This is the first half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, in particular exploring the principle that armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield. Last time we looked at the importance of generating cohesion in these armies and the ways cohesion could come either organically from the underlying society or be manufactured as part of training (or not be produced at all, resulting in less effective armies).
To close out this week, I wanted to provide some examples – each relatively brief – pulling the factors we’ve discussed (recruitment principles, mobilization methods, dealing with costs, leadership and cohesion sources) into coherent military systems that emerge organically from their underlying civilian society. And since this series was always intended as ‘one for the world-builders,’ I figured the best way to do this would be to take some fictional militaries, examine them along the lines above and see what (if anything) is necessary to fix them so that the underlying civilian society and the military it generates ‘matches.’
In a lot of cases, these are going to be fictional militaries we’ve looked at before, so a lot of this will be overlapping with more detailed treatments (which I’ll link) but also we’ll get some new stuff.
In the end, I had enough examples I wanted to work through that I opted to split this last part in two. So in this part we’re going to be taking apart some examples of matching up (or struggling to do so) army and society in literature (namely my perennials, A Song of Ice and Fire and The Lord of the Rings). Then in the second half, we’ll break some new ground and look at some examples out of video games that deviate from some of the classic ‘medieval fantasy’ patterns: the standing legions of the Empire of Cyrodiil, the oddly (but interestingly) bifurcated urban defense force of Baldur’s Gate and finally some private enterprise war in the Deadfire Archipelago.
I want to be clear, the goal here is not to praise or tear down any of these examples, but to explore them, to practice thinking about how the fiction armies and societies do and don’t match. I’ve tried to avoid here picking any example that is actively really bad (thus a preference for A Song of Ice and Fire (the books), for instance, over Game of Thrones (the show)).
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Westeros and Fragmented Vassalage-Based Polities
So my critiques of some of the ‘realistic’ worldbuilding of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones (and spinoffs) are not new. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with enjoying these stories; rather my critiques emerged in a period – now largely passed, thankfully – where it was common to claim that George R.R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities. But that era is largely passed and my sense is that the ASoIaF/GoT community largely now understands that Westeros is not necessarily the gold-standard for ‘realistic’ medieval fantasy societies. So I don’t bring this up first to bash GRRM, but rather because (unlike Middle Earth, as we’ll see) it represents close to a ‘pure’ example (notionally) of a fragmented, vassalage-based polity.
So first we should begin with the underlying society. Westeros as we see it is a complex agrarian society – that is there is quite a lot of specialization, but this is a distinctly pre-modern society in which the vast majority of the population is still engaged in agriculture or pastoralism. Now I find that Martin’s depiction of the ‘smallfolk’ – ably summed up by the Wiki – is a bit frustrating as it is mostly a collection of aristocratic stereotypes about peasants, but nevertheless this is clearly a society where the bulk of the population is a largely demilitarized peasantry. In short, it is supposed to resemble high or late medieval Europe. Above the smallfolk is a hereditary landed aristocracy which fashions itself a ‘knightly’ (mounted military) warrior aristocracy, structured through vassalage. The social distance between these two groups is yawning: Westerosi aristocrats have more in common with other aristocrats half a continent away than they do with the peasants out of their front door.1 That social distance is not a worldbuilding problem, mind you; we see that kind of ‘trans-national’ elite (keeping in mind these aren’t nation-states so we’re using the word ‘national’ rather loosely) in a number of pre-modern societies. A French nobleman often did have more culturally in common with an English nobleman than he did with his own peasants and indeed in some cases a mounted Christian European military aristocrat might find he had more in common with a mounted Muslim military aristocrat from the Middle East than either had with their own peasants too.
So far, so good. But – as I’ve noted a few times before – when we see the armies of these polities, both in the books and in the show, they do not derive organically from this society at all. Westeros produces very large, surprisingly uniform armies which are not obviously organized into the retinues of smaller lords but rather function as large field armies tied explicitly to the largest vassals of the crown. Moreover, very large proportions of these armies are infantry (especially in the show, where the Lannister, Tyrell and Stark armies are almost entirely infantry!), composed of massed peasant soldiers. They’re also broadly uniformly equipped, often with recognizable liveries.
In short, these resemble the armies we would expect of large, extensively administered state-based societies.
But, and I have to stress this extremely strongly, Westeros does not have a state. It was not a state under the Targaryens (they make no effort to consolidate control of the various House armies) and it sure as heck isn’t a state under the Baratheons who are even weaker in terms of central power.
So what ought we see? Well, let’s return to that underlying society.
The core of these armies are going to be that mounted military aristocracy. It’s possible in some regions (the north, perhaps?) the aristocrats might also fight on foot, but we’re still looking at the aristocracy. Now the core landed aristocracy is going to be really small, but what is going to expand out this class are two kinds of soldier that GRRM has largely neglected: unlanded knights bachelor and non-aristocratic ‘men at arms’ (men who fight like knights but do not have the social status of knights). GRRM has some unlanded knights, but not many – but in this sort of society, such men are going to be ubiquitous in the households of those landed elites.
After all, most of the wealth in this society is held by a landed military aristocracy (the lords) who want to develop private military force and lack a state, so they’re going to do so in their household, by retaining (as retainers) full time warriors. And in this society, we see very clearly that full time warriors are almost invariably mounted heavy cavalrymen. So while the number of lords and their families is small, they can retain a bunch of non-noble heavy cavalrymen as part of the retinues, though we’re still dealing with armies that are likely much smaller than the massive armies Martin reports: whereas Martin has armies reaching the upper tens of thousands, we might instead expect the armies of the most powerful houses to at best be fielding a few thousand to perhaps 10,000 or so mounted men at arms.
In short, to use our typology, our first component here is a retainer-based army composed of a warrior class, recruited on a vocational principle, with military costs largely devolved (these guys or their lords purchase their horses and armor as a private expense). Cohesion is provided through a mix of warrior-class cohesion, probably combined with collective training in small cavalry units within those noble households. We probably ought to expect these men to perform quite well on the battlefield, given how strong that cohesive bond is likely to be.
Now, below this, every army needs infantry, especially because – as noted above – the cavalry components of these armies are still small. But those major Houses didn’t just become states when it was time to equip their infantry, so the infantry – drawn from the commons – is going to be recruited also using non-state structures. That means that equipment and wage costs also have to be substantially devolved, because none of these polities has the administrative infrastructure to handle the complexity of these costs (note that this is as much or more a question of complexity as about raw revenues!).
That leaves the warlords of Westeros essentially two options and we might expect them to use both: they can raise their own peasants or they can hire mercenaries.
If they raise their own peasants, this is going to be clientage principle recruitment, because the administration isn’t there for an employment-based system and the smallfolk don’t have any political entitlements to tie to military service anyway (notably Westeros lacks enfranchised little urban republics to provide urban militias). We should thus expect costs to be devolved, probably using a brigaded household model simply because the smallfolk seem too poor to expect individual households to furnish a man with his equipment. Nevertheless, the equipment that results from this is going to be both poor and non-standard (it would be hard to tell a Tyrell peasant-soldier from a Lannister peasant-soldier if you saw one on the road). And the cohesion principle is pretty obviously weak: these guys don’t have a strong corporate identity and their masters cannot afford to keep them under arms long enough to drill them. They’ll get to the battlefield, but often perform poorly. And because we have to brigade a bunch of households to get a soldier, we should still expect the numbers here to be smaller: low tens of thousands, not mid- or high- tens of thousands.
The real problem is how drab they are. These are men of importance and station! They’re wearing expensive equipment! They would want to look nice!
The alternative would be mercenary infantrymen, recruited en bloc (likely via contractors) using an employment principle and paid in cash. Since these houses don’t have a lot of revenue because they have very limited state capacity, their ability to engage these fellows is also going to be quite limited, but it isn’t hard to imagine how valuable they’d be, especially for providing specific military skills that aren’t ‘mounted military aristocrat,’ which obviously the peasant levies will also generally lack. If there were polities in Westeros that produced good infantry – because they had tight civic militias or other strong communal structures – we should expect them to be in heavy demand as mercenaries, just as Greek hoplites or Swiss pikemen were in their day. Good infantry, after all, is nice to have, but the Great Houses of Westeros are structurally largely incapable of producing good infantry at scale.
In short the military that flows from Westeros social organization is meaningfully different than the one Martin imagines. It is much smaller (no 100,000 man strong Tyrell armies!), more fragmented and much less ‘regular.’ Not only does the king have to care what Tywin Lannister thinks, but Twyin Lannister has to care what Lord Broom thinks and Lord Broom has to care what his retainers think and so on. Tywin’s Lannister army would likely be broken up into dozens of irregularly sized and structured retinues (of which his own would be the largest). Notably, ‘landless knights’ would be a key commodity in this system, an essential military resource that everyone with land and money is trying to attract (which in turn means those retainers have some bargaining power too), in part because none of these fellows will have a lot of faith in their poorly and irregularly equipped, weakly motivated infantry.
Crucially, this is a society defined by low state capacity (because it is, in fact a non-state society), which limits what the king and his lords can do at almost every turn.
Now to be clear, I don’t want to make it sound like Westeros – particularly the Westeros of the books – is a complete failure here. I think we could actually bring the armies of Westeros into line with their underlying society with fairly modest changes: shrink both the world size and the armies to a scale that fits a personalistic, vassalage based mobilization system and acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale (lacking the revenues to recruit mercenaries or the social systems to effectively mobilize their peasantry), so they’re going to rely on their cavalry, which is in turn going to put sharp limits on the kind of warfare they wage. Finally, we’d want to flesh out the class of mounted man-at-arms and landless knight – present in Martin’s writing, but less common perhaps than they ought to be.2 The resulting world would feel smaller (it would be smaller) but that makes sense: these sorts of polities and their military systems do not durably scale.
Infantry and Cavalry in Rohan
I’d argue we can see a ‘heavy cavalry culture’ done a bit better with the Lord of the Rings‘ Rohirrim, although with the caveat that Tolkien is developing something closer to an early medieval society which still retains a relatively strong (perhaps fading) infantry tradition, as opposed to Westeros’ distinctively late medieval (or really early modern) sense; these are as we’ll see fundamentally quite different societies and as a result they produce different armies (albeit I think the armies of Rohan are more tightly fitted to their society).
Once again, we should sketch out Rohan’s society first. This is also a complex agrarian society, albeit less complex than Westeros and seemingly with a fair bit more pastoralism (in the form of ranching or fairly short-range transhumance, given that this society still lives in villages, rather than nomadic pastoralism). Military power is still somewhat fragmented in this society – men like Éomer and Erkenbrand appear to have some independent access to military force (they have their own retinues)3 but this is both a smaller and ironically more centralized kingdom than Westeros, but what make sit similar in a lot of ways is that state capacity remains low.
What I mean by that is that while on the one hand Théoden’s authority over his subordinates remains notionally higher (Tywin Lannister is a more independent figure than Erkenbrand, by custom and general understanding), Théoden still lacks anything like an administrative apparatus or bureaucracy and instead has to rule through his aristocracy. What’s different and thus what makes Rohan a bit more centralized in its structure is that Théoden has more latitude to hand-pick the top level of that organization chart, the three Marshals of the Mark (he initially picks himself, his son and his nephew, with his son being replaced by Erkenbrand after Théodred was killed), rather than being stuck with a specific local mega-aristocrat (like Tywin Lannister, Mace Tyrell, etc. etc.). Those commands (which historically are what will evolve into the highest reaches of the ‘feudal’ European nobility) are not yet wholly hereditary, though the fact that command in the Westmark immediately devolves to Erkenbrand Lord of the Westfold (the largest chunk of the Westmark)4 may suggest that, in the absence of a suitable member of the royal house, there’s a strong expectation that overall leadership ought to fall to a major local aristocrat.
As an aside, the fact that Rohan, resembling an early medieval kingdom is more effectively centralized than Westeros, which resembles a late medieval kingdom, should serve as a useful reminder that historical processes like centralization do not proceed only in one direction. It is not always the case that later societies have more centralization or administrative capacity.
We also need to talk about the situation of common folk of the Rohirrim. We don’t see much of them, but there are some assumptions I think we can make (which largely conform to Tolkien’s own pretty obvious Anglo-Saxon inspiration for these fellows). First, the Rohirrim aristocracy strikingly present themselves as having more culturally in common with their commonfolk than with neighboring aristocrats: they have their own language (that is, the aristocracy has not abandoned Rohanese for Westron) and their own internal term for themselves (an endonym) as Eorlingas, ‘people of Eorl’ which appears to include the commonfolk. Notably, the aristocracy, while clearly large landowners, do not appear to be titled: apart from Théoden King himself no one gets hereditary titles appended to their names (the Marshals being appointed positions). They also have a muster of all able-bodied men, implying a tradition of universal military service and thus a peasantry (I’m including their shepherds here) that hasn’t been entirely demilitarized. That last point matters a lot and signals, I think, quite a different underlying social structure than the one we see in Westeros.
We might then, in a desperate moment like this, not only see the lord’s armory emptied out, but individual middling-peasant households passing around old or surplus equipment to friends and relatives (pulling old arms and armor out of temple storerooms where they had been dedicated for last-ditch defenses was a standard trope of ancient Greek and Roman warfare, for instance).
Taken together, what I think we’re looking at is a landholder aristocracy governing a society mostly of free peasants rather than serfs. In something akin to the Carolingian system, there is probably a property line which makes a landowner liable for cavalry service (which thus defined the lower bound of the aristocracy), while landowners below that level are liable for infantry service (a ‘select levy’) and landowners much above that level are expected to furnish not only themselves but a larger retinue (thus we hear of the ‘knights of the king’s house’ and Marshals of the Mark having an Éored (120 mounted men) as part of their household). We should probably also assume a substantial number of farmers or herders who are simply considered too poor to serve (possibly expected to supply men for garrison service on a brigaded household model or as part of a ‘general levy’ in a local crisis).
The military organization then flows that social structure. The aristocracy fight at mounted heavy cavalry and are organized into retinues around the major magnates who on the one hand derive their wealth from large landholding but on the other hand owe their official positions to the king.5 We meet a fair number of these magnates (Erkenbrand, Grimbold, Elfhelm, along with of course Éomer and Théodred). There is a clear preference in these appointments, when not granted to a man of the king’s family, to use someone local: Erkenbrand commands in the West-mark because he is from the West-mark. Éomer will end up making Elfhelm command in the East-mark and by all indications Elfhelm is from the East-mark as well, given that he was in Éomer’s retinue as Third Marshal of the Riddermark with that geographic area of command.
Meanwhile, as I noted back in the Helm’s Deep series, we get a better sense of what we might term the ‘select levy’ of Rohan (the infantry force kept in the field by Erkenbrand) as well as the ‘general levy’ of all able-bodied men who have fled to Helm’s Deep. We’re pretty clearly told that the levies of Rohan are raised geographically (Erkenbrand has the Westfold’s men, who have a distinct sub-regional identity as ‘Westfolders’ and the ‘musters’ are by region); we don’t see the lower levels of command but there’s no reason to assume they’re not like the higher levels: local magnates lead the levies from their home area. That in turn explains the cohesive principle we see: when the Rohirrim get into trouble – common infantry and aristocratic cavalry alike – they invariably ‘clump up’ around the magnates, which suggest pretty close civilian ties. It makes sense: where do the regular infantrymen go when things are bad? The men of their village clump up together around their village leader (the local Big Man) who is also their unit commander and who they know fairly well. The comparative lack of social distance – implied by the common culture, language and lack of titles above – matters here for making this kind of cohesion work.
So my read on Rohan is that it is a complex, non-state agrarian/pastoralist polity, with a freeholding farmer class (a yeomanry) recruited regionally under a cultural norm of universal military service (at least for landholders), with an elite class that understands itself as a mounted military aristocracy (recruited as a warrior class, defined by wealth), where the cohesive principle is probably tight clientage ties between the infantry and their magnates and then horizontal ties between the magnates and each other. But that works because these fellows seem to actually know each other (in contrast, for instance, to the far more insulated noble class in Westeros).6 In terms of cost, this is clearly a system where costs are devolved, but the sense we get, given the performance of Rohan’s infantry against Saruman, has to be that the infantry class has preserved a bit more of their wealth against the aristocracy, again leading to somewhat better infantry, although it is worth noting that outside of the king’s immediate retinue, Rohan’s army is not uniform in its equipment.
Men of Gondor
Unsurprisingly, I think that Gondor – particularly book!Gondor in The Lord of the Rings is also an effective example of matching a military to its underlying society, but it is particularly interesting here because it is a composite force: different components are recruited under different principles, equipped differently, probably paid differently and so on. For large states, composite forces were very common.
And Gondor (at least under the last steward, Denethor II), is a composite polity and has a composite army to match. Gondor is also a complex, agrarian society, but a fair bit more complex than Rohan, with quite a few proper cities (Minas Tirith, of course, but also Pelargir, Dol Amroth and others) and evidently a fair bit of specialization. If the model for Rohan seems to have been Anglo-Saxon England, the model for Gondor seems to me fairly clearly to be the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, complete with a beacon system, and something like the tagmata and theme systems. Given the level of organization we see – Denethor is capable of large-scale building projects (like the repair of the Rammas Echor), substantial mobilizations (including the orderly evacuation of the Pelennor Fields) and maintaining a standing military force – I tend to conclude that Gondor is a state society, albeit that state power has frayed quite a bit around the edges (and of course part of the story is that it will be reasserted by Aragorn as king). Though we never see them, I think we ought to safely assume Denethor has some bureaucracy in addition to his military command structure, which lets him direct Gondor’s efforts from his high hall.
In particular, Gondor is split between the core territory around its capital and its subordinate regions, described as ‘fiefs’ and evidently entrusted to the control of a particular lord. Frustratingly, of these lords, the only one for which we can be sure we know how lordship is assigned is that of Belfalas, governed by the hereditary Prince of Dol Amroth (Prince Imrahil at the time of the War of the Ring), who has a different title from all of the other regional leaders but we do get references to these fellows equipping men out of their households, so I think we should understand them as local rulers who are vassals to Minas Tirith rather than appointed officials. So we have a core state with autonomous vassals making up its periphery; in this case the core state is geographically fairly small but clearly makes up the bulk of the military power: despite Minas Tirith’s long decline, it is a major population and economic center.
And lo! the military system basically follows from that political structure.
Because Gondor has a state at the core of its polity with the resources to manage massive construction projects and the like, he has a substantially wider range of options for the kind of military it will have. And it ends up having a bit of everything: a standing military centered on Minas Tirith but also a mix of other military systems drawn from its constituent regions.
First, the core of Gondor’s armies seem pretty clearly to be a standing, professional force, albeit perhaps not a very large one. The two components we see very clearly are the Guards of the Citadel and the Rangers of Ithilien. The Guards of the Citadel are pretty explicitly a professional force: Beregond is explicit that he is not any kind of aristocrat, but is still a full-time soldier in the Third Company of the Citadel (RotK 42). Given the fact that they are left effectively permanently deployed, it seems like the Rangers of Ithilien are similarly a professional force. To reach a little father, in Unfinished Tales (260 fn. 17) we get a title, “ohtar” for a “fully trained and experienced” footsoldier who was not, however, a knight, which also suggests to me (alongside Beregond’s use of the phrase ‘man at arms’ to seemingly mean the same: a man for whom war was a profession) that Minas Tirith has a substantial body of professional infantry at the core of its armies. We’re quite explicitly told that at least the Guards of the Citadel are equipped at state expensive, for they have a unique livery, but honestly it seems likely to me that the whole of this professional force was state-equipped, which is why we’re told that the livery is unique (in design and materials), rather than being told that these men were unique by having an issued livery at all.
Doubtless in an emergency this would be supplemented by drawing up the rest of the able-bodied male populace, but we’re not given a clear sense for the city of what that would look like. I find myself wondering if under normal circumstances, since Gondor is almost always in some kind of low-intensity conflict with Mordor, if the professional core wasn’t always supplemented by rotating conscription or some kind of reserve among the men of the city.
That said, I can believe that Gondor does have some professional, state-equipped heavy infantry – indeed, we’re told they have at least three companies of it in the Guards of the Citadels and presumably more ‘regular’ soldiers beyond those.
Then we have the forces of Gondor’s fiefs and here it is useful to just reproduce the passage in which they show up:
The men of Ringló Vale behind the son of their lord, Dervorin striding on foot: three hundreds. From the uplands of Morthond, the great Blackroot Vale, tall Duinhir with his sons, Duilin and Derufin, and five hundred bowmen. From the Anfalas, the Langstrand far away, a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen without a captain. Fisher-folk of the Ethir, some hundred or more spared from the ships. Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. And last a proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with […] a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came. (RotK, 46)
I should note that, in a slightly earlier passage, we also get Forlong the Fat, Lord of Lossarnach, with “a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes.”
What I love about this passage is that it not only applies our principle of militaries reflecting their civilian societies to Gondor itself – a composite kingdom has a composite army – but it also applies it to the component parts! One gets the sense that Belfalas (with its big city at Dol Amroth) are the most state-like of the fiefs and so they have an army that looks at lot like Minas Tirith’s army: a company (about a hundred) mounted knights, matched by seven hundred men-at-arms which – given their contrast between the other groups, I think we ought to understand as also being professionals, or at least well-trained in addition to well-equipped. By contrast, from the hill country of Morthond, we get five hundred bowmen led by what is evidently a ‘family affair’ of rule there, given that it is Duinhir with his two sons commanding them: a smaller, poorer community that fights in a way that fits with coming from a hard-scrabble kind of place.
We get some class-divisions too, particularly from Anfalas, where the great mass of men – presumably a poor peasant levy – are poorly armed saved for the household guard of their lord. Of course that strongly suggests that outside of Minas Tirith, Belfalas and perhaps Lossarnach (which seem to have fairly uniform equipment and perhaps represent the remains of the decaying Gondorian ‘state’ with professional troops and state-issued arms), these fellows are equipping themselves and that most of the costs of their service have likely been devolved either onto the men themselves or their lords (and quite evidently Golasgil has opted to spend those resources on his household guard and not on the rest of his troops; one wonders how that decision will play with the newly crowned King Elessar).
Notably, this is very clearly an infantry-focused force. That makes quite a bit of sense too, because Gondor is substantially more urban than Rohan or, for that matter, Westeros.7 The more urban societies get, the more infantry-focused they tend to be, for the obvious reason that raising horses requires a lot of space. Even though it is clear that Gondor’s population has declined, its military tradition still remains infantry focused (with cavalry support) and that too is a product of its economic and cultural structures (urban and state-based).
And again, because the infantry matter, this society can develop cohesion in them: for the professional core, that is probably a professional cohesion. One imagines the Guards of the Citadel are quite stubborn on the battlefield given that we see how intense their professional ethos of obedience to orders goes. On the other-hand, for many of the men of the fiefs, they arrive at Minas Tirith in fairly small, relatively tight groups, organized around leaders that are quite evidently familiar to them. One imagines that the bowmen of Morthond, for instance, probably all know each other and are tightly connected by bonds of clientage to their lord and his sons (notice that he doesn’t have a household guard – this militia is his army).
So we have a range of components, each with its own likely methods of recruitment and supply. We have a core of professionals, equipped by the state, housed and presumably trained together, with an appropriately professional cohesive principle, supported by levies recruited locally, with their costs devolved onto local lords and relying on organic cohesion arising out of their common communal bonds.
The result is something of a messy composite army rather than a ‘cookie-cutter’ army that is unrealistically uniform. And that’s probably more or less right: even the Romans, close to the gold-standard for pre-modern military organization west of the Ganges were never perfectly uniform and always made use of the forces of allies, client kings and subject peoples, creating composite forces.
Next time, we’ll keep this going by turning to look at some societies and armies from video games that, as noted, deviate a bit more from the ‘standard’ medieval fantasy pattern and think a bit about standing professional armies, urban militias and military contractors in substantially more complex state societies.
- Except, arguably, the North, but we’re mostly going to leave the North out here and focus on the southern Six Kingdoms, for the sake of simplicity.
- The alterations for Game of Thrones Westeros would be much more substantial, because the showrunners seemingly cannot resist having everyone fight with large infantry armies, often with uniform equipment, which is a kind of army this society is simply incapable of producing at scale, for reasons we’ve discussed before.
- Note that Éomer is able to sally out with his Éored in the movement that will bring him to destroy the orcs that seized Merry and Pippin, despite orders not to do so – it’s as much his Éored as it is Théoden’s.
- ‘West-Mark’ here denoting what is essentially a military district, the ‘West March.’
- Indeed, Éomer on becoming king is able to change the titles of the Second and Third Marshals, making them strictly geographic commands, which speaks to the degree to which these are offices in the gift of the king rather than hereditary titles.
- To get what I am saying here, note how culturally the aristocracy in Westeros in, say, the Reach, the Riverlands, or the Westerlands all have more culturally in common with each other than they do with their smallfolk. That’s not a crazy thing either – in, say, the 13th century, the aristocracies of France, England and Scotland shared a lot more literature, language (French) and culture with each other than they necessarily did with the peasants they ruled. But it is not true for the Rohirrim, who – commoners and elites alike – are culturally distinct and have a shared cultural identity that forms the basis for their military participation.
- Yes, Westeros has big cities but also remember that Westeros, as a place, is absolutely enormous physically. Gondor looks, by the map, to be around 100,000 square miles, very roughly, at the start of the War of the Ring; The Seven Kingdoms by contrast are somewhere on the order of three million square miles – which at that size makes them very rural and thinly peopled, with relatively few major cities (most regions just have castle towns!).
