Paris), which is not exactly a situation to be emulated.
But, he was afforded a place among the Elysian Fields when he died, which is about as solid of a ‘this is a hero’ outcome as you get in Greek thought.
Is Menelaus a cautionary tale or someone to be emulated? Or both? Or neither? Or both and neither to different audiences?
@Lena Synnerholm While agree that it doesn’t appear to have been commonplace, something doesn’t have to be commonplace for it to be something that people accept is a thing that can happen. Especially in what is in effect a piece of historical fiction (as far as there is an ancient delineation between fiction and non-fiction).
It could well be that in the long and twisting oral history of stories that eventually led to the Iliad as we know it being written down, that Paris kidnapping Helen was a reference to bridal abduction. It could well not be of course, but it would need someone more immersed in it to work that out. Of course, you might be just such a person and I’m making a fool of myself here, but that is one of the risks of commenting on the internet…
@Lena I remember reading in the Ancient City that the ritual form of marriage in both Greek and Roman society was a staged kidnapping. The bridegroom had to simulate a seizure by force. The bride must cry out, and the women that accompany her must pretend to defend her. Then the bridegroom carries the wife into his paternal house taking great care that her feet do not touch the sill.
No, I don’t know so much more about Ancient Greece. I am just aware that the most famous thing does not have to be representative.
Although they share an origin in prehistory Ancient Greece and Rome were not the same culture. Cultural practices which were the norm in Greek city-states don’t have to apply to Rome. Moreover, Classical Antiquity covers a period of more than a millennium. Culture can change considerably in that time even if the change is too slow to be noticeable in a human lifetime. I think there is a papyrus found in Pompeii describing a more recognisably modern marriage ceremony. Although it did involve paying a bride price.
In Roman times the father first had to release the bride from her paternal family religion. That part persists until today, where a father “gives away” the bride.
My theory is that Helen wasn’t abducted, but properly married to Paris. Homer lays out the facts, Helen has her bridewealth and maids, which is unlikely using the modern meaning of abduction. Homer also lays out the claims of the Greeks, that she was Menelaus’ wife. Both are strongly held beliefs! It’s just that we today can only see one truth, which makes Homer’s laying out two beliefs unusual and hard to understand.
I view it as two conflicting claims on the same woman leading to war.
Don’t even need to go back 3000 years for ritual kidnappings as part of the wedding ritual. One rural Bulgarian wedding ritual from 200-300 years ago was for the groom to bring a couple friends and “kidnap” the bride at night. The parents would then come up in the morning and negotiate the marriage.
As a kid it was not clear to me why abducting a girl for 3-4 hours forces her parents to bring a dowry and ask for marriage, and I did not think to ask the teacher. ChatGPT suggests that this ritual might be an actual elopement, aka with the consent of the bride but perhaps not always of the parents.
Now if the bridge is a willful princess and the parents had other political plans, it is easy to imagine how you do a nonviolent kidnapping which nonetheless turns into a war..
As a kid it was not clear to me why abducting a girl for 3-4 hours forces her parents to bring a dowry and ask for marriage, and I did not think to ask the teacher
I doubt a teacher would be willing or able to explain it to a school kid, lol. Depending on the age of the kid, i guess.
@Lena Yeah exactly. I think one claim is what really happened, and the other is a doctored claim to justify a war.
@Ynneadwraith,
We do have at least one case of a modern conflict sparked partially over sexual conflict. The uprising against the British that expelled them from Afghanistan in 1842 (and wiped out nearly the entirety of that army) seems to have been triggered by a sexual dispute. A slave girl belonging to a prominent Afghan noble escaped to the house of the (notoriously promiscuous) British resident and took up with him instead, and the noble was so incensed he persuaded other clan leaders to join in an uprising. Obviously that wasn’t the *cause* of the war, at most it was a symbol of broader grievances, revolving partly around conflicting sexual mores but also around broader issues of religion, nationalism, culture, and dynastic politics. Still, I do wonder if events like that might have happened in the Greek distant past, and if folk memories of things like that might have played a role in Homer’s composition.
Eowyn reminds me of Willard in APOCALYPSE NOW: “I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.” She wanted to see war, she saw war, she never wants to see war again–for herself or anyone.
I feel like it’s worth noting that Tolkien somewhat undercuts his own point here with Aragorn and Eomer?
Neither Aragorn nor Eomer, the two sovereigns, chose peace with honor and a life of quiet domestic rule after the War of the Ring. While Faramir is ruling as Steward in his stead (and presumably Eomer appoints someone to do the same job in Rohan) and Eowyn is presumably chilling in Ithilien with Legolas, Aragorn and Eomer are bloody and violently re-establishing Gondor’s colonial empire, winning immense renown doing so. Tolkien wrote a whole thing about the people of Harad and Rhun hearing Eomers war-horn and quaking in fear.
I feel like it’s difficult to argue that Faramir and Eowyn are meant to make a point about rejecting the pursuit of glory and death while Aragorn, protagonist of half the saga, the heat and glorious King Elessar, font of wisdom and grace, is out there butchering men to build his empire.
I’m pretty sure those weren’t imperial wars. Here’s what Tolkien has to say about it:
In Eomer’s day in the Mark men had peace who wished for it, and the people increased both in the dales and the plains, and their horses multiplied. In Gondor the King Elessar now ruled, and in Arnor also. In all the lands of those realms of old he was king, save in Rohan only; for he renewed to Eomer the gift of Cirion, and Eomer took again the Oath of Eorl. Often he fulfilled it. For though Sauron had passed, the hatreds and evils that he bred had not died, and the King of the West had many enemies to subdue before the White Tree could grow in peace. And wherever King Elessar went with war King Eomer went with him; and beyond the Sea of Rhun and on the far fields of the South the thunder of the cavalry of the Mark was heard, and the White Horse upon Green flew in many winds until Eomer grew old.
I’d be suspicious of a person in-story saying claiming that they need to fight for peace, but from an omniscient narrator I’m prepared to accept it.
And Aragorn actually surrenders part of his territory when morality demands it. The Drúadan forest is on Gondor’s land, but Aragorn knows it would be wrong to press that claim. So he renounces it, and recognizes the sovereignty of the relatively primitive people living there. That’s not the behaviour of an imperial conqueror.
How are those not imperial wars?
Gondor conquered vast swathes of Harad during its glory days before the Kin-strife. This is explicit; they would take the children of local rulers hostage and hold them as wards in Osgiliath. These were explicitly imperial adventures. Both Numenor and Gondor under the kings were imperial states. The appendixes detail Gondor’s imperial expansion in detail.
Harad eventually threw off Gondorian rule; Aragorn re-establishes it through force. Keep in mind these are lands that haven’t been part of Gondor for over a millennia, but Aragorn wants them back and takes them back by force.
For that matter he ranges much further afield than the old kings, who never projected power into the further east behind the Sea of Rhun.
Well, there’s:
“For though Sauron had passed, the hatreds and evils that he bred had not died, and the King of the West had many enemies to subdue before the White Tree could grow in peace.”
Being attacked is Imperialist aggression in your opinion?
Establishing rule over other peoples and nations who do not want to be ruled by you, by force, is imperialist aggression. Aragorn does not merely defend Gondor from being attacked; he re-conquers Gondor’s old colonial possessions. That is, again, explicit: “In all the lands of those realms of old he was king.” That means taking back Umbar and Harad and putting them back under the suzerainity of the Winged Crown.
In what way is putting lands that haven’t been part of Gondor in over a millennia and presumably do not want to be part of it now under your direct rule NOT an imperial project?
Sorry, this isn’t a politician’s pulpit. So, I’ll take your answer (attempted dodge) as yes, being attacked and defending yourself is imperial aggression.
That about concludes the value of a conversation with you.
But, just to be complete and address your rhetoric:
You could note that the term “In all the lands of those realms of old he was king” is connected to the wars he’s fighting in further regions only by the fact that he’s calling upon the Oath of Eorl, and discard the idea that he’s off imperializing, but that’s apparently not to your taste. He HAS to be a violent imperializer for… Some reason?
So, instead, lets look at your other claims.
Harad was only ever a Numenorian holding, not Gondorian, and as Aragorn is pressing the claims of Isildur (son of Elendil, King of the Exiled Realms, eg., Gondor and Arnor), Harad isn’t a part of that kingdom and therefore can be discarded from the term “realms of old”. To preemptively defend against pedantry and/or semantics, Harondor is specifically the notionally Haradrim region that you’re trying to tie the idea of old realms imperialistically conquered – But Harondor isn’t some independent Haradric realm, it’s ex-South Gondor, where Gondor and Umbar have challenged each other for control. And while there was a Haradrim presence in 2885, it was an invasion that got pushed back until Sauronic forces caused Gondor to fold contesting the region… At some point AFTER 2885. 5 years before Bilbo was born, and so, ~116 years before The Lord Of The Rings begins.
As Harondor was added to Gondor at some point around 850 T.A., the Haradrim are the ones that deserve your scorn for interrupting millennia of someone else’s living.
Umbar, as it stands at the end of the Third Age, is a Gondorian splinter colony, and stood originally as a King’s Men (Black Numenorian) colony – though I don’t hear you crying on behalf of the native Umbarans, instead you are pressing for the defense of the losers of the Kinstrife; i.e., the racists who got pushed out of the core Gondorian lands. Now, it has been ~1600 years since they lost that civil war and took Umbar for themselves instead, and in our world I’d give it credit. I mean, I’d still stand behind Aragorn conquering the heck out of them if we were living in those medieval-esque times, but I could give your view credit. But. But, we’re dealing with the world of Middle-Earth, in which politics can freeze for a thousand years with hardly a budge, and a claim three thousand years old is given credence. Timelines based around the expectation of (realistically) expeditious action are somewhat bunk, is what I’m saying.
Seeing as Umbar and Gondor continued warring all the intervening period, if, IF, Aragorn is retaking their lands, I’d put it to a final conclusion of the Kinstrife.
I don’t like being lied about. I never once said that being attacked is imperialist aggression on the part of the person being attacked; that was a ridiculous question that I ignored on account of its ridiculous nature, and you taking that as a “yes, I agree with this ridiculous question” is simply a downright lie.
I am not saying Aragorn is doing imperialism for “some reason.” I am saying it because that’s true?
Gondor under the kings of old expanded its borders by force multiple times; Umbar, it’s coastal dependencies, Harondor, and of course Haradwaith, which it put under tribute enforced by the taking of hostages. There’s also Enedwaith, but that’s trickier; Gondor claimed the land but its unclear if it ever actually secured that claim or if it just drew a line on a map and said “we own it now.” Although its hard to see how Aragorn would enforce such a claim in his re-united kingdom without needing to make war on the Dunlendings to force them to bend the knee. Perhaps he merely said he was their king and then did nothing about it?
Regardless, Gondor was an explicitly imperialistic, expansionist state. I don’t get how that can possibly be argued.
Eventually, all those lands threw off Gondorian rule. Aragorn then re-establishes it, again, through force of arms.
This is just straightforward imperialism. This isn’t me making things up; this is just, you know, in the text.
I don’t understand your point about Harondor. It seems like you’re saying “Gondor conquered it a long time ago, so re-conquering it under Aragorn is a-okay.” That seems ludicrous to me, but I’m not seeing a different way to interpret your point there. It seems like you’re interpreting my saying “a lot of these lands haven’t been part of Gondor for over a millennia” as establishing a standard of “holding land for a sufficiently long time nullified former claims on it” when in fact what I meant was “you can’t really make a claim Aragorn is merely defending his borders; those borders don’t exist.”
I’m not sure why you think I’m somehow pressing a claim on behalf of the losers of the Kin-strife regarding Umbar. I did no such thing. Umbar was conquered by Gondor in one of its wars of expansion a long, long time before Castamir drew breath. It was always one of Gondor’s colonial holdings.
A downright lie? Which is why you’ve continued to refuse to answer it, instead engaging in evasion, and making some accusations of your own. When you choose not to answer a simple question with an obvious answer, it’s easy to conclude what you’re trying to avoid saying. Ah, but of course, it’s “ridiculous”, and so you never have to answer it!
Speaking of which, when did I say that Gondor was never imperialist? I didn’t? Is that because I’m responding to your claim that Aragorn is Imperialistically invading? It is! More dishonesty from you! What a surprise!
You are saying “Aragorn is engaging in Imperialism for “some reason””, because you have no basis that it happened; you’re taking your own worst-possible interpretation and transplanting it as truth onto the text. I.e., It isn’t true.
I’ll come back to Harad and Umbar in a moment alongside your next point, because you’ve decided to shoot yourself in the leg by adding an example. Dunlanders! Ah, yes. The people that moved onto Numenor’s lands granted to them by the Elves, that later expanded into (by then) Gondorian land, and then got pushed out by the Eorlingas (soon-to-be Rohirrim) when Gondor granted them the land instead. So, do original claims have primacy, or not?
Again, not in the text no matter how much you repeat this claim, but let’s continue playing along for the sake of the argument.
Lets quote this bit:
“It seems like you’re interpreting my saying “a lot of these lands haven’t been part of Gondor for over a millennia” as establishing a standard of “holding land for a sufficiently long time nullified former claims on it” when in fact what I meant was “you can’t really make a claim Aragorn is merely defending his borders; those borders don’t exist.””
Yes, when you say something, people will react to the words you’ve said. When you claim that the people freed themselves of Gondor millennia ago and will be forced back under Gondor, it’s relevant that they haven’t been independent for thousands of years and have, in fact, just been peeled off quite recently. Of course, that’s taken a back seat to your new statement; having control and living on lands for 2000+ years doesn’t mean you have a claim to them. Fascinating!
Heck, that gives Aragorn the right to much of it via Elven heritage, and they’re all the imperialists that are false claimants to HIS land. (Any claims to the world via Maia blood are to be discarded, non-Morgothian Ainur divest themselves of such ownership as a matter of course.)
You are engaging in a defense against Aragorn attacking Umbar, as Umbar is Kinstrife Gondorians and Black Numenorians, you are defending them. That’s just a description of what you’re doing. But, hey, in character for you to claim you’re not doing what you’re doing.
Being attacked is Imperialist aggression in your opinion?
It seems pretty common historically for imperial expansion to be justified in defensive terms. Either “we need to conquer this primitive people to protect our frontier from raids” or “we need to annex this territory before our rival annexes it first” or something similar. Both the British Empire and Czarist Russia used that type of rhetoric a lot (and I’m not even going to call it “excuses” since I’m sure a lot of them honestly believed it). The line between aggression and defence can get hazy when you take an expansive enough view of your state interests.
A fair point! And to add to the list, and pertinent to this blog, Rome usually phrased their wars as defensive, for themselves or “brand-new friends” who just happen to need an army to assist them.
Though in Aragorn’s case I think as long as we exclude Mordor and whom/whatever may oppose a restored Arnor, his defensive wars were… Well, just that, heh.
In Mordor’s case because we know he restored Ithilen (an abandoned/contested area) up to and including the mountains (Minas Morgul &co. get demolished and resettled), and split off/created a state of Núrn. Though without Sauron there probably isn’t much of a nation of Northern Mordor left to talk about.
In Reunited Kingdom restoration (Gondor up through Arnor) he might end up fighting Dunlanders; but seeing as he’s willing to grant autonomy to Breeland (plus region), and the Shire, and a… Protectorate? of the Drúedain forests, he may be willing to settle a low-control vassalage of the Dunlands; or to just call it Rohan’s problem (seeing as the former examples are all friends & allies).
However! We don’t need to extend this credit any further than Aragorn II, Elessar Telcontar, himself. Tolkien (pessimistically, possibly) assigns his (Aragorn’s) son to be immediately more akin in philosophy and outlook to Steward Denethor II, realpoliticking and (Late, if Faithful) Numenorian. I guess when you have a Holy Restorer King Father and The Last Elf* Mother you end up with an intrinsic sense of superiority and that advancing your new (old (new)) kingdom is of value in and of itself.
*sort of, not really
May I ask why you’re being so incredibly vituperative and aggressive?
If you’re going to stake your entire argument on ancient history, please try to get it correct. The Dunlendings were not trespassing on land gifted to others, it was their land, which they had dwelt in since the Edain had fled over the Misty Mountains, and the Numenoreans had forced them off most of the good land.
They did resettle in parts of Calenardhon, and were forced out by the Rohirrim, but Gondor had abandoned actual rule over the region and it was mostly empty. That’s different from conquest, and the only actual example we have of that period is Isengard, where the Dunlendings and the remnant Gondoridan garrison intermarried until they became indistinguishable from other Dunlendings.
Also, Umbar by this point is not a majority Black Numenorean city, it had merged with its demographic hinterland and was a Harad city with a mixed nobility.
You think that he wasn’t King in those distant lands because he conquered them, but because he invaded them and forced them to agree to favourable terms and acknowledge his supremacy? Right.
Harad was a subject under the Sea Kings and the text makes clear that Elessar subjects it. You are actively ignoring the text in order to avoid having to acknowledge nuance.
They had already gone ahead and engaged in that most boring of politician’s answer: responding to an entirely different question, because they didn’t want to provide the direct proof that they’re being foolish. And when I went ahead and translated their attempt to deflect, I was called a liar. And they STILL dodged actually answering.
That dishonesty is infuriating to me, so… Yeah, I wasn’t going to bother to be polite. Speaking of.
Yes, you should try to get it correct.
As in, my post already addressed this; the land was Elvish before it was Numenorian, and before it was Dunlendish. The Dunlanders had moved up from the Enedhwaith into the White Mountains/Misty Mountains, driven there by the Numenorian depredations along the sea shore. Then it was gifted to the Numenorians by the elves.
I largely agree with your position that Dunlend is it’s own place, but! But for the purposes of the argument with Murc, where first claim has primacy over anything later, then this is a wrong done to the elves, even if it went uncontested. Likewise “moving into unused Gondorian land”. Can you take things from people just because they don’t strongly contest you, or are unable to? The argument opposing seemed to be “No, except if I think it doesn’t count”. I had (and have) no reason to let that sort of claim glide by.
On Umbar; the Normans that invaded England mixed with the Anglo-Saxon nobility, but it’s pretty clear who they thought was in control, even if in the long view it was just another influx to the mess that makes up Englishness in the English. It was only by the end of the 100 Years War that there was a clearly separate identity again. Is Umbar an independent nation by this point? Yes, almost certainly. Is it still (mostly) Black Numenorian and then Kinstrife Gondorian at the top levels? Very likely (in LotR’s hilariously extended timelines, anyway). Would I normally be fine with just calling them Umbarian? Yup! But it’s both true and easy to present it via the historical stance.
I think he wasn’t King in those lands, because he wasn’t King in those lands. The text is not clear on any such thing, and the only reason I bickered over the details of the various lands was to entertain Murc’s spurious claims for the purposes of the argument. Because just repeating “No, that’s wrong” is pretty boring.
You are ignoring the text to… … I just realized I have no idea what the opposite of whitewashing is? Besmirch, and/or slander aren’t what I’m looking for. Hm. Anyway, you get the idea. Having a single example of Good And Just (human) King doesn’t somehow annihilate the idea of moral greyness it emphasizes it, it adds nuance. Aragorn coming into a kingdom that’s had a long and sordid history, is on the brink of proto-nationalism, and being an honestly good person and running a good kingdom raises questions! Especially when (as noted) his son supposedly returns to Late Numenorian type.
If you want to use the Red Book of Westmarch framing device wherein this is Frodo’s written account, with a bit by Bilbo and Sam, then editted by Sam’s daughter, then passed over to a Gondorian scribe who editorialized century(ies) after the fact, to call into question Aragorn’s character/rule, that’s fair! We could have fun deciding where Frodo or another character defended Aragorn, or where Sauron, Orcs, or Mordor, were given unfair judgement, the view against them biased or propaganda. But to take the text as at least near true, Aragorn spent his time defending himself from nations that still bore grudges encouraged by Sauron (whether or not they were deservedly angry over the past, it’s still defensive now), and Eomer happily came along for friendship and those sweet glory points.
Restoration of the Old Kingdoms by the Heir of Isildur doesn’t automatically include Umbar, let alone Harad, or Rhun (yes, you didn’t bring up Rhun, but Murc did). It’d be the restoration of the realms of Isildur; Arnor and Gondor, both of which have shed many areas that belonged to them from their foundation (of which only Umbar exists as a Maybe, and not a strong one, as it was a King’s Men region). It can still have messy questions along the way of how do you reestablish long-dead kingdoms in lands that have mostly forgotten them, but that’s not the same as imperialist aggression against foreign lands.
Yes, Tolkien is quite explicit that the original Numenor falls because it chooses to become an imperial colonial power preying on Middle Earth instead of staying on its safe peaceful island that the Valar blessed the Edain with as their reward for fighting against Morgoth and just sticking to trade. Aragorn’s story does darken with the expansion of Gondor or the Neo-Numenor into the south and east as an imperial power in the end, thus sowing the same seeds of destruction. The tale of Aragorn and Arwen darkens quite a bit in the appendix, and not just in Arwen’s death. Tolkien is quite the subtle ambiguous writer, which is what makes his work endure.
I think you’ve got that backwards. The Numenoreans do not go against the Valar because they become colonialists–they become colonialists as a result of going against the Valar.
“Establishing rule over other peoples and nations who do not want to be ruled by you, by force, is imperialist aggression.”
Is it different from what the Allies did to defeated Axis countries after WW2?
Uh, yes?
Germany, Italy and Japan all returned to being independent nation-states after WWII, to say nothing of the various Axis client states like Hungary, Romania, Finland, etc.. Germany had to give up large swathes of territory, and Germans were expelled from some regions where they live, and Japan lost its colonial empire, but none of those countries ceased to exist or were incorporated wholesale into bigger empires. Very different than what happened to, say, defeated African or Asian polities in the 19th c.
The Soviet Union become larger after WWII and not only marginally. It incorporated a part of Finland, the entire of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), a corner of Germany, a large part of Poland and smaller parts of Czechoslovakia and Romania. Most of occupied Germany became either part of Poland or the Soviet vassal state of East Germany. Poland also became a vassal state as was Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. If I understand it correctly only Yugoslavia was taken over by independent Communists.
@Lena Synnerholm,
I’m well aware of the exact extent of Soviet annexations after WWII (and for that matter the reciprocal land swaps that involved Poland being moved westward), as well as the fact that the United States and Soviet Union emerged as hegemonic powers with networks of allies/clients. I don’t think any of that detracts from my point, which I tried to phrase fairly carefully. Neither Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe nor for that matter American hegemony in Central America was an *empire* in the sense that, say, the pre-1945 British or French empires or the pre-1914 Russian or German empires were. (Obviously, you can still say that the Soviet Union was an imperial state within its frontiers, e.g. with respect to the Baltic nations, Ukrainians, Uzbeks etc., and there would be a lot of truth to that).
This is why I’m equally critical of people on the left who talk loosely about US “imperialism” in Latin America (which I think is, again, very bad, but not actually an *empire*, although as of this week, all bets are off, I guess). Formal decolonization wasn’t everything, but it was something, and it actually mattered.
Without wishing to wade into the question of whether or not Aragorn’s Fourth Age wars are should be understood as imperialist or not, I do think there is some merit in analysing the contrasting fates of characters who are similar to Éowyn.
To be clear, I love Éowyn; I think her character is one of the most complex and interesting in the book, and Tolkien is for the most part remarkably successful at not condescending to her on account of her gender. The conclusion of her narrative – learning to understand the virtues of living for your ideals rather than just dying for them – is, I think, both moving and fitting. Nonetheless, the choice to give that narrative specifically to her, and not to several other male characters whom it could also have suited, does suggest to me that Tolkien is (unsurprisingly for a man of his era and beliefs) still working partially under the shadow of gendered stereotypes.
The two main comparisons here that stand out are Éomer and Boromir; I don’t think Aragorn works as well, because unlike the others, he is never presented as being at risk of loving the sword for its sharpness. Boromir, however, very much is. Like Éowyn, he is consumed with a dream of glory and great deeds, and it his desire to be a martial hero (“what could not a warrior do in this hour, a great leader?”) that tempts him into claiming the Ring and leaves him in sore need of redemption. Yet, as Bret’s other article recounts, Tolkien permits Boromir to have “conquered” that redemption with sword in hand, dying valiantly in the process.
Éomer’s pursuit of the hero’s death also meets with no authorial rebuke. Filled with rage and despair on the Pelennor Field, Éowyn’s brother seeks a glorious end (exemplified by his war cries “Death take us all!” and “Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!”), only for this rash charge to lead his entire army to the brink of disaster, “for fortune had turned against Éomer, and his fury had betrayed him.” Yet Tolkien never suggests that Éomer should repent of this or renounce the warrior’s life like his sister; instead, as alluded to in the original comment, he spends the rest of his career piling up glory on battlefields across Middle Earth.
Overall, I don’t think that Tolkien was explicitly using Boromir’s and Éomer’s fates to show that Éowyn’s embrace of peace was wrongheaded, or a path only suited to women. The contrast may not have been noticed at all, and might even be wholly coincidental. Nonetheless, on balance, I do think it unfortunate that the character who gets the fullest lesson about the superiority of love over war also happened to be the novel’s only female fighter, while several of her male equivalents either achieve martial martyrdom or chase it without consequence.
I would argue that the lines about men having peace who desired it means that the intentional framing is that Aragorn and Eomer have the burden and responsibility of making war for the sake of the security of their realms rather than personal glory and extraction of tribute. For Eomer in particular, the main significance of being ever at Aragorn’s side in such wars is primarily the love that grew between them more than his aggrandizement. In any case, a point is still made of them both living to great age and dying in a fashion that might be deemed undignified but for things like being attended by dear friends in their final moments (see the fact that Eomer sent a message to the Shire asking to see Merry one last time).
That’s a fair point, and I’m sure Tolkien primarily envisioned Aragorn and Éomer’s later campaigns as sober-minded Just Wars, but to me the line about how “on the far fields of the South the thunder of the cavalry of the Mark was heard” still has a little too much of the troubadour’s braggadocio about it for comfort. I think it’s one example of Tolkien the saga-lover briefly getting too much of an upper hand over Tolkien the Christian-WW1-survivor, to the story’s detriment. And even if service in these wars is meant to be solely a duty rather than a pleasure, it’s perhaps telling that there’s no question of Éowyn rather than a male character being allowed to bear that burden long-term.
Nonetheless, I do think it’s interesting and heartening that Éomer plays such a small role in the overall story. In many works of this genre, you might expect a dashing warrior-prince fighting to save his homeland and avenge his family’s honour to be the main character (indeed, I am reading Eddison at the moment, and his books are stuffed to the gills with Éomer-ish protagonists). I think it’s important that Éomer is there, and that his martial ethos is fairly presented; literature about war which pretends it is only ever mud and wretchedness, with nothing stirring and honourable ever mixed in, will leave the reader too easily dazzled by its thrills when they are encountered in real life. However, the fact that Éomer plays his part only in concert with petit-bourgeois hobbits, some crotchety trees and his odd sister helps the book as a whole to keep its moral compass true, with only the odd wobble here and there.
“I think it’s one example of Tolkien the saga-lover briefly getting too much of an upper hand over Tolkien the Christian-WW1-survivor, to the story’s detriment.”
I’d agree with this.
I’d potentially also add into the mix ‘Tolkein the Englishman living in the last days of the British Empire’ and thus not being particularly attuned to the intricacies of imperialism. Or, at least, having grown up in a milieu where imperialism over Europeans was very much Bad (mostly anyway)…with a significant grey area about whether imperialism over foreigners was ‘necessary to ensure one’s safety’.
It was a complex time to be writing about imperialism. Hell, it still is a complex time to be writing about imperialism, considering recent events.
You mean E. R. Eddison, as in The Worm Ouroboros? Because yeah, his protagonists tend to be eager warlike honor-before-reason guys who aspire to death in battle.
To Ynneadwraith: Very true, and I think “not being attuned to the intricacies of imperialism” hits the nail on the head. On the one hand, as a sort of Little Englander (or Little North European), he seems to have had no real sense of identification with Britain’s wider imperial project, and could write things like “I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust.” On the other hand, he seems to have been broadly oblivious to or suspicious of active anticolonialism, and bridled at criticism of Eden during the Suez Crisis. I think basically he just didn’t care all that much about things outside his own regions of interest; hence why non-Western-coded people appear in LOTR only as faceless footsoldiers of the enemy. There’s no attempt to provide sympathetic detail about their culture, but also no attempt to load them with the specific negative stereotypes that crop up in Calormen, Impland and other contemporary pseudo-Asias. So I generally still view Tolkien’s Eurocentrism as leading him into error, but largely errors of omission rather than commission.
To Simon_Jester: Yes, that Eddison. I’m currently reading ‘Mistress of Mistresses’, which is great in many ways, but by this point I’m actively rooting for someone to take the author’s beloved Lessingham down a peg or three.
@Montefeltro I’d agree with that, especially the bit about ‘errors of omission rather than commission’.
And as a Brit on the left of the political spectrum myself, I see the ‘anti-imperialist for the obvious stuff’ attitude a lot.
Morally repulsed by the things that people are doing in imperial projects…but generally oblivious to the already established imperial privileges that permeate our society. And I’m not some magical saint that’s always known about this sort of thing making me higher and mightier than everyone else, it’s been a journey of discovery myself. I used to quite vociferously argue that we should keep the Elgin Marbles because ‘we would do a better job of preserving them for history than the Greeks’, despite being appalled at our blatant imperialism in Iraq. One’s obvious, the other not so much.
The Elgin Marbles were bought from Turkey while it still controlled Greece. They were not stolen, plundered or whatever you would call it.
The Greeks could reasonably make an argument that the Elgin Marbles were not the Turks’ rightful property to sell.
If the Nazis had sold the Mona Lisa to a Swiss art dealer in 1943, it would be understandable that the French would come looking for it after the war. If the Swiss art dealer argued that he bought it fair and square from the authorities in Paris at the time, they wouldn’t be sympathetic, and we probably shouldn’t be sympathetic to the art dealer either.
What if it had been the Vichy regime that had sold the Mona Lisa? Or any property transactions that took place during that period?
“the specific negative stereotypes that crop up in Calormen” To be fair to Lewis, Calormen also generates fully-developed characters, who even marry the fairer-skinned people, which doesn’t happen in LoTR. Also, the behavior of Calormen residents seems to be mostly drawn from Hebrew and Roman portrayals, not British colonial portrayals, of the mysterious East. (In that regard, the Jews, whatever their sins, did not exercise imperial power over Persia, while the Romans kind of fought to a draw, though Crassus and Julian might have called it a loss).
@ey81,
To the extent Calormene religion and culture is supposed to allude to anything, I think it’s very much supposed to be alluding to Phoenicia and by extension, Carthage, and possibly also Assyria and Babylon. Not to Persia.
I think Calormen is probably a general melange of Middle-Eastern-ish influences, rather than clearly based on any one culture. It’s interesting, because in a way, it is more sympathetically depicted than Harad or Khand; we actually get to learn quite a bit about its history and culture and meet named and fleshed out Calormene characters, some of whom are shown to be redeemable or even virtuous. But at the same time, its more detailed depiction also contains many more overtly Orientalist tropes; the Calormenes are consistently mocked for their culture of despotism, decadence, slavery and lasciviousness, plus their state religion is literally Devil-worship. I don’t think Lewis is being especially malicious – his overall attitude is one of amused condescension rather than fear or hatred – but it’s an open question of whether his approach is better or worse than Tolkien’s general disinterest.
I think Calormen is largely Arabic-inspired with elements other Semitic-speaking peoples thrown in.
@Lena Synnerholm My understanding is that recent investigations have raised suspicions as to the legality of their acquisition. There’s a significant chance that the purchase was not entirely above board after all.
Though really, that’s tangential to the point I was making. My realisation was that I was arguing that they should be kept not on the legality of their acquisition or not, but from the position of a northern European viewing southern Europeans as somehow less capable of safeguarding their own heritage.
You may be able to make that sort of argument in earnest for places where there is major risk of defacement of culturally significant artifacts…but Greece is not one of those places, and I was wrong to hold that opinion of them. It highlighted to me that there were areas of my thinking that were still coloured significantly by underlying cultural assumptions that are widespread among people’s thinking here in Britain, even if you’re not a ‘rah rah up the empire’ type.
I never thought about South Europeans as inherently less able to safeguard their own cultural heritage. When I grew up the word “Greek” just meant people speaking Modern Greek with each other.
Remember Tolkein was writing in the context not just of WWI but of WWII, a war that the British and French leaders eventually decided was necessary despite knowing well the bitter costs of WWI. I don’t think Tolkein was a strict pacifist.
And from a perspective, Eowyn is rewarded. She gets the happy peaceful rebuilding life, like Sam. After she succeeded in the heroic task of defeating the Witch King.
Meanwhile Boromir dies, heroically, but having failed to protect Merry and Pippin. And Eomer gets decades more of war.
Finally, I don’t think Eomer snapping at the death of Theoden and believed death of Eowyn is the same type of flaw as having a long-standing flawed philosophy of loving war. People make rash decisions under grief.
You’re right, Tolkien was certainly no pacifist (though, if you read his letters, his view of the Allied cause in WW2 is more negative and cynical than most people’s would be today) and he isn’t punishing Eowyn. In the post-Ring world, both the path of the dutiful soldier and the path of the peaceful gardener seem to be legitimate and honourable possibilities. I merely think it probably wasn’t a coincidence that he chose the latter for the novel’s only female warrior, and the former for her brother.
I do agree that Eomer’s heroic death-wish is less consistently attested than Eowyn’s. This might just reflect him being a more minor character whose thoughts receive less coverage, but it’s true that when we first encounter him, he is willing to publicly endorse Theoden’s rather unheroic neutrality policy. Nonetheless, this is possibly done out of loyalty rather than conviction (Aragorn swiftly talks him round), and obsession with martial glory does seem to be a key element in the culture of Rohan, to the extent that this trait in Boromir is explicitly linked to his spiritual kinship with Gondor’s northern neighbour. On balance, I think Eomer, as possibly the most archetypal man of Rohan in the book, does have at least an element of this in his makeup, with the attendant advantages and risks.
Faramir, Eowyn’s husband, was also someone who did not like war but was willing to both fight it and make peace. He probably renounced war alongside Eowyn.