I’m a little sad not to see the ‘army’ of the Shire in here in the discussion of Tolkien. But this is very good.
This one is an interesting question. Early in The Hobbit, Gandalf seems to dismiss the Shire as a military power, commenting that they have no heroes or warriors to be found and “that is why I had to settle on a burglar”.
But read his remarks closely and he makes it clear there are a lot of hobbits with swords or axes and shields, even if they haven’t seen recently military use. Which seems like the Shire could throw together a decent medium or maybe even heavy infantry shield wall. It’s not so much that Gandalf has dismissed the Shire as a military force so much as concluded that the dwarves wouldn’t find the Beowulf they wanted.
Well the Took patriarch famously bashed an orc chief so hard he invented golf a few hundred years before The Hobbit, so it’s probably more fair to say that the Hobbit Beowulf was simply undiscovered.
Actually given that Samwise the Great would proceed to fuck up Shelob, daughter of Ungoliant the Cthulhu-like demon spider, the dwarfs were merely a generation removed from their Beowulf. Although Bilbo was, himself, quite the legend. But he certainly wasn’t ready to hear that *then*!
As for the shire as a whole, they had a decayed military that nonetheless could produce a capable light infantry armed with bows, which Pippin and Merry famously marshal during the scourging of the shire. It just hadn’t had to organize since the aforementioned Took invented golf. They had no real shields or armor, although if pressed they could likely drum some up over time.
I picked Beowulf as an example because Tolkien had published a translation – and he’s a very different sort of hero from Samwis expert for killing monsters. Beowulf is a warrior aristocrat who spends his spare time practicing ways to be badass, like swimming in full armor. Samwise is a gardener dragged into the war, who wants to get back to gardening after the wars is over. He’s quite deliberately a different sort of hero from Beowulf.
Bullroarer Took is a more Beowulf like character. We’re not told his exact social position, but since he fights as heavy cavalry (and this is presented as a sign he is truly exceptional), it’s likely he is a vassal to the king of Arnor. And inventing the game of golf with a severed head is also a very Beowulf thing.
But overall, the Shire’s military is soldiers, not warriors. Probably the other hobbit aristocrats in that war were officer-aristocrats commanding infantry and archers.
I was kind of hoping he’d talk about the Rangers of the North, because I’m not sure they make any sense.
I recall in the Game of Thrones articles some discussion of the Night’s Watch and how Bret found it implausible that they would stay loyal to their mission and not interfere in southern politics on a time scale of centuries.
And in the article about the future of Westeros’s elective kingship (tl;dr: Fat chance of it lasting) there was discussion in the comments of the Night’s Watch as one of the two places who know anything at all about election. The other being the Church of the Seven.
I was actually thinking specifically about his Night’s Watch post because (as I mentioned in a comment at the time) I think a lot of his criticisms of the Night’s Watch (that without a good reason to keep them at the Wall, there was a good chance they’d turn around and conquer the North) could apply equally to the Rangers.
Apologies for misunderstanding your question.
Tolkien’s Rangers of the North only work as well as they do because in Tolkien there’s an explicitly moral component to culture and Good People simply do not do certain things, at least for so long as they stay Good. The Rangers are a scattered people who are unusually long-lived and associate closely with the elves; they are to some extent an offshoot of Elendil’s “Faithful,” the Numenoreans who rejected Sauron and fled before the continent sank. Gondor is the biggest descendant of that population but not the only one, and not necessarily the one of highest character.
The Rangers are also explicitly supposed to be few in number, to the point where when Aragorn mobilizes them as a fighting force to come to his aid, he gets… I don’t know, I think it’s only a platoon or company at most. Even given that the northern reaches of Arnor are largely depopulated wilderness, that’s a very small force to conquer much of anything.
They’re the remnants of the army of a fallen Kingdom that exist on the sufferance of allies, specifically in this case the Elves. I get the feeling the reason they’ve been getting smaller in number over time is precisely because the ones left are the ones that haven’t yet gone “screw this, I’m joining somebody else”
The rangers are probably best viewed as a hereditary military order quietly bankrolled by Rivendell, which we know fosters their children and provide them training and supplies. This isn’t actually that implausible, as we can see similar arrangements in the crusades era Mediterranean with various knightly orders which were largely funded by the Pope and sometimes the Byzantine empire, although those politics were, well, Byzantine, with significant material donations by the Italian city states and personal and supplemental resources from kingdoms as far away as England and Scotland.
These knightly orders could not organically produce the economic activity needed to arm and equip their men, lacking the civilian tax base to support the needed specialists (they never held that much land) but they had lots of backers. So a steady stream of European armed, trained, and funded men at arms sailed Italian built ships to islands in the eastern Mediterranean and spent centuries raiding the Muslims.
The rangers are a lower intensity version of this type of organization. They operate in a stateless landlocked frontier region rather than the urbanized eastern Mediterranean, so they are much smaller in scale and resources. This wouldn’t work if there were thousands of the fellows marching around, but we see thirty of them in one place, with some unknown number of dependents hidden about. The north is a periphery for Sauron too, so it works out.
I cannot remember where this was, but I do vaguely remember a suggestion somewhere in the Fellowship of the Ring that they have small villages.
Tolkien’s unpublished notes put the center of the non-Ranger Dunedain settlements at the Angle between the Bruinen and Mitheithel rivers, about 300 miles east of the Shire and extremely close to Rivendell. For anyone who plays Lord of the Rings Online, the Angle is where the Ranger village of Tornhad is in the game.
Yes; to be clear the ranger villages are extremely close to Rivendell, the Bruinen is what Elrond floods in the fellowship to break the pursuit, and the Mitheithel merges with it downstream towards the Enedwraith past the gap of Rohan.
There aren’t any major settlements there, so the Rangers are generalists and likely don’t engage in a lot of specialized labor, but this is fine with their depiction. They mostly engage in first system warfare, raiding and skirmishing, and occupy a large enough range to basically be hunter gatherers with some mild agriculture to support them. Their leader is a Chieftain and they maintain no cities, these are basically a tribal people.
This leaves two gaps-one we see that Aragorn and the grey company are well provisioned and two that Aragorn and the Grey Company are well trained in various skills that require specialization. Both are solved by the fact that Elrond is explicitly training the notable Rangers. Aragorn was raised in Rivendell as a prime example, and Aragorn is not walking around with any major weapons until they are given to him by Elrond and Galadriel in the story. All his weapons are of elf-make.
Further when the grey company arrives in Rohan they only have horses of their own (which tribes can maintain), but are clearly at least partially outfitted by the elves because they all wear the same broach, presumably given by Elrond, to clasp their grey cloaks. We know less about their lives before then, but it’s probable that they’ve had at least some education by Elrond. Aragorn’s standard bearer Halbarad is his cousin and quite possibly the next in line to Gondor; we know he’s a relation but not if he’s in the kingly line, as he never receives a genealogy from Tolkien (Aragorn is certainly directly in the line, that does not preclude other relatives and the number of generations nearly guarantees them).
Aragorn is effectively a tribal chieftain being educated by a urbanized society. There’s plenty of historical parallels here, although most of them are traced to the colonial period and are ethically problematic. Irrespective they happened and the men they produced were highly educated leaders, whom commanded quite capable skirmishers and scouts in the ranger tradition and were capable of recruiting out of both their native and their foster societies. Thayendanegea for example; he led a group of Loyalist and Mohawk volunteers in New York during the American revolution which were very effective.
Sorry; to clarify the geography, the Bruinen and Mitheithel merge quite near the misty mountains and the resulting merged river defines the north bank of the Enedwraith, the region west of Isengard. The Rangers thus occupy a relatively small Peninsula just outside Rivendell. That’s still plenty of room for a tribe, though.
There’s a very good essay going into the Dunedain from Michael Martinez 25 years ago (https://middle-earth.xenite.org/of-thegns-and-kings-and-rangers-and-things/) that suggests the Rangers exist to give legitimacy to the King if/when he tries to reclaim the North by being representatives of his authority even though he’s not present or ruling.
The Chieftain of the Rangers is a role separate from the Lord of the Dunedain – the former didn’t exist until Aranarth decided not to reclaim the Kingdom of Arnor. They happen to coexist in Aragorn at the time of the War of the Ring, but it’s certainly plausible the two could be separate if e.g. the rightful Lord of the Dunedain was a minor not ready to be the Chieftain of the Rangers. The one is a hereditary aristocratic role, while the other may or may not be purely hereditary but is a military leadership role that would likely be linked to the Lord by kinship ties if the two weren’t embodied in the same person.
Of note, the Chieftain of the Rangers as a role has existed roughly as long as the Thain of the Shire, a role that exists “to hold the authority of the king that was gone.” These were likely created as ethnic/clan-based leadership roles to maintain some form of societal cohesion as the Kingdom of Arnor disintegrated in hopes that a future King could reclaim their loyalties by gaining authority over a single Big Man rather than having to persuade a fragmented power structure.
Terry: the idea that Rangers are to Rivendell as Gurkhas are to Britain is a great one. (And you notice that “he’s just a puppet of the Elves” is an accusation levelled from time to time at Aragorn.)
And the analogy pops up elsewhere too. “Do not be tempted to do too much. It is Middle-Earth’s war, and you are there to help them, not to win it for them” as TE Lawrence would have advised Gandalf.
Or maybe the Rangers are like a pastoral tribe living on the fringes of the inhabited area, where all adults are warriors. Like the desert Bedouins living on the fringes of Babylon’s fields.
Having just brushed up on their lore in Tolkien Gateway: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Rangers_of_the_North, I have to agree. They’re supposed to be the remnant of the people of Arnor, and while they’re organized enough to have a line of chieftains (the last of which being Aragorn), who can pull together a force at will, we don’t know about their base of operations, or how they maintain cultural ties while being a “wandering people” with no evident nomadic bands or regular meetups. That being said, I find the idea of being a ranger as a cultural identity rather than a mere individual profession fascinating. The closest approximation I can think of would be the frontier scouts (like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett) and mountain men in North America. I haven’t read about any real-life medival equivalent, though thanks to Tolkien you see them a lot in fantasy lore. However, it isn’t hard to imagine a people coming out of a non-state or weak state environment deciding to live as wanderers, agreeing to come together annually for a rendevous but traveling individually the rest of the year, living off the land and offering assistance to any settlements they pass through.
Perhaps the Romani were the model for this peoples.
I think there are mentions that there are Dunedain villages hidden around Eriador. (I can’t remember where, I think maybe in one of the descriptions about Aragorn’s father?) Though I know the heirs themselves were raised in Rivendell. Eg. Aragorns Grandfather is said to have had a house in the Angle.
One thing about the Dunedain that’s always struck me as very strange is the way they have remained a separate people from the Bree-folk despite being active in the same areas for many generations. I’d expect there to be a lot more integration between them over the years: Dunedain falling in love with Bree-landers and settling down in the villages or Bree-folk falling in love with the Dunedain and running off to marry them, less adventurous Dunedain setting up as huntsmen or herbalists in the villages (or even settling down as farmers, there seems to be more than enough land) while more adventurous Bree-folk ran off to join the Rangers, and so forth.
But evidently none of that has happened: the Bree-folk and the Dunedain are still very much separate groups (they have different phenotypes and naming conventions and the Bree-folk clearly see the Rangers as strangers to be mistrusted).
The Rangers live at least twice as long as the Bree-folk from what I can tell.
It’s not quite the same as the Elves, but it’s still a pretty big difference to overcome.
Funnily enough, Lois McMaster Bujold’s *Sharing Knife* series is (among other things) an examination of how and why a society like the Rangers might exist. It’s also built around a romance between a “Ranger” and a “Breelander” in which the age/lifespan-gap is a major element…
It’s not entirely impossible that they are genetically different enough that they’re not intra-fertile. Or close enough, but their offspring are sterile, e.g. a horse and a donkey mating to produce a mule, or a lion and a tiger creating a ‘liger’. They exist – but they themselves cannot reproduce. In a society that places tremendous value on family and lineage, this would be a major downside to relationships like that.
For use in fantasy world-building, recall that if you have half-elves and half-orcs, then unless they are sterile themselves, you’ll need to consider one-quarter-elves, three-eighths elves, three-quarter orcs, et cetera. I do not know of any fantasy milieu that includes half-dwarves.
As far as I know in Tolkien, Elrond “Half-elven” does not have children. Which would be somewhat odd for a lord of an enclave like Rivendell.
@Jon
Forgotten Realms but they are only a bit larger dwarves and Athas , where they are sterile
Of course, Elrond is called half-elven but that isn’t strictly speaking true. He is the son of Earendil, the son of Tuor and Idril (Earendil is therefore half-elf, half-human) and Dior, daughter of Beren and Luthien (Dior is half-human, quarter-elf, quarter-Maia).
Elrond is therefore half-human, three-eighths elf and one-eighth Maia.
“As far as I know in Tolkien, Elrond “Half-elven” does not have children.”
He is Arwen’s father (her mother is Galadriel’s daughter Celebrian), and he also (in the books) has twin sons, Elladan and Elrohir.
Arwen of course marries Aragorn, and their children would be, let me see, five-eighths human, eleven-thirty-secondths elf and one-thirty-secondth Maia.
Aragon is descended from Eldrond’s brother who had children with a human woman. To me it is evident that elf-human crossbreeds can and often do have children. The Rangers are humans with elf admixture and not a separate species as Jon sugests.
Its fairly common for non-sedentary peoples to stay ethnically distinct from farming, but adjacent to them. They effectively are different ecological zones and some level of intermarrying doesn’t really change that (which generally exists, but is rare). The Vlaches in the Balkans didn’t really start assimilating until the early modern period, by which time they had been living as herdsmen adjacent to Slavic communities for a thousand years. The Pygmies are another example and they are genetically distinctive enough that rates of intermarrying per generations must have been *quite* low. Or the Romani!
Having different modes of subsistence does make interbreeding much less likely. However, I think the Romani is a poor example. If I understand it correctly Romani in different countries show different degrees of interbreeding with the locals. Also, I have never met a Romani with any darker than olive skin. The people originally migrating northwest from South Asia were likely more dark-skinned than that on average.
Actually, the Vlaches are a good example of why this model doesn’t work. Genetic testing shows that they aren’t genetically distinct from their neighbors; what makes them different is their culture which is a product of subsistence. The level of intermarrying wasn’t insignificant.
The pygmy populations are different. They did and do maintain distinct populations, with very low levels of successful intermarrying. This is a combination of cultural and physical factors; it is difficult for us to comprehend how utterly inhospitable the deep jungle was to an agriculturist, even one from the region. The primary expansion of sedentary people into the rainforest basin necessitated iron tools to clear the forest, and it’s no mistake that blacksmithing was an incredibly important semi religious profession in the Kongo. This delayed intense contact until the formation of pseudo states (smithing and specialization being ingredients of early statedom), and meant the lifestyles on contact were basically completely incompatible which led to a lot of failed marriages.
This created a perfect storm of isolation that is quite unique in history; the level of intermarrying is unrecognizably low for populations in prolonged contact.
As Lena says the Romani are more similar to the Vlaches in that their genetic distinction is not that significant. They’re actually mostly European by genetics, the original founding South Asian population is less than 30% of their genetics as a group. They’re, as a group, generically European first. Jewish groups generally show similar trends, although there’s more regional variations. The distinctiveness is primarily cultural.
All this means is that Tolkiens idea of separate races is flawed, which should not be a surprise. He grew up in Victorian and Edwardian England. Of course he had a bunch of unscientific views on race, which notably blend into his legendarium.
Tolkien’s best trait here is that he absolutely despised abuse and injustice in the real world, irrespective of if he believed races existed; he despised the Nazis and opposed apartheid, without necessarily rejecting the concept of race they were founded on. Even if Jews and blacks were a separate race abusing and killing them was wrong, and the essence of the Northern European race was utterly incompatible with Nazism. This isn’t *modern or correct*, but it’s still the mark of a fundementally moral man that he can have an intellectual foundation of hogwash and still see and know evil.
Oh, and that he didn’t make his superhumans the predecessors of his people. The Dunedain and Elves aren’t the Anglo saxon inserts, those are the Northmen (Rohan, Lake town) and Hobbits.
@Lena,
The unsuccessful Republican candidate for state rep in my district is a Roma, and she is *definitely* darker than “olive skin”:
https://www.wglt.org/podcast/wglts-sound-ideas/2022-08-22/q-a-interview-with-republican-state-senate-candidate-desi-anderson
@Terry,
I think South Asia and Ethiopia seem to be two other areas where there was extremely low levels of intermating (in South Asia that was because of the caste system and I believe Ethiopia seems to have had something similar).
@Hector I don’t know about Ethiopia but in South Asia it was absolutely the caste system, there are genetic studies showing that genetic mixing abruptly ended 1900 years ago when the caste system was “implemented”. That’s pretty strong evidence it’s responsible.
The mechanics of why it was so strong are likely beyond me, but from what little I understand it was strong in part because there was some degree of voluntary obedience from all levels of society. The key to the system working was probably the existence of Vaisyas and Sudra classes, as this prevented the Vedic system from merely being a division between the elites and peasants by also providing a way for the skilled craftsman to exhibit hierarchy. Notably the Vedic system had few marriage restrictions, this took centuries and both the development of narrower professional classes and several political edicts following the introduction of Buddhist thought and Hindu synthesis.
My interpretation is that this all hinged on the capacity for the middle and lower classes to engage in exploitation and competition with each other, which created the popular buy in needed to keep the system from collapsing over time like other marriage restrictive systems seem to do. But I’m pretty ignorant of the scholarship here.
I am not denying that Roma with darker than olive skin exist. My personal experience does not have to be representative. Unless they are dressed in a certain way they have to voluntarily tell me if they are. I may have met Roma who I mistook for South Asians for this reason. Thank you Terry for getting a number on their South Asian admixture. I only remember that about half of them have a genetically traceable South Asian ancestry on either their mother’s or their father’s side.
About Ethiopians they consist most of what I call Horn Africans. This larger group also include the indigenous populations of Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia. While I count them as Black I can tell them apart from other Sub-Saharan Africans. In addition to having lighter skin colour on average they have shorter heads and mostly tall noses. I think these are due to an immigration wave after the development of agriculture which brought Afro-Asiatic languages there too.
@Terry,
I can’t really comment on the history, since I’m just an interested lay observer, but I will say that in the *present day*, the existence of castes does have massive buy-in from the Indian population. Not necessarily in the sense of “do you think social hierarchy is good” but in the sense of “do you think strict rules on who can marry/date whom are desirable.” According to the Pew Research survey in 2021, this is true across education levels, across age groups, across religions (Muslims and Christians are strongly opposed to marriage outside your caste as well as Hindus), and most importantly across castes. The two big things that do tend to predict being more accepting of inter-caste relationships are 1) if you’re South Indian or 2) if you’re Buddhist (Buddhism was kind of reinvented in 20th c India as an explicitly modernist, social justice oriented faith).
To be clear, I wouldn’t take the Pew numbers at face value, since I do think they oversample or overweight social conservatives, and therefore the disapproval rates for intercaste relationships are significantly biased upwards. (The Pew estimates for vegetarianism are much higher than what Indian government statisticians estimate, for example, and their estimates for BJP support are much higher than what most polls, or election results, indicate, which makes me think there’s some, inadvertent, systematic error going on, in the direction of a certain specific type of social conservatism). Even if you think their estimates of disapproval for intercaste relationships are, say, 50% higher than in reality, and the true number is like 45% instead of 65% “extremely opposed”, that’s still a very high level of disapproval, and the interesting pattern that it’s not really affected by age, caste, education is probably still true.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23983542891&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkOvTBhDgARIsAKUNyRsywzxNAtjdKrZD8H6LynK_Bxvb88lRQL06hqbbMyWQS-RgQzIDJ_kaAlZBEALw_wcB
I read in 2018 that only 1/5 of India’s population are vegetarians. If this number has increased since then it can be explained by rising standards of living as it means you can afford to be picky.
@Lena,
I read in 2018 that only 1/5 of India’s population are vegetarians
Vegetarianism is declining, actually. The most recent estimate i’ve seen (from official sources) was 25%, although i can’t find the citation rn. It was 29% about 10 years ago. Pew estimates 39%, which I think is clearly wrong (and suggests there was some bias in their survery).
(To be clear, even people who are vegetarians will usually abstain from meat on specific days, and even those who can eat meat or fish don’t usually eat very much: this is a lower to lower middle income country, where meat and fish are still expensive, and truthfully probably more expensive than they could or should be).
@Hector fascinating. I don’t really have anything to add to the modern stuff because that’s such a comprehensive coverage of the polling and interpretation.
I will say that I find something darkly hilarious about the Jain population seeing similarities with Hindus while Hindus see them as separate, but that’s probably just me projecting some sardonic contempt for “model minority” movements. I don’t know enough about Jainism to be actually informed here.
The part I find most valuable, as pertains to both world building and just understanding people, is understanding here is how this all happened. There are obviously religious aspects, as well as customs and traditions which arise from religion, which indicates some sort of top down imposition. However the caste system almost certainly wouldn’t work if it were just a class system imposed by the elites. The professional and tribal castes are critical to it, yet also deeply complicated. The motives for maintaining the caste hierarchy arise from it forming a core of Indian identity, but what motivated people to first start identifying so strongly with a caste that they wouldn’t marry out of it? Shame is probably the impetus to forbid or punish errant marriages by one’s children, but shame requires the group to exist and the taboo to be real, what first motivated people to accept the group, then the taboo?
About the only thing that makes sense to me is competition, the idea that on some level the caste system had to arise from the economic and social benefits from forming an in group to be a part of. Any top down decrees just established the customs that these groups used to play their dominance games with each other, not the impetus to form the segregated groups to begin with.
As pertains to world building the implication is that any early caste system should probably look like a mix of gangs, high school cliques, and guilds, written in the complexities of a *generally* non violent custom and privilege based society.
“To be clear, even people who are vegetarians will usually abstain from meat on specific days”[…]
I think it should be “people who are not vegetarians”. My 2018 source to the fraction of vegetarian in India is found here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43581122
I am not a vegetarian although I have been mistaken for this more than once. While I am not religious (which is a common reason for refraining from meat at certain times) I have drastically decreased my meat consumption for environmental reasons. So much at I have to plan what to eat in order to get enough protein. I think cured meats and fish pickles are relatively inexpensive in Sweden. So are things like frozen meatballs and fish fingers. Not until the pandemic did plant-based imitation of minced meat became cheaper than the real thing.
I am aware Romanians and Bulgarians are basically indistinguishable genetically (though given they were geographically intermixed doesn’t require much intermarriage per generation), though still probably higher than the Roma, much less the Pygmies, though Roma probably has the effect that the most intermixed individuals are probably prone to drop out of the community). But they remained clearly distinct cultural groups throughout.
the Roma, much less the Pygmies, though Roma probably has the effect that the most intermixed individuals are probably prone to drop out of the community).
@Hastings,
This is true of Pygmies as well, actually, from what i’ve read.
@Lena,
It’s true that the Amhara as a whole are a mixture of some *very old* native ancestry (they’ve actually lived there long enough to develop high altitude adaptations) with Middle Eastern ancestry. i’m not referring to them, but to some smaller ethnic groups. Quoting David Reich:
“Today there is an intricate caste system that shapes the lives of many people with Ethiopia, with elaborate rules preventing marriage between groups with different traditional roles. The Ari include three subgroups- cultivators, blacksmiths and potters- who are socially and genetically differentiated from each other and from non-Ari groups. Since the Ari have a distinctive genetic affinity to the 4500 year old ancient highland indivdiual compared to other Ethiopian groups, it is clear that there were strong local barriers to gene exchange and homogenization within the region of present day Ethiopia that persisted for at least 4500 years. This is the best example of strong endogamy that i know of, even more ancient than the evidence of endogamy in India that so far is only documented as going back a couple of thousand years.”
I can understand they remain culturally distinct even if they are genetically virtually the same. While their languages have a traceable common origin they are quite different from each other. The Romanians are culturally descended from Romans which survived on the Balkans Peninsula. Their language is still mutually understandable to Italian and Spanish. In contrast Bulgarian form the southeastern end of the South Slavic dialect continuum. Which means they are culturally descended from people immigrating there during the Early Middle Ages.
> This is true of Pygmies as well, actually, from what i’ve read.
It’s actually a quite well understood effect there. The marriage customs for both pygmy’s and local non pygmy’s are patrilocal, meaning wives move in with husbands. Pygmy women and non pygmy men can marry, but non pygmy women and pygmy men generally can’t. This generally constrains gene flow to one direction-out of pygmy society. There is some reverse flow because of what researchers term failed marriages and illegitimate children, either from divorce, separation, or death, where a pygmy women returns to her family with mixed children. These children are likely going to be disadvantaged by the lack of a father, but there isn’t total isolation.
These effects can be somewhat generalized to minority and oppressed populations globally; most patriarchal societies discriminate primarily on marriage between out group males and in group females, out group females are more tolerated in terms of gene flow. Of course I’m paving over an often *unpleasant* ground truth here by calling all of these pairings marriages and hiding behind scientific language.