Tolkien is full of a morality that boils down to “know your place”. If your bloodline entitles you to be king, then it’s right for you to be a king and do all that kingly stuff. If you were born a peasant (aka, Sam), then the way to be a hero is to be the most loyal and bravest servant imaginable – but still a servant with no ambition beyond your class. Eowyn and Faramir, being on the upper end of the social ladder but not right at the top, need to have the corresponding final roles for their arc to be complete.
The morality in LotR is really quite simple once you recognise that it’s based on a rigid class structure where anyone can be a hero, but the kind of heroism that’s valued depends entirely on who your ancestors were and your social background.
Hobbits are described as largely lacking ambition anyway.
While Aragorn is descended from the royal house of Númenor the only real benefit he gets from it is being educated by Eldrond. He becomes king of Gondor because he saves the country and not because of his descent.
Oh please, if he didn’t have the blood of numeneor in him and wasn’t descended from the line of kings, there’s 0 chance that the stewards (who had been defacto royalty for centuries) would have stepped out of the way. Aragon’s blood wasn’t sufficient for him to get the throne, but it was absolutely necessary. It’s the root of his legitimacy. He’s literally part god. Oh, and as an added perk, he gets to live for a very long time.
And yet if Aragorn had acted like Ar-Pharazon the Golden, whose actions were *not* limited to defying the Valar, and whose oppressive actions were called out for being oppressive *on their own*, that claim would have been squat.
Sure. Which is why divine / inherited nobility is necessary, but not sufficient. In Tolkien’s world view, class determines what it is right and proper for you to aim for; it doesn’t guarantee success in achieving that aim.
And yet, in the Silmarillion, the Numenorians’ ancestors literally rise from petty chieftains, which though nobility, are explicitly subordinate to the Elven Kings, to semi-independent vassal lordships, to marrying into the families of the Elven Kings, to being soveriegn rulers of Numenor itself.
Doesn’t Sam end up Mayor of Michael Delving?
Was that the place he started in?
No.
I agree that Sam seems an odd choice to cite here, as the Gamgees are probably the clearest example of social mobility in the book. He starts off as a servant, but not only does he end up as the Shire’s longest-serving Mayor (the closest thing it has to a Prime Minister) ever, his children found not one but two major gentry dynasties: the Gardners of the Hill (who basically replace the extinct Baggins clan) and the Fairbairns of the Towers (who become Wardens of the whole Westmarch). Plus one of his other kids marries the Thain.
It is nonetheless true that, in his personal conduct, Sam comes across as totally devoid of ambition and fanatically devoted to his “Master” Frodo. So I’d agree that the kind of heroism characters are expected to display depends on their social background (ultimately, LOTR is a conservative text in which lineage matters as well as ability), even if it’s not true that this requires them to “know their place” forever.
Fair point, and a reasonable emendation to what I originally said. I would caveat it further, however, that Sam’s final position, while one of authority, is still a very local and parochial one. He doesn’t become a viceroy for Gondor, or lead armies, or anything like that: it would completely break the text for him to want that, or for anyone else to want it for him. I don’t even think he gets (eg) a statue in Minas-Tirith for the wider world to recognise his heroism.
We could compare him with other lower-class characters in LotR to see whether his modest social mobility is exceptional or not, but the text is extremely lacking in characters from a modest background. Which really reinforces the point.
I think you’re broadly correct about the way in which class and birth constrain characters’ horizons in Middle Earth. In almost all cases, peasants till and lords fight (which is why we see much more of the latter), and there’s no real challenge to that.
Still, I do think you continue to slightly underestimate the extent to which Sam and a few others break that mould. I think it’s stretching it to call his rise “modest”, within a Shire context; translated to a British one, it’s as if ‘Downton Abbey’ ended with Mr Bates the valet inheriting Downton, serving seven terms as PM, and marrying his daughter to the king. Fair enough, that context is somewhat parochial within the grand scheme of Arda (I guess Mr Bates doesn’t get to be US President), but he isn’t exactly forgotten elsewhere. He may not get a statue in Gondor, but he seen by spectators of Aragorn’s coronation as among the “princes of great fame”, his daughter becomes a courtier in Minas Tirith, and Frodo says that “he is now one of the most famous people in all the lands, and they are making songs about his deeds from here to the Sea and beyond the Great River.”
Plus, although you’re quite correct that there aren’t many other non-elite characters to compare him to, some that spring to mind are Rosie Cotton and her family. Interestingly, their actions in the Scouring of the Shire are said to lead directly to “the very considerable rise in the fame and fortune of the Cottons” (and indeed, one of them ends up standing in for Sam as mayor while the Gamgees spend a year at court in Gondor). So it appears that you don’t have to be a Ringbearer to go up in the world.
But finally (and circling back somewhat towards your original post and the actual article), I do think you may be onto something in noting that Éowyn’s final fate may have something to do with her social position. It’s often forgotten that her frustrated dream was not just to marry a hunky Ranger or be a woman who fights (these tend to get the focus, particularly in the film), but to escape Rohan and be a queen. Aragorn was really a means to this end: “You desired to have the love of Lord Aragorn. Because he was high and puissant, and you wished to have renown and glory and be lifted above the mean things that crawl on the earth.” Her renunciation of him and of war thus also means, to some extent, a renunciation of ambition to rise above her station.
For that matter Tolkien witnessed in his lifetime two wars that accelerated the decay of the British class system. Almost quite literally some former gardeners ended up being mayors, while some patrilineal lines of the upper classes left no heirs.
Considering the hundreds of thousands of British dead in each of the World Wars this makes sense to me.
I am writing to add a bit about Sam’s rise in the Shire, because although “He doesn’t become a viceroy for Gondor”—as mentioned by holdthebreach—he *does* become one of the three Counsellors of the North-Kingdom, as appointed by the King and therefore seemingly with authority higher than “local and parochial” that were already obtained by the Thain, Mayor, and Master of Buckland.
As mentioned, Sam literally rises from low birth to Mayor. And both the Kings and Stewards of Gondor are mentioned as promoting Non-Numenorian men to high rank and those policies being moral and wise and anyone who, say, started a civil war against *literal meritocratic promotion regardlesss of blood and lifespan* as evil.
And the Elves literally give up their right to stay in Middle-earth to the ‘Dominion of Men’.
The elves have a potential lifespan of tens of thousands of years. This makes them fear change in the world around the. Sauron gave them rings with the power to slow down such change. With the destruction of the One Ring these rings lost their power. The elves now experience change too fast for their comfort. Moreover, I think they had stopped reproducing by then. So they all choose to leave Middle Earth.
It is notable that the general consensus among many fighting WWI and WWII that the nice thing was to go home again. There’s a bit in Quartered Safe Out Here where Fraser talks about how he teared up reading letters about the daily business of home. He also, of course, talks about how in many ways he misses the camaraderie of the war. And that also he would cheerfully never go through it again or never have anyone else go through it either.
The Hobbit in some ways has a similar message – the reward for adventure and war is that you don’t have to do it any more, because it’s not actually that fun when it’s not your idea, even if you do grow and learn things. People you care about die. Things are lost forever. If people think the lesson of WWI and WWII was that getting to quietly garden and heal things is somehow a failure, they are fools. Tolkien is extremely clear that quiet domesticity is a masculine virtue just as much as a feminine one.
On that note while Bilbo and Frodo have a gardener I remember no suggestion that they have any servants doing female coded chores on their behalf. Bilbo explicitly does his own cooking and washing up.
Interesting observation. One might suspect that Tolkien wanted to avoid, at all costs, adding a female character … (I do not know why he has so few; Éowyn is quite well written, so it seems unlikely that he thought he could not write women) but one might also suspect that Bilbo and Frodo only ever had gardeners so that the character of Sam could have a place in the story. (I do not recall if a gardener was mentioned in The Hobbit?)
I do not know if Tolkien had servants, but considering that other authors of the time, who write about the real world, can hardly conceive of a character who does not have at least one maid- or manservant, he must have! Then again, maybe in war he learnt that a man can very well do his own cooking and cleaning and put that in his writing.
It is certainly convenient to reduce the number of servants; a main character who does not use their servants’ names is unlikeable, but naming all the servants a wealthy household could have can result in having quite a lot of names.
“I do not know if Tolkien had servants, but considering that other authors of the time, who write about the real world, can hardly conceive of a character who does not have at least one maid- or manservant, he must have! Then again, maybe in war he learnt that a man can very well do his own cooking and cleaning and put that in his writing.”
It’s long seemed likely to me that Tolkien made a deliberate decision not to give any hobbit at all any servants, or even any subordinates or employees. (Sam is a gardener – he’s an outside contractor who almost certainly doesn’t work full-time and, crucially, is not part of Frodo’s household.) Meanwhile everyone else in the story, Orc, Elf or Man, is part of a very prominent dominance hierarchy, to the point where that’s almost the first thing they say when introducing themselves: I am Legolas, son of Thranduil, King of Mirkwood, or whatever. This is my place in the power vertical, this is who I answer to, this is who answers to me. Hobbits don’t do that.
Hobbits don’t want dominance over others – that’s why they’re so resistant to the Ring.
As for whether Tolkien himself had servants: as an undergraduate he would have lived in college and had a “scout” – a male servant employed by the college to look after several of the students, mainly cleaning and lighting fires. (No cooking – students ate in Hall.) When his children were young he had an Icelandic au pair. I don’t know if he had other staff; I can’t find any references to them. His parents had live-in servants but that was in a different age; by the 1920s and 1930s it is getting very common for even fairly well-off people – and Tolkien, as an academic, was not rich – not to have live-in servants.
I remember reading a fairly interesting thing about the “death of the domestic” in the period. (it notes that WWI might actually be at least a contributing factor…) but the use of servants decreased *dramatically* in the first half of the 20th century, and even those who did retain some “help” often moved from full-time live in servants to part time ones coming over maybe once a week or so.
Specifically Baumol’s theory of “cost disease”: that is, as industrial labor produces vastly more wealth than most other applications of manual labor (even if the workers only see a fraction of that as take-home wages), the expansion of industrialism increasingly priced out not only domestic service but also any number of previously inexpensive hirelings.
” the use of servants decreased *dramatically* in the first half of the 20th century, and even those who did retain some “help” often moved from full-time live in servants to part time ones coming over maybe once a week or so.”
Yes, absolutely right. In some cases this was industrialisation and social change opening up more lucrative alternatives for poor kids. Wartime explosives factories paid their mainly-female workforces up to six times as much as they would have earned as domestic servants, and lots of domestic servants made the jump accordingly – and I imagine the same would have applied, perhaps with a lower pay jump, in peacetime.
And of course, as well as price pressure on the supply side, there’s labour-saving technology coming in as well to reduce demand. If you have a hot water boiler, you don’t need servants with kettles coming up when you want to have a bath – you just turn on the tap. If you have gas fires, you don’t need servants laying fires and cleaning fireplaces – and they make less mess when operating, which means less dusting. You might have an electric washing machine, or a gas cooker rather than a coal-burning stove. None of these things were common yet in 1930s Britain as a whole, but they were fairly common among the servant-having classes.
It makes sense to me that a linguist in Britain at the time would have been middle class. Even today being a scientist is not as well-paid as a lot of Americans think. It also makes sense they did not have any servants due to the increased mechanisation of housework. My paternal grandmother grew up in Sweden during the Interwar Period. Her parents had dual income from service work which was not that common back then. Judging by what she told me as a child they had a pretty good standard of living. She said they had things like a vacuum cleaner but never mentioned any servants.
Tolkien is easily located in the English census of 1921. (There are no census records available for 1931 or 1941.) In 1921, when Tolkien was a reader at University of Leeds, the Tolkiens had two live-in servants, both women.
It’s good to remember that censuses include the great and famous as well as the ordinary.
“In 1921, when Tolkien was a reader at University of Leeds, the Tolkiens had two live-in servants, both women.”
His children were very young (John born 1917, Michael born 1920) at the time – presumably they were nannies/nurses.
One of Tolkien’s servants is identified as a nursemaid, the other as a cook.
I do not think the claim, that no hobbit in Tolkien’s work ever had a servant or even a subordinate or employee of any kind, can hold up. I also think that Sam’s relationship with Frodo is definitely meant to be understood as a dependent servant, not as an independent contractor.
On the latter point, the books repeatedly, borderline insistently use the words servant and master to describe Sam and Frodo’s relationship.
This often is in the voice of the third-person omniscient narrator “[Sam] was not disposed to be quick friends with anyone who had beaten his master, however long ago.” Or “Sam frowned, and looked at his master; and at last he broke out: ‘With your leave, Mr. Frodo, I’d say no!”
[Galadriel says to Sam] “‘You cannot go home alone,’ said the Lady. ‘You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror….”
[Sam says to Galadriel] “But if you’ll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you’d take his Ring. You’d put things to rights.”
“‘Patience!’ said Faramir, but without anger. ‘Do not speak before your master, whose wit is greater than yours. […] So be comforted. Sit by your master, and be silent!’
Sam sat down heavily with a red face. Faramir turned to Frodo again.”
[Sam says to Faramir] ‘Now look here, sir!’ He turned, facing up to Faramir with all the courage that he could muster. ‘Don’t you go taking advantage of my master because his servant’s no better than a fool.”
The above is far, far from exhaustive, but there’s only so long a comment can be. But yeah. The books don’t just suggest that Frodo’s and Sam’s relationship is that of servant and master, they darn well insist on it. The narrator calls Sam Frodo’s servant. Wise characters like Galadriel and Faramir clock Sam as Frodo’s servant without needing to be told. Sam calls -himself- Frodo’s servant. Even the author synopses written by Tolkien, in an out-of-story author’s voice that is a step above even an in-story narrator voice, call Sam Frodo’s servant.
On the former point, of whether hobbit society normally included master-servant relationships, we get very few and very brief glimpses inside ordinary hobbit households, but I think that two of these glimpses can answer definitively that yes, broader hobbit society does actually include the institution of dependent servants who are outside of the nuclear family but working inside the household of a hobbit farmer or a hobbit gentry.
I think that the dinner at Farmer Maggot’s in the first book is the only scene offering a direct view of a hobbit farm household anywhere in the books. And while it is a fleeting scene, hardly belabored to the degree that Frodo and Sam’s master-servant relationship is, there’s Maggot, then there’s the rest of the Maggot family, and then there’s “other hobbits belonging to the farm-household,” right there exactly where we’d expect them to be in a historical premodern farm household.
“Two of Maggot’s sons and his three daughters came in, and a generous supper was laid on the large table. The kitchen was lit with candles and the fire was mended. Mrs. Maggot bustled in and out. One or two other hobbits belonging to the farm-household came in. In a
short while fourteen sat down to eat.”
These other hobbits are not independent contractors, they are “belonging to the farm-household.”
Even stronger evidence, because it uses the very strong word “dependants,” is the description of the ancestral hall of Merry’s family, the Brandybucks (hereditary Masters of Buckland):
His family grew and grew, and after his days continued to grow, until Brandy Hall occupied the whole of the low hill, and had three large front-doors, many side-doors, and about a hundred windows. The Brandybucks and their numerous dependants then began to burrow, and later
to build, all round about. That was the origin of Buckland […]”
The plain reference to, on the one hand, the Brandybuck family itself, and on the other “their numerous dependants” I think really just strictly rules out the idea that upper hobbit households do not -have- dependents.
But…
While I think you’ve gone too far, I don’t think you’re grasping at nothing. An aversion to coercive hierarchy does come through in the books in a number of ways. Quite a bit in the Scouring of the Shire, but also how e.g. despite knowing that a servant’s role is to hold his tongue, Sam often doesn’t, or his appendix note that the Westron language included both a familiar and a deferential form of address but that hobbit dialect had lost the latter.
Not just in LotR but in his other writings (on Beowulf, on the Battle of Maldon, on his own experience as an officer in WWI), Tolkien valorizes and elevates the relationship between servant and master, social inferior and social superior, and he especially elevates the heroism of the servant, which he argued was purer. He did not delete that relationship from his setting, but he did powerfully idealize it, both between hobbits and between others (Sam/Frodo, but also e.g. Merry/Theoden or Beregond/Faramir). There are masters and servants in the Shire as elsewhere in the story, but it is a story in which, on the good guys’ side at least, masters are commanding without being domineering and servants are faithful without being servile.
You make a fair point with regard to Sam – but I would say that he isn’t doing servant-type work *before* he leaves the Shire with Frodo. He isn’t living in, and he isn’t doing housework – he’s just the gardener. He goes with Frodo because the Gaffer tells him to, and from that point on he’s Frodo’s servant.
As for the Brandybucks:
“His family grew and grew, and after his days continued to grow, until Brandy Hall occupied the whole of the low hill, and had three large front-doors, many side-doors, and about a hundred windows. The Brandybucks and their numerous dependants then began to burrow, and later
to build, all round about. ”
In the context, I think it’s pretty clear that “the Brandybucks” are the male-line family – the hobbits whose actual surname is Brandybuck – and the dependants are collateral relations (with different surnames) rather than servants. It would be quite normal to describe a poorer cousin living with you as a dependant, but it would be odd to describe an employee or servant as a dependant. In modern English law a dependant is “a person who relies on another as a primary source of income and usually assistance with activities of daily living”. An elderly parent or a child is a dependant, but an employee is not.