This all impacts genetic studies; the prediction is that genetic groups isolated by discrimination will have uneven uniqueness between their y amd x chromosomes compared to groups which are isolated by physical barriers, but there’s so many exceptions and confounding variables it’s hard to ever be certain about this. Trying to translate genetic studies into lived history is almost always imprecise. Even the pygmy’s show mixture, and the pygmy’s are about as morphologically distinct as human populations get, being consistently much shorter than other populations. If people can possibly produce offspring with each other they probably will.
The anatomical feature limiting successful human reproduction is the size of a newborn’s head compared to the pregnant’s hip width. The average 18-year-old pygmy woman has the same hip width as an average 18-year-old woman among her people’s taller neighbours.
@Lena,
I meant “Even non vegetarians typically abstain on specific days”, thanks for catching that!
@Terry,
Yes, I caught that about Jains too, when I first saw that (monumental, even if flawed) survey. The thing it reminded me of is how Mormons in the US often insist that they’re absolutely Christians, while other Christian groups say “no you’re not actually”. I can’t actually comment that much on Jains though. I knew one in college and I *think* my cousin married someone from a Jain family (either that, or a different group that had similar food taboos), but neither of those two people is particularly practicing so I never asked them about exactly what they believe.
I think one of the most interesting trends in South Asian religion in recent decades is actually kind of along the opposite lines. You have some tribal or otherwise marginal groups, both in India and Nepal which historically might have been considered to be practicing broadly “Hindu” or “Popular Hindu” religion, who are now starting to assert “no, actually, we’re our own religion, something distinct”. Like these groups for example: In the past, the ruling authorities (whether Brahminical Hindu, or Muslim, or British) would have had strong reasons for classifying these people as “Hindu” rather than as animists or generic polytheists or nature worshippers. Now that modernity and modern political ideologies have made tribal peoples more politically empowered and self confident, you’re starting to see them assert “no actually, we’re not Hindu, we’re nature worshippers.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnaism
Thus far it looks like the groups involved are fairly small groups in the east or northeast (although “small” in South Asia still means we’re talking about millions of people), but if and when organized, “official” Hinduism gets more hijacked by a very specific cultural, political and ideological group, it’s going to be interesting to see if things like this take off in other parts of the country as well, and if groups on the periphery of the “Hindu” fold start self defining as their own religion. They would have pretty good justification! According to the scholars, it looks like some of the deities worshipped especially in the south and east and by people lower down the social scale, are very ancient and actually predate the Indo-European arrival and the formation of Hindu religion as we know it.
There is already Hindu Nationalism which I view as reactionism filtered through Hinduism. If various groups are going to define themselves as non-Hindus depend on just how blatantly destructive its proponents are going to be.
Possible typos:
“The aristocracy fight at mounted heavy cavalry”
At or as?
“the Citadel are equipped at state expensive, for they have a unique livery”
expensive or expense?
“To reach a little father” – should be “farther”
Now the question whether to rant about the complete illogic of the Elder Scrolls Empire of Cyrodiil, now, or to wait until next week when Bret had a stab at it.
Grah, I can’t help myself. Here’s some high-level thoughts:
– The only game where there’s an indication that the Empire is actually projecting power into its provinces is Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which I doubt people will have even heard of. Otherwise, we do not see any demilitarisation or subordination of the traditional rulership to the imperial rulership.
– In fact, there’s two instances that imply heavily that *not enforcing a monopoly on violence* is the norm for the Empire (First when the Potentate disbands local armies, which is treated as part of the pattern of breakdown of the first Empire, and then during the Great War, when local forces from Hammerfell rescue the Legion from an attack by the Thalmor)
– The Great War and its aftermath (which we see in person in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) makes no sense whatsoever. It basically amounts to the empire being reduced to a tributary and then spending its own resources, both monetary and military, to enforce the overlordship of its new ruler onto its own provinces. The Skyrim Civil War is basically the Empire fighting tooth and nail to enforce its own delegitimisation.
Well, regarding the Skyrim thing, is that the empire was not actually enforcing the rules of the concordat on Skyrim until the stormcloak rebellion started, which gave the Dominion leverage over it and forced it to mobilize to avoid losing territory
“The only game where there’s an indication that the Empire is actually projecting power into its provinces is Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which I doubt people will have even heard of. Otherwise, we do not see any demilitarisation or subordination of the traditional rulership to the imperial rulership.”
Well, that’s not true. Morrowind is not only overflowing with the Imperial Legions, but the Empire established a monarchy with a loyal Queen (married to an Imperial General) to depower the traditional rule of the Great Houses.
Besides the history of the Third Era spells out how much the power, authority and centralization of the Empire has fluctuated over those four centuries. The situation for Tiber Septim in Redguard and that of Uriel Septim VII in the main games (pre-Skyrim) are very different.
Based on the evidence we see in the games, the power of that imperial monarchy is basically nil. Barenziah rules over her palace and that appears to be it. All the rest of Morrowind is dominated by the Houses and loyal to the Three.
I was under the impression that the game sets out pretty clearly that VVardenfell is an ancient religious outpost that has been inviolate by treaty for hundreds and hundreds of years until the imperial puppet king (not the current one, the uncle he murdered shortly before the game starts) declared it open for colonisation just a decade or so ago unilaterally, over the heads of the Temple(!!!!?!!!).
In general it seems like the puppet monarchy was at least moderately able to command respect and weild authority, even if on the ground it didn’t control much land.
Even if the puppet monarch didn’t wield tremendous power, it’s not like the Empire wasn’t exerting power among the Houses. While House Hlaalu was a traditional great house, it was, at the time of the game, extremely open to Imperial influence, being the most friendly to Imperials and allowing Imperial-style cities to be built within its territory. This copies numerous historical examples, and some extant examples: Rather than fighting the locals, empires often side with a local faction in some internal conflict as a way to establish power. This has a lot of advantages, after all. The Imperial influence on the other five Houses is more subtle, but still there. This is, after all, the whole reason Daguth Ur and the Sixth House can gain traction: a significant faction within the Dunmer want the Empire gone.
It must also be admitted that by the end of the game, the Empire (via the player) has ended Vvardenfell culture. Like, just, all of it. The gods of the Vvardenfell religion are dead. The ability to erase a culture and end a local religion does not suggest a lack of Imperial power in the area. Sometimes power isn’t a flamethrower; sometimes it’s slitting a few throats.
Claiming that Imperial power is not being projected into an area that’s on the brink of war–on multiple fronts, with multiple factions–precisely because of the presence of imperial power is….well, a bit silly. The whole point of Morrowind IS the projection of Imperial power into an area that really, really doesn’t want it. Vvardenfell isn’t a fully-integrated territory yet, but the Empire is certainly exerting both power and authority, in a wide variety of ways, many of which are literally part of the playbook by which empires exert power.
@Dinwar, your argument would be stronger if you didn’t keep bringing up the Nerevarine and over-emphasizing its effects.
Firstly, it’s not something the Empire planned to take down the ALMSIVI. When the player character lands on the island, Caius Cosades has only the vaguest idea what the prophecy is (except that you fulfil its conditions) – the first missions for him are just very basic information gathering, and by the time you learn its full scope, he is cut off and ordered home. That is of course in addition to the fact that the Three were already dying and the transformation of the Dunmer religion was inevitable. If anything, destroying Dagoth Ur preserved their society and religion against a much more substantial reshaping.
Which is my second counter-point to your assertion of it as an destructive event: When we see Dunmer culture and religion again a few centuries later, it’s not actually changed substantially. The religion managed to reform itself as its original Daedra-worship and House politics appears to have taken only the tiniest of shakeups (House Hlaalu got the boot), and that not from the end of the ALMSIVI, but the end of the Empire.
We already see this resilience to the “Nerevarine shock” in Morrowind itself, where the religious organisation under Vivec is able to smoothly pivot from opposing the Nerevarine to supporting them and pretending it was part of their plan from the start.
“When we see Dunmer culture and religion again a few centuries later, it’s not actually changed substantially.”
Their religion was ended. Their homeland was in ruins. Their gods were dead. They lived on the margins of society in a diaspora, as a hated minority that was barely tolerated. Even before that, in Oblivion, there’s the like “I’m XX, of House Hlaalu. Not that that means anything anymore….” In Skyrim the Great Houses aren’t even mentioned.
But yeah, sure, their culture and religion hadn’t changed at all……
“…your argument would be stronger if you didn’t keep bringing up the Nerevarine and over-emphasizing its effects.”
Even if you want to discount the fact that the Empire was able to wipe out an entire indigenous religion, the Blades still count as an exertion of Imperial power into Morrowind. They were there for quite a while before the player shows up, operating as an official group, but in the shadows. Such groups were not unknown in the past–spies and intrigues were part of war for as long as war has been going on (see “The Art of War”).
At this point, I have to ask: What do you think an empire projecting power IS? We’ve ruled out stationing troops in the region. We’ve ruled out oppressing (gradually, I will admit) local customs. We’ve ruled out tax collecting. We’ve ruled out overt and covert warfare. We’ve ruled out……..well, everything. At this point I honestly think you’d only accept total and complete absorption into the Empire as part of the core as acceptable. And the problem there is that that isn’t how empires work. Vvardenfel was a hinterland, a rustic backwater. As long as they paid their taxes and didn’t cause too much trouble it makes perfect sense for the Empire to not waste the resources pushing too fast to make Vvardenfel into Cyrodiil.
@Dinwar The evidence is in the Dragonborn expansion of Skyrim, in which you see both the continuation of religion (ancestor worship in family tombs, worship of a set of three gods) and of the politics, with House Redoran and House Telvanni having a presence right there on the island, plus a feud with another House (in this case a Hlaalu remnant) getting carried out with the help of the Morag Tong.
Yes, this is in contradiction to some dialogue both from Oblivion and the Skyrim main game, but as more direct evidence, you can’t just dismiss it out of hand.
And I’m not disputing that Uriel VII sent the Nerevarine to Vvardenfell with the intention to shake things up. I’m disputing that killing the three god-kings (plus a fourth for good measure) was the plan all along. This matters for the question of “How much power can the Emperor exert?”, because accidentally killing a ruler is different from doing it deliberately.
The Dragonborn DLC doesn’t negate anything I’ve said. It’s a small remanent of the culture, one clinging to a past that has objectively ended. Solstheim changes significantly from Morrowind to Skyrim.
Continuation of cultural traditions long after relevancy has faded is pretty common in a diaspora. Doesn’t mean that the culture itself survived, and it absolutely doesn’t mean the culture is unchanged. The three Great Houses had pretty much no influence over Morrowind at the time. I don’t recall them playing a huge role in the game, they were just kind of there as a throwback. In contrast, I don’t think any of the Dunmer in Windhelm say what House they belong to.
“This matters for the question of “How much power can the Emperor exert?”, because accidentally killing a ruler is different from doing it deliberately.”
The ability of the Empire to run a covert network of operatives in order to influence a hostile culture–which was in place BEFORE the game, the player integrates themselves with the existing network through the plot–is certainly an example of exerting Imperial power. The killing of the three gods was a bit extreme for what the Blades usually did, but it was different in scale, not in kind.
Remember, this network is powerful enough that when you arrive as a prisoner they were willing to let you go free, and the only questions they asked were the ones necessary for character creation. This was a well-established quasi-official network of operatives, who were well-connected with the official Imperial staff. I am at a loss to say how this can be anything other than an exertion of Imperial power.
Further, I will point out that you continue to ignore all of the other examples of power that I’ve listed. Even if the Blades don’t represent an exertion of Imperial power–and they do–the Empire still has a tremendous amount of power in Morrowind. Not as much as, say, Washington DC has over Idaho, but again, we’re dealing with a society with significantly lower state capacity in general.
@Dinwar Firstly, I already admitted that you convinced me that the Empire can exert influence on Morrowind. You do need to beat that drum.
But please get your facts right. We’re told explicitly that Morrowind is ruled by Great Houses and are given the exact list [src]. We’re explicitly told that Solstheim is under the jurisdiction of House Redoran and part of Morrowind [src][src]. And we’re given evidence that Raven Rock is not politically isolated but in fact connected to the central government [src] And there are publications to support these facts [src][src][src]. At this point, it becomes rather spurious to claim that somehow the refugees and descendants of refugees in Windhelm [src] give us a more accurate picture of the state of Morrowind than the ruling councillor of a settlement who is writing letters to the central government.
As for the matter of intent, I feel we’re talking past each other. Sure, the Emperor sent you there to become part of the Blades, that’s evidence of meddling. I’d dispute the efficiency of the Blades operations on Vvardenfell, but more to what I am getting at: If I try to knock a new doorway into an interior wall and the house collapses on me, that’s not evidence of my ability as a demolisher but evidence of the weakness of the house. What evidence do we have that the Blades knew this would topple the Tribunal when the Nerevarine was sent to Vvardenfell? The initial coded briefing message doesn’t say anything like that [src][src] It takes Caius tapping two local informants before unearthing a hint that the Nerevarine could affect the Tribunal [src]
To add to this, the state of politics in 4E200 Solstheim and the successful use of spies are not hills you have to die on when you have stronger arguments. Again, on the question of “Can the Empire act as imperial overlord over Morrowind”, you have the following strong points that I concede:
– Their imposition of taxes, tarrifs, state monopolies and a census
– Their installation of a puppet king who is used to further a project of cultural assimilation
– The presence of a garrison and their own religious institutions on what is considered a sacred land to the native religion
But to me, the argument about the Blades is not a strong point in your favour. For starters, you undercut yourself by pointing at Art of War (喝!), which is not a manual about an overlord ruling a subject, it’s about a general conquering a hostile polity. If spies can be used as a tool of external politics (conquest), then advancing proof for “The Empire used spies against Morrowind” does nothing for furthering the case for “The Empire is an imperial overlord of Morrowind”. Because they might be an external aggressor using spies, or even an imperial subject using spies against its overlord. These two facts are just independent and proving one does nothing towards proving the other.
But even if I do not suppose that above position, and also concede on the question of intentionality, then still your argument does not require the use of superlative and the dismissal of all evidence presented on Solstheim. Because your position would still be as follows:
To support the project of cultural assimilation exerted through Helseth, the Empire used the Blades in an attempt to weaken Tribunal Temple power. The Blades were successful in this, removing a major roadblock to the project. Helseth makes good strides in pushing his boulder up the hill, so much that from the distant perspective of Cyrodiil, chroniclers a few years later are already proclaiming: “He’s done it, it’s 100% achieved” (Which is just clearly exaggeration. It’s been 6 years, and these are elves. There’s probably Telvanni councillors who’ve not remembered to blink for that time).
If anything, the fact that the moment the Empire’s support falls away, that boulder rolls back down the hill and flattens Helseth and his entire House in the process is in your favour, because it shows just how much influence the Empire had to push such an unpopular agenda.
The situation where the Empire, which has lost a major war, and is now forcibly allied with its former enemy, is actually quite typical, and so is also the situation where such a state needs to enforce an unliked policy internally in order to avoid a catastrophic war or foreign occupation.
To give an example, I would point to post-Napoleonic France where Louis XVIII was essentially brought to the throne in the baggage train of the allied powers. But still, the French civil administration remained, France was soon unoccupied but you needed to accept an unlikeable internal policy for a while as part of the deal so as not to trigger an unwinnable war. Prussia was in a very similar situation in 1807. I think that the US-Iraqi relationship in early 2010’s had very similar dynamics. The leeway for the losing side here is that the winner will not be eager to upset the apple cart either, and start an expensive war, and eventually, if everything goes well, you will have done internal reforms, restored your national strength and can restore your full freedom of action.
If you listen to the discussions of Imperial leaders in Skyrim, this is actually their strategy. And you can see, if you read the materials found during the game, that the Stormcloaks are supported by Thalmor, who want the empire to be divided into smaller countries powerless to resist them. In historical perspective, I would tend to say that the Imperials are in the right: their strategy of preserving internal independence and waiting for a chance for throwing off the Thalmor yoke is, historically, how major states behave. The main reason why this works is because the local representatives of the major power in advantageous position have a need not to upset the apple cart. They have failed in their mission if they are forced to request military intervention- and most likely, their superiors have better use for those resources elsewhere. So, they tend to paint the situation in favourable light, allowing leeway for the weaker power, and an efficient use of this leeway will allow a lot to be done.
So, the economics of the game are simply unrealistic, but the grand strategy is not. (Similarly, I really liked the College of Winterhold arc, where the local leader solves his bureaucratic qualms by making the player the nominal president of the college while becoming, himself, the actual power behind the throne.)
The important part to note about the analysis of the Empire’s strategy is the case of Hammerfell: The Empire was allowed to just unilaterally declare themselves incapable of actually enforcing the ceasefire treaty within Hammerfell without any negative consequences. There, the war continues to go on, and apparently is binding up a large amount of military resources of the Thalmor.
Which means the calculation for the Empire when faced with the succession crisis in Skyrim being triggered by Ulfric is as follows. If it tries to keep Skyrim in the Empire, it needs to spend even more resources to do so (they apparently already had to bribe Skyrim’s jarls for them to accept the peace treaty instead of rebelling), reducing both its own military strength and that of its vassal, leaving them weaker when the important war with the Thalmor comes around again (which everyone treats as basically inevitable).
If on the other hand it declares Skyrim to be another Hammerfell, it forces the Thalmor to spend those same military resources, because they don’t have a case that this somehow is the Empire’s responsibility, after having already conceded the argument on Hammerfell. Which means the Thalmor would have to spend military resources, either to force the Empire to comply, or to end the civil war themselves. At the very least, you’re saving the military strength of one of the provinces (Cyrodiil or Skyrim) instead of wasting them against each other. Not to mention that it’s likely that like Hammerfell, an independent Skyrim would be able to hold off the Thalmor much more effectively, because time and again we see that the Empire is bad at extracting military manpower compared to the local rulers.
And then there is the matter of legitimacy, which is that the civil war is ostensibly about the worship of Talos, the deified Tiber Septim. The Mede Empire presents itself very much as the continuation of the Septim Empire, down to having Tiber Septim’s face on their coinage. And note what those coins say: “The Empire is Law. The Law is sacred“. Basically, the legitimacy of the Empire rests in part on its sacral nature as being ordained by its god-ruler Talos. Which means that not just conceding on Talos not being divine, but then taking up arms when people insist that he is, the Empire is weakening its own legitimacy. When the second war with the Thalmor were to end with a victory, Cyrodiil could not really claim to be the Empire’s rulers again, because the Stormcloaks would immediately be able to say: “Oh yeah? Why’d you piss on Tiber Septim’s legacy, then?” If on the other hand they refuse to enforce the Talos ban in Skyrim and force the Thalmor to fight the civil war, they don’t burn that bridge.
Addendum: Based on what we see, the Empire already skipped on being responsible for enforcing the Talos ban within its territory. It’s instead done by Thalmor agents acting as secret police.
So there’s even less reason for the Empire to jump in with military force when that fails.
“The important part to note about the analysis of the Empire’s strategy is the case of Hammerfell: The Empire was allowed to just unilaterally declare themselves incapable of actually enforcing the ceasefire treaty within Hammerfell without any negative consequences.”
This is not true. The Empire didn’t merely announce that they couldn’t enforce the treaty in Hammerfell; they fully officially renounced Hammerfell as an Imperial Province in order to maintain the peace. The consequences were so dire they felt forced into granting Hammerfell independence to avoid them.
Hamerfell then fought on against the Dominion until eventually signing the Second Treaty of Stros M’Kai as an independent realm.
“The only game where there’s an indication that the Empire is actually projecting power into its provinces is Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard…”
Morrowind. A major part of the setting is the conflict between the Empire and the Dunmer. You see this in a few ways. First, there’s the limited amount of territory that’s “Imperial”–most of Morrowind is culturally, biologically, even architecturally distinct. The legions don’t fight the Dunmer, but they’re not exactly best friends with them, and some of the Dunmer will attack you on site (makes exploring the less Imperial areas fun). There’s also informal conflicts. The whole Assassin’s Guild thing, for example. Even the interactions show that you, as an outsider, are Other and not welcome in the culture. It’s a fantastic way to manage the limited computer power of the time, and the flagrant racism allows the developers to use the limitations to enhance the setting.
The quesiton is, what does projection of Imperial power look like? The ebony mine monopoly, the taxation without caring about internal politics, the physical presence of legion forts–I’d say these all count. The Dunmer certainly think they do at any rate.
“In fact, there’s two instances that imply heavily that *not enforcing a monopoly on violence* is the norm for the Empire”
There’s also the Assassin’s Guild and Fighter’s Guild, both of which are built entirely on the use of violence. The Assassin’s Guild needs to hide more, but the Fighter’s Guild is open in every game. The Mage’s Guild also engages in a lot of violence. Ostensibly they’re a research institution, but they fight a lot too.
Then going back to Morrowind there’s the whole tax collector quest early on. The guards basically say “Huh, that sucks. Up to you what to do about it.” They are perfectly find with vigilante justice.
I think one of the things fantasy writers have to remember is that all modern ideas on politics, war, and governance are based on humans. Argonians and Khajit are NOT. Argonians in particular are going to function significantly differently than humans, what with the whole tree thing. And the Mer aren’t either–they look more human, but at the end of the day we can expect very different physical and psychological needs from them. I can see a good argument being made that a monopoly on violence isn’t going to work in such a case.
The other thing is, the idea of a monopoly on violence was only ever on paper in human cultures. There’s a rather famous story where competing institutions–one local, one imperial–argued about who had authority over a case. “We come to Rome to sentence Nazareth/We have no law to put a man to death/We need him crucified, that’s all you have to do!” The whole situation arose precisely because there were multiple institutions that had the authority to enforce laws, and no one wanted to deal with the guy on trial or the political fallout from it. This means that in areas where the Empire extended its power (Black Marsh, Elsewhere, Vvardenfell) it would be perfectly reasonable for the locals to have authority over certain things, and the Imperials to have authority over others.
“The Great War and its aftermath (which we see in person in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) makes no sense whatsoever.”
I disagree entirely. The idea of a puppet ruler has all kinds of historic precedent, and it was the only way the Empire could end the war without ceasing to exist. The Great War was an attempt to remove the Empire and replace it with an Elven overlordship, based on the idea that Elves were inherently superior. The Empire gave up as little as possible to continue to exist, and the Aldmeri Dominion took as much power as they could, both at the time and as time went on. The Aldmeri decided that they would switch tactics, essentially. Again, this has historic precedent–it’s one of the ways Rome and England both expanded their empires, for example. There’s also the Bene Gesserit, though the Aldmeri Dominion acts more like the Honored Maters without the….well, less than PG-13 aspects.
The tax gatherer quest is the perfect example of what I mean with the lack of projection of power. If there was actually a functioning imperial system in place, there would not be a lone imperial tax gatherer wandering around begging random adventurers to help him out in collecting taxes. Instead, Vivec would be sending part of his wealth over to the empire on the regular, or would have his Ordinators help out the tax gatherers.
I disagree entirely. The tax collector reminds me of the Roman tax system–private citizens bidding on contracts to collect taxes for the Empire, and making a profit off those contracts. It helps the Empire because they don’t have to pay the tax collectors AND because it means the tax collectors, not the empire, gets the hate (which you clearly see in the quest).
By the way, the tax collector quest I was talking about was the early one where you find the dead tax collector. He wasn’t asking for help, you just stumble across him.
I also can’t see the Ordinators helping with tax collecting. This goes back to the division of power I discussed. The Ordinators were temple guards, focused on a very narrow range of responsibilities. Using them for Imperial purposes would have literally be sacrilege to the Dunmer. Vvardenfell wasn’t worth the resources to fully take over, so the Empire allowed local customs to continue, including certain local laws. Made the Empire’s job easier, and kept the Dunmer relatively happy. Again, you see this in Rome–local customs and laws, including law enforcement, were respected to a fair extent.
Saying that something’s not a functional system when it was in fact, in reality, a functional system for centuries, is a bit silly. Again, it goes back to state capacity. The Empire in TES has more state capacity than historic ones, but it’s still far more limited than a modern industrial, internet-age society would have. Handling that lack of capacity is one of the main things the Empire has to manage. And at least in Morrowind, the game developers found a perfect solution in history.
As for why the Empire would do this, play Skyrim. The whole Aldmeri Dominion thing is what happens when an imperial core tries to impose too much on the rest of the population. Could the Dunmer kick the Empire out? No, they tried and failed. But they could make it very, very expensive, and the Empire had enough to deal with at the time. It was better for them to officially play nice and get the ebony and taxes (while the player undermines the very foundations of Dunmer society and ends their religion, because the Empire isn’t nice).
I’ll respond to everyone who brings up Morrowind as a counter-point to my assertion that we don’t really see the Empire projecting power in one post, since otherwise I’d repeat myself a lot.
The core premise of the argument is that an empire projecting power into its peripheries has to suborn the local rulership and local institutions to the rulership and institutions of the empire itself. The local rulership and the local institutions might still be there, but they can only wield power by the grace of the imperial core not taking that power. And the most important power for the imperial core to hold is to be the arbiter of disputes and delegitimiser of violence – instead of the local king being allowed to raise an army to settle the land dispute with his neighbour, he has to argue the case to his imperial overlord and hope the request is granted.
And to me, despite the presence of forts in Vvardefell, the Empire in Morrowind fails that test. What we see is less subordination and more parallel structures, and these parallel structures from the Empire appear to be weaker than the local structures.
– Barenziah, as noted, is the puppet queen installed by the Empire to rule over Morrowind. But she’s never depicted as having any authority over the actual rulers of the country, neither over the ALMSIVI nor the House heads.
– At no point during the power struggles of the Houses does the Legion intervene, or is even considered a viable pawn to wield against another House.
– Given the monumental architecture of the cities of Vivec and Mournhold, the ALMSIVI are capable of extracting a good amount of taxes from the local populace. Instead of somehow interfacing with that, the Empire apparently does its own thing, with its own Imperial Census institution and its own tax gatherers, both of which are far too small to actually do their task and who are incapable of even calling upon the other resources the Empire has on Vvardenfell.
– The Mages Guild is a bit of an edge case (it’s technically not an organisation fully subject to the Empire), but it’s also weirdly unable to leverage its influence in the rest of Tamriel into any kind of advantage over the Telvanni.
Even in the extremely off-hands Roman Empire, these thing weren’t true. If you had a dispute, even among locals, you always had to be aware that this could get escalated up to the governor if it got too contentious. Tax gatherers could call on the governors and the local garrison to help out if taxes were not handed over willingly, and you’d be very sure the governor would stick his nose into the affair if a tax gatherer got killed.
All I can say is you are wrong. You are wrong about how empires project power, you are misremembering the facts of the game, and you are mistaken about how historic empires work.
I think I figured out our disagreement. Your position is something like “We see the presence of the Empire in the region, and that is sufficient proof of their power projection, because ancient empires usually did not have as much presence in a province as we see here.” But my position is “Even for ancient empires that were very hands-off in their provinces, we see the influence of their power on local institutions and local elites, just from the fact that these institutions and elites are subordinated to the imperial power because it’s an empire. And I do not see sufficient proof that the Empire has such an influence. They are physically present but not politically present.”
To illustrate the first sentence of my position, let me take the example you give from the New Testament: The crowd argues with the Roman governor and tried to dispute his application of the law, yes. But they can’t ignore him after he has inserted himself in the process, and they can’t proceed to carrying out the sentence until he’s done all he wanted (which notably includes a sort-of attempt at a pardon). The governor might just be one person and might not interfere with the local laws very often, but his authority is a shadow over the whole judicial process, because as we see, when things get too big, he has the power to insert himself.
Also note the process of “Romanization” as laid out in Becoming Roman (cited favourably by Bret and recommended by a fireside) as another example of this influence despite the lightness of the imperial presence. The governor might not be in a province long, but all local elites, who previously had been in a position to escalate to armed conflict but now couldn’t because the Legion would drop the hammer if they did, have to bring their intractable conflicts to the governor. And to ingratiate themselves to the governor for the rare occasions where they needed him to decide in their favour (or to not stick his nose into things when they assured him everything was fine), they made sure that his stay was as welcomingly familiar and cultured as possible, by aping Roman customs and rebuilding cities in the Roman manner.
Morrowind has a lot of Imperial garrisons, mostly on the south and west. Possibly because House Telvanni seem to be more concentrated on magic, and also seem to be a lot more independent as a result. And their concentration is in the east and north.
Sure, Morrowind has independent Dunmer militaries. The Imperials are, frankly, in a long process of losing control there. And retreating as a result.
The Emperor is in the process of losing all his heirs, setting up the Oblivion Crisis to happen six years later.
If you read the books, some of them record the process of the Imperials attempting to conquer the rest of Black Marsh and getting owned.
The Empire has projected as much force as they can, as far as they can. The games (at least the later ones) tend to be set in the peripheral areas, or (Oblivion) in a crisis of authority or (ESO) in an interregnum.
Even if we include the earlier and side games, the Empire never looks that powerful.
– ESO is set after the fall of the Reman Empire, with Cyrodiil pretending to be the Empire like a very sulky Byzantium in 1452. (That fall itself is a bit ???, but we don’t have enough sources to really say what went on)
– Redguard, as mentioned before, appears to be the only one depicting an ascendant and powerful Empire, being set shortly after the conquest of Hammerfell by Tiber Septim and actually featuring an imperial governor! (Spoiler: He fails and starts a rebellion)
– Arena is basically a prelude breakdown of the Septim Empire, in which just the Emperor being replaced by an ineffectual puppet causes all provinces to revert to local rule for ten years
– Battlespire is set during that same ten-year crisis and could be taken as exemplary of how the pretender is sawing off the branch he’s sitting on (He sacrifices a college of battle mages for a daedric deal, permanently weakening the Empire militarily in return for some personal gain)
– Daggerfall shows that the Empire is incapable of reverting this breakdown in High Rock and northern Hammerfell. In the end, they have to do it via violent reconquest by magical superweapon (which they then immediately lose. Good luck holding on to your new territories)
– Morrowind is under intense discussion in this thread, but I think we all can agree that the Empire is not doing great there. Talos himself says so.
– Oblivion is not only a crisis of succession, it also shows that even in Cyrodiil the local rule from the Arena crisis has not been successfully reverted – the Elder Council is reduced to begging guardsmen off the individual cities to fight an invasion (I’ve tried to stay away from the question of how the military is formed since it’s for next week.)
– Skyrim is of course set in the twilight days of the Mede Empire, which is sort of a Justinian/Majorian kind of reconquest attempt of the Septim Empire.
“Arena is basically a prelude breakdown of the Septim Empire, in which just the Emperor being replaced by an ineffectual puppet causes all provinces to revert to local rule for ten years”
Well now I don’t understand why you’re calling the Empire illogical. Your points against examples of Imperial Projection of Power have been that as they’re depicted in the games they’re ineffectual, in your opinion. But as you note yourself here, the Empire depicted in the games is right at the end of the Septim Dynasty. And if going by the various in-game history books, this state isn’t new although the last three emperors have been struggling to reassert authority and keep the empire together. With poor Uriel having so much bad luck to get through.
If your point about illogic is just pointed at the Empire post Oblivion crisis, I don’t have much objection though.
And sidenote; Barenziah isn’t queen of Morrowind by the time of TES III and she hasn’t been the queen for centuries. It’s her son Helseth who’s just maneuvered himself into the position and in his short reign bans slavery province wide (between Morrowind and Oblivion).
I’ll admit my initial post was hyperbolical and that the Empire is not quite as not there as I initially thought. The reason why the Empire feels illogical to me that its nature never quite seems to cohere.
The presence of imperial garrisons made up of mostly ethnic Imperials would make sense if it was a military-tributary extraction regime. But that’s in conflict with the fact that it does not disband any local militaries and its inability to recruit any manpower from the core when the core province is under direct attack.
But if on the other hand it’s a more “benevolent” overlordship like the Roman Empire in which the provinces feel like they’re getting as much out of being in the Empire as they lost, then its rapid disintegration makes little sense. And while I’m open to debate on this point, if we’re talking about such an “everyone wants in” kind of empire, we should see some kind of effect of local rulers realigning their ambitions to be oriented towards the imperial throne and morphing their institutions to smoothly interface with the imperial ones. Even in the breakdown state of the late Septim Empire, there should be remnants of this, but it never feels like that. And it’s not for lack of sources, in basically all games the player character bumps elbows with the local nobility.
I personally think the Imperial Provinces are, generally, best seen as something almost as client states. The brief attempt to replace local rulership with an Imperial Governor in Hammerfell didn’t end well, as we see in Redguard, and after that it seems Tiber Septim and his successors largely has kept local power structures in place but subordinate to the Empire. The Septim dynasty has intermarried with the royal houses of Skyrim and High Rock, and in Morrowind raised house Hlaalu into power by creating the position of king. Vvardenfell is also administered by a Hlaalu duke who has plenty of Imperial advisors and is directly guarded by the Legion.
NPCs and lore texts also talk about how much House Hlaalu adopts “Imperial ways” though exactly what that means is less clear I’ll give you that.
Yes the tax collectors need you to help him, but we should consider that Vvardenfell was only opened up for colonization a few years before the game and so the infrastructure isn’t all in place – but also it’s a game and one where basically every issue and decision requires the player character to go deal with it. A bit of ludo-narrative dissonance. The Empire does however seem able to maintain and enforce a monopoly on the trade of ebony, similar to how many real monarchies got so much of their revenues through salt monopolies as this blog has talked about before. In Morrowind there is also a lot of talking and complaining about the various tariffs on goods set out by the King.
On the rapid disintegration, I would argue the opposite. What we see over the history of the Third and Fourth era is that Empire hasn’t disintegrated despite long periods of civil war, regional conflicts and eroding Imperial Power. Apparently there is still something valuable enough from the Empire (or then the fear of the Legions powerful enough) that none of the provinces attempt to claim full independence even in the periods where they are almost completely autonomous.
And although there are local military forces I don’t think we ever see evidence in the games that they are particularly big or significant. Town Guards, House Retinues, Knightly Orders, but not armies and certainly not forces that could rival the Imperial Legions. And the legions recruit from all provinces, while the Colovians make up an important core they seemingly aren’t the majority. Looking at the NPCs in Morrowind, there’s ~57 non-Imperials to ~37 Imperials.
We see a bunch of wars break out during the Simulacra but they didn’t start before it and they end as soon as Uriel is back on the throne. The implication is, to me, that what the Empire brings above all is peace.
Still, after writing all this, I will concede that there is some contradiction between what we see and what we’re told. In Morrowind, at least, we’re told that Empire is held together by “a strong hereditary emperor and bureaucracy, by the rule of law, by a powerful professional army, and by religious tolerance” but we don’t see much of the bureaucracy. And law does seem generally devolved.
@Livendus I’ve got to write things out properly (I want to go and argue with citations), but I’ve come to rest on basically the same conclusion: The Empire is in a bit of a superposition state, where on the one hand it’s a very loosely bound coalition of non-state polities but on the other hand it’s apparently a strong state which puts down garrisons everywhere and can dictate tariffs and taxes. And this superposition state makes it hard to resolve any question properly.
“…but not armies and certainly not forces that could rival the Imperial Legions.”
There are two objections here: The Nords and the Argonians. Neither are terribly good objections, though, I will admit.
The Nords were one of the core peoples of the Empire and tended to go into the Legions, though, so that’s not a strong one. You see what happens when the Nords stop supporting the Empire in Skyrim–they stand a reasonable chance of winning against the Legions. But as long as the Empire and Skyrim got along the Nords WERE the Legions in some ways, so no one cared too much.
The Argonians are….weird. I would love to get more of their lore into the game, it would be a truly weird area on par with Vvardenfel. During the Oblivion Crisis the Daedric Prince involved stopped opening Oblivion Gates into Black Marsh because the Argonians kept invading his plane, whereas it took a tremendous effort to shut down and hold back the Gates in Cyrodiil and other provinces. Of course, their military prowess were not unmatched, as evidenced by the Argonian slaves seen in Morrowind. The fact that the Argonians lost to the Dunmer in several wars does tend to support your conclusion, but the fact that the Hist was able to alter the Argonians to become a serious threat to a Daedric Prince tends to argue against in. So…..not really sure where I stand on this. I think that if the Empire respects the Hist the Argonians are unlikely to be able to take the Legions in a fight, but if the Empire becomes a threat to the Hist all bets are off.
“The implication is, to me, that what the Empire brings above all is peace.”
Peace and trade are what empires always brought those inside their orbits. Cohesion, in other words. In exchange you give up bits of your autonomy and culture over time until there’s nothing left of who you used to be. Whether the exchange was worth it was always a question. It’s worth noting that Germanic tribes invaded Rome to be included in the Empire; some people obviously thought it was worth the trouble.
Something interesting to note is that Orcs, Khajit, Argonians, Dunmer, etc. in Morrowind and Oblivion are just part of the population. Some individuals may not like specific races, but in general an Argonian is treated like a Nord or a Basmer. In Skyrim, after the Empire weakens, you see a change. Khajit, Orcs, and Dunmer are all pushed to the outer edges of society–Orcs in self-imposed camps, Khajit in travelling caravans, and Dunmer in slums. This strongly suggests a reduction in the cohesion that held the Empire together for so long.
@Dinwar
“There are two objections here: The Nords and the Argonians. Neither are terribly good objections, though, I will admit. ”
Well I’m generally talking about the Empire during the Septims. Even so I don’t think they contradict my point.
When Ulfric Stormcloak rebels against the Empire he isn’t leading the Army of Skyrim, or the Army of Windhelm. He’s leading the Stormcloaks, a newly formed military force largely consisting of veterans from the great war.
And while Skyrim absolutely was and is a vital part of the Empire, particularly for military recruitment, I don’t believe such a rebellion would’ve held up against an otherwise unified Tamriel.
As for the Argonians, there simply was the fact that no one had any idea that they could be mustered and commanded into such ferocity by the Hist. The unity of the Argonians and the rise of the An-Xileel party was something new and unexpected for practically everyone.
My point was really just that while the provinces weren’t *completely* demilitarized, it at least appears as if the Legion make up the unquestionably strongest forces in each of the provinces, maintaining Imperial Control.
“As for the Argonians, there simply was the fact that no one had any idea that they could be mustered and commanded into such ferocity by the Hist.”
That’s fair. Even for Mehrunes Dagon it was an out-of-context problem, and required the Hist to re-shape at least some of the Argonians. For a fair analysis we should probably assume that the Empire and Argonians didn’t know this was possible prior to it happening.
“My point was really just that while the provinces weren’t *completely* demilitarized, it at least appears as if the Legion make up the unquestionably strongest forces in each of the provinces, maintaining Imperial Control.”
I generally agree. I’m just wondering out loud, working through the concepts. The Legions could definitely defeat most provinces, as evidenced by the fact that they DID defeat a good chunk of them.
I guess my issue with the Nords is that I’m not clear on how different the local forces were from the Legion forces. In the game Skyrim they’re different for those lords loyal to Ulfric, and of course there are the housecarls and city guard and private retinue of the jarls, but even there many came from and in some cases identify with the Legions. I sort of got the impression that in many cases being given a post in Skyrim was a sort of honorable retirement from the Legions. As long as Skyrim was loyal to the Empire such fuzziness was to everyone’s advantage. And frankly Skyrim was one of the last provinces anyone would have expected to rebel, outside the whole Talos thing.
Here an attempt to sort of tease out the nature of the Septim Empire based on the written sources. I’ll try to avoid references to other dynasties, including the Mede Empire (while the UESP presents it as direct continuation of the Septim Empire, I’ve decided the evidence base is too thin to make a decision.)
By my personal estimation, the greater amount of evidence points to the Septim Empire actually being nothing more than a first-among-equals arrangement of the ruler of the Imperial City, based on personalistic relationships with other city-states ruled by hereditary aristocrats, with power being immensely fractured and actual imperial rule being challenged as often as respected.
As leading source, I’ll use A Brief History of the Empire, which it should be noted is a very hagiographic account of the Septim dynasty. If there is a source which would overemphasize the imperial power of the emperors, it should be this one. But rather we find the opposite. There are very few emperors listed who do not have to fight at least one internal war of some kind, and the word “vassals” is used throughout, indicating a more personalistic and immediate relationship between the emperor and local rulers.
This indicates that a century (thank Tiber Septim for starting a new Era, it makes the math pretty easy) after the integration of Summerset into the Empire is still politically split into pieces, each with their own king. And also that they can raise and command forces so independently of the emperor that the relationship of the military cooperation is described as an alliance, which usually implies an even partnership.
Here I want to especially note the phrasing “kingdoms, duchies, and baronies of the Empire” – it indicates that political power is immensely fractured, even after three centuries of the empire trying to spread its influence. The empire, instead of just defeating a single provincial leader has to subdue each individual polity one by one.
That last sentence about Tamriel’s unity is also noteworthy – Uriel I is one of the first emperors, reigning within living memory of Tiber Septim and yet already the realm is fracturing again, and continues to remain fractured for three centuries. Reading the history in the book between Uriel I and Pelagius IV proves that sentence right.
And Pelagius IV is Uriel VII’s father, who will be the last emperor of the Septim dynasty and whose reign we get to see and is also marked by heavy fracturing. So the empire even in its most hagiographic account depicts not a strong central core enforcing some kind of statehood over its subjects, but a dynasty that is busy playing whack-a-mole with its vassals like a medieval king.
To support this primary source, some other evidence of the weakness of the empire and the weak, fractured nature of the polities it rules over:
– The depiction of Cyrodiil in Oblivion, with each city being ruled by a hereditary ruler who can independently command their guard forces
– The depiction of High Rock and Hammerfell in Daggerfall and later book sources about the period [src][src]
– The continuity of the depiction of the political order of Skyrim in Skyrim and ESO, with power fractured between the Holds. Given how Potema is able to hold out in Solitude against the Empire during the War of the Red Diamond was likely also continuous during the Septim Empire [src]
On the other hand, there is a lot of things that the Empire does which do not align with this vision of it as a weak dynasty that is constantly struggling to stay control of an army of vassals, but as a strong centralized state capable of projecting power deep into its territories:
– The existence of the Legion as a professional standing army and its dispersement into forts throughout Tamriel [src][src]
– The existence of the Elder Council, described in the Brief History as the collection of the “wealthiest men and women in the Empire, and the power they wielded was conclusive”, but whose membership is completely disjoint from the local nobility in Cyrodiil [src]
– The existence of such institutions as the Imperial Census and Excise [src] and exclusive imperial building contracts in the provinces [src][src] (While these are fiction in-universe, Waughin Jarth is attempting to depict history accurately[src])
– The existence of the concept of provinces, especially that Gortwog gro-Nagorm is attempting to get recognition of Orsinium as one (and that there appears to be a defined review process for such an application) [src]
– That there is an idea of assimilation into Imperial culture and that resistance to it is the main reason for unrest in the provinces [src]
@Dinwar Regarding The Legions could definitely defeat most provinces, as evidenced by the fact that they DID defeat a good chunk of them., that has to be tempered with the fact that the initial conquest of Tamriel by Tiber Septim did not just involve the Legions, but also a god-like superweapon and a dragon. Plus possibly an immortal king. Although the Legions do get to claim victory over Elsweyr, Valenwood, High Rock and Morrowind.
@Alien@System
You make very good points, there does seem to be two different visions of what the Empire of Tamriel is. The bureaucratic, centralized Empire – or the more fragmented, feudal realm wrangling vassals. (There is a mistake in the first Wolf Queen book calling it “The Holy Cyrodiilic Empire” which is kinda fitting)
And honestly I imagine a lot of those issues come from different writers with different ideas that then may have changed between games. And Oblivion, for all the nostalgic fondness I have for it, really doesn’t do a good job of showing ‘The Imperial Province’, capital of a continent-spanning Empire.
Perhaps the best way to square the circle is the history. Uriel VII has inherited Pelagius IV’s stabilized realm. Now the tax officers and Legions are out reestablishing themselves, bolting the once decrepit and ignored Imperial institutions back on top of the Provinces.
As the Daggerfall intro puts it.
“The unworthy heirs of the Septim Dynasty have allowed the bonds of the Empire to weaken and crack. Uriel Septim VII cannot repair what his ancestors ignored.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VATWMUJ3WD0
But that’s just me musing, not really arguing.
Upon reflection, I retract this statement as too strong. I’ve become convinced that at the very least, the games where Michael Kirkbridge was a major creative influence (Redguard and Morrowind) do grapple with the question of how the overlordship of the Empire affects the provinces. I think there’s still a case to be made that the grand strategic situation surrounding the Skyrim civil war is weird, but I’ll also retract my position of it making no sense whatsoever.
I therefore also formally and with humility present to @Dinwar the coveted price of having won an argument on the internet.
“Doubtless in an emergency this would be supplemented by drawing up the rest of the able-bodied male populace, but we’re not given a clear sense for the city of what that would look like. I find myself wondering if under normal circumstances, since Gondor is almost always in some kind of low-intensity conflict with Mordor, if the professional core wasn’t always supplemented by rotating conscription or some kind of reserve among the men of the city.”
The book Lord of the Rings Weapons and Warfare, based on the films, says as much. All abled bodied men of the city are expected to be part of the army for a few years and afterwards are sent to the reserves.
Such a system implies a wealth of resources over manpower, as they are able to equip nearly all of the reserves to the same standard as the standing army. Unlike the book, Weapons and Warfare also portrays Minas Tirith as little more than a city-state (most other movie media tried to work in the soldiers from the fiefs).
Look, you got to have some sympathy for movies that just want to have all the soldiers look alike. Put yourself in the shoes of the costume department here. It’s got to be a lot easier to adapt one pattern to a 100 extras than to develop 100 costume patterns so everyone looks different.
How the material reality of having to film real people in the real world affects movies is part of why they’re so great.
They should try a different approach them. For example, they could switch to devolution and make extras supply their own arms and armor.
Muster the cosplayers! Weta calls for aid… and Comic Con will answer.
Given the job of obtaining 100 distinct costumes that look like they came from a single military tradition, and the options of (1) making them from scratch or (2) interviewing 2000 cosplayers to pick out 100 that work — I suspect we’d hear those sewing machines start up pretty quickly.
There’s at least one cosplayer (Riki LeCotey) who does a lot of costuming for movies and TV.
So at least some of them are already doing that.
Yeah. The problem is that if you’re aiming for true realism here, you need the equipment to look “diverse but not too diverse.”
Imagine if your costume specification is “every soldier has a breastplate, but they all look like they were made bespoke by different craftsmen, but craftsmen who were all kinda imitating each other, except a few old ones in a different and outdated style.”
Trying to equip an army of extras this way, you could very rapidly end up with a costuming budget of so many millions that even by the standard of a modern Hollywood production it’d be a serious dent in the overall budget. I’m normally not a big fan of Hollywood executives but in this case I don’t blame them at all for saying “no.”
I mean, you could always just cheat. Make a half dozen differing designs, and stick them on whoever is actually visible in the frame. You are working with film language and visual shorthand, completely bespoke armor is not really needed. If two soldiers have the same breastplate, but one is missing a helmet, they no longer look uniform. Make one costume with different colored fabric, add excessive belt buckles to another, and you are good to go.
And crucially, the orks do not have consistent uniform for the most part(Uruk-Hai notwithstanding). I suspect it is less a question of capability of the costuming department, and more a filmmaking decision to contrast uniform orderly humans vs chaotic disorderly orcs.
(Would have been an interesting film choice to go for the opposite actually. Uniform orcs leaning into implications of an industrializing state with film language suggesting fascism, contrasted with human soldiers with different and bespoke armors and costumes.)
That’s funny but also partly what should be done. Divide the extras into 2-8 groups, and give each group in turn several historical examples of one of:
– knot patterns
– key patterns, including the Greek meander (or not; it’s too famous)
– the main divisions of medieval heraldry (pale, chevron, rayonné)
– Islamic geometric patterns (“zellij”/”girih”)
– various animals side-on (passant/rampant), asymmetric
– various animals side-on, mirrored across pale (countercharged?)
– various animals head-on (and human faces, and birds displayed)
– assorted other charges (stars, thunderbolts, sheaves of grain, &c)
Give them some buckets of paint (preferably with the instruction “there are three color groups: red, light (white/yellow) and dark (blue/green/black)”) and let them paint their own shields. If you’re feeling extravagant, even make two types of shields, chosen from the three main categories — round with round center-boss (“viking shield”), oblong with “spine” boss (mid-Republic scutum), bossless arm-grip (aspis, kite, heater). The different overall shapes and the boss as a visual element should make for very distinct looks. Overall you should get an outcome that is the best of both worlds: each group will consist of individualized soldiers, but the audience will be able to tell at the speed of perception which group they are looking at.
Oh, and it will improve the morale of the extras. People like to look nice and have nice looking things.
Your big problem there is going to be that a lot of the experts aren’t going to do a great job painting their shields. While this is probably quite realistic, to the movie audience it doesn’t signal “this extra is a warrior who is more accustomed to chopping people in half than to painting so yeah it’s sloppy but if you say anything to him about it he’ll chop you in half.” It signals “the movie costuming department is unprofessional.”
So give them stencils. They are commercially available and easy to use.
If the shield is really bad, have them whack it a few times with a chain. Then it signals “These warriors have been in the field for a while and have gotten into a few fights”.
I feel like costs are also why armies in movies and tv shows tend to be mostly infantry. (With Monty Python’s Holy Grail as the most extreme example.)
That and skill. The pool of extras who know how to ride a horse well enough to do basic maneuvers like riding in column is much smaller than the pool of extras who know how to walk in a straight line.
I seem to remember the background documentary about the LOTR films talking about how most of the Rohirrim extras are actually women, simply because it was a lot easier to find women who knows how to ride than men.
Some of the Nazgul chasing Arwen in Fellowship were also women. Given their costuming and effects, that was probably easier to pull off than the Bearded Ladies of Rohan.
When I grew up in Sweden in the 1980ies and 90ies riding was considered a girl thing. It would not surprise me if it was the same in New Zeeland at the same time.
It’s kind of ironic that we’re forced to posture rich armies because designing poor armies is too expensive.
To be fair, if you tried to equip a poor army personally, you’d **also** rapidly run into the same problem.
Eh, just bad casting.
Put out word among HEMA, living history, and SCA types that you need extras for a movie and they’ll come in their own armor and garb. This gives you a very nice variety–some folks in plate, some in maille, some in cloth, some in brigandine, all sorts of stuff–without you needing to buy it. Plus you build up a fan base that’s going to be VERY excited to see the movie or show. Last time I spoke with a SCAdian about being an extra the problem was that the guy’s kit was too good, better than the hero’s kit in the movie. (Same thing happened with “Deadliest Warrior”: folks offered to donate accurate recreations of various things, but were turned down because it wasn’t showy enough.)