This is also a very good point:
“his appendix note that the Westron language included both a familiar and a deferential form of address but that hobbit dialect had lost the latter”.
And it’s unusual, linguistically – Tolkien would have known very well that English lost its familiar form (thou) and would probably have known that after the May Revolution Russian officers had stopped addressing their men with the singular/informal ty and started using the plural/respectful vy. “We are modern now and will address everyone with equal respect” is how humans do it; hobbits seem to be the opposite.
It makes sense the Hobbits could have live-in employees. They could still have relatively small differences in social status, however.
@ajay
“In the context, I think it’s pretty clear that “the Brandybucks” are the male-line family – the hobbits whose actual surname is Brandybuck – and the dependants are collateral relations (with different surnames) rather than servants. It would be quite normal to describe a poorer cousin living with you as a dependant, but it would be odd to describe an employee or servant as a dependant.”
Sorry, but I think you are flatly incorrect on this specific point. In a pre- or early-modern household, it would be pretty common for servants and retainers to be referred to and thought of as ‘dependants’ with respect to the Big Man. It comes from the notion that everyone who wasn’t a householder would need a master on whom they depended, hence the common description of the unemployed and vagabonds as ‘masterless men’ in the 16th and 17th centuries. The dependants as a class would probably include – as you say – relatives and cousins who hadn’t or couldn’t support households of their own, but they would be in the minority and my reading is that the dependants here are chiefly not members of the Brandybuck family.
More broadly (and blurring distinctions still further), aren’t the Gamgees also tenant smallholders of the Bagginses? So even if Sam isn’t explicitly a servant like a valet or a footman as the novel starts, he’s still in a dependant, subordinate position.
However, ultimately I do agree with your point that hobbit society isn’t nearly as hierarchical, formalised and domineering as the human societies which surround it. One good example might be Pippin’s sense of strangeness at being sworn into Denethor’s service in Return, which I think is presented as being unusually formal to him, even though he is as close to the heir of aristocracy as hobbits get in the Shire, being of the Took clan.
“More broadly (and blurring distinctions still further), aren’t the Gamgees also tenant smallholders of the Bagginses? So even if Sam isn’t explicitly a servant like a valet or a footman as the novel starts, he’s still in a dependant, subordinate position.”
I don’t think there’s anything in the text to suggest this or disprove it. There’s no mention of rent or tenancy between the Bagginses and the Gamgees. The Gamgees, Sam and the Gaffer, live at 3 Bagshot Row and have done for a very long time – but that could be because it’s their house, or because they’re tenants of very long standing. The Gaffer is evicted from his home by Lotho and Sharkey, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t own it. They can’t have lived there for too long, though, because Bilbo’s father built Bag End and Bagshot Row was built at the same time.
Note also that the Gaffer tended Bilbo’s garden, but not because he was part of Bilbo’s household. He was part of his cousin Holman’s household – Holman was a full-time professional gardener, and the Gaffer was Holman’s apprentice (as he remarks in Ch 1, “A Long-Expected Party”). If Holman was taking on apprentices, that means that he was the head of his own household, not a servant in someone else’s, and that in turn implies very strongly that Bilbo wasn’t Holman’s only customer, and that the Bilbo-Gaffer relationship – and therefore the Frodo-Sam relationship – was much more “I am one of the customers of his gardening business” than “I am his master and he is my servant”.
(The Gaffer was a second son. His elder brother Andy, Sam’s Uncle Andy, took over his father’s ropewalk, as Sam remarks later in Lothlorien.)
TBH, I think Bilbo’s ‘doing for himself’ is largely wishful thinking. The middle classes of early 20th-century Britain were obsessed with the problem of servants – complaining that far too many of them were idle, incompetent, disobedient and light-fingered, that when you happened to find a good one they too often up and left you to a higher-paying job, and having even good servants was a bummer anyway as you had no privacy, the maid was always wanting to dust your study when you were trying to write, et cetera. A number of artistic and/or literary men had a fantasy that they would be a whole lot happier if they could only sack all the servants and do everything themselves. This idea doesn’t seem to have gained anything like as much traction with artistic and/or literary women, who had to supervise these annoying servants and so could see how much heavy and often squalid labour keeping house entailed before modern devices and chemicals became available, and had a pretty good idea that if this plan were ever acted on, it wasn’t their husbands who would end up raking the clinker out of the range, hauling scuttles of fresh coal from the shed, blacking the boots, filling up the oil lamps, skinning and jointing the rabbits and scrubbing pots and pans in a vast stone sink without the assistance of washing-up liquid or rubber gloves!
Tolkien himself certainly had live-in servants: how many and what roles I don’t know except that a succession of young Icelandic nannies/au pairs looked after his four children. But with all those children and servants around he may well had a pipe-dream of being a bachelor hobbit living on his own in a luxurious hole, managing somehow to keep it spick and span and provide himself with four substantial meals a day without visible effort.
Tolkien loved gardening – he didn’t have a paid gardener but he did have the assistance of his son John who apparently did all the heavy digging while Tolkien tended the roses and weeded the lawn. So when it became necessary to provide Frodo with a faithful retainer, making him the Bag End gardener was logical. Not only did the Gamgee father and son never have any business inside the house: Tolkien actually knew and sympathised with what gardeners did for a living, while nothing in his writing suggests that he had any knowledge of or interest in any branch of housework!
Thank you for the context. People with high-status jobs are often unaware of how much effort low-status jobs require. A linguistics professor is a high-status job even if the person is not exactly rich.
As well as the material side, Tolkien may also have wished to avoid the ‘master problem’ – the frequent petty tyranny of the mistress of the house, the also frequent unwanted attentions of the male members to female servants (a common, if veiled,trope in 18th and 19th century fiction). His vision of social relationships did not have much room for the dark side.
IIRC Tolkien had a batman as an infantry officer. In the next war he would have lost that privilege.
I’m told his family had more money than we often think, because they were reserved old money and he did not have much use for it after he took early retirement.
“IIRC Tolkien had a batman as an infantry officer. In the next war he would have lost that privilege.”
Lang syne I had a batman
To clean my boots and belt
But now, a middle-aged fat man
I clean my boots myself
With effort and with swearing
With elbow-grease and sweat!
(I have not sunk, thank goodness,
To battle-dress as yet)
wrote the Chindit commander Bernard Fergusson, bemoaning the loss of the privilege.
Batmen survived through the back door, as it were – the platoon commander had (and has) a runner as part of his platoon, and in peacetime soldiering the runner’s job included batman duties. (See George MacDonald Fraser, “The Servant Problem”, about his succession of eccentric batmen while commanding a Highland platoon in postwar North Africa; interestingly, he is shocked by his discovery that one of his soldiers doesn’t know how to darn his own socks, and ends up darning them for him. How many 23-year-olds today could darn a sock?)
I worked for an army general who had a batman (this in Australia in the 90s). He did not have any use for him, so seconded him to general office duties.
The skill of darning socks became more or less obsolete when the average replacement price of a sock dropped well below the average price of an hour’s unskilled labor. Repeatedly repairing a sock by darning the holes in it only makes sense if replacing the sock wouldn’t be cost-effective as an alternative.
I have tried doing this but decided not to do it again. It made the repaired sock noticeably stiffer and did not think it was worth it.
I think we think Tolkien didn’t have much money, because at least as a child and young man, he didn’t.
His father died in South Africa, when baby brother Hillary was a toddler and he not very much older.
His mother was cut off from her family because she converted to Roman Catholicism….the same happened to orphan Edith, after she married Tolkien and converted.
Professor JRRT made a decent living, but not an extravagant one, especially once there were 4 kids to feed and clothe.
Not until the books hit big, was there a good nest egg for his golden years.
Old money? Maybe, but it didn’t go to him or if it did, not until he was much older.
At what point did Ronald Tolkien get his inherited money? In 1921 R was registered as having two live-in employees (a nanny and a cook). To me this sounds like he was upper-middle class at the time. His situation can be contrasted by two of my great-grandparents. My paternal grandmother told me her mother was a teacher and her father a janitor of the same school. This dual income made them solidly middle class. Yet they did not earn enough to pay someone to do housework for them.
The next generation demonstrates that “having much money” is relative. My dad has or at least had a childhood friend named Tommy. He came to believe my paternal grandparents to be “wealthy” due to his own poor situation. His mother was a housewife his father alcoholised. With too much of his family’s single income wasted on booze they would have been relatively poor. In contrast my grandmother worked with kids and my grandfather for the social services in various ways. Combined with no-one of them having any addiction problems this made a noticeable difference.
My paternal grandfather died from cancer when in his early 60ies. Tommy then transferred his belief in the Synnerholm family’s “wealth” to my parents. Likely because he had the highest income out of three brothers. (His older brother worked with foreign aid and his younger as historian at museums.) As an engineer and later civil servant he would had earned more compared to the Swedish average than his father thirty year earlier. On the other hand my mum was a teacher which was not so well-paid by then. I did not grow up in luxury by late 20th century standards. When you grow up in a community of 6,000 – 7,000 people with no obvious differences in economic resources you don’t feel particularly wealthy.
“naming all the servants a wealthy household could have can result in having quite a lot of names.”
Tolkein? Afraid of quite a lot of names? Have you got the right author there?
Though, perhaps he knew full-well that he had a penchant for Quite A Lot Of Characters and was making a vain attempt to reign it in a bit.
“One might suspect that Tolkien wanted to avoid, at all costs, adding a female character”
That seems highly unlikely, given that there a lot more female characters in the works he had already written for his own amusement.
Aredhel, Nienor, Idril, Luthien and so on. Particularly and especially Luthien.
Perhaps he wanted to avoid writing about servants.
Considering that Sam and his father and their kinsman Tolman were servants to the Baggins family (3 generations servants to 3 generations of masters), I doubt that he was avoiding servants or women…he was avoiding anything unnecessary to the war story he was writing.
Bilbo went off on his adventure and had no one to leave behind (“footloose and fancy free” we used to say).
Frodo literally brings his servant/dogsboy/batman/squire/esquire along to war, with two of his closest kin, leaving a third behind.
Every person mentioned had a purpose in the narrative (even the fox, thrown in for a bit of whimsy, had a purpose, to show how unusual it was for hobbits to be camping out, and that even woodland creatures understand that major events are afoot).
We don’t even know exactly how many elves were in Gildor’s Wandering Company or their names or sexes.
We do get background for Bilbo and Frodo ‘s relatives and their relationship to many of them, but it builds up both character and the world they inhabit. It makes things real, the world of the Shire has weight and stakes.
This was a war story – you get the women and children out of the way as much as possible in a war….
Only an idiot complains about a lack of women in the movie Dunkirk.
Tolkien gave us everything, including a female warrior and a brown skinned hero (Sam) ..what else do you want?
Why do you think Samwise Gamgi is brown-skinned? I imagined all hobbits as unquestionably light-skinned. This would make sense due to the latitude of the Shire and their civilised diet.
“I imagined all hobbits as unquestionably light-skinned. This would make sense due to the latitude of the Shire and their civilised diet.”
Their diet??? They are not flamingos. Why on earth would you think that diet affects skin colour?
The skin colour of human populations is determined by a combination of latitude and diet. The higher the latitude and the more plants in the diet the more light-skinned humans are. If I understand it correctly there are no breading population of hobbits outside the Shire. Ronald Tolkien has explicitly stated the Shire to be on the same latitude as England. He also stated they mostly get their food from agriculture. So it makes sense to me they would all be light-skinned.
I should have expressed myself more clearly. Apart from the effect of suntan human skin tone is hereditary. Higher latitude and more plant parts in diet select for lighter skin tone. It takes more than a few centuries to evolve this adaptation. The ancestors of the Maori arrived in New Zeeland no earlier than around 1200 AD. They are still largely light brown like other Polynesians. The Icelandic were forced by soil erosion in the Middle Ages to eat mostly fish. I think mutton consisted a larger part of the diet they adapted than grain. Yet they are as light-skinned as Scandinavians and Irish. I don’t know how it is with the Xhosa. They have lived on the latitude of Morocco for a millennium now. If they have a larger fraction of light brown members than other peoples further north (such as Ambo, Makua and Shona) they have started to adapt.
Anyway, natural selection may not be relevant in context. Ronald Tolkien’s fictional universe has been said to run on a combination of Catastrophism and Lamarckism. Instead we could look at the cultures the various peoples are based on. The Shire is an idealised form of Early Modern England. So it makes sense the Hobbits are all light-skinned for this reason too. The dwarves are either all light-skinned (the Scandinavian origin of the idea) or have a smaller number of light brown members (their Ashkenazim influence). The elves have been explicitly stated to be light in colour. I imagine the human inhabiting Gondor and Rohan to look like South Europeans. This means mostly light-skinned with some being light brown. The humans inhabiting Harad would be a mix of light and dark-skinned like real Iranians. The orcs are their own can of worms. Unless their skin tone has been explicitly stated some unnatural colour is probably the safest.
“This was a war story – you get the women and children out of the way as much as possible in a war….”
Setting aside the number of women who want to be active participants in war, whether that be in logistics roles or active fighting, the process of “getting these people out of the way” is not a frictionless one, and there can be compelling narrative out of the process of their struggle to survive amidst a war they cannot escape.
Still, it’s as Tolkien said: those without swords can still die upon them. War is never so clean or convenient as to leave out the non-combatants. Quite the opposite, really.
This is the big weakness in the typical argument of “why would women even want to be in war? War is dangerous.” War will be upon women whether they will it or not, and in those cases if they lack the agency to be fighters they are left with few roles besides “potential victim”.
(See also the idea of “women don’t need to worry about their agency in the midst of war, because they can delegate their protection entirely to men, an authority that they can absolutely be trusted to never abuse”)
“Only an idiot complains about a lack of women in the movie Dunkirk.”
A motivation to include women in the movie Dunkirk could have easily used any of them who piloted or crewed the little ships that aided in the evacuation.
As an Oxford don, Tolkien would certainly have a maid (called “scout” in the university parlance, god knows why) for his office. I strongly suspect that he would have had a maid/housekeeper at home, and probably also a nanny when his children were young.
If the Baginses don’t have one, it’s because Tolkien wishes to imagine a world where his idealised country gentry can lead the life of a gentleman without needing to acknowledge the reality that this required the existence of servants who had a less idyllic life.
Hang on…if said gent lived alone? And he HAD a servant… Hamfast Gamgee took over the gardening chores from his kinsman Tolman, (who presumably worked for Bilbo’s parents at first) and who started out as extra help for the Estate sale, and once Tolman retired, it was the Gaffer who ran the garden and general outside maintenance. Then Samwise became a companion to Frodo, simultaneously an assistant to his dad, and Bilbo took an interest in Sam, and taught Sam to read and write (which the Gaffer thought was kindly meant, but “hope no harm will come of it”).
But Bilbo seems to have liked to do for himself as far as cooking and cleaning and everyday chores.
And it was not unusual for bachelors of Tolkien ‘s era, even well to do ones, not to have a fleet of servants. Just a single maid or a manservant, if that.
Which Bilbo had, and then Frodo after him, having both father and son in their employ. With just the two of them, then just Frodo for 17 years, no need for anyone except the gardeners.
I’m also not sure that shieldmaidens died to re-establish gender norms. Its been decades since I immersed myself in the Sagas, but what I recall is that true heros die gloriously in battle and then go to Vahalla. So this is the reward of the shieldmaidens. The same glory of the best of the male heros. This does not sound very patriarchal to me.
It’s true that women warriors fare poorly in Greek and Roman mythology. But the Amazons are based on the Scythian female warriors and the Greeks never defeated the Scythians who remained well in control of their homeland. In fact, one of the Scythian queens Tomyris slew Cyrus the Great of Persia and remains revered in Central Asia today. Various female warrior queens Boudicia, Zenobia did kick alot of Roman legionary ass even if they were eventually defeated. One Nubian queen Amanirenis defeated Augustus’ legions and blocked Roman expansion to the south. The mythology has more than a whiff of sour grapes to it, in my opinion. Rather, armed women did seem to freak out Greeks and Romans and make them feel very insecure.
Also, I think it is a mistake to view a death in battle as a defeat. This a modern sensibility. In these cultures of the past, this was often a glorious success and we should appreciate it that way.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
I can think of a few Norse heroes who died admired in old age: Egil (and his father), Kari in Njal, the sons of Ragnar. It was not death in battle that made one a hero but unflinching defiance in the face of death. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey covers this well in his Laughing Shall I Die.
Well noted. Of course, for the British, the mindset of leaving home for war and returning back as a civilian is even starker than elsewhere in Europe. The connection to service may persist, as it did with Peregrin, who remained a man of his king for the rest of his life, even when he returned home: the obligation never ended.
For example, my own grandfather went to the WWII, and returned home, but as all Finns who have done conscription, he remained a reservist by law: he went to military refresher exercises even in 1970’s. (Not quite the most normal thing for WWII veterans, who were not called to them en masse, but his civilian occupation caused this.)
For me, a key significant feature of my childhood was that dad would leave, every few years, for a refresher exercise, while otherwise, he was seldom away. Then came my own conscription, and my children have grown equally accustomed to dad leaving for a refresher exercise every now and then, and to the fact that “dad’s war rucksack” stands packed up in a closet.