I know it’s been done before. “Timeline” used SCAdians (and as a thank you they put some KSCA bling into the movie–the gold chains and white belts), and I’m pretty sure at least some Tuchux were involved in Eragon (you can see their shields in the final battle sequence). So the idea that it can’t be done doesn’t hold; it has been done. Just a question of whether the film makers are willing to put the word out.
This does raise some visual problems. For movies, if you really are trying to get ‘nonuniform realism,’ you need to hit a sweet spot of ‘uniform but not TOO uniform.’ This is partly a matter of visual coding (you want a group of fighters to look like disciplined allied warriors, not a loose mob of randos). It’s also partly a matter of realism.
Take the Bayeaux Tapestry as an example. The people who made that knew exactly what a Norman army looked like, since they were 11th century Normans themselves. Every figure on that tapestry was hand-embroidered, so the artists had exact control over their appearances. Making each one unique was little or no harder than making each one nearly identical. And the fighting men look… fairly uniform, from a certain point of view. Shields and armor and weapons have fairly consistent appearances- the colors vary but they’re clearly all armed with kit made by people who have strong shared beliefs about what ‘proper’ military equipment looks like.
If you depict the Battle of Hastings, you probably don’t want your Norman knights to seem much less uniform than the knights on the Bayeaux Tapestry do. That is to say, they may be wearing different colors and emblems, but they’re all clearly wearing mail and carrying a kite shield and a lance, or a sword if they fight dismounted.
You can surely get SCAdians who match that description, but you’ll struggle a bit to find enough of them who match it precisely enough, because you can’t just have one guy wandering onto the field in ‘high Medieval’ plate armor; he’ll stand out like a coffee can in a roomful of burlap sacks.
The Bayeaux Tapestry has actually been compared to a film reel. I prefer to call it a comic.
maybe if a lot of that had been spoils of war
I’m not sure the tapestry is the best guide. Remember, the point of the tapestry is to tell a story, and the facts that may get in the way of a good story tend to get ignored. It’s like that column in Rome that shows everyone in lorica segmentata armor–despite evidence that this certainly wasn’t the case. The point of the tapestry is to tell a story, not to be photo-realistic. Basically, I wonder how much of the imagery is them being honest about what they saw, and how much is them trying to convey an idea to the audience (both are valid, to be clear).
I also think class is going to have a lot to do with this. The upper classes are necessarily going to be more uniform, for a few reasons. First, they want the best they can possibly afford because it keeps them alive. They also all are going to generally fight the same way so will need generally the same weapons and protection. Second, you’re going to inherit some pieces so getting a full kit is going to be cheaper than it seems. A hauberk is a hauberk, but maybe you need a different style of shield or a new helm or those fancy new gauntlets they’ve been making these days. Each piece is more affordable. Finally, peer pressure–coming out in Dad’s outdated kite shield and helm when everyone else is using heaters and a different kind of helm will get you laughed at. In this context, that can have serious consequences.
There still will be variance, though–richer people will have better stuff, second and third sons will have worse stuff, etc. Remember, variance is useful. A battle is tremendously chaotic even if it will never devolve into individual duels. Half the point of a nobleman looking unique is so that his people can find him. If everyone’s uniform you have no idea where your particular lord is–and therefore cannot come to his aid or rally around him. In contrast, if you can identify him among a few thousand people, about half of whom are trying to kill you, you have a FAR better chance of surviving. This is the whole point of heraldry, but tabards and shields and banners weren’t the only part of it. Helms and armor styles and famous weapons and the like also played a role in being able to identify a person in combat.
In contrast, a lower-ranking soldier (who generally are either ignored entirely or portrayed as interchangeable nobodies in all media, from tapestries to film to oral history) is going to get what they can. Maybe a gambeson, maybe they scavenge a bit of armor, maybe a war hat fell in their lap; whatever they can get they’ll add to what they have. This would result in a pretty varied group in terms of kit, but likely an average over-all look of raggediness.
For a movie, a lot of this is going to come down to what you want to show. For Ivanho or King Arthur or the like, you can show the background people being uniform because no one cares about them. Same with LOTR to a large extent–it’s a story about nobles. If you’re trying to show the war from the perspective of the people who fought it–say, something from the perspective of Fred Colon or a Private Ryan style story–you want a lot more variance.
Details in the Bayeux Tapestry have been used as clues in recreating Viking shipbuilding. The Normans may have been Frenchified but they still had Viking longship.
“Details in the Bayeux Tapestry have been used as clues in recreating….”
On the other hand, as someone who’s made a few hauberks and see a bunch of others, I can tell you that the way they are presented is HIGHLY stylized and unrealistic, both in terms of the size of the rings and the pattern of the weaving. Someone using the tapestry to recreate a byrnie is going to have a very bad time.
And that’s my point. Some things are going to be accurate, sure, but others are obviously stylized, and it’s an open question as to which are which in some cases. I’m not saying that the tapestry is inherently bad. I’m saying that there are valid concerns when using it to describe the past, and we should be aware of them when trying to use the tapestry to interpret the events depicted, and even more so when trying to use it to interpret events NOT depicted. Doesn’t mean it’s useless, just means that it’s perfectly valid to ask for additional lines of evidence.
At least the reconstructed methods for shipbuilding work. (There were other clues available as well.) This as opposed to stylised depictions of chain mail which were misunderstood as rings sawn onto cloth in the 19th century.
“I think we could actually bring the armies of Westeros into line with their underlying society with *fairly modest changes: shrink both the world size* and the armies to a scale that fits a personalistic, vassalage based mobilization system and acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale”
Shrinking Westeros would not be *a modest change* !
It’s basically on par as making its summers and winters become constant three-months seasons…
Westeros is defined by its huge size !
That’s what make the sense of wonder of this world, and makes the thought experiment interesting : what if England was a hundred times larger ?
Which brings the other point : its armies would be much more fragmented, as you explained, but couldn’t they be quite large anyway ?
Logistics considerations aside, I mean.
The essential considerations for warfare would be how to provide for such large armies, which is mostly impossible away from rivers and coast.
That would have interesting repercussions (losses would be easier to replace, making for protracted wars; and mastery of the Riverland and coastal cities would be quite essential, and harder to challenge)…
Westeros’ huge size is underused to the point of not being supported by the text. If Westeros were actually the size of South America, its politics would not take the shape that it does. For starters, there would be far more than seven kingdoms, because as Bret explains, vassalage polities do not scale well – past a certain point, a kingdom becomes so unwieldy that the king can’t actually keep up his horizontal ties with all the vassals any more *and* be prepared to intervene in case a dispute between vassals is about to become violent, just from the travel times. The King of the Crownlands wouldn’t be able to pay any attention to what’s going on in Dorne because he’d be busy with all his vassals and his immediate neighbours.
I’d say based on what we see of climate and culture, Westeros is, intentionally or unintentionally, roughly equivalent to the Western European countries on the line Spain-France-England-Scotland, except without a sea or strait between the “France” and “England” parts. Dorne seems to be very much inspired by Spain, or by clichés about Spain, while The Wall seems to be Hadrian’s Wall’s very big brother.
That’s pretty large, perhaps implausibly so, for a political entity with that kind of technology, society, and culture, but, I think, still a *lot* smaller than the entirety of South America.
(Though, of course, Scotland isn’t actually permanently covered with snow.)
Martin explicitly says Westeros is the size of South America. Fans using the scaled maps broadly conclude the Seven Kingdoms are somewhere between the sizes of Australia and Brazil: https://atlasoficeandfireblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/the-size-of-westeros-revisited/
Of course, in every way the stories portray it it’s smaller, because GRRM doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s said.
If the Seven Kingdoms only consist half the continent George Martin’s numbers seem to work out.
On that scale the seven kingdoms are very large kingdoms, but not crazily outsized if you think of them as actually being separate kingdoms. And I think that matches the text. They were indeed separate, then they got pasted together by Kings on magical dragons. Kings who not only could conquer or threaten annihilation, but who also could actually visit their vassals regularly to maintain those all important personalistic relationships. Once the dragons died out there was a long tradition of the great lords seeing themselves as peers in a larger polity, but that unity is visibly fraying well before the series starts, shattered by war, only tenuously retained by Baratheon in the war’s aftermath, and – without magic – is probably destined to collapse sooner rather than later. Maybe the decline was longer in the coming than would happen in reality, but at least it is there.
This makes sense to some extent, thank you.
@intropi: That would make sense, except kings don’t travel alone. Wherever they go, they go with a substantial part of the court, a force of bodyguards (“knights of his house”, or at least overlapping), etc. Even excluding all ~unspecialized servants on the sketchy assumption that they can “borrow”/”use” some at the destination, it would be extremely unlikely that a King (especially an “Over-King”) would travel in a party of fewer than a couple hundred people.
What the kings can do is fly strategic burning sorties. Against a modern industrial kingdom, that would not be enough by itself. Against a personal (vassalage-based) and low-productivity realm, it may very well suffice. And of course he has armies to project, and he can very effectively support those by burning enemy armies to pieces days before contact (“operational interdiction”), and he can accelerate sieges by acting as artillery. So yes, dragons do increase the scale even with a personal (vassalage-based) system, and centralize power (the king can un-appoint the lesser kings). But it’s a blatantly force-based approach that would not survive without the dragons. The king would really need some permanent “ambassadors” to maintain relationships in his lieu. But that’s an administrative state (on the Overking’s side at least), which can achieve this scale without dragons.
I’d very much rely on fans’ calculations here, rather than Martin’s assessments. Discounting the cop-out that we don’t really know how big the Lands of Always Winter are, if we consider “Westeros” starting at the Wall, South America, with its almost 7M sq.mi., would be WAY too big in comparison, given any reasonable metric.
If we take the fan figure of 3M sq.mi., being roughly 1,200 x 2,500 mi, the length of the continent would be roughly the distance between the latitude of Narvik (in northern Norway) and Tunis, which would very broadly correspond to how Westeros actually looks like (also climate-wise, with the Wall being in northern Europe and Dorne in northern Africa).
Of course, even so, it would be way too big for a single medieval / “feudal” polity. This is arguably THE “original sin” in Martin’s work. He fixes other issues that OGH raises here to some extent (in Dunk&Egg stories, I’d say that the description of social and military order is pretty on point, with having eg a retinue of a landed knight, a couple of non-landed knights and a bunch of levied peasants), but having a continent the size of half of Europe with a fairly uniform culture while having a single non-state polity just doesn’t quite work.
If we include the Land of Always Winter in Westeros I think it would work out mathematically. I agree on the climate zone argument although the rapid climate shifts may cause trouble to this.
To me the Land of Always Winter could as well be centred around Planetos’ north pole. Cris Wayan’s Kakalea has such a continent reaching 15 degrees north (although the bulk is north of 25th parallel) and he is a better worlbuilder than George Martin. There is a world map of Kakalea here:
https://www.deviantart.com/siriuscb/art/Kakalea-Planet-Texture-960190282
His idea is to make a planet relatively Earth-like yet with low biological productivity. The name is supposed to mean “bad luck” in Greek. I have tried to transcribe it back to Greek as κακαλεα or κακαλια but it was not listed in Wiktionary. Anyway, I think it is a good name. It is pronounceable in most Austronesian languages and sound like something bad to Indo-European speakers.
It’s not totally outside the real of possibility. The Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate both managed control from Kandahar to Calcutta and Kashmir to Hyderabad (or a bit further in the Mughal case). And fielded armies in the 50,000 plus range. There were sub-units and subordinate states, but their rule was reasonably tight – they could collect taxes across the whole area, replace governors and so on.
One interesting logistic note is that north India was tied together less by rivers than by ox-cart trains, slowly moving bulk goods.
@Lena: yes, you’re right, and from what I’ve read online this seems to be the widely accepted reason for the discrepancy in size assessment, namely that Martin was apparently referring to the whole continent, including the lands beyond the wall. Personally, I think it’s a cop out – were it to be true, the Lands Beyond the Wall would have to be larger than Seven Kingdoms, which is…well, theoretically possible, but improbable. I think that the more likely explanation was that Martin simply didn’t quite think it through. I base this on the fact that he is notoriously non-committing about distances in the book, to the point that his map doesn’t even have a scale.
@Peter T: Yes, there are a few examples of pre-modern (as in, pre railroad) polities coming close (various Chinese states also come to mind, and there is of course the Great Mongol Empire)…but, as you say, these are mostly considerably more centralized than Westeros. And even so, there is still a significant discrepancy in size; if Wiki is to be trusted, Mughal Empire was at its greatest extent 1.5M sq.mi, which is only about the half of Westeros.
Good point about the land-based logistics though! When I was thinking about similarly large empires in history, I was already mentally discounting them because they were based on sea or river traffic, but I wasn’t aware of the logistical situation in India.
To Peter T:
When you say “Hyderabad” do you mean the one in India or the one in Pakistan? I had already noticed there are two cities named “Hyderabad”.
To Draugdur:
I think the calculation of the Seven Kingdom’s size is derived from the stated length of the Wall. George Martin is known to just make up his large numbers.
@Lena: yes, exactly! That’s what I meant, the fans actually did the math, no matter how approximate, while GRRM just pulled a number out of his posterior 🙂
This is the kind of contradiction one gets when making various statements without understanding their consequences.
Mughal Empire was at its greatest extent 1.5M sq.mi, which is only about the half of Westeros.
The “greatest extent” of the Mughal Empire was also pretty short lived, their expansion in the south provoked intense resistance, although that might be due as much to religious policies of Aurangzeb as to geography.
The whole Mughal Empire wasn’t actually all that long lived, they effectively lasted from 1526-1760. On paper they were disbanded in 1857 but like the late Roman Empire, the emperors had been largely powerless and clients of more powerful states (Marathas, Afghans, or the British) for the last century of their existence.
I don’t think the Roman Empire is a good analogy in this case. It was divided in a western and an eastern half in 395. The Western Roman Empire was a failed state lasting less than a century before being divided by its conquerors. The Eastern Roman Empire remained independent with various borders until completely conquered in 1453. I don’t think it ever was a vasal state or anything comparable.
@Raphael,
Dorne read as more “foreign” to me to really be the equivalent of Spain, from a Western Europe/England perspective. Maybe more a stereotypical “Middle Eastern” country? Minus the Abrahamic patriarchal culture, of course.
It was also hilariously implausible, of course, that everyone in a continent the size of South America would be speaking the same language.
Many people from North America have trouble grasping just how abnormal their own situation is in this respect. That loads and loads of language would naturally arise over millennia does not occur to them.
It’s also just easier to write stories where the characters can all understand each other, even if you know it isn’t realistic. Tolkien came up with a thin excuse, Martin didn’t bother.
(In Lord of the Rings, there’s a lingua franca that covers several regions that don’t seem to have much contact with each other – Rohan is only vaguely aware of the Shire if at all – and that lingua franca is the Hobbits’ native tongue, which is convenient because they aren’t the sorts of people who would have learned a foreign language.)
@Lena,
Probably well under millennia, actually. It seems like about 500 years seems to be enough time for languages to diverge, though I’m not exactly sure?
@Richard Hollander: if a story is going to focus on the nobility, just have them continentwide learn the equivalent of Latin. The author (or some haughty characters) can even point out that since those contemptible smallfolk don’t speak Westelatin, they don’t properly understand their religion, given that the ritual texts are all performed in Westelatin. They just listen to words they don’t understand (in a religion which often refers to itself as “the Word”), or murmur it along without knowing what it means, the sheep! Would it be too anvilicious if we called priests shepherds?
@Hector: the speed of language drift is highly variable and the reasons behind the variation are AFAIK not well understood. Some languages, such as Icelandic or Hungarian, appear to have changed very little in a thousand years, to the point that (in the latter case) short 11th c. inscriptions are included in schoolbooks and, while obviously not the modern language, are understandable without explanation to schoolchildren. Whereas English obviously changed beyond recognition. Several times over.
Well, there is a factor that is well understood. It is common for writing to be high-status and conservative. The limit case of this phenomenon is a religion making a big corpus of text sacred. If that happens, the whole written language will be frozen in amber as it is. But the spoken language will not. You can get a great big gap between the two if you wait long enough.
I think it is Finnish rather than Hungarian. Finnish has historically developed more slowly than other related languages. In contrast Hungarian seems to have a Slavic substratum. It is worth noting that present-day Hungarians are genetically very similar to Slovaks. The difference is mainly a matter of admixture in the Hungarians. This means the Hungarian language has to a great extent been adapted by a pre-existing population in the area. Of cause this would have affected the development of the language. Unfortunately, Hungary was until recently ruled by nationalists not seeing the point of people different from themselves having rights. Those may have claimed their own language to be closer to its Uralic origin than there is evidence for.
Moorish Spain + Barbary Coast, half-assimilated, with some distinct ‘traders and (relative) tolerance’ vibes that could be golden age Ottomans or early Renaissance Italy (Venice, Florence) seems like the intended vibe. But frankly we don’t see enough to know, in the books to date.
I’d say it’s another exception to the maximum power distance culture and we’re mostly looking at Five Kingdoms, not Six, but again we can’t be sure, and that still doesn’t really matter for Bret’s point.
@Lena:
I did not mean to give an exhaustive list. Finnish and Hungarian can both be examples of slow-changing languages. It may well be the case that from the 10th c. to the present, Finnish was more conserved than Hungarian.
It is also true that Hungarian has before that cutoff taken a lot of vocabulary from Turkic languages (just about anything to do with agriculture) and at some time from Slavic languages. And that there is no genetic difference whatsoever. It may not even make sense to speak of waves of admixture (from the 10th c. between the arriving nomadic early-Hungarians and the existing agricultural Moravians(?), through the Middle Ages, to assimilation during the 19th c. in the Habsburg monarchy) but to treat it as continuous. (Also if you find some “steppe ancestry” today, that might have arrived in the 13th century with the Cumans or the Mongols.)
Despite that, the 12th c. Funeral Oration and the 13th c. Lamentation are included in schoolbooks (in pronunciation form) and are mostly understandable. Texts older than that are not included partly because before Christianization, Hungarian was written in a wood-carving non-Latin alphabet. (Which was derived from a Steppe Turkic writing system.)
What 21th century governments have to do with how much the language changed during preceding eras is, ahem, not obvious. If anything, from the Gesta works medieval kings sponsored (which of course they did) until the 18th century, the elite tried to emphasize a relationship to the Huns. The discovery that Hungarian belongs to the Uralic (formerly Finnougric) family was at the time greeted with pushback of the form “the reindeer-herders of Lapland are less prestigious relatives to have than Attila”. (Indeed there is a stupid conspiracy theory that Hungarian isn’t Uralic, this is just a lie invented by the Habsburg Empire to …er… something something indomitable horse-nomad spirit, I think.)
I think this is yet another case on the very long list of language use and genetic ancestry having very little to do with each other. (Outside toponymy. Conquerors reliably pick some of that up from their subjects, even in cases where the latter learn the conqueror’s language without leaving the slightest impact on it. Albeit the pronunciation almost always needs some clobbering, and frequently the conqueror’s word for what type of terrain feature this is gets tacked on.)
The Hunnic language is unclassified due to insufficient evidence. Unless we can follow styles of artefacts claiming to be culturally descended from the Huns is unverifiable.
@Basil Marte,
Whereas English obviously changed beyond recognition. Several times over.
Right, and it’s interesting that *most* of that change seems to have happened in a relatively short period. I can read Shakespeare pretty easily, Chaucer (in the original) with difficulty, and Beowulf might as well be Greek or Russian. So, most of the change seems to have happened over 400 years.
Like you I am a non-native English speaker. I can read 17th century English without too much trouble but has very little experience with anything older. The changes before the time of Geoffrey Chaucer were likely even faster. I would say less than 300 years from the Norman Conquest to Black Death. What would have happened would be a significant expansion and possibly partial replacement of the vocabulary. These would have been accompanied by some simplification of inflictions but not as much as in Afrikaans or Yiddish.
@Hector: (belated reply to your Saturday post)
Depends on *which* view of Spain and the Middle East you take into account. Of course GRRM himself is American, and in the USA, the stereotypes that I’m thinking of are to a large extent associated with the Middle East. Stereotypes like “hot-blooded” and “easily angered”. But in the more northerly parts of Europe, those particular stereotypes are associated with Southern Europe, too. And I guess it’s at least theoretically possible that GRRM, despite being American himself, is aware of that.
For me, what puts Dorne very much closer to “like Spain” rather than “like the Middle East” is the fact that they clearly have the Westerosi tradition of knighthood, like Spain had the European tradition of knighthood back in the day. I mean, the probably most famous novel ever written by a Spaniard is about a man who really really wants to be a knight.
American ignorance on geography is the basis of standing jokes in Sweden, Norway and Canada. It would not surprise me if a lot of Americans think everyone north of the Rio Grande speak the same language unless they are recent immigrants. No-one ever told them that Canada has a considerable French-speaking minority. (Canada was a French colony before it became a British one.) Or that the Southwest has Spanish-speaking minorities dating back to before its American conquest. Similarly, they might well be unaware that many languages spoken by Native Americans and Eskimos still exist. To such a person “everyone on the entire continent speaks the same language” would seem plausible. I think “the mother tongue of the viewpoint characters is the lingua franca of the region” is better. Although it is a bit contrived in the case of the unassuming hobbits.
When I wrote “loads and loads of language would naturally arise over millennia” I was thinking about Europe. The linguistic diversity of Europe is considered moderate by global standards. I am also using a restrictive definition of Europe not including Anatolia or anything east of the Ural Mountains or the Ural River. Europe according to this definition has at least THREE DOZEN regional majority languages. This diversity is the accumulated result of millennia of smaller population movements, various conquests, cultural absorption and gradual divergence.
@Lena Synnerholm:
” The linguistic diversity of Europe is considered moderate by global standards. I am also using a restrictive definition of Europe not including Anatolia or anything east of the Ural Mountains or the Ural River. Europe according to this definition has at least THREE DOZEN regional majority languages. This diversity is the accumulated result of millennia of smaller population movements, various conquests, cultural absorption and gradual divergence.”
Somehow, you’re reminding me of how, years ago, Mark Rosenfelder aka zompist posted a post on his own forum about how, if Earth would be a fictional place invented by a team of world-builders, the distribution of language families might have come about. To quote:
“Yeah, the mega-thread probably went something like this:
Sam: Here’s the final map,
Lenny: Is that a penis?
Sam: It’s a peninsula. OK, everybody pick a location and a family. Remember, we want it to be diverse and naturalistic.
Gerald: Top of this area. Indo-European.
Ross: I’ll take the area to the east. Indo-European.
Greta: I’ll take this little peninsula… just east of the penis. Indo-European.
Alia: I wanted that area… how about if I take this tiny little area right above you? Indo-European.
Sam: You can take bigger areas, you know. A few empires and such are naturalistic.
Lenny: I take the penis. Indo-European. Oh, we’ve also spread to this entire continent to the west.
Gerald: That’s not even close to your peninsula. Fine, my family takes the northern continent. Also this big island continent in the east.
Ross: My area extends all the way across the top of the map.
Sam: Sigh. Please, we can’t have the whole world be one family. I’ll take this area in the center. Semitic.
Irene: I’ll take the region to the east of that. Indo-European.
Jake: I’ll take the eastern half of the mega continent and all these islands.
Sam: Oh come on, you can’t take an area that big.
Jake: Fine. Just this little island group then, and it’s an isolate.
Cory, Jake’s younger brother: I’ll take this peninsula. Jake’s family.
Jake: You can’t be right next to me and you can’t be in my family.
Sam: He can be next to you if he wants. But Cory, Jake wants to be an isolate.
Cory [reading Jake’s notes]: Yeah, yeah.
Inge: I want this big area east of Irene. Indo-European.
Sam: Goddammit. Fine. I’m taking the coast opposite this Indo-European megafamily so nobody can make more Indo-European there.
Calvin: I have a great idea for an Indo-European language which…
Sam: No more land grabs.
Calvin: It’s OK. It’s a family that’s hung on just on the fringes of Gerald’s area.
Gerald: What? Mine is obviously the dominant language of the planet, how could a whole language family continue to exist there?
Sam: You two work it out. Since it’s not new territory, I’ll allow it.
Not shown: the group decides that their species evolved in Africa, which should therefore have the most diversity, only Ben has already grabbed most of the continent for his “Bantu” and won’t give any of it up.
Also not shown: to cover up Gerald and Lenny’s outrageous land grab, the group puts all their older and wackier conlangs on those continents in random locations.”
( https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=9638#p9638 )
I think the Atlantic-Congo languages are so widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa because they were spread by agriculture. It is uncertain if the Mande languages share an origin with them or not. Similarly, it is uncertain if the Nilo-Saharan languages share a common origin with each other or not.
@Lena,
Just to clarify, I’m a native English speaker. I was raised in the US in a very much “assimilated” family. If I can self-psychoanalze (always a bad idea) i’d guess my nationalistic sentiments are a response to that kind of deracination. As they say, “what the son seeks to forget, the grandson seeks to remember.”
I thought you were from India, thank you.
“For starters, there would be far more than seven kingdoms, because as Bret explains, vassalage polities do not scale well – past a certain point, a kingdom becomes so unwieldy that the king can’t actually keep up his horizontal ties with all the vassals ”
I do not get this. The whole point of hierarchy is that it is fractal: you only need deal with your immediate superiors and inferiors. The difference between a vassal and a servant is that a servant has no power base of his own, which means he can be commanded fairly easily. A vassal DOES have a power base of his own, which makes dealing with him more like dealing with a junior ally.
The issue is that as the kingdom becomes bigger, the king must increasingly *travel further* to be meeting and forming personal relations with the spread-out vassals, as those vassals become rulers of increasingly large nested fiefs in their own right. If a king must travel thousands of miles (with much of his court!) to visit each of his high lords, then how much time does he have for doing anything else? (Or in turn, if the lords are centralised thousands of miles from their fiefs, how do they feel about effectively being puppets for whoever they left in charge, when news or letters will be weeks and months out of date)
I find this argument quite convincing as far as it goes – but it does not go far enough to set a scale. If the Holy Roman Empire could stretch across half of Europe, how do we know that the Kingdom of Westeros cannot stretch across an area the size of South America? If the only answer is personal intuition, GRRM might have a different intuition.
There is also the fact that the first Kings of Westeros could travel around their Kingdom by dragon, and their kingdom has been falling apart since they lost those dragons.
replying to ad9 but for some reason it won’t let me do it:
Charles V spent his life travelling from one crisis to another. I don’t think the HRE ever mustered all the troops that ostensibly owed it allegiance in one place.
The whole “dragonback” thing sort of works if you don’t think about it too hard.
Sure, you can terrify the locals into obedience. Until you leave.
*Everything* has to be done by the one guy that can travel there fast, namely the emperor. That one guy only has so many hours in the day, and what’s the point of being emperor if you’re *always* flying from one crisis to another?
And any problem that can’t be fixed via dragonfire won’t be. A bridge is out? If you had (Roman) troops you could rebuild it. Applying dragonfire to it would be counter-productive.
Even given the limits of Martin’s sense of realism, the limits of dragons as a means of power projection actually do play a role in the Targaryen conquest. This is why they never conquer Dorne- it’s a place where it’s logistically impractical for them to deploy large armies. The dragonriders of the imperial dynasty can fly around burning out keeps, but as long as the Dornishmen are determined to resist, they remain “unbowed, unbent, unbroken.” And as a dragonrider, well, you and your dragon have to sleep somewhere at some time. Be careful if a Dornish patrol finds you then.
By contrast, their conquest of the rest of the continent seems to have generally involved situations where they had at least SOME backers with armies that logistically could be moved into the relevant territory, forcing the local kings to deploy for a pitched battle… which the dragons then annihilated (the Field of Fire and the conquest of the Reach and the Westerlands). Or to hunker down in their castles… which the dragons then annihilated (Harren the Black and the conquest of the Riverlands).
And then there are multiple entire kingdoms that yield without a fight. The Eyrie’s reigning monarchs rely very heavily on the invulnerability of their royal seat; a Targaryen queen made a ‘peaceful’ visit on dragonback to make the point that that invulnerability is a fiction to a dragonrider. The North mustered and marched south, but their king yielded in the face of Targaryen forces (presumably seeing the whole ‘field of fire’ thing coming).
And my honest impression is that the Targaryen ‘yoke’ rested rather lightly on the Seven Kingdoms most of the time, which helps to explain how it was enforceable on these terms.
(also replying to ad9) But that’s just the thing, even HRE – a notoriously unstable and decentralized polity, to such extent that it can hardly be even called a single polity – was just a fraction of the size of Westeros (which is supposed to be one kingdom). Heck, even the entire European realm of Charles V, which btw was promptly broken up, was only about a third of Westeros.
Draugdur, IIRC the realm of Charles V was discontinuous – it had France in the middle of it. The eventual split separated the Iberian part of the realm on one side of France from the rest of it. Which suggests that a kingdom of that size would not be impossible, if it also rules France.
Conversely, Westeros north of the Wall is never part of the Seven Kingdoms, and half the remaining area is lost by the end of the series. The kingdom that survives the show is therefore about the size you gave of Charles V’s European possessions. This does not sound absurdly larger.
Another way of looking at this is that Japan is ~ 2000 miles long, which suggests that the smallest possible upper limit on the size of a vassalage system must be > 2000 miles on a side. Meaning 4 million square miles. South America is 7 million square miles, so I do not feel like ruling it out as absurdly impossible.
The Inca Empire stretched along most of the Andes, perhaps 3000 miles, and their administrative problems without writing must have been worse than those of Westeros. They managed.
Sure, Westeros is a lot bigger than 15th century England. But so were a lot of 15th century Empires. Being a lot bigger than 15th century England does not make Westeros impossible.
@ad9: you’re of course correct about the realm of Charles V being discontinuous, but the point was that, even if it weren’t, it’d still be only a third of Seven Kingdoms. There IS a significant difference between 1M sq.mi and 3M sq.mi. (not to mention the frankly absurd 7M sq.mi. of South America).
Regarding Japan, I’m not sure that it’s such a good example. I’m not much of an expert on Japanese history, but based on common knowledge and geography alone, I’d expect that a lot of logistical issues were solved by maritime travel which follows different logistical rules. From what we know of Westeros, it doesn’t really seem to have a similar tradition (for example, Robert travels to Winterfell by road, instead of taking a boat to White Harbours), and Westeros is significantly more “continental” anyway (geographically speaking)
A fair point about Inca Empire though. I have to admit, my knowledge there is even more shallow, it’d be in fact quite interesting to know how they “managed”. Maybe an idea for another post for or OGH – a “natural” size of a pre-modern polity, the exceptions, and how they solved the logistical issues.
A map of the Inca Empire can be found here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tawantinsuyu_(orthographic_projection).svg
They had proto-writing but not full developed writing.
ad9, Draugdur: One quibble on Japan, the 2000 miles includes Hokkaido, which wasn’t really part of Japan politically until the last couple of centuries. Before that it was ruled by the native Ainu people, before the Japanese started moving in and treating the Ainu much like the natives of North America were. That is, extremely badly.
So that knocks off at least 300 miles by my eyeballing of the maps on Wikipedia.
@ad9,
I have a *lot* of admiration for the Inca Empire, but it’s worth pointing out that the empire in its completed, maximally extended form didn’t actually last that long, less than 100 years. They began their process of expansion in, apparently, the late 1430s and were destroyed by the Spanish a century later (though a much reduced Neo-Inca rump state held out for another 40 years). If the Spanish hadn’t come along and aborted the process, they might well have split up into smaller polities over time because of the strains of holding together such a large state.
They also had some pretty clear natural advantages (one of the world’s most productive crops, one of the world’s richest offshore fisheries, etc.) that it’s not clear Westeros has.
Good you pointed out just how short-lived the Inca Empire was. There is some mythologizing making it seem several centuries old. I don’t know how those myths arose but they may have arisen later.
There is some mythologizing making it seem several centuries old. I don’t know how those myths arose but they may have arisen later.
They’ve been very influential, both in the imagination of their own descendants (indigenous and part-indigenous people of western South America), and in the imagination of the Spanish and other “western” peoples, partly because of how unusual they were, so I think that may be part of what has made them seem like they occupy a bigger chunk of history than they actually did.
@Hector: good point, I honestly have to say I also had the “myth” (that it lasted longer) in mind. In any case, the duration is one reason why I also wouldn’t count eg the Mongol Empire as an example – sure, it was a land-based medieval polity with an even bigger territory than Westeros, but it collapsed within a few decades.
@cptbutton: true, I frankly just disregarded that because we’re doing back-of-the-napkin math anyway, so 300 miles give or take doesn’t make much of a difference 🙂
There could be some misunderstandings regarding the extent of the Mongol Empire. Genghis Khan did conquer an impressive area. However, when he died this area was divided by his sons from his first marriage. These full brothers and some of their sons continued to conquer in a similar way. But “the Mongols” were not a unified polity anymore.
In theory you can have a beautiful tree model where each level rolls up to the next, and there are as many levels as you want: peasants to knights to barons to viscounts to earls to marquesses to dukes to a king; go right ahead.
In practice, this doesn’t work precisely because of the reason you’ve noted – the lower level vassals have power of their own; so the upper levels need _enough_ power that they can ‘encourage’ their juniors to stay broadly in line. But if you’re operating on a personalist vassalage model like that, there’s something of a hard cap on how much power those upper levels can manage to control within their own retinues etc.
This has the effect of keeping these systems rather flatter. Knight, lord, king is usually the common limit; with “lord” covering a lot of variation and churn. That in turn means the physical ability of the monarch to travel enough to actually stay in touch with the lords is a limit on how big such a polity can get (and you can’t necessarily just drag them all to one place, since they have stuff to do to manage their own lands and vassals).
I think there’s various definitions of “Works” here but the point is that you don’t have to deal with the vassal-of-your-vassal: You deal with your vassal and he deals with his vassal.
Now such a system has plenty of points where it might fail, but there are also plenty of points where it “works”, for a reasonable amount of time.
> the point is that you don’t have to deal with the vassal-of-your-vassal: You deal with your vassal and he deals with his vassal.
Again, in theory yes, in practice no.
You, and your retinue/direct commands, need to be reasonably well able to deal with _any_ of your vassals who gets ideas, _including_ all of their sub-vassals. You don’t need to be able to deal with _all_ of your vassals kicking off at once, but it’s really useful to be able to directly muster probably 3x or more the force that any of your vassals can bring to the table.
When you multiply that requirement up through a few levels, you end up with the top needing to be able to directly command a very substantial fraction of the realm anyway – i.e., you’re no longer looking at a primarily feudal/vassalage based system, it’s a centrally organised monarchic state.
Replying to your argument below (since I can’t do it directly, apparently) :
“When you multiply that requirement up through a few levels, you end up with the top needing to be able to directly command a very substantial fraction of the realm anyway – i.e., you’re no longer looking at a primarily feudal/vassalage based system, it’s a centrally organised monarchic state.”
That’s a thoughtful argument !
Do you have a source for it or is it a hunch ?
If the later, I’d really like to have the Pedant’s opinion on it…
What you say is logical, but logic isn’t always what directs human affairs…
(also, others have pointed how the Holy Roman Empire solved this, with the Emperor fragmenting his most potent vassals, to avoid the situation you describe)
HREGN in large
Maybe High Priest Kings would work better
“vassalage polities do not scale well – past a certain point, a kingdom becomes so unwieldy that the king can’t actually keep up his horizontal ties with all the vassals any more”
Only if we assume the king has to increase his direct vassals by the same amount with his land. He can give more land to himself and his old vassals to control directly, without creating more vassals.
“The King of the Crownlands wouldn’t be able to pay any attention to what’s going on in Dorne because he’d be busy with all his vassals and his immediate neighbours.”
well that’s one unrealistic thing about Asoaif. Most lords should have more interest in their than their neighbors’ land than flocking to Kingslanding to scheme.
> Only if we assume the king has to increase his direct vassals by the same amount with his land. He can give more land to himself and his old vassals to control directly, without creating more vassals.
This requires a corresponding increase in administrative capacity by the king and existing vassals, to manage larger allocations of land directly.
> That’s what make the sense of wonder of this world, and makes the thought experiment interesting : what if England was a hundred times larger ?
The problem is that GRRM doesn’t understand the history or the underlying political/technological/etc constraints that you would need to marshal to actually explore that thought experiment. Instead he just multiplies everything by 100 and assumes it’ll work out.
There is a reason my post-apocalyptic world don’t have any continent-spanning empires. The closest thing is Australia which manages to keep together over many centuries. Yet with the exception of the Murray – Darling River system all their settlements are near the coasts. These are not that numerous either as arable land is so scarce. With irrigation, terra preta, crop rotation and high-yield crops inherited from technological civilisation it still can’t sustain more people than Ireland. An island 1% of its size!
I think the answer is clear: You get the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, with the major rivers dominating strategy – and all players trying to develop strong and well-administered states to survive.
from what I know, there didn’t seem to be a lot of river battles in the Spring and Autumn period. Also it is still a quite feudal society compare to the late Warring States period. Most “states” around this time were just small feudal domains, land battles with aristocrats on chariots were the norm, and code of honor were expected to conducted on the battlefield.
Apparently, George Martin’s idea of epic proportions is making things arbitrarily bigger without understanding their consequences.
Exactly. He has no grasp of scaling theory, and seems never to have heard of Haldane’s On Being the Right Size.
John Haldane understood the square-cube law a century ago. However, I want to point out that there are small animals like lemmings living on the Artic tundra. I think they survive the winters there by taking shelter under the snow protecting them from the worst cold. On the other hand there is a reason non-Sauropod dinosaurs never grew heavier than the largest elephants contemporary with humanity. Sauropods could grow something like five times as big but were slow and relatively stupid animals. To survive they would have relied on a high reproduction rate and the very few reaching adulthood being too big for predators to take on.
@Steve Morrison,
I was going to bring up Haldane’s essay, but you beat me to it!
One interesting thing about that essay is that he does, in a short aside, apply it to human societies as well as to animals.
Yes, scale issues do apply to human societies as well although it is less clear-cut. There is a reason societies orders of magnitude different in population are not organised the same way.
the problems with large armies is how to feed them on the campaigns. At some point they wouldn’t be able to live on the local countryside alone and need a proper supply line from home.
This series is great, and was more or less perfectly timed, as I recently started running a TTRPG campaign in a homebrew setting, where the behavior of a pre-state army is fairly important to the plot I had planned.
I ran an Elder Scrolls campaign for the last few years (it fizzled out due to burnout on my part beginning of this year), and I also felt like Bret’s writing (although of course not this series, I don’t have a time machine) helped me a lot with making sense of political developments. Over time I did subtly bend Elder Scroll’s ideas of ruling to be more in line what’s historically feasible. That also makes it easier to deal with the oddball effects of the player party, because you have a firmer grasp on how the rulers might think and what they might consider important.
Interesting article again. I understand Jackson’s decision to give Gondor’s armies a very distinct look from Rohan and the other factions, and to play up the idea of Gondor as a state with a professional army, but the movie look has always bothered me, especially the extensive use of plate armour. But I have the feeling that the Gondor armour has become so iconic and influential in pop culture that a more book accurate depiction would not go over well with audiences today.
On your point that Gondor is likely modelled on eastern Rome – Minas Tirith is often compared to Constantinople, but its description in the books reminds me much more of Mystras, the capital of the Despotate of Morea, which outlasted Constantinople for a few years. I don’t think Tolkien had Mystras actually in mind, but both its look and general vibe (the mountain stronghold-capital of a severely diminished empire, whose former actual capital has fallen) fits Minas Tirith quite well, I think.
I am under the impression they are Ancient Greek inspired.
What, Minas Tirith? I don’t really think so.
Ancient Greece was organized around city-states. Gondor is specifically a realm with multiple centers of power all subordinate and unified into a single ‘kingdom’ (granted there’s no king but the Stewards are de facto kings in the same way that Roman emperors were despite all those polite fictions of refusing a crown and just being the ‘first citizen’ or whatever).
Ancient Greece didn’t have a legendary past in which its forebears (the Numenoreans and the early post-Fall ‘Faithful’ refugees of Elendil and Isildur’s generations) built colossal architecture like the Argonath and Minas Tirith itself.
Gondor and Minas Tirith are a much better fit for a number of other civilizations (such as the Byzantines), I think.
I was referring to the design of their armour only. Of cause Minas Tirith is nothing like an Ancient Greek polis.
Tey used maille
The Ancient Greeks used several different materials for armour at the same time. It becomes like that if the soldiers are buying their equipment themselves.
Despite being an avid reader of ASOIAF, I didn’t know until today that there was a House Broom. I learn something every time I check out this blog!
And speaking of ASOIAF, your section on it focuses on armies of Westeros south of the Wall. Do you plan on discussing the armies of those north of the Wall as well?
I guess the Dothraki have been examined in detail, but I do have vague memories of the Wildlings’ assembled forces being a hodge-podge of different tribal contingents.
House Broom’s words “We Sweep Clean.”
“Westeros produces very large, surprisingly uniform armies which are not obviously organized into the retinues of smaller lords but rather function as large field armies tied explicitly to the largest vassals of the crown”
I really don’t think this is the case. I think the show is leaking into your memory of the books. Let me go point by point.
“It is much smaller (no 100,000 man strong Tyrell armies!), more fragmented and much less ‘regular.’ Not only does the king have to care what Tywin Lannister thinks, but Twyin Lannister has to care what Lord Broom thinks and Lord Broom has to care what his retainers think and so on. Tywin’s Lannister army would likely be broken up into dozens of irregularly sized and structured retinues (of which his own would be the largest). ”
Let’s put aside the size of Westerosi armies. Martin is famously terrible at numbers and so many of the numbers that appear in the books are outright nonsense.
But in the books over and over we shown larger lords (like Tywin) having to care about what lesser lords think. This isn’t in evidence as much in the first book (because we don’t have the POV of any of these larger lords and because it’s still the first book and Martin hasn’t had time to flesh out who these smaller lords are) and the Lannister vassals are noted specifically as being unusually and remarkably subservient to Tywin (both compared to how the same vassals acted in the past and in other regions) but we get constant references in the books about how difficult it is to wrangle Riverlands and Reach vassals and again and again AGAIN we have lesser lords doing their own things or at least trying to. For example in the first few books you can see Lord Bolton steadily working to undermine rival lords by putting their retinues in dangerous places (for example the Umber retinue being put in the van at the Green Fork or the Glovers and Tallharts being sent to Duskendale where they get mangled) while keeping his own retinue and those of friendly lords relatively unscathed by putting them in safer positions.
As far as the retinues, those are right there in the books. For example in the Battle of the Green Fork in the first book a lot of these specific retinues are mentioned. The Lannister personal infantry retinue is the red cloaks of Lannisport (an urban city watch/militia) who are noted as being unusual for all having red cloaks, the Karstark pikemen, Tyrion’s band of mountain clans, etc. etc. I don’t think the kind of uniformity of Westerosi armies (in which EVERYONE in the Lannister army is a red cloak) exists in the books and I’m not sure what’s the source of your assertion that Westerosi armies are especially “regular” in the books, in the books they are portrayed as Medieval hodge podge retinues of retinues and the red cloaks are only Tywin’s personal infantry retinue and FAR from the bulk of the army.
Martin’s medieval armies seem like a pretty clear example of retinue of retinues with elite cavalry and brigaded houshold infantry and I’m not sure where you’re getting it being anything else (the show is whole different beast of course).
Now Martin DOES get a lot of details wrong. As you note there aren’t enough unlanded knights and mounted men-at-arms, although we do get examples of them like the Cassel family. Also Martin doesn’t know the nuts and bolts of how brigaded peasant infantry is raised but he’s obviously read books that include that kind of infantry and is trying to replicate it. But in general, Martin’s armies look a lot more like Medieval armies and you’re claiming.
“To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with enjoying these stories; rather my critiques emerged in a period – now largely passed, thankfully – where it was common to claim that George R.R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities.”
I think it’s pretty clear that George R. R. Martin’s work represented a truer or more faithful vision of medieval vassalage-based polities. Not because Martin’s historical knowledge is that deep, he has a pretty thin pop history view of Medieval societies that gets a lot wrong it’s just that the competition in terms of fantasy world building WAS JUST THAT BAD. I remember in 1996 when A Game of Thrones came out it was like a breath of fresh air compared to standard 80’s/90’s fantasy world building. A lot of what we had at the time was having Tolkien, filter that through D&D, and filter THAT through D&D-inspired fiction. There was so much fantasy fiction that was inspired by other fantasy books that had been inspired by other fantasy books and on and on that they were often really disconnected from historical inspirations and were getting things WILDLY wrong, so Martin’s very flawed pop history understanding looked a lot better in comparison despite goofy shit like 100,000-man Medieval armies.
These days thanks to the internet it’s a lot easier for world builders to research various things so the general standard isn’t as bad as in 1996 when A Game of Thrones came out, but there is still so much Ren Faire fantasy (in which everyone has modern ideas with a Medieval palette swap) out there that A Song of Ice and Fire is still WELL above par in terms of realism , even though there are serious gaps in Martin’s understanding of Medieval polities (such as most people not taking their own religion seriously enough).
As an addendum, this: “acknowledge that these polities are going to really struggle to employ good infantry at scale (lacking the revenues to recruit mercenaries or the social systems to effectively mobilize their peasantry)” is already present in the books.
In the books it’s pretty clear that Westerosi polities DO struggle to employ good infantry at scale, with better infantry retinues (such as the urban city watch/militia of Lannisport) being specifically called out as exceptions that can’t be deployed at scale and we do see Westerosi polities not have the financial resources to recruit mercenaries at scale, with one of the few exceptions being the Brave Companions who are bargain bin mercenaries only recruited in limited numbers by the exceptionally rich (in the books, the bit about the mines running out is show only) Lannisters. Again you’re telling Martin to do…what he’s already doing.
Now I don’t want to go too far in defending Martin, his pop history view of the Middle Ages is maddeningly inaccurate at times and his sense of scale is terrible and any time he gives us a number it’s probably utter nonsense…it’s just that the specific criticisms you’re making of him here seem to be things that only apply to the show and are things that the books already do at least somewhat.
And I do note that the Lannisters are said to have exceptional amounts of ready cash at hand thanks to the gold mines. (thoguh even that is not enough to actually fight a major war)
But yes, I think the assumptions aren’t really correct, Martin has problems with scale and to some extent the details, but he is *broadly* recreating late-medieval feudal society for Westeros.
Exactly, I could make up a dozen point list of things that Martin gets wrong about Medieval society, but “what a Medieval army looks like” isn’t really one of them (aside for them being way too big, but then most of Westerosi world building is just “turn Medieval society up to 11, logic be damned”). This post is just chock full of stuff that apply perfectly to the show but are just really off-base when applied to the books. I think the Pedant hasn’t read the books in a while and is getting some book canon and show canon mixed up.
If Westeros has a more or less static economy (and we certainly don’t see that much indication of technological advancement or innovation), then wouldn’t “mining more gold” pretty soon run into issues with inflation?
Given the rough similarity to Western Europe, I’d assume the gold eventually ends up going to Yi Ti, Asshai, and other places in Eastern Essos in exchange for luxuries from the more complex civilizations there. Just as in our world gold and silver flowed east on the Silk Road for silk, spices, etc.
Sure, put “how Medieval economies work” in the bin of things that Martin understands on a pretty surface level, but the amount of inflation would depend on the amount of gold being mined and the size of the economy it’s circulating in, both of which are hard for us to calculate.
If you mine gold at the same rate for a thousand years, then by the thousandth year, every years production increases the world gold stock by 0.1%, which is a pretty low inflation rate. This calculation ignores the fact that some fraction of gold in circulation is going to be lost in each year, and eventually the amounts mined and lost are going to balance.
If you mine gold at the same rate for a thousand years, then by the thousandth year, every years production increases the world gold stock by 0.1%, which is a pretty low inflation rate
@ad9,
Good point!
I was thinking of things like money cowries, where it eventually became unusable as currency because of inflation. But maybe part of what was going on there was that improvements in shipping technology meant that you could suddenly obtain much larger quantities of cowries than you could before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetaria_moneta
It’s not about mining more gold so much as just having gold mines (which presumably produces X amount of gold a year) gives them more access to ready cash than their neighbours.
Ultimately that might run into inflation issues, but probably not since the “demand” for high quality metals is usually pretty high and it usually takes apretty extreme shock (like the conquest of the americas) to really budge that.
Jory Cassel was my first thought when mentioning met at arms in asoiaf. Also we see Clegane, a landed knight, pillaging around the Riverlands with a troop of what have to be men-at-arms. There are also scattered mentions of “household knights” in the service of various lords, which I think we should unlanded to be unlanded knights bachelor in the retinues of those lords. I also recall there being a discussion of the Northern lords keeping cavalry who are not knights as permanent retainers.
Had the sworn swords be men at arms or another variant of knighthood?
I think it is not exactly the same but more a variant on a common theme. The idea of knighthood was introduced to Westeros as part of the Cult of the Seven. If I understand it correctly most people in the North don’t adhere to this religion. Although they might be influenced by some ideas from it.
I can understand that fantasy fiction before “A Song of Ice and Fire” was even more unrealistic. First you had Ronald Tolkien whose writing had numerous ties to reality. Then you got the “Dungeons & Dragons” role-playing games which were at least partially inspired by him. However, these were in a different, interactive medium following its own logic. What works well for role-playing games does not have to work well for fiction literature. Which means loads of what makes fiction relatable was lost by being transferred trough role-playing games. This is not a second artist effect but at least a third artist effect.
The influence of Tolkien on Dungeons and Dragons is I think largely cosmetic: that the races of the characters you can play were in early DnD (with one exception) based on Tolkien. It just happens that that is the part that all the players have to read to get started. The actual inspiration for DnD – the books that get cited in the rules to explain what is being modelled – is much more Conan, and Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouse, and similar pulp fantasy.
Yes and no, Gary Gygax didn’t really care for Tolkien and he included some Tolkienisms mostly because his players wanted them (and things like Moria and Smaug were certainly an influence) but the heart and soul of D&D is pulp fantasy as you say, and probably even more Jack Vance’s Dying Earth than the authors you mention.
HOWEVER, Gygax didn’t remain in charge of D&D that long and a lot of people running and playing D&D were trying to jam the square D&D peg in a round Tolkien pastiche hole. There’s a looooong history of DMs getting frustrated when D&D rules don’t really do a good job of generating Tolkien-style epic quests (including me as a teen) and during the 90’s when ASoIaF came out D&D was in its second edition when it was at its most Tolkien Pastiche in terms of inspirations.