I remember well my own father sighing when his war-time placement ended, and I was close to conscription age. “It seems I really have been allowed to live my life without ever needing to leave for war. Now, it is your turn.” I sincerely await for the day I can say the same to my own kids. On the other hand, the fact I have been worthy enough to have been summoned multiple times to a refresher, is a source of pride: Finnish military has enough reservists that they don’t need to bother calling up bad ones.
This is probably an experience somewhere midway between the warrior mentality and Tolkien’s idea of peace as reward: a permanent, intergenerational need to allow some part of your identity to be shaped by the military, while fervently hoping you never need it and may enjoy the domestic life instead.
Technically the demobilized WWII British vets were in the reserves, as I understand it. Once you’re in, you’re in forever. Of course, they conscripted in WWII, but I suspect the rules were the same for WWI – Tolkien was Lieutenant Tolkien forever.
One notes that the really good martial artists aren’t nearly as keen on using it as a lot of less capable ones. There is a lesson there about violence. It is manly to be good at it. It is also manly to not use it.
The professor did some air raid warden duties during WWII, as I recall. So he never really left the Reserves.
Imagine people having their blackout effort inspected or being shown to air raid shelters by a pretty unpleasant middle-aged linguist.
“Technically the demobilized WWII British vets were in the reserves, as I understand it. Once you’re in, you’re in forever.”
Not forever – once you demobbed as an Other Rank, you had four years’ service in the Regular Reserve, then you were out. Note that this is a different body from the Territorial Army, which is all part-time volunteers. I believe that junior officers had a similar reserve liability. Major and above were considered to remain in service until retirement, and were entitled to keep using their military rank as a title.
The situation has now changed – under the 1996 RFCA officers and other ranks can be called back to the colours at any age up to pension age, regardless of how long they’ve been out of service, in the event of national emergency or threat of invasion.
Very apropos, since Tolkien loved the Finnish language and mythic epics; and since Finland is well known for its military prowess and determination.
Ronald Tolkien was fascinated by Finnish grammar and used it or something similar for his Elfin languages.
Of course, it’s rather nice to go home to a private estate with a chestful of dragon gold. Much nicer living the rest of your life toiling as a peasant farmer. Or in Tolkien’s case, he had a pretty nice postwar life being a tenured professor at Oxford with a nice family and public literary fame. He might have had a different sentiment if the world wars had never happened and England was simply filled up with a generation who never had any opportunities for prosperity, just focused on population density and the avoidance of war. Another ex-soldier turned author wrote about that with his portrayal of Efrafa in “Watership Down.”
The defining factor that made WW1 and subsequent wars different from anything in previous human history was probably indirect fire: originally artillery, later artillery, aerial bombing and missiles. For most of human history you could at least see who was trying to kill you and could try to kill them back, even including line-of-sight field artillery. But indirect fire transformed war into Death From The Sky, as if God or the Gods themselves were raining burning hail down upon the damned. To be caught out in the open under such a rain of death was usually unsurvivable; all of modern tactics and operational doctrine revolves around trying to inflict that on one’s opponents while avoiding getting it inflicted on oneself.
Against this, personal courage (beyond stoically enduring what cannot be avoided) and sacrifice are useless or even counter-productive. Though there is plenty of conventional battle that gives scope for classic heroics in LotR, we are also shown war as waves of uncanny dread and paralysis of will, that sword and armor can do nothing against. The Fell Beasts are unstoppable except when their riders deign to land upon the ground. The only way Tolkien could have made the analogy more explicit would have been if Sauron could have contrived to have poison rain fall upon the armies of Gondor and Rohan.
To us Europeans the idea of war being glorious was pretty much killed in WWI.
The Cenotaph in London was dedicated to The Glorious Dead.
Very Middle-Earth of them.
Language evolves slower than major culture-changing events in modern societies. And the kind of ritual language used in memorials evolves more slowly yet. I’m not surprised that epitaphs still call the dead “glorious” well past the point where the average veteran doesn’t feel the glory.
Yes. And this sadly is a lesson the USA never learned, to its detriment (luck?) today. When karma comes home to roost, it will be a Fell Beast indeed.
Well, they seem fairly intent on finding out at somepoint soon.
“To us Europeans the idea of war being glorious was pretty much killed in WWI.”
The governments, and many of the people, of Germany and Italy for the next 20 years are not present in this picture.
I may have overestimated the prevalence of this view.
Another of my favourite cartoons: a WW1 German soldier in a trench, knee-deep in mud and effluent, rats and bursting shells everywhere, pointing at another German soldier with a very familiar moustache and telling his officer “the corporal here’s got an amazing idea for a sequel!”
Excuse me for taking your joke seriously but he did not have his iconic moustache back then. Also, WWII was first predicted as Germany’s revenge after the Peace of Versailles.
“Excuse me for taking your joke seriously but he did not have his iconic moustache back then.”
Very true, but I imagine the cartoonist thought that the joke might not land otherwise…
“Also, WWII was first predicted as Germany’s revenge after the Peace of Versailles.”
By Wavell, among others, who AFAIK was the first to call it “The Peace to End All Peace” – a description also used in the finest English history book ever written, “1066 And All That”.
Thank you for pointing out Archibald Percival Wavell predicting Germany’s revenge. I only knew Ferdinand Foch and John Maynard Keynes did it.
The artillery is not quite the wand of death you describe. Most typical artillery strike modes are designed to cause an attrition somewhere beween 10 and 50 per cent, depending on the effect desired. The amount of fire you need to get more effect is simply so large that usually, it is not worth it, and it might not even be technically feasible: after some time, everyone who has survived is in a shell crater or ditch, and killing them requires a close hit. Simultaneously, the tubes of your artillery start to heat up and you need to allow them to cool. Anyhow, a unit that has just lost half of its strength in casualties is not going to be fighting effectively.
So, the rain of indirect fire is probably survivable for many of its victims, but if you end up under it many times, the likelihood of escaping unscathed diminishes a lot.
I think more importantly, it’s very hard to *fight* under the rain of death. You can survive it by hunkering down but it is fairly difficult to *do* anything. (at least until they need to stop the barrage for a bit)
Congratulations on another incredibly well-written piece. Not the first one to make me cry, the peasant series and Why Boromir Conquered already did that. Probably some others too, though I am a soppy mess of waterworks in general if I do say so myself.
As a minor and pedantic point, re-evaluation casts the Somme as a strategic victory. germany had amassed a large reserve, with the intent of driving the weakened French out of the war (which would result in near total Allied defeat). The Somme was brought forward, and the British allotted a larger part, to forestall this, and succeeded. By the time it finished the Germans had committed that reserve and more, and the opportunity was gone. They fell back to the defensive Hindenberg Line.
This was not, of course, visible from the trenches.
“No one really listens to the advice of Nestor in the Iliad”
As it happens I’m in the middle of my first read of the Iliad (just started book 9), and this confused me. It… Seems like he’s often the first to speak, and they often do what he says. I would have said they largely honored him for his age and experience. What subtext am I missing here? I’m reading the Wilson translation if that makes a difference.
Incidentally, the name Nestor has been used as a synonym for “old master” in Swedish.
I said Ronald Tolkien was not such a bad world builder! He may have created a world were technology is unchanging or even regressing. But I suspect many of the mistakes of his admirers has been ascribed to the admired.
Who accused Tolkien of being a bad world builder? But I agree that his admirers make many mistakes. Tolkien and his contemporaries seem to have inspired the notion that fantasy novels need to be about whole realms, rather than individual people, that they need to be doorstoppers, but his imitators do not seem to grasp the need for characters with whom the reader can identify, and they tend to not finish their endlessly long series of doorstoppers, while Tolkien originally wanted to publish all or Lord of the Rings as one book.
Regressing technology is not necessarily unrealistic, and even less so in a fantasy world where dragons destroying cities is a thing that happens.
The idea of technology level steadily increasing seems natural to us, but for a classically educated person, this is not equally apparent. Ancient Rome and Egypt, just to name two cases, were pretty stagnant in their technology. (Introduction of certain cavalry technologies from enemies being a notable exception in case of Rome.) And the near-total collapse of Roman economic networks in the West meant that all finer handcrafts and most written culture were also lost. It was only by a somewhat fortunate chance that the Hellenistic culture and science were preserved in the East, and later, by Muslims. History knows several cases where more isolated civilisations have actually suffered clear set-backs: e.g. Mayans come to mind.
Of course, the Early Middle Ages were definitely not stagnant in their technology, with numerous great inventions being made, but there is a clear precedent that a preindustrial civilisation may be rather stagnant in technology, unless external factors force change. (Politically, such stagnation is much less likely.) Personally, I don’t think that an industrial community can stagnate similarly, because it will exhust natural resources unless it continues developing.
So, personally, I don’t find the idea of a state failure and resulting stagnant remnant empire quite an unreasonable proposition.
The technology of Ancient Egypt was not static through millennia. Being one of the first cultures to develop writing the history of Egypt is divided as following:
¤ Early Dynastic 3150 – 2686 BC.
¤ Old Kingdom 2686 – 2181 BC.
¤ First Intermediate 2181 – 2055 BC.
¤ Middle Kingdom 2055 – 1650 BC.
¤ Second Intermediate 1650 – 1544 BC.
¤ New Kingdom 1544 – 1069 BC.
¤ Third Intermediate 1069 – 664 BC.
¤ Late Dynastic 664 – 332 BC.
¤ Greek Period 332 – 30 BC.
¤ Roman Period 30 BC – 640 AD.
¤ Middle Ages 640 – 1517 AD.
¤ Turkish Period 1517 – 1914 AD.
¤ Modern Period from 1914 AD.
Within each of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms there was relatively little change in technology and practices. I think this was because the Pharaohs controlled such a large part of Egypt’s economic resources. In other words too much of the country’s economy was controlled by the government. The same can be seen in pre-modern China with its large bureaucracy. Most developments in technology and practices happened during periods of internal splintering. Which meant less control and more competition.
While I absolutely agree that this stuff needs to be fact-checked (if only in the perennial fight against orientalism), it’s worth noting that we know that the technology of ancient egypt was not stagnant or unchanging (far from it). But in the early 1900s, I don’t think this was a widespread enough conception to be influencing things like the cultural zeitgeist about whether technology’s natural state is progression or stagnation.
Hell, I’m not sure it’s widespread enough knowledge nowadays to influence that. I tend to ascribe it to poor worldbuilding, but the number of technologically stagnant-or-degrading societies in fiction is colossal. I’d suggest that it enormously outweighs the number that are demonstrated to have technological progression.
I don’t think it is widely known today. There are pseudoarchaeologists making it sound like Alexandros conquered a Copper Age Egypt.
Egypt is really a bit of a funny case because in popular depictions, it gets more or less put in stasis around 1500 BC and nothing past that gets really talked about. Even the Wikipedia article for the Ancient Egyptian military just doesn’t bother to explain anything about its rather rapid decline after the conquests during the New Kingdom period.
I took me reading Bret’s series about ironworking to understand what had happened there: Egypt could still compete militarily during the Bronze Age, but the Iron Age hit it like a ground hits an egg. As one of the few agrarian places without large forests, it couldn’t produce charcoal to have a native iron production of large enough scale. Thus, as iron weapons become dominant, it was basically fated to be reduced to an imperial subject because it could not compete technologically. And that’s basically what happens, with Egypt being controlled first by Kush, then Persia, then the Ptolemies, then Rome, then the Kalifates and then the Ottomans.
If only they’d been able to produce usable charcoal from straw, reeds and bulrushes, things might have gone differently.
This would explain the end of the New Kingdom. I only remember iron smelting was not yet invented at the time of Tutankhamun (1341 – 23 BC). Which lead to the question how he could be buried with an iron dagger. It is now verified to have been made from an iron meteorite.
Egypt successfully revolted against both Kushites and Persians. It was the wealthiest province of the Roman Empire, and a powerhouse in medieval times. Chis Wickham in The Donkey and the Boat (a survey of the mid-medieval economy of the Mediterranean) demonstrates how central it was. The Black Death hit it particularly hard, and it does not seem to have really recovered before the global economy shifted away from the Med.
The Black Death hit harder in the more densely populated parts of Europe. With millions cramped into the fantastically fertile Nile valley Egypt would have been hit even harder. Egypt also imported enslaved Africans for 1,200 years. They might well have imported more than other Near East counties because they could afford it. Most children of these imported Africans would have spoken Arabic like their parent’s slave-owners. Combined with a proportionally higher death rate from two pandemics (Plague of Justinian and Black Death) this could explain why Ancient Egyptian has no living descendants. Paradoxically, Egypt’s agricultural wealth led to its indigenous culture going largely extinct.
World-building can be viewed in several lights, depending on what a user is looking for. For sexy half-elves riding dragons I’d go with Middle Earth as a base setting (obviously there would be some tweaks to it) simply on account of Smaug (and nevermind the I.C.E. Middle Earth card-game which supplied half a dozen or so more dragons); for political and/or economic intrigue, give me the 2nd Edition AD&D ‘Waterdeep: City of Splendours’ boxed set with its multiple lists and tables, calenders/time-lines and maps which tend towards the technical rather than impressionistic.
Are you being sarcastic? Because there is not a singular character in Middle Earth I would describe as “sexy”, though no doubt the elves are all very beautiful, Tolkien didn’t really describe scantily dressed people, and though I have not read all of the Silmarillion, I am unsure if there are any dragon-riding elves at all … there is no doubt more sexy half-elves (and, potentially, dragon-riding) to be found in any D&D merchandise, and while there may be political intrigue there, too, there’s a lot more political intrigue in LotR than there’s sexy half-elves. (Yes, to women, the guy who plays Elrond may look rather hot in his tight-fitting clothes, but I have my doubts as to whether that is what you meant, and in any case, his description in the books does not include any overt sexyness.)
If ‘Dior the Fair’ wasn’t supposed to look sexy, I have no idea where the appellation is supposed to come from.
And as you mentioned, there’s Dior’s grandson Elrond (if I’ve counted the generations correctly) too. For that matter Aragorn (even with only a fraction of specific elven heritage, but sufficient for Tolkien to comment at one point of the Aragorn-Arwen match that it was a reuniting of the long-sundered branches of the half-elven) apparently looked quite good when he was dressed in something other than travel clothes or fighting gear.
But fantasy fiction and games are full of much detailed good-looking humanoid or any or all genders; but there are so very few dragons who have the work put in on them and the sheer narrative presence of a Glaurung or a Smaug – at least to my mind. The dragons of the Tolkien family (and spinoff works inspired by them – I would recommend ‘Smaug Ahunt’ or ‘Smaug Roused’ from the I.C.E. card game as examples of artwork of dragon-burning-stuff – are a category when it comes to world-building I would top-rank Tolkien works. And anything involving dragons (apart from comedy parodies such as ‘fairy dragons’) ought to be looking at Tolkien dragons as a baseline. I suppose other people who grew up with different fictional dragon influences may have other preferred dragons.
Sorry, the punctuation got a bit out of hand. The long dash in between ‘stuff’ and ‘are’ in ‘ … as examples of artwork of dragon-burning-stuff – are a…’ should have been a close-bracket.
I don’t remember who but I think someone did in the comments to the Bret’s criticism of “Game of Thrones”. Some examples of bad worldbuilding in later authors I can come up with:
¤ Ursula Le Guin has magic so powerful there should not be much of a conflict.
¤ Frank Herbert made up “spice melange” which he could be made in whatever he wanted.
¤ Anne McCaffrey was inconsistent in her descriptions of travelling times.
¤ James Rigney had a major disconnect between culture and mode of subsidence.
¤ Joanne Rowling have magic being hidden for no good reason.
¤ George Martin just makes up large numbers without understanding their consequences.
Mistakes like those may have been ascribed to Ronald Tolkien because they are so common in the genre he pioneered.
LeGuin’s magic exists in a context where the major institution to teach people to use it try to instil the philosophical value of “being reckless with this has the potential to destroy the world”, and many of the setting’s historical major antagonists are people being reckless with magic in a way that has the potential to destroy the world (which becomes the point at which Roke wizards need to bring out their mightiest arts). Even then, it has a lot of reliance on a deep insight into what or who you’re trying to effect, and can be weakened by things like being in an unfamiliar archipelago.
Thank you, I was not sure if it was a good example. I also avoided mentioning Terry Pratchett because I knew he had been writing satire.
> Ursula Le Guin has magic so powerful there should not be much of a conflict.
why both sides having access to powerful magic (or equivalent) would prevent conflict from occurring?
Of cause, you can have Mutually Assured Destruction. Let us say only one side realise it is. Then one can still have conflict. But this is harder to describe in fiction without having the villains look like idiots.
@Mateusz,
Tim Powers speculates a bit about that in one of his earlier books, “The Drawing of the Dark”, and suggests that powerful magic being used on both sides would result in a sort of deadlock, that primarily neutralizes the other side’s magic rather than accomplishing anything “magical” in its own right. Except for little things at the margins.
Fantasy stories are very vulnerable to setting botch-ups, because (at least if you’re the original creator) you can’t pull an encyclopaedia and half a dozen other reference books off a shelf and look up all the details of how and when Hogwarts was founded, or take a ‘work trip’ where you go off and get a guided tour of the ruins of Atlantis.