Probably no shortage of second-order inspiration, too, as the pulp fantasy that inspired D&D has never been shy about borrowing from Tolkien.
@Philippe Saner
It can only very superficial borrow from Tolkien
The pulp fantasy that imitated the original DnD largely predated Tolkien. (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, for instance, debut in 1939.) Tolkien’s influence is generally stronger on fantasy fiction from the seventies and eighties. Then I think there’s an iterative process where DnD starts to become its own influence on the fantasy fiction that’s influencing it.
Right, and even the stuff that wasn’t filtered through D&D influences was often fiction inspired by fiction inspired by fiction without much knowledge of the historical inspirations of a lot of that fiction so you had a lot of photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. It’s hard to overstate how much ASoIaF was a breath of fresh air in a genre in 1996. Also I was 16 at the time that ASoIaF came out and while I loved history I didn’t know enough history at the time to spot the many weaknesses Martin has when it comes to understanding the Middle Ages. As far as I could tell then it was perfectly realistic and a lot of other people were in the same boat as me at the time.
The first problem is the discrepancy between distances and travelling times stated. The later treat the Seven Kingdoms as if they were the size of the British Islands. Then it is clear George Martin does not really understand subsistence. Peasant agriculture can’t store enough food to make it through all those sudden and unpredictable climate shifts. Similarly, you can’t have a society living mainly on horse meat and milk. Moreover, the degree of inbreeding described would not work in reality. Unless there is magic involved in the very process of reproduction I would not accept that.
” Peasant agriculture can’t store enough food to make it through all those sudden and unpredictable climate shifts.”
False.
It can and it does, actually, though I’d admit in less extreme circumstances.
Sahelian – or other arid – agriculture is about storing about five years of reserves in order to survive a streak of bad years (which is why the Voulet-Chanoine column had such a death toll, it’s mostly not the people they directly murdered – even though they did a number there too – but the people who had to survive on an arid agrosystem after their reserves had been stolen).
A peasant agriculture that would need to “store enough food to make it through all those sudden and unpredictable climate shifts” would probably produce a *very* different agrosystem than “just late medieval agriculture but poorer” as we see in the show, though.
It’s difficult to tell whether that would bring more power to the lords (who have the granaries) or to the peasants (who can hide food if they are too pressured, which means that the lords would die of hunger), by the way.
Genetics in Westeros is very clearly non-Mendelian (see the persistence of certain phenotypes in various Westerosi noble families for generation after generation). To what extent this is Martin not understanding how dominant genes work and to what extent this is purposefully magical is hard to tell.
To Lien:
You are right in that it would require different agricultural methods than in Late Medieval Europe. I did not consider the possibility of agriculture in the Sahel where rainfall is unreliable. The combination of this unreliability and poor data led to the idea that the Sahara is growing. I don’t think it does permanently over the span of a human lifetime.
To Bosh:
I think it is mostly George Martin not understanding genetics. What you mention sounds like wishful thinking among promoters of juridically hereditary privileges mistaken for reality. What I thought about was primarily the Targaryens which as described as marrying brother and sister for something like ten generations. My educated guess it that a family would go extinct from inbreeding in less than half of this time. Then there is the elderly villain who is stated to have repeatedly raped his own daughter, followed by doing the same to the resulting daughter, and possibly for one more generation. All is told to emphasis just how evil he is.
@Lena Synnerholm if you actuall y go through the targ famil tree there is actually less inbreeding than you’d expect with a few generations of inbreeding interspersed with a few generations of outmarriage and back and forth.
Indeed, and there have been at least three occasions where the heir to the throne was a Targaryen without the Targaryen look. But none of those heirs lived long enough to actually inherit.
The Lannisters are still blonde, after many centuries of intermarriage with other Houses. (Lord Tywin married a fellow Lannister – his second cousin – but that isn’t the standard practice for his House.)
Robb Stark has the most distinctive feature of both of his parent’s Houses – the Stark facial shape and the Tully hair and eye color. And he ends up being essentially the leader of both of those Houses.
I think there’s something more going on than just weird genetics. I think the gods or fate or something has an idea of what each House should look like, and makes sure the head of the House always has that look.
Is it only the head of each House and not the entire House? Then the gods could subtly intervene to decide which ones of the parent’s genes are inherited and/or who is inheriting the post in question. Or God if monotheism is true in-universe.
Just the heads of house. House membership is inherited from the father, but appearance is inherited from either or both parents. For example, some of Lord Stark’s children look like him and some look like their mother, but they’re all members of House Stark.
“I can understand that fantasy fiction before “A Song of Ice and Fire” was even more unrealistic.”
Depends on the fantasy in question. A lot of it was fairy-tale logic, either intentionally (such as “The Enchanted Forest Chronicles”) or unintentionally (fairy tales were a major inspiration). Note that fairy tale doesn’t mean NICE. Conan is a good example of a story that could be said to be based on the less family-friendly sorts of fairy tales.
That said, there were a lot of authors that integrated realism into their fantasy. “The Crystal Cave”, for example, attempted a semi-realistic retelling of Arthurian legend from Merlin’s perspective, and outside the obviously mystical elements does a reasonably good job of being realistic. There were also some neat combinations of fantasy and science fiction that you don’t get anymore. And some delightfully absurd stories, such as the Myth, Inc books and Xanth, which directly play into the absurdities of fantasy. Myth, Inc at least attempts to inject a level of realism into the story. Xanth happily runs rough-shod over realism, but in a way that acknowledges that it exists. Discworld is also surprisingly realistic (aside from the unrealistic parts, which are explained in the world-building) and predates Game of Thrones (the book). The Chronicles of Amber are a good example as well–again, the parts where they become unrealistic (the huge armies, the magical powers, etc) are all explained in-universe, with the added benefit of the main character not being a particularly adept student of magic so there’s a lot he (and therefore the reader) doesn’t understand.
I think what helped a lot of earlier fantasy was its scope. Like, in the first Myth, Inc. book the plot largely revolves around finding out who killed Skeeve’s mentor. Arthurian legend confines itself to a small group of islands. A lot of fantasy is just internal squabbles within a kingdom, squabbles where the economics of raising an army don’t come into play. We don’t need to go into detail about how Maleficent raised an army; she’s a baroness with her own lands, of course she does it the way her people always have, we can focus on what she does with that army.
As for Martin, he’s never impressed me with his level of realism. He has subscribed to a very specific type of aesthetic–Gritty Realism–and confused that aesthetic with reality. This is a common thing, but the reality is that this aesthetic is no more realistic than any other. It’s the sort of thing that appeals to edgy teenagers who’ve just discovered that the world is harsher than their sheltered childhoods led them to believe–the kind of kid that thinks the Punisher and Deadpool are the best superheroes, and think wearing chains and smoking cigarettes is the height of rebellion (and get off my lawn, it’s after 8 pm turn the music down!)–but as adults we are not obliged to agree that this aesthetic is any more (or less, to be fair) insightful about the human condition than any others. It’s a valid perspective, but it’s just one of many and often obfuscates as much as it reveals, just like any other aesthetic taken too far.
My problem is that people may mistake the not obviously fantastical for reality. Which include things being too big to be practically useful.
I try not to trouble myself with the opinions of illiterates when discussing literature.
Note that Martin’s errors don’t fall under this because his errors undermine his entire premise. And once you dig even an inch below the surface he’s about as realistic as the Belgeriad.
@Dinwar
I think a lot of the problems with Martin’s realism or lack thereof come because he DOES dig under the surface. He provides so much detail and information on the nuts and bolts of governance that we can see his ignorance where with other authors we skim more over the surface and a lot of their ignorance of history isn’t as obvious.
Reading F&B especially makes Martin look worse since the more gaps in his history he fills in the less space there is for me to fix stuff by shoving corrective headcanon in the gap in the narrative.
Avoiding much detail is a good way for authors to handle their personal ignorance. Unfortunately, some people are ignorant of their own ignorance in the relevant area. Which leads to descriptions not working in reality.
I think Martin is similar to Rowling in that they want to tell a serious story but also want to include ridiculous details. In Harry Potter the wizards cold play a sensible sport but no, they have to play Quidditch. Westeros could have a normal wall and normal castles but no, it must have a gigantic wall and gigantic castles.
“I think a lot of the problems with Martin’s realism or lack thereof come because he DOES dig under the surface.”
Fair. Let me put it a different way: Martin tries to show under the surface, but with a very superficial understanding of the systems in question. This has him creating societies that are about as realistic as many of the fairy-tale sorts of societies (and ironically LESS realistic than something like Conan’s world). But that varnish of apparent realism, and the ’90s/early 2000s belief that Gritty Realism was a more “real” aesthetic than other sorts of aesthetics, has people holding him up as the paramount author when it comes to realism.
It’s why his works are such good topics for this blog: His errors are numerous, cover a broad swath of military and cultural issues, and are popular enough to drive engagement.
Agreed that skimming over the stuff you don’t understand is generally the best way to deal with it.
Tone also helps. In a story where realism isn’t expected you don’t have to be so careful about movement speed and the like. No one cares if the Black Pearl does 300 nautical miles between noon and noon in the Doldrums, but the dear Surprise is limited to what wind and sail allow. No one cares how fast Carrot got to Uberwald, just that he met his girlfriend on the way. If Martin’s world had magical crops, or rode even marginally fantastical beasts (the Pleistocene megafauna has a lot to choose from here), a lot of the complaints would vanish. A crop that can produce 100x the food wheat does would be a huge change in economics, but would also signal to the reader that this isn’t England and the normal rules don’t apply.
Some Pleistocene megafauna are mentioned in the books. But its usefulness could still be misunderstood the same way as nomadic people’s relationship with the horse is misunderstood.
I think my perceptions are also skewed by the amount of shlock fantasy I read as a kid (I was 16 when AGoT game out) then I was just grabbing anything off the library shelves that had a picture of a dragon on it. A read through some many books that nobody would think to read now, and the more historical fiction tone of ASoIaF did feel so much more realistic to me at the time. Of course if I go back and read older fantasy now I can pick and choose much better stuff, but in 1996 ASoIaF came like a breath of fresh to me personally and it took me a while to figure out how limited Martin’s knowledge of history is (you can hardly blame a 16 year-old for limited knowledge of history though). Still I think that a lot of the Pedant’s criticisms of Martin in this post are unfair and criticize him for things that the show does that he doesn’t do (instead of the many things he does get wrong himself).
I agree that Bret may mix up the book series and the TV series. Some things the TV series handles particularly badly are handled better in the books.
To attempts an analogy based on last week’s discussion:
GRRM = Herodutos: Claims to be based on real history, and gets some things right, but shouldn’t de read uncritically, generally gets less reliable as one travels East, and you definitely shouldn’t trust any of the numbers he gives you.
Most other fantasy = Homer: Evokes the vague idea of a past age, but not really grounded in any real period of history.
Who’s Plutarch, then?
Plutarch would be how people who don’t like Tolkien view Tolkien (whereas people who like Tolkien would view him as, I dunno, Polybius?)
“The Lannister personal infantry retinue is the red cloaks of Lannisport (an urban militia)”
So which is it, then? Those are two completely different things, working on different principles. Including a different way by which come into their red cloaks, probably implying a different degree of uniformity of said cloaks!
If they are the foot equivalent of household unlanded knights, then the lord gives them livery (the lord buys all the cloaks from one source). (Or, corresponding to all these male retainers, there are numerous female members of the household, and the lady can assign some of them the task of making the cloaks. They can check each other’s work, and probably one of them, formally or informally, acts as foreman for/over the rest.) Whereas if they are an urban guild or somesuch, who adopted the cloak as a symbol of membership status (quite independently from the Lannisters) for some reason, then they probably each buy their own. (Or have their wives make them at home.)
Right, Martin is very imprecise about this kind of thing so we don’t get any information about how the Red Cloaks are raised and equipped so we have to guess.
But there is a very real distinction between:
-Book canon: the Red Cloaks are a specific element of the Lannister army drawn only from the city of Lannisport that has relatively uniform livery and armor and which trained to a higher standard than the bulk of Lannister infantry which is default peasant levies.
-Show canon: basically the entire Lannister army looks like a uniform standing army.
I’m not claiming that Martin’s understanding of all of this is more than a very surface level pop history understanding of Medieval armies, it’s just that in this post the Pedant isn’t criticizing things that Martin gets wrong (which are legion!) but criticizing things that the show gets wrong but which Martin mostly gets right, which is inaccurate on his part.
You mean like WoT, Malazan
Not a fantasy army, but if societies always recreate their social structure on the battlefield, I wonder what the armies of the superstates in 1984 look like. We know that they’re fairly small, and I think it’s reasonable to assume they don’t give weapons to proles.
The problem with trying to do an analysis of 1984 is that the worldbuilding is such that one almost wonders if “Oceania” is actually confined to Britain and is that world’s equivalent of North Korea.
For example, the fighting is implied to be on a continental scale, but none of the characters is in the military or knows anyone who’s in the military. For that matter, the one time we’re shown a military action (the sinking of the ship) instead of hearing about it over the radio, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, based on the information provided by O’Brien regarding the geopolitics of the world.
1984 is really more about the psychology of living ng under totalitarian rule than any reasonable world building so it doesn’t always make the most sense.
One bit that always struck in my craw was this line: “Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.” Why would the Thought Police be especially efficient though? In real totalitarian states we find all kinds of inefficiencies in their political police forces.
That line in 1984 comes from Goldstein’s book, which is itself party propaganda. Though we have reason to believe the book is mostly in universe, the party also clearly wants people to believe the Thought Police irresistibly capable, so they would put that in the book true or not.
Clever, I like it. I still think Orwell underestimated how much damage a million people like Julia running around would do to a totalitarian state, however…
This is what Václav Havel called “power of the powerless”. Authoritarian regimes are dependant on the actively dissident being few enough for them to be kept down. If too many actively resist it the regime falls. Exactly this has happened on multiple occasions in my lifetime.
The thing is, Orwell was writing at a time when Nazi Germany had just been beaten down at enormous sacrifice on the part of several other major nations, and when the Soviet Union had just accomplished one of the biggest successful feats of “map painting” in European history- one that was not reversed within the lifetime of most people Orwell’s age. Totalitarian states looked more dangerous and it was easier to overestimate them.
Their power and stability has really been overestimated. My parents have met fellow Baby Boomers which grew up in the belief that Russia had “always” been Communist. In fact Communists seized power there late in WWI. I personally saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union on TV. (Every time this event gets mentioned I get the mental image of the Soviet flag being lowered at the Kremlin.) Later I learned just how horribly flawed this society was. I now consider planned economy to have an expiration date of less than a human lifetime.
@Bosh: “1984 is really more about the psychology of living ng under totalitarian rule than any reasonable world building so it doesn’t always make the most sense.”
I’d go even farther and argue that it’s even to some extent about the kind of mental, err, discipline that many followers of all kinds of political causes and movements *completely voluntarily* subject themselves, too.
As worldbuilding, though, it seems to have been fairly explicitly based on James Burnham.
“subject themselves, too.” was of course meant to be “subject themselves to”. D’oh!
It is decades since I last opened “1984”, but I think that “Oceania” is essentially America+Britain+Australia, which is reasonable, considering that this was how the American assumed that Western Europe would easily fall to a Soviet aggression.
The war itself is, I think, mainly inspired by Keynes’s war-time observation that the economies of industrial countries actually work better with the overproduction of resources being destroyed senselessly in war. So, you have a steady war of attrition maintaining the legitimacy of the governments, carefully calibrated for such a balance that active operations take place only in marginal areas.
It is decades since I last opened “1984”, but I think that “Oceania” is essentially America+Britain+Australia,
It’s bigger than that- it includes all of the Americas (north, central and south) as well as the southernmost portions of Africa, and then, as you say, the British Isles and Australia.
The war itself is, I think, mainly inspired by Keynes’s war-time observation that the economies of industrial countries actually work better with the overproduction of resources being destroyed senselessly in war.
Paul Sweezy developed that idea even further in his 1967 book Monopoly Capital, although he also went into other ways that capitalist economies could use up the surplus generated by underconsumption. He was writing from a Marxist/Communist perspective so his views might not be congenial to everyone, but I think he’s described as having tried to synthesize Marx and Keynes (and was certainly, at least, very much influenced by Keynes).
I’m not a big fan of Orwell’s politics but I have a lot of respect for his talent as an essayist (most of the “ideas” he’s trying to convery in 1984 are also present somewhere in his essays). I don’t think he was a good fiction writer at all, though. He was a lot better at rhetoric than he was at world building.
I *am* a big fan of Orwell’s politics, but I agree that he was a much better essayist than fiction writer. Even 1984 is to a large extent an essay dressed up as a novel.
I continue to be rather baffled as how this economic theory continues to be respected.
– It is true that for as long as the government can borrow, or hike taxes with popular assent because there’s widespread support for the goal it is to be spent on, the government can temporarily act as a seemingly bottomless pit of demand, increasing utilization rates for all kinds of resources (including the employment rate). But obviously this is temporary, simply because if it could be maintained over time, the economy would simply grow to match (and this government-feeding sector of production would increase as a fraction of the whole economy). Another reason it cannot be maintained is that lending capacity and popular support for taxation are not infinite. If you want to run a “forever war” at high economic mobilization (or even without it!), the public will, after not too long, start asking questions about the theory of victory, so you get things like the WW1 French mutinies, or Vietnam-era anti-war protests, and so on.
– It is obviously, hilariously false that wasting output on war is better than the alternative use of those resources.
– There is an interesting case to be made that the war allows some very productive general-purpose investments and for some coordination problems to be resolved that couldn’t otherwise be done. For example, WW2 gave a massive boost to civilian air travel by building lots of long paved runways, by spending generously on aerospace R&D, by cutting through some patent thickets, etc. Why these worthwhile things couldn’t be done in peacetime should be understood, and should inform some rigorous “political worldbuilding” that comes up with ways to solve the problem. But I don’t think the lesson should be framed as “war helps with this kind of problems”. That would imply that the way to solve NIMBYism is to start WW3. Uh, that might not be literally false (when rebuilding nuked cities, setbacks and parking minima will be disregarded), but has a severe case of baby-with-the-bathwater syndrome. Anyway, there should be a way to do seisachtheia (“shaking off of burdens”) without war.
– The original observation about “overproduction” is incomplete. The US geared up to do a tariff (Smoot-Hawley), the markets panicked that Congress will actually do it, and eventually they did end up passing it. Atlantic trade volume fell by 2/3rd or so IIRC, much more steeply than the economies on either side. So economies both lacked some inputs and accumulated some big piles of “surplus” output. People walking around, like Keynes, could see and trip over the piles of surplus, but they didn’t see and thus didn’t notice the missing inputs. Hence the flawed conclusion of “overproduction crisis” and this whole line of questioning about “what to do with surplus; maybe war?”.
to be clear, it’s very obvious that orwell believed that sort of rude Keynesianism, or at least the party in the book does. but yes it’s nonsense in the real world.
The war in 1984 is not described as being fought for economic reasons to make Oceania richer. It is being fought for political reasons to make Oceania poorer.
Or at least, to make an excuse for Oceania being poor and to justify the Thought Police, rationing, purges, war fever, isolation from the rest of the world and so on.
The war is not meant to be economically rational.
Constant war as an excuse for oppression makes sense to me. Modern wars are economic lose-lose situations anyway.
“For example, the fighting is implied to be on a continental scale, but none of the characters is in the military or knows anyone who’s in the military. ”
As is pointed out in the book, the number of people actually fighting is fairly small, and the important frontiers are never fought over. Oceania has not so much a war as an excuse. Recall that North Korea is still officially at war with South Korea. Have they exchanged many shots recently?
It’s been a little bit, but I don’t think the book ever says that the number of people fighting is comparatively small.
Furthermore, we’re shown prisoners brought back from the front in some quantity, the fighting described at the book’s finale involves the entire Congo region, and the “debatable land” that the three powers fight over seems to consist of Africa between the Mediterranean and Angola, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia.
I do not have a copy to hand either, but IIRC a couple of thousand POWs are to be boiled alive during the climax to Hate Week, although Oceania swaps sides at that point and I think we do not see what happens to them. But that is not a lot compared to the hundreds of thousands captured in Normandy and Tunisia in WW2, for example. The armies of Oceania’s wars might be a hundred times smaller than those of the world wars, and recruited mostly from the areas fought over.
1984 is built on expanding on the 20th century totalitarian states. They absolutely 100 percent arm the proles, the proles are the ones who fight and die for the state and probably a fair percentage of them end up in senior leadership within the armed forces. It would be like how it is in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the army is closely monitored and controlled by commissars within the armed forces.
Brent F,
It is, but it’s also an expansion on Orwell’s speculations here, and elsewhere:
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.
He was predicting that the world of the future would be characterized by super-states that were effectively unconquerable, so in a world like that it wouldn’t be surprising if warfare is actually a smaller scale endeavor than it was for, say, the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The purpose is to use up the surplus without allowing it to trickle down to the masses, and to keep people in a constant state of agitation, not actually to make military gains in the traditional sense.
This is partially how the Cold War developed. The world became dominated by only two superpowers. However, other countries became allied to them rather than actual part of them.
I was wondering how the Rohirrim infantry cohesive principle works. You describe it as the infantry “clumping upp” around the magnates. Due to the strong clientage bonds, however shouldn’t we expect the magnate to be part of the heavy cavalry aristocracy. So the magnate is “over there somewhere” instead off with his infantry for them to “congeal around”. So how does this work?
Helm’s Deep is a special case because everyone is inside a fortification and the magnates are therefore dismounted. (Barring Theoden’s last desperate riding out, and that’s just with his household retinue.)
On a larger battlefield, medieval armies normally divided into “battles”, often three, each of which would usually contain all the troops from a given area. So the Westfolder cavalry could be leading the vanguard, followed by the Westfold infantry. They’re not too far away.
When a battle goes badly, banners and livery / heraldry help a lot. Look for the unit of heavy cavalry with the lord’s banner, head for that. Or, look for the infantry wearing your particular combination of colour and shield design, head for that. Infantry in medieval armies usually don’t have enough status to have their own coats of arms, but it was very common for lords to provide their infantry with a cheap garment like a modern high-viz vest that they would wear in battle.
And the Rohirrim magnates are still comfortable fighting on foot Anglo-Saxon / Viking style, as shown by Eomer wanting to form a shield wall when he thinks all is lost at Pelennor Fields. So rejoining the infantry and dismounting is part of their accustomed fighting style, and it’s something everyone knows to do, even if they’re not formally training for it.
How does the Rohirrim infantry cohesive principle of “bunching upp” around the magnates work if as we expect the magnate is part of the mounted aristocracy. So the magnate is not with his infantry for them to “congeal around”. So how does this work?
It works because the magnate is, in a sense ‘low’ enough – socially close enough – for the infantry to know. He’s the big man of their small village, rather than a distant lord in a big castle.
I can imagine that working, though maybe moreso for morale then for cohesion. Would I be right in thinking that this principle would be stronger if the magnate was physically with the infantry?
I have also been wondering for a long time how the infantry is operated in these kinds of systems, who makes sure that they end upp in the correct place in line, or how do you make infantey like this advance. Because it seems like all the authority figures are not there to coordinate this kind off thing.
And thank you for the quick answer.
That explains it from the perspective of cohesion. Maybe I misunderstood the question, but I think it is about on the ground physical mechanics. If I am infantry in the retinue of a lower lever aristocrat, and I have a solid social relationship that attaches me to him. How does that translate to physical behavior? He’s a mounted armored warrior and is forming up with a bunch of his peers in a line of cavalry for a charge. What am I supposed to do?
Same question and extending to the knight lance (the unit) as well. Since a knight lance is a mix of the knight and his household member and clients, many of which would be on foot. What happens to the infantry when the knight and all of (total single digits) his riders are joining a cavalry block?
FWIW, I suspect the answer is that you, as an infantryman, are led into battle by your lord’s senior servant (steward, bailiff, reeve, etc), and your social relationship with him is as strong or stronger than than your one with his master.
Another example of the underlying social relationships replicating themselves on the battlefield.
I actually meant the interaction between the 2. Looking at the other mechanics for cohesion they seem to rely on the fact that everyone is surrounded by people they either care directly about, or atleast care about how these people think of them. Basically making use of a combination of: peer pressure, personal trust and the personal relations which make you care about other people’s safety.
Notable atleast to me was how practically all of these either rely on the physical presence of the people you share such a bond with, or are atleast significantly stronger when they are present. Hence my question, my personnal conclussion was that the tighter bond between the infantry and magnates primarily helps in a morale aspect, unless the magnate is physically present such as at the hornburg. And that the primary source of cohesion where this is not the case, is the bond between the infantry, which is strengthened due to the value put in the infantry. With a secondary source being the bond to whoever leads the group, who I just like someone below always assumed to be one of the major servants/followers/subordinates of the magnate. Atleast to me this structure felt more logical.
Sorry for the block of text, but I figured this was the place to share my ideas (and have them stress-tested)
Possibly slightly out of scope here (ie. not in Westeros proper) would be the cities on the ‘shore of(?)’ the Dothraki Sea, which do seem to be small urban city-states while Danaerys is rolling them up one by one with the help of the Unsullied, who might also qualify as the “in-demand mercenaries”. Danaerys seems to have obtained their services in ways other than coin, but before she showed up I could easily see them as your “Swiss pikemen” type.