A creator can always go for the ‘fantasy lite’ option of setting something in the real world* and just have people with weird appearances and science-defying abilities wandering around, but even then it’s a lot of work double-checking any magic-systems are coherent and do not self-contradict, and figuring out how normal governments interact with the fantastic element. (Or a creator can always try and handwave away government interaction questions by going with ‘the fantasy elements are hiding themselves because ‘insert reason here – often something to do with not wanting to cope with suspicion and prejudice (especially when it comes to untrained children), or not wanting the hassle of being expected to sort out everyone else’s problems’.’ )
* so they can at least use some real-world people/places/events that can just be looked up.
You are right in building a world from scratch is really hard. At least Ronald Tolkien should be given credit for actually calculating travelling times. He also provided most and possibly all his cultures with a plausible means of subsistence. I don’t know if any of the published books say where his elves get their food from. (Some were published posthumously by his son Christopher.) But the hobbits have been stated to both grow cereal grain and keep livestock. His dwarves are mentioned as growing tubers. Similarly, the plains of Rohan are inhabited by herders. He even stated that only the northwestern part of Mordor have noticeably reduced light levels from air pollution. Other parts of Modor allow for irrigated agriculture.
I suspect that the Elven woodlands were remarkably abundant in nuts, berries, edible mushrooms, salad greens, and game of every sort given the elven skill at encouraging nature to be at its best. An exception might have been the Mirkwood, and Tolkien explicitly mentions their importing supplies from Laketown.
We talk about this on the worldbuilding reddit a lot. You only have a certain amount of time as an artist/writer, and you must apportion it between worldbuilding and actually creating the thing you are trying to create (be it writing, or artwork, or a game, or whatever). You must balance the two properly, otherwise you will either end up with a story that wrenches people out of their suspension of disbelief (or is discordant with the rest of your work’s thematic beats), or get lost in the worldbuilding and never produce anything tangible at all.
A bit tangentially, but worth bringing up as well. I feel like the general public have a fundamental misunderstanding about what ‘worldbuilding’ actually is as an endeavour. They quite often think that ‘worldbuilding = realism’ when in actuality, realism is a choice within the wider worldbuilding approach.
What worldbuilding is is the creation of tone in a work through the construction of the world around your plot. Realism is a popular worldbuilding choice, but it is not the only correct one, and is not a binary choice of ‘realistic or not realistic’.
Spirited Away is the ur-example of ‘unrealistic’ worldbuilding, with Miyazaki stating that the train-ride scene with No Face across a limitless, featureless shallow sea is intended to evoke the sensation he had when he first rode in a train carriage (the sensation that the world outside the carriage disappears into insignificance as all focus is placed on the occupants of the carriage). And despite the patent absurdity of this from a realism perspective, it does not challenge one’s suspension of disbelief because the rest of the worldbuilding supports this.
A lot of people like to stick a divider between ‘hard’ worldbuilding that aims for realism and ‘soft’ worldbuilding that aims for tone…but that’s a false dichotomy. Every piece of worldbuilding is aiming to conjure a sensation in someone’s head, and is thus about ‘tone’, whether you’re aiming for ironclad realism or not.
Oh, just to finish off my tangential point about worldbuilding being tone-setting not realism, let’s take the opposite example to Spirited Away. A hypothetical story set 100% in the real world. Let’s say it’s effectively a non-fiction work about your own, real-world experiences so everything is entirely grounded in the real world.
How do you choose what you do or don’t put in the narrative?
You choose the things that help build the correct picture around your story. To create the right tone for your plot to sit in, so people are guided to the right sensations as plot beats occur. It’s all about tone, even though it’s effectively non-fiction.
Ynneadwraith:
Words have different meaning between countries (e.g. the exact item of lower body clothing identified as ‘pants’ in the USA, as compared to the UK), between generations (e.g. terms which younger generations adopt to have specific sexual related meanings quite different from what previous generations might hold a word to mean), and for technical specialists (e.g. geologists using the word ‘beds’ to describe rock layers).
The Reddit concept of ‘Worldbuilding’ you mention seems to me to be an example of that latter category – a specific term used by a group of specialists to mean something different from what the general public see the word as meaning.
Interesting, nevertheless, to have a divergence of language brought up in a discussion of a blog post about J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien being a linguist…
🙂
@Look More Closely Later
Potentially, though I’m not quite sure that’s the entirety of it.
The general public seem to intuitively ‘get’ the idea that ‘good worldbuilding’ doesn’t necessarily mean realism. On an intuitive level, they seem to understand that it’s something a little different, though lack the vocabulary to really describe it. For instance, the general consensus of Warhammer 40k and Dark Souls seems to be that they have ‘good worldbuilding’ despite their wild technical inaccuracies.
I think the general public’s understanding is something closer to a combination of ‘is this world compelling’ and ‘does this world allow me suspension of disbelief’.
Then you get folks who sort of scratch the surface of worldbuilding, and tend to hyper-focus on the ‘suspension of disbelief’ bit so their technical understanding of worldbuilding narrows somewhat. Thanks to the internet and multiple people picking holes in the realism of creative works*, there’s probably quite a lot of people in this cohort (though I’d argue not quite enough to make their understanding of worldbuilding the default).
Then you get folks like myself and others, who circle back round to that more fundamental understanding of worldbuilding as a tradeoff between compellingness and believability.
*This is not necessarily a bad thing. You want any anachronisms to be there by deliberate creative design, not through ignorance.
I have no problem with fictional works containing magic as long as it is roughly consistent. My problem is more of authors not understanding the consequences of their own statements. For example as I am writing this there is heavy snow outside my windows. Some people may imagine this weather to apply year-round without understanding it would drown the landscape in ice:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Myths-on-snow#wbb1
To Michael Alan Hutson:
If a people can use plant magic on a regular basis they would not need agriculture. Instead they could make wild plants productive enough for permanent settlements.
Bravo, Sir, bravo.
STANDING OVATION POST.
I have a lot more to say, but no time to say it, but it is absolutely, IMHO correct…
Wish I’d been there for the convo.
Pedantic note (not connected to the main topics of the text) about the sizes of armies at the beginning of WW1: you probably used (at least partially) peacetime sizes of European armies instead of mobilised. Austria-Hungary had almost 500 000 men in peacetime, more than 3 millions after mobilisation; Russia had almost 1.3 millions in peacetime, almost 5 millions after mobilisation; Germany and France had around 3.8 millions each (after mobilisation).
After WWI Britain had a female surplus somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million. I don’t think this war had been fought on British soil. If I understand it correctly nearly all the Britons killed were male. The few exceptions would have been hospital staff. Unless the Spanish Flu disproportionably killed men the Britons killed in WWI should be nearly 2 million.
“Unless the Spanish Flu disproportionably killed men the Britons killed in WWI should be nearly 2 million.”
But every source gives British dead in WW1 as somewhere between 800,000 and 900,000. See this for example https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/crime-and-defence/the-fallen/
I think your mistake is that you’re starting from a mistaken assumption, which is that before the war Britain had a population that was 50-50 male and female. But this isn’t the case. In the 1921 census, after the war, there were 109 females for every 100 males. But in 1911 the census found that there were already 106 females for every 100 males (and that was an underestimate due to a suffragist boycott campaign). Here are the figures for adult men and women in England and Wales, as an illustration. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1911-12-15/debates/47314e20-ad6c-4e44-a635-ab79eede91da/Population(UnitedKingdom1911)
This is strange, you might be thinking: in modern Britain (and most other modern countries) there are actually more boy babies born than girls (105 to 100). Yes, but in the early 20th century infant mortality was higher for boys; men tended to do more dangerous jobs (heavy industry for example); and single men were far more likely to emigrate than single women. Britain already had “surplus women”; the war only made the number higher.
I don’t know if the flu killed men more than women, but I can believe it would – it spread very fast in the army and in military establishments, remember, which would be mostly male.
As a general rule, infectious diseases kill men more than women. It seems to be due to stronger immune responses in women. And women develop better resistance from vaccines than men.
This can be socially significant. In “Too Many Women?” by Guttentag and Secord, they note that in the cities of the late middle ages, which were rife with epidemics, there was a noticeable shortage of men vs. women.
Britain already had a significant female surplus before the First World War – I think you’re assuming that it was 50-50 male/female in 1914, which isn’t the case. The census in 1911 found significantly more adult women than men.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1911-12-15/debates/47314e20-ad6c-4e44-a635-ab79eede91da/Population(UnitedKingdom1911)
Higher mortality in dangerous jobs, and emigration by single men, are the main causes.
Thank you, the text you linked to indicates a noticeable gender imbalance. I did not think about the possibility of significantly more men than women emigrating.
And thank you for making me dig into that – I knew both the casualty figure and the imbalance figure, but somehow I had never brought the two together in my mind and asked myself “how can you kill 860,000 men and end up with two million extra women?”
And I would speculate that the Spanish flu probably did kill more men than women – it spread very widely in all the combatant armies, both at the front and in military establishments at home. I don’t have data to back this up, though.
Well, cramped conditions do increase the spread of airborne diseases. This may have disproportionably affected men.
“Spanish flu killed more people than the First World War” is true globally but, interestingly, not in the UK – only 228,000 deaths.
As to whether more men died in the UK…. There were, in absolute numbers, more female deaths from Spanish flu in the UK, but it’s estimated that the death rate among men was slightly higher (because the UK male population was smaller, as we’ve discussed). And deaths from flu of British men serving overseas would not have been registered as “UK flu deaths”.
The whole concept of “praise, fame, renown” seems lost on Gary.
“Bah!
What do most adventurers risk life and limb for if not the gold and jewels?!
they are part and parcel of the measurement of the mission’s success.
Who really cares how many critters are slain? It’s the treasure that counts.
It is virtually the ONLY reasonable meansure [sic] for thieves success.
Cheers,
Gary
”
As in, Gary Gygax.
That’d seem to me to indicate the kind of fantasy that Gary was a fan of. If he’s thinking Fafhrd and Gray Mouser (especially Mouser) for example this is pretty well them to a “T”.
I worked at TSR Hobbies in the early 1980s and experienced Gary Gygax firsthand. Basically, he was a Dwarf. Right out of LOTR, his outlook on life, his morality, his virtues and failings — and as an ersatz self-identified Elf myself, I was not terribly impressed.
As another elf-adjacent human…that explains a lot about my attitudes towards DnD. It’s all the mucky grubbiness without any of the wonder.
Depends on how good your DM/GOD is…
Agreed, though there’s structural things with DnD that I dislike, and it is rather exemplified by the ‘who really cares how many critters are slain? It’s the treasure that counts’ quote.
Compare and contrast that with something like Glorantha. You still get the whole adventurers adventuring for fame and glory thing…but the whole setting is designed to embed you within a society and make you care about the characters within it. It exposes the shallowness of the statement from Gygax (and all of the cultural assumptions that come along with it).
Do we read books because we get paid, or because the characters and plot are compelling?
Oh, and if anyone wants an intro to Glorantha, this is a great little read: https://andrewloganmontgomery.blogspot.com/2018/10/six-seasons-in-sartar-1-introducing.html
Not all campaigns are like that, but it gives you a flavour of what Glorantha encourages you to do systematically.
Thank you.
Back in the day, me and mine deliberately played ADnD, and sometimes had “house rules” to deal with a few blind spots…
But then again, I learned and earned my DnD chops back in 1979, and one of the DMs was one of the our University’s professors (math PhD with a strong background in European history), so we tended to get scenarios that were more like scripts from a good historical novel adaptation.
Gygax famously wasn’t much of a Tolkien fan. (I got the impression the tolkienisms in D&D were largely included under duress) he preferred the Sword and Sorcery stuff: Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, etc.
Or the dwarfs/dwarves of “Dungeons and Dragons” could have been taken from Viking mythology. This is where Ronald Tolkien got them from.
Oh, he absolutely had read Tolkien and used it. But it wasn’t where his interests lay. He was much more interested in the american human-centric pulp fantasy than Tolkien.
There was actually… I can’t remember a if it was an actual legal case or the Tolkien rights holders just told them to knock it off, but certain LOTR specific terms (eg. hobbit, Balrog) were replaced (halfling, Balor)
I think Ronald Tolkien copyrighted the word “hobbit” but have not thought about other terms.
We showed my kids the LotR movies over Christmas. This got me in a reading JRRT again state of mind, but with a goal. I have a bad habit of reading the events while.overlookinh the people. I wanted to read it again, but with specific attention to Aragorn, Galadriel, Denethor, and Eowyn. This is such a tremendous resource for that goal, and I feel like once I hit that part of the story it’s likely I will understand better than I ever have what her journey is. Thanks for understanding for some of the thick-headed among us.
I think the blog article may have missed the bit that Éowyn is trying to prevent her uncle’s body from being despoiled when she has her moment on the Pelennor. I appreciate this was a script for only a limited duration broadcast, but from the translations of western European myths I’ve read, that’s something which seems to me was supposed to be pretty important at at least one time.
But, with only a limited time for an address, I guess some stuff has to get left out, and it’s a matter of what the lecturer considers the most important from their own perspective which makes it in.
She was, but that was the _excuse_ more than the _reason_. Eowyn’s wish to win honour in battle (and likely die while doing so) is already very well established – that’s the entire reason she is at the battle in the first place!
“Excuse” is a rather strong word. She showed her love for her uncle when she cared for him all this time, a task she received no renown for – surely, she would have defended him even if she had no wish for glory at all.
Also, she did not really need an excuse for fighting an enemy. (And she did, in fact, not give any kind of excuse for her wanting to ride to battle, if I recall correctly. Wanting to win honour in battle was a perfectly accepted reason among her people, I imagine as ubiquitous as ” … because I wanted to survive” is nowadays, and she quite rightly rejected the notion that women should have no right to that universal human ambition.)
Tolkien could have had her randomly fight that exact opponent, as he did with Faramir, but I imagine he thought it fitting, for the purpose of the story, that she should have a specific reason for picking that fight. (And pick it, she must, as to better illustrate her courage)
And having her know the prophecy about “no man” being able to kill him, and choosing to fight him for that reason, well, that would be rather boring.
One might say her fight was triggered by the attack on her uncle, but it would do her unjustice to say that she used her uncle as excuse.
There are two main reasons I say it’s an excuse:
1. Her entire presence there isn’t about protecting her uncle (and king) – it is about seizing glory through death, despite her duty to Theoden and to her people. Remember she had been charged by both him and Aragorn to remain and govern them, which she disregarded on her own quest for doom.
2. Imagine the same scene – the Witch King, Merry, and Eowyn on the field, but without Theoden there. Would she have done anything different? I think not. Nothing in her character to that point or at that point suggests she would have quailed away from the Witch King. She rode as one seeking death with no hope and would have stood against the Witch King just the same regardless of who was there.
I don’t know. Something just seems intuitively wrong to say that Theoden’s presence is irrelevant to her emotional experience in the face of such an enemy.
“I think the blog article may have missed the bit that Éowyn is trying to prevent her uncle’s body from being despoiled when she has her moment on the Pelennor.”
She is, but that is not why she rides to the Pelennor. She rides because she thinks their cause and country are doomed, they are all going to be killed or enslaved, and she wants to die gloriously before that happens. She rides “as one who seeks death, seeing no hope”. She rides to battle hoping to have a chance to attack the most terrifying supernatural abomination available, and if it happens that she kills it, she will just look for another terrifying supernatural abomination to attack, again and again until something finally manages to kill her.
That is why the Witch-King’s supernatural aura of terror doesn’t work on her: he is trying to terrorize her into retreat by threatening her with the very thing she most wants.
Note that when she awakes in the Houses of Healing her major feeling is frustration that she will not be fit in time to join Aragorns obviously-doomed forlorn-hope challenge to Sauron. She is frustrated that she will not be well enough to get herself killed in battle.
She is in quite a state of mind.
It somewhat understates Eowyn’s heroism to say that she seeks death. Recall that the Lord of the Nazgul–presumably not lacking in either intelligence of psychological astuteness–apparently perceives that Eowyn seeks death and threatens her with worse, the houses of lamentation. Yet she still does not flinch.
It strikes me that a lot of modern evil comes from people who are unwilling to part with the idea of glorious war. For most of history almost every polity was dependent on regular warfare either for expansion or security. But in the modern days, wars beyond anything that the kings and warriors of old could imagine tax the economies of victors to no gain and it’s become a much more complicated question whether victories are even good for security.
In that context it makes sense to move from a model of glory where great warriors earn renown and put themselves above noncombatants, to one of sacrifice where good soldiers die and face horrors to protect civilians, and civilians honor that sacrifice by among other things trying to seek peace so that fewer sacrifices will be needed in the future. But I think a lot of people still see war as a glorious thing which should be sought out rather than avoided.
Which people does this evil come from, though? Sparta-fanboys who talk at length about how they are superior to women because they can fight better, then complain about only men being drafted the moment the possibility of real war looms at the horizon?
Putin, who sends criminals to the front lines, giving them the best chance to earn renown, with little to no complaint from the law-abiding citizens who you’d think deserve such a chance far more?
(And has he been seen at the front lines, attempting to go out in a blaze of glory, like King Theoden would have done? I cannot recall having seen a photo.)
I am rather doubtful that there still are men who not only talk about glorious wars (a lot of talking is admittedly happening) but would, indeed, desire to win glory in them.
The fact that even the conservative parties are openly considering the drafting of women, in countries which explicitly banned women from joining the military back when peace seemed to last forever, proves that war definitely has lost all glory it may still have had after World War II, in practice, if not in theory. Men did not want women to compete with them for very much theoretical glory, when the dying was also very hypothetical. (I suppose, though, that the money was very real) Now that the dying has suddenly gotten a lot more real, oh wonder, the glory does not seem so very glorious anymore, and they are more than willing to share it with women. (Which rather proves they expect there to be precisely none of it.)
The wish to imagine themselves as warrior and put themselves over civilians is there in many men, no doubt, but the willingness to die for that privilege? I do not see any of that.
There’s no Eomers in this modern world. Nor are there many quiet, peaceful little hobbits like Sam and Frodo, who despite never having fancied themselves great warriors, still are willing to risk life and limb for a good cause.
What we have a lot of are Grimas, who justify their molesting of women with their alleged superiority (derived from their theoretical status as warriors), but then are the first to run away very fast when there is talk of them proving said warrior status by actually risking death.
@Rose,
There are certainly still lots of people, all around the world, who get fired up by the thought of killing or dying in the name of their preferred ideological vision. And probably always will be. But, I agree that’s different in an important sense: what matters to people like that is typically the ideology, not the war and conflict in itself. If they could get their vision enacted through peaceful means they’d usually prefer that instead, at least in principle.
“Men did not want women to compete with them for very much theoretical glory, when the dying was also very hypothetical.”
And yet, during the ACW, WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, no one proposed that women be drafted. I don’t think this view comports with observed facts.
Millions of women were drafted during the Second World War – my own grandmother got her call-up papers in September 1939 et militavit sine gloria nec sine fas. I suppose that, not being American, she may not count.
Only the Soviet Union had women actually fighting in WWII.
Only the Soviet Union had women actually fighting in WWII.
What about partisans in the various Axis-occupied countries?
Those were not part of the regular armed forces so I don’t know if they should count.
@Hector: partisans were not “drafted”
“Only the Soviet Union had women actually fighting in WWII.”
This is only true if you take an extremely odd view of fighting which excludes everything except “actually physically pulling triggers to fire on the enemy while in uniform in the regular armed forces in the European theatre”. (Note that by this standard General Eisenhower and General Zhukov did not fight in WWII.)
Chinese women fought in the nationalist army. 54,000 British women served in anti-aircraft batteries – not firing the guns, but as drivers, support crews, and operating the rangefinders and computers that produced firing solutions for the guns. Female SOE agents engaged in ground combat with German troops in occupied Europe. Resistance movements across Asia included women who took part in ground combat, according to eye witnesses.
“Only the Soviet Union had women actually fighting in WWII.” is a lie
For example Danuta Siedzikówna, executed by Soviet regime installed in Poland by Soviet Union. After Russia invaded Poland in cooperation with their ally Adolf Hitler.
And she was not unique, there was more of women partisans in Poland.
“Those were not part of the regular armed forces so I don’t know if they should count.” why not?
Under what bizarre definition these partisans were not fighting in WWII?
These may have been overlooked in the history books I relied on. For comparison Lise Meitner never got recognition for being the first to have splintered the atom.
In World War II, women were still forbidden from fighting in war because it was still considered prestigious. That was my point.
When German women wanted to join the military in actual combat roles (and maybe even in adminstrative roles that were part of the combat forces rather than the medical, I would have to look that up) during the time of long established peace after 1945, they had to go through the courts for their right to do so. The government didn’t simply shrug and say “Well, drafting women would be wrong, because it is men’s duty to fight, but if you want to volunteer, sure why not?”
Men protected the privilege to earn money for doing combat practice and going abroad in peacekeeper roles that were very unlikely to get them killed. They wanted it for themselves, when there was an established peace that many of us hoped and half assumed would last forever.
The fact that German men are now, with Russia waging war against Ukraine in pretty much our direct neighbourhood, not only willing to let women fight in wars, but fully intend to force women to do so, indicates that the social prestige of doing so has gone down a lot – and that what men were eager to keep to themselves always was the honour part (and maybe the money part) … not the dying part.
“In World War II, women were still forbidden from fighting in war because it was still considered prestigious. That was my point.”
But your point was wrong, as multiple other comments (including mine) have noted.
I’m unconvinced that it’s about preserving a gender privilege; rather more that until modern times female fertility was so highly valued that the social norm was that women of child-bearing age had to be protected. The modern value of woman contributing militarily tracks rather well with the decline in fecundity as something seen as precious.
There were proposals that women be drafted during and after Vietnam…
These proposals were made in conjunction with arguments against the Equal Rights Amendment.
And while the ERA is stuck at the last few states to either vote yay or nay, it rattled a lot of people when many women agreed that the draft should apply to both sexes, and therefore there shouldn’t be a draft for either.
Which is when we got the all volunteer army.
Drafting women to infantry service was an example of the biggest objection to the ERA: that it was so broadly worded that it was impossible to anticipate just what a future Supreme Court might hold it to mandate. To many, the ERA was a pig in a poke.
Indeed, that was one of the objections to the ERA.
“but then are the first to run away very fast when there is talk of them proving said warrior status by actually risking death.”
Here in Britain there appear to be reams of ‘patriots’ online clamouring for war and violence…only for their reaction to our Chief of Defence stating that ‘the nation’s son’s and daughters must be ready to fight’ being ‘I’m not fighting for them’.
It should also be noted that people form that very same political movement were found to have a 43% conviction rate for prior domestic abuse among those arrested at protests against asylum seekers.
So your societal analysis has merit, to me.
Thank you.
I mean, it is only logical.
Violence against women is anti-social (and more cowardly than violence against fellow men would be).
Dying for your country is pro-social, and brave.
It is not likely that one and the same man would be cowardly enough to beat his wife when frustrated with his job rather than confronting his boss, but brave enough to die in battle. That he would be egoistic enough to terrorize his wife in order to gain some small benefits (domestic abusers have been found to intentionally spread terror exactly so that they always get their will, they’re not randomly angry) but at the same time altruistic enough to die for his country.
While it is not impossible that a man would be misogynist enough to be selfish in his dealings with women, but altruistic in his dealings with men, the fact that men are now sent to wars by governments that also contain women, rather than by a patriarchal lord or king, would make sure that there’s not much difference in behaviour.
People rarely act out of character.
(I am convinced people would have been very surprised if Boromir had used his warrior status to justify treating the hobbits like slaves for the whole journey, had attempted to take the Ring, and then died bravely in an attempt to protect them like he does in canon. That just wouldn’t have fit with what we know about people.
Likewise, had he been a humble, virtuous man, without any noticeable flaws, readers might have felt blindsided by his threatening Frodo and considered it bad writing.
Instead, Tolkien established him as being a flawed, yet mostly okay guy, so that both his being tempted by the Ring and his heroic death were consistent with his personality. )
I have written a blog post on where I think evil comes from:
https://blog.ifraagasaetterskan.se/Why-ill-will-is-a-myth#wbb1
Well, people still watch war films, play war games, debate which country’s uniform and parades look better. So a big part of the population still see glory in wars. People would not still play Total wars and Mount&Blade if they think wars are totally distasteful.
However, actually wanting to go to war just for the sake of glory nowadays? I don’t think a lot of people want that, beside religious fundamentalists.
People still sign up for combat units. I think that, in addition to citing patriotism, they typically describe themselves as seeking “adventure” and “excitement” rather than “glory,” if that makes a difference.
This is wonderful, thank you for posting it.
I was always moved by the Dead Marshes scene in the Two Towers, and can’t help imagining that his experience at the Somme was the genesis of that image of the dead preserved forever in the mud.
Also, he may have been aware of the existence of bog bodies. Those have been preserved by the chemical environment of the bogs.
Tolkien thoughts on heroism and war were also infused in his work “”The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth”, on which Gavin the Medievalist made a video recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx7cbPJXZt0
> Rapid Prussian had won them the Franco-Prussian War
I think this is missing a “mobilization” in there? or perhaps some other word.
Or it should be “rapid Prussia” without the genitive.
Ernst Junger fought on the Somme, and it occupies much of the middle of Storm of Steel. All I can say is if that is what the business end of an unprepared army looks like in that part of the world, I’d hate to be at the wrong end of one that considered itself good to go.
But you certainly get some idea of where Tolkien was coming from.
I don’t disagree with anything said here as such, but I don’t think Eowyn’s story can be as easily divorced from issues of gender roles as is implied here.
She makes a very good point in her argument with Aragorn – “‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.'” – and Aragorn has no real answer to it.
I bring this up, because while Tolkien says over and over again that living in peace like the Hobbits is to be commended, he doesn’t write about it much. He doesn’t write about the hard physical labour by women which is essential to the functioning of his world – the female experience of Middle-Earth is substantially absent (the Silmarillion is a little better, but female characters are out numbered ten to one – and the only male character who is in any way influenced by his mother is Fëanor, the rest of them might as well be motherless).
I’m not saying all of this to damn Tolkien really, rather that I think part of what makes Éowyn such a rich character is this struggle with conflicting impulses. Her whole arc could be read as Tolkien implicitly criticising his own artistic priorities – it’s not FAIR that half of all the beings in his world are relegated to unrewarded and unsung drudgery, work that is simultaneously lauded and taken for granted. Faramir seems to be the first person who ever asked Eowyn what SHE wanted, as every other male character feels perfectly entitled to assume it on her behalf (well, maybe not Gandalf).
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think all of these ideas and themes can exist simultaneously – Eowyn’s story did not have to mean only one thing. And I’ve thought for a long that the Lord of the Rings gets a huge amount of its emotional power from the kind of schism between conflicting values in the story.
> Faramir seems to be the first person who ever asked Eowyn what SHE wanted
Which makes him awesome.
“I bring this up, because while Tolkien says over and over again that living in peace like the Hobbits is to be commended, he doesn’t write about it much. He doesn’t write about the hard physical labour by women which is essential to the functioning of his world”
I don’t think he writes very much about hard physical labour full stop, to be honest. We never see a single dwarf do any mining or metalworking. We never see an elf actually making a rope or kneading some lembas dough. There are no smiths and no masons, and while we meet some farmers we don’t see them doing any farming. Because he’s writing an adventure story, not a gazetteer!
And as for not writing about living in peace – what authors write about most does not reflect what they think is desirable. Iain Banks, for example, pointed out that he had designed the Culture to be a utopia – but it’s hard to tell interesting stories about a utopia, so all the Culture stories take place around its edges.
Regarding warfare being “regular” and peformed in cycles in the pre-modern era, exactly how frequently did the cycle repeat? It seems like human conflict tends to be scaled by how many people are dying in warfare at any one time, but has anyone done an in-depth study on the sheer frequency of any particular conflict involving a group of armed people attacking another group of people? For example, if you were a boy growing up at any point in classical period Athens, could you reasonably count on being drafted in some kind of military campaign during your adolescent years? Or even if there was no war declared, could you get your rite of passage by signing up for some kind of raiding campaign, like the Norse people did much later? or were they one of very few settled societies that did that?
In the history of Classical Athens starting from 499BC you get the Greco-Persian Wars, in which the longest time they go continuously without some manner of conflict is about ten years and the longest they go with a continuous war is about 28. This ends in 449.
Then the Peloponnesian War starts in 431 and lasts through to 404.
Athens is involved in the alliance against Sparta in the Corinthian War of 395 to 387, establishes the Second Athenian League to resist Spartan hegemony in 378, and after the major Theban victory against Sparta in 371 becomes involved in the alliance against the new hegemon, culminating in a major victory in 362.
24 years later, Philip II has his major victory against a league including Athens that establishes Macedonian dominance, and the Classical period gives way to the Hellenistic.
That’s not including lots of other minor wars against troublesome neighbours, tributaries, or colonies.
So yeah, there is pretty consistent warfare over a period of around 150 years.
Thanks, that’s a good summary. A major eye-opener this blog gave me is how frequent warfare was in the pre-modern world, and how at least the leaders practically enjoyed it.
The democratic states of ancient Greece, such as Athens, were not perceptibly more pacific than the oligarchic ones. So it wasn’t just the leaders.
In another post, Devereaux wrote “Rome goes to war every year. No, seriously. Every. Year. From 509 to 31BC, the only exception was 241-235. That’s it. Six years of peace in 478 years of republic.”
Though interestingly, Rome seems to have moved away from the concept of war as the arena in which warriors win glory toward a more modern concept.
Probably due to the difficulty of expanding further and being unable to defeat Parthia.
I find myself reminded of the claim that there is no such thing as an anti-war film. A film about a war is a film about a group of people taking great and lethal risks in the service of some collective goal. That inherently looks noble and heroic.
I’d say the important difference between present and ancient times is not the tactical conditions of a battle, but the strategic context of the war. In an agrarian age, war is a zero sum game for a (roughly) fixed resource (farmland). In an industrial age, war is a negative sum competition for something you could just as easily have built at home anyway. That is naturally less attractive, making war a worse option.
Soldiers were not more likely to die in modern wars than ancient ones, but given that they did die, they were more likely to be slain by the weapons of the enemy, rather than by dysentery. That should make for a better ratio of heroism-to-squalor.
Especially in overtly feudal societies, where lords were not just the political rulers of their realms but literally their owners, war was a business. It was how anyone with an ounce of ambition got ahead in the world. Think of the maneuverings of corporations today with buyouts, mergers, hostile takeovers, etc.; it’s more or less war only done with money instead of violence. In a pre-industrial society the dynamic was to conquer more land, to tax more farmers, to support a bigger army, to conquer more land, with the unspoken goal to become emperor of the planet Earth if you somehow could. Modern sensibilities are appalled at how Columbus and the conquistadors treated the native Americans, but to late-feudal thinking it was simply the natural order of things for anyone too weak to defend themselves to be conquered.
“Modern sensibilities are appalled at how Columbus and the conquistadors treated the native Americans, but to late-feudal thinking it was simply the natural order of things for anyone too weak to defend themselves to be conquered.”
Considering that Columbus was recalled to Spain, tried, and stripped of his governorship for his tyrannical treatment of the locals and general mismanagement of Hispaniola, I think the ‘dog eat dog’ attitude of historical societies can quite often be overplayed.
Not that it was nonexistent, but it is often exaggerated by various folks who stand to gain from people believing that dog-eat-dog is the natural state of humanity (not saying you’re one of them of course, just a general observation).
“Not that it was nonexistent, but it is often exaggerated by various folks who stand to gain from people believing that dog-eat-dog is the natural state of humanity”
Wasn’t a very important point of the blog post series on GoT that the Middle Ages were, in fact, not as violent as in that allegedly “realistic” series?
(And of the series on Sparta, that Sparta, which really had a dog-eat-dog mentality, rather underperformed in war despite, or perhaps because of it.)?
The maneuverings of corporations are limited by the law nowadays, I don’t see why it shouldn’t have been similar with wars before then.
As for there not being such a thing as an anti-war movie, that depends entirely on the mentality of the viewer.
Many might think it noble and heroic for a group of men to wage war on the enemy tribe so that they may rape the enemy tribe’s women (a collective goal!), but I would very much disagree. Not every collective goal is automatically good or virtuous.
And seeing as in pretty much any war, men rape (if they have no access to women, they rape other men) and I see rape as inherently reprehensible, I could very well argue that there is no such thing as a pro-war movie – at least no honest one.
War seems noble and heroic in LotR even to me (to some extent) because Tolkien told it from the point of view of those defending their homelands, not from the side of those attempting to take what is not theirs, never mentioned rape or even non-sexual types of torture as anything the heroes did, etc.
The fact that most of the enemies are orcs (who are, it seems, always evil, even towards one another, and have no civilians we can see) and some enemies, like the Witch-King, aren’t even properly alive, reduces the rather morally problematic part of killing people, which is inherent in any real war, too. (Very convenient that Éowyn’s most famous deed is the killing of a creature that was undead to begin with.)
And LotR is not a pro-war book – it is merely a book that admits to the fact that sometimes, one has no other choice but to enage in a war of self-defense. It just glorifies that self-defense as much as possible. (The fact that no one dies of dysentery makes the whole thing more epic, maybe, but honestly, if you wrote a fanfic wherein half of the Rohirrim die of dysentery, while the orcs are immune to it and only die in battle, I would not consider the orcs one bit more heroic, or the Rohirrim one bit less heroic because of it).
@Rose,
While I sympathize with your point, I do think you can believe that a particular war is good even while deploring the rapes that are likely to come along with it. Also, while rape does happen in most wars, some armies do it enthusiastically while others do their best to deter and suppress it. (Not just liberal-democratic militaries, either: during the Cuban guerrilla campaign in the 1950s that led to their successful revolution, the revolutionaries were famous for summarily executing accused rapists in their ranks. Not just for moral reasons, but because they knew it would help build public sympathy for their cause).
@Hector: Yeah, some armies execute rapists, but many don’t, and when rape is part of pretty much all bigger wars, it makes wars rather undesirable from women’s point of view. (And from the POV of men who’d rather not rape anyone than risk being raped themselves, too)
My point was that it is hard to make a movie that is honest about how war usually happens, and is also pro war.
Sure, the war in LotR is kinda “right and just” and so on, and all the heroes are very honourable and all, but I think most readers agree that it still kinda sucks, and everyone would have been better off if Sauron had just never happened.
(Except, that is, for the reader. The reader can only enjoy the story because something bad happened, but then, it is the same with murder mysteries, and I don’t think anyone ever claimed Sherlock Holmes stories are pro-murder.)
Is that pro-war?
To justify a war of aggression, you would have to have an extremely evil enemy government, that oppresses its own population so bad that said population would be better off if you attacked.
It happens, yes, but is not the case with most wars.
I do not think that you can make a honest movie that glorifies war so much that it gets pacifists to prefer war over a peaceful situation where no one attacks them, and there are no countries evil enough to justify attacking them.
Are there people who will always interpret any war movie as being pro-war?
Probably, but does that really mean a movie cannot be anti-war?
(I admit that it may be a matter of word interpretation. I assume that “pro-war” means “war is always better than no war”. Of course, if you read it as meaning “war can sometimes be the least bad alternative”, then yeah, a movie that depicts horrible war crimes on both sides might make the viewer think “Those groups are both horrible, I hope some aliens nuke them from space” – but if you asked that viewer if they preferred that that war never happened, they’d probably agree.)
I assume that “pro-war” means “war is always better than no war”. Of course, if you read it as meaning “war can sometimes be the least bad alternative”
@Rose,
Oh, I didn’t mean that many films or pieces of modern culture are *pro war* in the sense that you mean, and I certainly don’t think they ought to be! I was more taking issue with the idea that a healthy culture or piece of media ought to be *anti war* in the sense that “no war is always better than any war / this war, whatever the cost.” I’m certainly not pro war in the sense you mean, but also not anti war: I think war is a tragedy but sometimes necessary, and in many situations it’s “worth it”. I would see any movie, for example, that broadly takes the view “this war involved a lot of suffering, and in a perfect world it would be better if it hadn’t happened, but in the long run it was worth it” to be neither pro war nor anti war, strictly speaking.
I agree with you that the pro war attitude you’re pointing to seems to have died, certainly by 1945, but there are alarming signs it might be coming back.
“War seems noble and heroic in LotR even to me….”
This is why Tolkien wrote the Scouring of the Shire, and in fact thought it one of the most, if not the most, important chapters of the book. The whole point of that chapter is to show that war IS NOT heroic. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s always ugly and dirty and brutal. Tolkien was annoyed by all the war epics where the hero goes Over There to fight and gets to come back to a safe, secure, pleasant home. The chapter exists to show that war happens at home, too, and that the places you know and love are not immune to the destruction and brutality. Repairing after the war is noble and heroic; the war itself is just unmitigatedly bad.
There’s also the line from Faramir about not loving a sword for its edge or an arrow for its swiftness, but only that which it defends. And Gandalf’s statement about how no one wants to live in times like these, but you don’t get that choice. And Aragorn’s statement–to the innkeeper and to the men on the march to the Black Gate–that even small things can help. Even Gimli’s tale of going through the Paths of the Dead can be read as an extended metaphor for the horrors of war.
“…or even non-sexual types of torture as anything the heroes did, etc.”
He absolutely mentions these.
“I put the fear of fire into him” was said by Gandalf about his interrogation of Gollum, during the Council of Elrond. That means Gandalf used fire to inflict pain on Gollum until Gollum gave Gandalf the information he wanted (“fear of fire” is like a man dragging a woman by the hair in a painting–it’s not literally saying it, but it’s absolutely saying it). That is, by definition, torture. Aragorn was also not gentle with Gollum; whether it’s torture or not depends on your view of such things. Given how the Ring works Gollum’s reaction to the Elven rope may not have been an act; there’s evidence that Elves can make things Morgoth’s minions can’t touch (the Silmarils being the most extreme example), and Galadriel was Feanor’s kin. Frodo stopped it pretty quickly, but Sam was entirely on board with torturing Gollum.
Aragorn used the Army of the Dead as well. That made EVERYONE cower in fear, friend and foe alike. It was war stripped to its absolute barest, brutalist, most horrific essential: The business of war is the breaking of people’s minds, and you just hope to whatever god(s) you believe in the enemy’s minds break before your friends’ minds do. It was Sherman’s March to the Sea stripped of the flimsy pretense of destroying military stores. And that’s the classic destined HERO doing this! And Tolkien isn’t subtle about it; Gimli personifies this terror, just in case we readers want to gloss over the effects. Again, whether you call it torture depends on your view of such things, but the fact is Aragorn was willing to drive a significant portion of the people he sought to rule stark, raving mad in order to accomplish his goals.
Then there’s the Numenorians. That’s a bit beyond LOTR, other than the appendixes, but yeah, they weren’t nice people.
The Rohirrum’s treatment of various groups is discussed at several points, and again, they’re not nice people; the whole reason Saruman was able to sway humans to his side was that they had legitimate grievances against Rohan (Saruman made them seem worse and more one-sided than they were, but Rohan’s hands weren’t clean).
There are probably more examples that I’m forgetting as well.
So no, Tolkien didn’t shy away from his heroes doing some very dirty work. He may not put it front and center, but these things are definitely present in the books.
“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” – Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, USA
Even in an agrarian society it would be possible to grow the economy by cultivating more land. It would also be possible to increase productivity by adapting better agricultural methods. However, in areas with a well-developed Feudal hierarchy there would not have been much land left to cultivate. The adaptation of better agricultural methods would have been so slow as to be unnoticeable during a human lifetime.
A lot of western Europe reverted to forest in the period 400-900. This was then reclaimed 900-1500. So in what we think of as feudal times there was a lot of land improvement going on, much of it driven by lords.
Over the same period a raft of new crops and techniques arrived or were developed (rice, citrus, sugar …). A peasant of the period would see a fair bit of change over, say, 50 years – new villages, new foods, new opportunities abroad ..
There was a major setback in the middle of the 14th century due to Black Death.
Reclamation of land is expensive. A medieval lord faced the same question as a modern businessman, is it more cost-effective to build more productive capacity or to acquire someone else’s existing capacity? To continue the corporate analogy cited above, a medieval lord could consider either war (a hostile takeover) or a dynastic marriage (a friendly merger).
Your average feudal lord was a fairly minor landowner (viscount, castellan or just lord) enmeshed in a close web of kin, alliances and obligations. While violence over matters of honour was hardly infrequent and disputes over rights sometimes led to armed clashes, actual conquest was very rare. For one thing for most of the period, royal or strong comital oversight was present. One built up one’s estate by marriage, negotiation over rights, forming alliances with those who could grant favours and, yes, by attracting peasants to clear land with reduced dues. A lot of northern French villages are called ‘Les Essarts’ or equivalent.
Or one joined the winning side in the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, etc., and received from the king the land of the defeated lords. I didn’t mean to imply that individual barons typically tried to conquer villages of a neighboring baron.
“In an agrarian age, war is a zero sum game for a (roughly) fixed resource (farmland). In an industrial age, war is a negative sum competition for something you could just as easily have built at home anyway.”
Ironically, the most warlike people – nomads – did not base their economy on farmlands. Most agrarian people also did not frequently go to war for farmlands as we think, as the income extracted from far away conquered lands (from taxes and other resources) did not always pay for the cost of maintaining those land.
Actually, industrial age made it easier to extract value from conquered lands, due to the domination of conquered markets, harvesting of native industrial materials, exploitation of cheap local workers… can make more money for the conquerors than just taxing some poor peasants.
A zero-sum game is one in which the value of the prize does not change throughout the game. The average poker player, for example, ends up with exactly as much money at the end of a game as at the beginning – but the money is distributed among the players differently. One mans loss is another’s gain.
Trade is a positive-sum game e.g. a man dying of thirst gives food to one dying of hunger in exchange for water, so both end up better off. Water is worth more when you are thirsty.
The Napoleonic Wars were nearly a zero-sum game because the amount and productivity of the major asset in the war zone – land – was not much affected by the wars. One powers loss was another’s gain.
But the World Wars were a very negative sum game because the major productive assets in most of the combatant countries were damaged by the war. One powers loss in no way guaranteed another powers gain. The average survivor was worse off than when the war started.
Whether a game is positive or negative sum does not depend on how easily resources can be extracted. In depends on how easily they can be created or destroyed. It’s hard to destroy land.
It’s worth noting that even if industrial assets are not actively destroyed in a modern war, they are often damaged by excessive wear: a machine vitally needed for the war effort is run 24/7/365 either until the war ends or until it’s degraded into scrap metal. After the war, however well managed in terms of government payments applied to the depreciation expense on the accounting books, this is still a physical loss that has to be recovered from.
I was once told in an economics class that in 1943 the capital stock of the USA went down because of this, which had never happened before or since.
By the Napoleonic Wars the average standard of living in several European countries had already started to rise. Which meant it was now possible to grow the economy faster than the population. However, this is likely only clear in hindsight. It took a few more decades before any larger number of people started to notice society could change considerably.
On the other hand you are right in arable land being actually destroyed in WWI. There are some areas in Belgium and France still not possible to cultivate after a more than a century. They have been too poisoned by the repeated use of chemical weapons. As a result they have been abandoned for the foreseeable future.
“Whether a game is positive or negative sum does not depend on how easily resources can be extracted. In depends on how easily they can be created or destroyed. ”
Then there is no positive or negative sum game, because the Law of Conservation of Mass.
WW2 made USA and USSA into global hegemon and eliminated the threat of German and Japanese militarism. Power is not just producing more stuffs and spending less stuffs, as many outdated economy theories thought.
*I mean USSR.
The important thing here is economic resources becoming unusable or not. This does not directly have with the Law of Conservation of Mass to do.
It’s hard to destroy land.
Nuclear war might do it though (although I know there’s some debate about, e.g, how long the fallout would last and whether it’s, for example, safe to live/farm in the Chernobyl exclusion zone again).
As I have pointed out before some chemical weapons can do it too.
Chernobyl is not a good representation of nuclear war. The isotopes are different, and the mechanism is different. Nuclear reactors use a lot more material than nuclear bombs, and the material is different in significant ways. The whole point of a reactor is to keep the reaction going for a long time, generating as much power as possible with the minimum fuel possible; the whole point of a bomb is to extract as much energy as possible in the shortest time span possible. While both rely on nuclear physics, it’s like saying that basketball and artillery are interchangeable because both rely on ballistics.
Put this way: People can’t live in Chernobyl. They are currently living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radiation levels in both are comparable to background radiation. There are also geologists who routinely go to nuclear test sites to study how violent force alters mineral grains, as part of their study on asteroid impacts. But geologists are by definition insane, so if you want to exclude them you can. (Self-deprecating humor there.)
This is a major issue, going both ways. With regards to nuclear reactors, one reason we abandoned the technology is that people are (or were) concerned they’d become bombs. This is 100% impossible. The physics does not allow it. When a reactor fails it goes into meltdown, which is what you saw at Chernobyl. Not exactly healthy, but not a bomb–and anything built after Davis-Bessy was designed all but makes such a meltdown impossible (I think thorium salt reactors make it impossible). As for bombs, people wildly over-estimate the radiation concerns. It’s horrific at the time, and not great if you’re dealing with the fallout, but unless the bomb was designed to salt the area with radioactive debris it’s not going to last very long.
So no, nuclear war wouldn’t render wide swaths of land radioactive for thousands of years. Not unless the bombs were specifically designed to do so, anyway.
While nuclear test sites in the western USA are accessible, the multi-megaton explosion sites in the Pacific are a different matter. They’re still considered too radioactive for indefinite human habitation (less from acute radiation exposure and more from contamination of food and water by radioisotopes). And while it’s true that reactors cannot produce a nuclear explosion, the concern was over proliferation: if a reactor’s spent fuel is reprocessed to extract plutonium you then have the makings of a bomb. Plans back in the late 1960s to eventually convert most electric power production away from fossil fuels to breeder reactors foundered on the fact that it would have meant producing tons of bomb grade plutonium under less than ideal security circumstances.
Aeschylus’ epitaph is in elegiac couplets.
Is there any special significance to this? Is metered verse common on classical gravestones? Are elegiac couplets considered particularly fitting?
Not a professional Classicist, but I think most inscriptions were in some kind of meter. The meters considered most serious were hexameters and disticha (elegiac couplets), so those would be considered fitting for gravestones. I think the Ionic dialect (including Athens) had a particular preference for disticha – Solon and Theognis composed their entire works in this meter.
Surely Athens spoke Attic Greek and not Ionic Greek?
“elegiac” meter was considered ideal for expressing “elegies”…
Typo alert: “Beneath this stone like Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian” – shouldn’t it be “lies” or something like that?
Thank you for this thoughtful analysis!
Perhaps. The structure of the epitaph is actually the reverse of what’s given in the post: “This memorial[-stone] covers Aeschylus the Athenian, [son] of Euphorion…”. So the verb in Greek is “cover” and the wording of the English translation is open to argument since it’s not closely based on the Greek.
“Lies” would be pretty conventional for an English inscription. “Like” is pretty clearly a typo.
As you point out Tolkien left out a huge field of classical studies: all the Occitan and Italian romances that then further expanded in the Commedia dell’arte. He is ignoring a good 600 years of literate tradition in order to serve his skewed view of Catholicism that was way backwards even during WWI, but exceptionally so in 1955. This is no more evident than in his handling of the female characters that’s rough when not entirely offensive.
I like to offer the counter example of the “Orlando Innamorato” (1483) that was already mocking all the pre-ancient world view of warfare and valor with its story full of dumb knights, runaway princesses, wonderous magic and clever stratagems.. Story that was left incomplete because war was literally knocking on Boaiardo’s door since the Italian Wars were gearing up. Then we have its “sequel” the “Orlando Furioso” (1516) where those themes are elevated to new heights thanks to a cast of characters that would embarrass every fantasy stereotype we have now: Angelica, Bradamante, Marfisa, Melissa, Adalgisa are fighting women (when not directly knight themselves) that fight for the love they want and deserve. They lounge for marriage and a tranquil life but to reach that destiny have them hop through war, diplomacy, sorcery and temptations in cycles of adventure that way more creative, entertaining and fun than the vast majority of the stuff that came later (Also Angelica has a magic ring that dispels magic when put on a finger and… Makes the wearer invisible when put in the mouth, does that rings a bell?)
Then, more than 450 years later, we have bi-dimensional female characters that somehow should be regarded as some literary heights because… English language curriculum I suppose.
“As you point out Tolkien left out a huge field of classical studies: all the Occitan and Italian romances that then further expanded in the Commedia dell’arte. He is ignoring a good 600 years of literate tradition”
OK, what the post actually said was “Although Tolkien did not work on similar continental literary traditions, the French tales of knightly deeds (chansons de geste) or the songs of the Occitan troubadours, he can hardly have been ignorant of them and one detects allusions to them at certain points in the Lord of the Rings”.
You need to read the second half of that sentence as well.
Considering the spectrum between “war as an arena in which warriors win glory” and “war as an arena where two polities contest for resources”, where does ancient Rome fit? My impression from ACOUP is that Roman armies were like WW I armies, masses of conscripted men who were not expected to distinguish themselves heroically but rather to grind down the enemy by attrition. And only really successful leaders were feted. Whereas the Classical Greeks still adhered to the concept of warrior glory.
The Romans many have started off with a conscription army. But as the area under Roman rule increased this become impractical for economic reasons. So they switched to a professional army instead.
My impression was always that the Roman army was more like a finishing school for Roman citizens, at least prior to it becoming a professional army. Every male citizen knew it was coming, their fathers did their stint, their grandfathers, their neighbors, etc. There was always the chance to come back covered in fame and glory, but even if you didn’t you came back with some new friends (not an insignificant factor in Roman life). And it was a rite of passage. Since most men served in the army at some point it marked your transition to manhood in a very significant way. You see a similar attitude in the South in some places (possibly others, but I can’t verify that)–everyone serves in the military, so it’s just assumed that any man you speak with has and anyone who hasn’t is treated as something less than an adult.
I also wouldn’t say that either Rome OR WWI armies were removed from the concept of warrior glory. The whole reason people tried literally everything but attrition in WWI was that such a concept was WILDLY unpopular to everyone. Who’s going to send their sons to war knowing they’re inevitably going to be nothing more than a way to soak up enemy ammunition? As for Rome, a number of important figures arose, even in the later Imperial ages, due to military might (and even more good generals died because of it).
The memorialization of Aeschylus adds another (small) coda to the retort to the myth of Spartan greatness in the Sparta series. Like the Corinthian helmet or the hoplite phalanx itself, the Greek focus on renown and valorization of a warrior’s death is often presented in lazy pop-culture as a uniquely Spartan trait. Even a fairly brief look at examples in other Greek poleis shows how widespread the notion actually was.
Sparta was organised quite different from the other Greek city-states. So it is easy to overestimate the cultural difference between it and the others.
“the result was a running history Q&A that ran for just over five hours”
Please please tell me someone recorded and posted this somewhere.
Considering the spectrum between “war as an arena in which warriors win glory” and “war as an arena where two polities contest for resources”, where does ancient Rome fit?
Most of the way towards ‘polities contesting for resources.’
While Romans certainly esteemed and rewarded success in war, this took place not at the level of warriors slaying foes in combat or even at the level of commanders winning battles, but at the level of generals winning campaigns; then going on to parlay that into a successful career in politics. Eisenhower going on to be president of the USA would have made a classic Roman success story.