Then again, I only ever read “Song of Ice and Fire”, none of the sequelae, and quit watching the show somewhere in Season Five, so whadda I know? Thx. J.
Essosi in general are written as heavily reliant on mercenaries, clearly inspired by Martin’s (highly imperfect) knowledge of Italian condottiere.
Funnily enough, A Game of Thrones (the first book in ASoIaF, not the show), seems to imply a somewhat more centralized kingdom, closer to what you describe for the Rohirrim. In particular, the 4 Wardens (of the North, East, West, and South) are appointed by the king and, although there’s a strong expectation that the position will go to the son of the previous Warden, the king can technically appoint anyone he wants (hence Robert proposing naming Jaime Lannister as Warden of the East after Jon Arryn’s death, an idea which greatly concerns Ned).
However, after the first book, Martin more or less drops the idea of the Wardens (the lists of characters at the end of each book still mention who each Warden is, but I don’t think the title is ever mentioned in the actual text) in favour of the pure vassalage system you describe here. And, to be honest, I don’t think the Wardens ever made that much sense (the idea that the Dornish would be under the command of a Tyrell, or the ironborn under a Lannister was always dubious), so quietly retconning then was probably a good idea. However, I’m wondering if the inconsistencies you note here might be leftovers from a time when Martin was envisioning a somewhat more centralized kingdom.
The Wardens are not a priori a bad idea, especially if trying to tell the tale of a more centralised kingdom (as we’re meant to imagine it was under the Targaryens) falling apart. In Early Medieval times, especially the Carolingian period, landed titles were intended to be by appointment and there were royally-appointed war minister positions, but over the generations the expectation of “placing a man on the honor of his father” became so strong that it morphed into hereditary titles. Of course, to tell that story, Martin would have needed to pace the action out over more than one generation, which he wasn’t really good at – he didn’t even manage to actually commit to the multi-year timeskip he had originally planned.
Yeah, the Wardens are what tvtropes calls “early installment weirdness” – something from an early episode that doesn’t line up with later worldbuilding.
That said, for what it’s worth, I’ve made up a reason for the Wardens to exist that makes sense to me, at least.
Aegon the Conqueror only actually conquered six of the Seven Kingdoms; Dorne didn’t join up until generations later. So I figure there were a lot of minor wars between Dorne and the “Seven Kingdoms”, sometimes without the Targaryens being present. So you’d have the question of who is going to be in charge on the side of the “Seven Kingdoms”, and the King settled it by declaring the Lord of Highgarden to be “Warden of the South”. Then the other Warden titles got handed out as meaningless courtesy titles.
The problem is that Ned clearly doesn’t see the them as “meaningless courtesy titles”. The reason why he’s so worried about Jaime being named Warden of the East is because it “would put half the armies of the realm into the hands of Lannisters” (with Tywin already being the Warden of the West), implying the title comes with real military power.
To be clear, Ned says its a meaningless courtesy title outside of wartime. During a war with an outside threat the Wardenships matter (and Warden of the East counts for a lot of they are worried about a Targaryean restorationist invasion). Hence the recommendation that Stannis is a better appointee if they think the job needs filling with a real soldier today.
One critique I have about Game of Thrones is the earlier Targaryen history. They would not have wanted just 8 over-powerful vassals when they still had dragons. The fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire happened *while* the Emperors still had considerable power since they broke up large vassals when they could. Its just as central authority hollowed out, the Emperors had a natural incentive to align with the smaller knights, cities, and counties to protect them and utilize the support against the big powers, so they survived (The Holy Roman Empire even at its weakest was far from a state of anarchy, the extent of fragmentation was only possible *because* that top-tier title existed).
Dorne existing is fine. But the wardenships make more sense as regional commands that then become hereditary. Eg Starks and Boltons are most common families to be appointed Warden of the North. Cregan Stark starts the Dance of the Dragons crushing local opposition in the North, then as part of the peace settlement Warden of the North de facto or de jure becomes hereditary. Stormlands are a cadet branch so being oversized is more reasonable. Iron Islands no one really cares about when they are keeping to themselves. The Riverlands and upper reaches of the Mender are flat and easy to logistically project power into. My guess is The Reach expanded northeast from Highgarden and the Riverlands were created comparatively recently, perhaps during the Blackfire Rebellions. Which explains why they are the most brittle realms.
So the Arryns have had vassalage over everyone in the Wardenship of the East for generations. But the actual official title is not actually technically hereditary and if the traditional holder is underage, it may be semi-acceptable for the King to appoint someone to fill it (for that matter guardianships in actual medieval Europe). But that obviously gives tremendous power to undermine their authority to that person if so inclined.
I think the Targaryen incentives are a bit weird because whereas a Holy Roman Emperor’s power is divisible (he can raise an army and find a general to besiege your castle for him), a Targaryen emperor’s power is personal. He has to actually fly out there on his own dragon and lay waste to your castle, and he can’t do that for every petty chiseling bit of tax evasion because he’ll get the kind of reputation that makes it impossible to extract even limited taxes from the realm.
This also presents some nontrivial complications, such as knowing where to find your castle; it’s practical for the Targaryen king to know where all the major capitals of Westeros are but it’s not practical for him to memorize what every single minor town and fortification looks like from the air. Seven help him if he burns down the wrong castle!
So limiting the total number of “top vassals” to a single digit number, many of whose families were already the kings of their respective domains before the Targaryens showed up, may actually be the best the Targaryens can do. Yes, there is potential for those specific families to undermine the Targaryens’ authority, but the Targaryens have a “NUKE” button they can push on anyone who really crosses them, and each of those “top vassals” is likely to have one or more major families who would be well content to take over the position of Lord Paramount.
The other Warden’s Cardinal have reasons to exist themselves. The East for things from Essos, the North has to watch on the wildlings and the West for the Ironborn if they revert to raiding. The size of the 7 kingdoms is something that promotes this as a sensible idea.
So it makes a lot of sense within the Targaryean monarchy to have a system for someone who can take spot leadership of an issue that the King can’t or isn’t available to deal with. A lesser version of the Handship as a deputy King with lesser powers.
By the Baratheon era (and likely the late Targaryean period as well) the power of the crown has devolved to the point that its the actual nobility that matters an the Wardenships are largely defunct in practice.
So its both early period weirdness and something that can make sense in context.
You often kinda get weird stuff like that though. With titles and/or offices of various types that might be handed out by royal assent and whose powers could vary considerably. Sometimes these kinds of postions are more or less literally the king formally says “I expect you guys to listen to this guy” and the degree to which it works is entirely dependant on how much the local nobles cares about that, sometimes there’s weird paralell structures going on.
That’s one of the hardest things to get right about the Middle Ages for world builders, how much weirdness and inconsistencies there are with everything. Off the top of my head I can’t think of a single example in fiction that really gets the “paradise for rules lawyers” aspect of the Middle Ages right.
Yeah there’s the entire “Is feudalism a thing and in that case *what*?” going on because “idealized” feudalism as described basically *doesen’t* exist anywhere (*maybe* northern France for a bit, but people will argue about it) and there’s always all sorts of weird remnants, innovations, exceptions, etc. Also how the incipient (or decaying!) state structures could coexist with vassalage, various relations to cities, traditonal local assemblies, etc.
Even in northern France at the height of the High Middle Ages you had all kinds of peculiarities and complexities, having those are pretty part and parcel with a a “feudal” conception of power at its most basic (basically a thing you own personally due to being granted a right that is quite specific).
My favorite bit of Medieval complexity is in some places (relatively early Medieval northern Italy my memory says but I could be off) and times different people in a the same society could be tried by completely separate law codes as law was viewed as a precious personal inheritance.
@Bosh,
I think you refer to the fact that in Northern Italy, the Goths were, personally, under the jurisdiction of Gothic law while the population at large were judged in line with Roman law. This is not a very uncommon situation. For example, Israel still uses the Ottoman system where each ethnicity (i.e. religion) has their religious family law.
It is actually surprising how flexible this kind of system of privileges can be. Because you didn’t need to pretend that everyne is equal under the law, any new situation or social class can be accommodated by inventing a new privileged (or penalised) group with its own law.
@Finnish Reader,
For example, Israel still uses the Ottoman system where each ethnicity (i.e. religion) has their religious family law.
India does this too, to an extent. Though there’s plenty of room for controversy about how it’s been impleneted.
One problem with this system, especially in the modern age where religious authorities are weaker than they once were, is that there is actually no singular thing called “Hindu law” or “Shariah law” (leaving aside whether “Hinduism” is even a coherent concept). What the Shariah is and requires is highly contested, and that’s even more the case for Hinduism: people within each of the broad “religious traditions” hotly disagree with each other.
I understand that lawyers would tell you that even the US has a polylegal system. States have slightly different laws, and there may also be a federal law that might or might not override state law, depending on circumstances.
@Hector,
I completely agree that the system of privileges and personal jurisdictions is not really very applicable to a modern industrial society. This is precisely because it is designed to put every person to a specific social niche and to define the interactions possible for them – and the flexibility that makes market economy efficient requires that market participants can select their interactions freely and make up new forms of economic interaction without major restraints.
This is very visible if we look into the remnants of such systems: diplomats and NATO allied forces. The applicable treaties define quite wide extraterritoriality and personal jurisdiction of a foreign state for these groups, but on the other hand, the members of such classes are also closed out from being economically active members of the host society. This is incompatible with the basics of market economy, if applied to any group that you want to function as part of your economy. It is extremely inefficient to have, say, a situation where one market player would be covered by a different legal tradition and court system than the other participants or would have different bankruptcy rules than everyone else.
It’s less about markets (the different jurisdictions were dealt with by having rules about where disputes between parties of different legal status were adjudicated) than the idea of the state as belonging to all – as in all French/US citizens/British subjects equal before the state. A rejection of aristocratic or clerical privilege. After all, privilege is literally “persona law”.
@Finnish reader
Indeed, that was exactly what I was thinking of, thanks!
I think the main reason the Warden titles don’t come up much past the first book is because the first book ends with half of them rebelling against the crown, one of them being somewhere between interim and specifically adopting a neutral stance in the civil war, and the last being essentially equivalent to the royal power.
Books thereafter are dealing with a political fallout with more complexity and immediacy than whether or not Mace Tyrell is still technically Warden of the South.
Another interesting thing with seeing that cohesion play out in LOTR, is the bit describing how many of those lords died, giving us an idea of the way they might have viewed their leadership role, and reinforcing that their command was split up to be the forces they brought, not redistributed. Duilin of Morthond and his brother being specifically killed leading their archers closer to the Mumakil for instance, is a simple but accurate way to show the way command was dispersed historically.
Might be worth noting (and I didn’t see this on a quick skim of the comments above) that there are good Doylist reasons to cut the GoT show some slack on excessively uniform, excessively infantry-heavy armies. It is hella easier to arrange for a bunch of extras on foot than a bunch of extras on horses, and it is also easier to tell your prop and CGI departments “just make two hundred of these” than “make bespoke rag-tag equipment for two hundred guys.” You might be able to approximate the latter by coming up with, like, five designs for each bit of equipment and making forty of each one, so you can mix-n-match to break the uniformity, but that’s still a lot of extra work, especially when working on a TV show’s budget and production schedule.
It doesn’t make the *end result* more accurate, of course, but I do try to acknowledge when external pressures are in play. (Similar to “why is armor apparently useless in most movies?” Because it’s much, much safer for the stunt guys to hit each other at a heavily protected point of center mass like the stomach or chest than to show them going for the genuine vulnerable spots.)
Who says you need to ask them to make it? I can’t imagine that all of the clothes from the various medieval movies/tv shows just get thrown away after filming.
Yet LoTR was able to introduce a reasonable level of variation for the Rohirrim. It’;s not 200 different kinds of armour, it’s that you have 2-4 sets of armour that someone might have (in the case of the Rohirrim, textile armour or chainmail) and you can introduce variation in what armour people actually have. In the case of GOT, have the nobility in plate, for lesser nobles have the plate be in increasingly poor condition, for the infantry have textile amour, chainmail for some (Albeit I can actualyl imagine the show skipping those because chainmail is pretty expensive), with varying levels of plate for others. For denoting particularly unfortunate bastards, you can even have a smattering of people that only have a helmet.
That gets you an army that can have considerable variation in what each extra has by way of amour, yet without actually straining the budget that much.
“Yet LoTR was able to introduce a reasonable level of variation for the Rohirrim.”
And the Orcs. If you know what you’re looking for you can determine the clan and rank of many of the Orcs on-screen based on their armor. We don’t really see many Dwarves fighting, and I exclude the Hobbit movies from these considerations.
The units that were relatively uniform are the Elves and Gondor, in both cases signaling their superior discipline and abilities (think the Elves at Helm’s Deep marching in unison).
For nobility it would be ridiculously easy: Buy a bolt of cloth (white tablecloths work for this), cut a hole in the center, paint whatever design you want on it, and boom, you have a tabard. Looks historically accurate, cheap enough that any kid could afford to do it, and quick enough that you can do it the night before the filming (speaking from experience here). If you want to make it really fancy, put some ribbon around the edges; it was common enough in the Middle Ages. Okay, maybe you don’t want the grand-high-overlords to wear tabards; what about the knights? Livery was a thing in GoT, and a tabard (being a rectangle with a whole in the middle) has always been a cheap way to do this.
I’m not saying this is the only way, to be clear. What I’m saying is that this is something every Medieval re-enactor and every high school drama club that’s put on “Camelot” has done, to solve this exact issue. This is not an out-of-context problem. Another example is an oversized T-tunic (what I used to fight in). Even fancy feathers glued onto a helm would work, and be historically accurate.
Whoops — coming back with more time to read, I see that I missed where this was addressed by other commenters!
@Marie in general I very much agree with you. Making a TV show is hard work, and the battle scenes aren’t that important.
However, GoT wasn’t working on a typical TV show’s budget. (Nor is Rings of Power.) When you’ve got five million US dollars per episode, I think we can be a bit more critical.
In 2025 dollars, the Lord of the Rings trilogy cost ~$543 million. A Game of Thrones cost ~$793 million. Admittedly there was a lot more film aired for AGoT, but at the time it was being produced it was the most expensive TV show in history. If it had been a priority they could have done more diverse costuming for the extras (or varied the bits for some of the CGI creations).
On the movie side, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy had the same inflation-adjusted budget as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Not the entire PotC, just that one film. The individual films were cheaper than films like True Lies, Superman, or Cleopatra had been in their era. They had large budgets, but unlike AGoT they didn’t have the largest budget ever for their medium when they were made.
While scaling Westeros down would be the easiest way of resolving its plausibility, it would be much more interesting to try to make it work at its present large size.
Logistically speaking, you could divide Westeros into three parts: the coasts, the riverbanks, and the other inland portions. The inland regions would be de facto independent. Commanders simply cannot feed large armies in these areas and there is not a practical way to physically transport many resources out of them. Most of Westeros would be null space. It’s also plausible, given the unpredictable seasons, that the population is much less dense than in historically comparable regions like medieval Europe, which makes it harder for armies to march through as there is even less food available for plunder. The inland regions then are nothing but endless forests and fields ruled over by petty lords who are theoretically subject to the real powers on the coasts and rivers. They would probably be a good source of mercenary knights.
The coasts and the riverbanks can be supplied by maritime and riverine logistics. Armies can operate there and anywhere within a few days march, or weeks, if they have a more efficient tail. “The Seven Kingdoms” is in practice land adjacent to the accessible waterways of Westeros.
In general, this should be a famished world driven by food scarcity, which would puts selective pressure on the ability to concentrate supplies. That is to say, you would expect more farmland to be required per farmer because of the enormous need to stockpile crops for winter. This means that farmland is more “spread out,” which in turn makes it harder to collect supplies by cart.
In the real world, there’s a concept called hydraulic despotism, which argues that river lands like Egypt have a natural political and geographic pressure to unify into strong states because monopolizing the irrigation system secures the state’s power. Westeros might have what we could call a granary despotism. A state can secure its power by securely storing taxed grain for winter and then redistributing it when the snows roll in. Naturally, this is much more easily done by boat.
When Aegon the Conqueror builds King’s Landing, his primary idea is to store taxed grain. The city grows around the Red Keep and the granaries. He would need a bit of a bureaucracy for this but he could scrape up some leftover Valyrians from Essos. They would be widely hated.
The dragons are the divine right of kings made flesh. Only the Targaryens have them, they can go anywhere, and they can easily destroy any army, city, or castle. They allow the Targaryens to rule a primitively organized Assyrian style of empire: disobey me and I will destroy you. It doesn’t matter that some inland lord has no personal relationship with the king, or that the king can’t get an army out to his lands, when the king can fly over and torch his castle. Dragons are what allow for a tenuous unification of Westeros.
On that note, Targaryen taxation probably began as a demand for livestock to be shipped to King’s Landing to feed the dragons, since that would be much easier than the king having to fly around to various vassals’ field to feed his divine right weapons.
In the real world, there’s a concept called hydraulic despotism, which argues that river lands like Egypt have a natural political and geographic pressure to unify into strong states because monopolizing the irrigation system secures the state’s power.
@Ersatz,
The way I’ve heard it describe is that in irrigation based societies (especially terraced, rice-based ones) it’s also in the interest of society as a whole, not just the leaders, to have a strong state. Since you need extensive coordination to organize the irrigation system (i.e. when to flood the fields), and a strong state is a good way to do that. I know there are other people who have pushed back though and pointed to examples of decentralized coordination mechanisms.
I asked about hydraulic despotism here a few years ago and Bret answered that it was legitimate historical theory back in the early to mid 20th century, but has since been mostly discredited.
As opposed to the “horse collars ended slavery” thing, which was 19th century pop science never taken seriously by professional historians.
Of course, geek that I am, I mostly knew them from mentions in mid-to-late 20th century science fiction.
Wait what?
Rain-fed agriculture has lots of indifferent but passably productive land beyond the current margin. So if a bigman/state tries to take oppressively much from the peasants, the peasants can run for the hills and set up there. Note that as the margin swings as population changes (e.g. with the Black Death), how much extraction is possible changes with it. (The process may involve conversions between ranching, transhumance, etc.)
Floodbank agriculture has a sheer cliff between the productivity of fertile land and desert. Once all currently-extant kemet is cultivated, a peasant feeling extorted can’t just run off and set up in the desert. So even without a state and without any irrigation beyond whatever the Nile floods on its own accord, the local big man can in principle take as land rent basically the entire crop. It would actually make a lot of sense for them to do precisely that, and to “issue” food on schedule so the peasants don’t starve to death. It isn’t actually relevant that complex irrigation works can extend the quantity of arable land.
This is just the Georgist theory of land rents. Yes, more intensive land uses need to chain back through less intensive land uses. The marginal non-crop land is unusually good pasture, so you need to buy off the shepherd (at the marginal non-pasture’s productivity as pasture) — plus the rents the shepherd pays — from your harvest.
Now, the theory needs to be modified to account for how adversarial extraction works. Peasants growing potatoes in sparsely-populated broken hills are less efficient to tax than peasants growing grain on flat plains, independently of a simple calculation of land rents. Likewise, rebellious Egyptian peasants can’t very well hide their houses and fields from the big man even if they do find some strangely unclaimed piece of floodplain.
It is also outside this theory that because floodplains have high population density (and unusually high labor productivity, and disproportionately high extractable “surplus” fraction) they are prime ground for state formation and consolidation. So you don’t get strong local big men and weak states in Egypt. At least you get strong small-state-level nomarchs and a weak pharaoh, but also weak local big men.
Rice terracing has a related mechanism called “agricultural involution” (as opposed to revolution). Since rice paddies are so ridiculously productive, this land use can over time, as the population increases, bulldoze everything else in its path, until only land that is hilariously useless for any purpose remains, or in some cases until you cover the entirety of the region is rice paddies and there is no remaining uncultivated land whatsoever. This can end up in the same place as the case of the Nile floodplain, albeit via a different route.
Also in either case, the “missing” intermediate land would include woodlands. So Egypt always has to import cedars from Lebanon.
With the second to last paragraph, you’re making exactly the mistake that was debunked about Hydraulic Despotism, which is that despite the extremely different mechanisms of agriculture between Ancient Egypt and China, somehow these two systems are to be treated as the same. (And as critics pointed out, it’s pretty clear that this conflation serves to Other both systems and the states arising from it in contrast to the rainfall-based agriculture of Europe).
The arguments you bring forth are based on two questionable assumptions: First, that “run for the marginal lands” is the only feasible tax avoidance mechanism available to peasants. And second, that just because it’s possible under that analysis for a system to be 100% extractive and despotic, that it therefore has to be that way.
As for history, it has to be noted that the strong Chinese states (and the traditions of the state institutions that then were used going forward) evolved not in the rice-growing south, but in the wheat-growing central plains. And our evidence does not suggest that in practise, an Ancient Egyptian peasant was more heavily oppressed or regulated by the state than a medieval serf.
The population of the Nile Valley downstream of Aswan did grow considerably over the millennia. Was this enabled by cultivating more of it? Or did agricultural methods improve significantly over millennia?
My first point is about the geography. Namely, the nature of rainfall and topography ensures that water falling on a patch of land will run downhill and collect into a river. As a consequence, any reasonably well-watered patch of land (and most if not all of Westeros survives on rainfall agriculture) isn’t going to be THAT far from the nearest river big enough that medieval people are willing to use it for barge traffic. Medieval barges tend to be quite small, because “shallow draft” is in demand and the barge doesn’t have to be very big to outcompete alternate forms of transportation (namely, ox carts).
So the fraction of land which is “riverbank” for purposes of “is it logistically possible to support an army there by barging in grain to a central warehouse from which food is regularly shipped to the field army overland” is generally going to be quite a large fraction. The kinds of places the navigable rivers don’t go tend to be especially hilly and remote, or alternatively quite arid (e.g. steppe or prairie) and thus poorly suited to cultivation in any case.
My second point is that “hydraulic despotism” is a fundamentally false model constructed in large part by armchair reasoning on the part of European pseudo-historians who were not familiar with the cultures they were talking about, certainly not be the standards of modern researchers. Wittfogel’s description of China as a “hydraulic despotism” was widely disputed even by other sinologists of his time, and he by no means had the expertise to apply the concept to any other historical society where he wouldn’t even have spoken the language to interpret primary sources.
And by no means should we expect “granary despotism” to arise in Westeros. Grant that the Westerosi have to stockpile huge amounts of food to survive year-long “winters” (which may or may not outright prevent plant growth; it’s hard to imagine wildlife surviving a period of a year or more in which no plants grow at all). Given that the periods when this is necessary (the mega-winters) are precisely those at which transportation is the most difficult, it seems very illogical to imagine that the optimal solution is to have very large, centralized granaries dominated by some powerful lord who controls a wide area. One would expect the granaries to be relatively decentralized, on the contrary.
The “seasons” in question are more like rapid climate shifts which can’t be predicted in-universe.
I have thought some of the nature of the “seasons”. It is now cannon that they affect Esssos as well. George Martin has stated they are caused by magic. He has also described the “winter” as darker than the “summer”. It is a bit unclear to me what they mean in terms of weather. What I know is the Reach being able to grow food in “winter” but not nearly as much. I have read a description of the snow melting away entirely at times which I think applies to the North. Apparently, there are smaller temperature changes within the “seasons”. This explains why people talk about “years” in-universe.
My educated guess is each one of Planetos’ poles being magically made to point away from its sun for several orbits at the time. Within these “summer” and “winter” (depending on hemisphere) phases there are smaller temperature changes caused by the planet’s elliptical orbit. So when it is “summer” there is a noticeably colder period around aphelion. Similarly, in “winter” the snow melts away at perihelion in areas where it otherwise would not. This prevents them from becoming drowned in accumulated snow as would be the real-world consequence.
I’ve been loving this series, but I notice one group keeps getting left out of these discussions of pre-modern armies: siege engineers. Somebody has to design and build the catapults, siege towers, covered rams, etc. Where do they come from, how are they organized, and what do they do during peacetime?
My impression is that no one prior to the gunpowder era was in the business of educating their own siege engineers; they came out of whatever passed for civilian academia or engineering practice and sought out royal patronage.
My understanding is that a lot of them were basically in the construction sector. That part of being an architect/learning how to build stuff was also learning how to tear it down. Notably Vitruvius book on architecture also covers siege engines.
“The real problem is how drab they are. These are men of importance and station! They’re wearing expensive equipment! They would want to look nice!”
Well they are on a cultural death march, there’s something to be said for atmosphere. It’s not like we don’t see austere kit choice in reality, the various knightly orders had a semi standardized tabard which was nearly monocolor.
Of course you’d still expect one asshole to show up in motley even with a clear cultural taboo, as anyone whose tried to organize any form of costume gathering can attest, so the point probably stands.
On the general point I think it’s very likely the show runners are reusing assets, which is part of why the uniforms are similar between eras. Even if they’re kit bashing their game of thrones stuff together to get the final product you’d see similarities simply because it’s economical. This would lead to inheritance of uniformity even if the house of the dragon show runners knew better.
This is basically a Tiffany problem writ large. Realistic Medieval clothing looks bright and garish and “fake”/cheap costume/RenFaire to modern eyes so we don’t get realistic Medieval clothing.
The funny thing is that I feel some of the early Technicolor stuff like the 1950’s Ivanhoe movie is actually in a lot of ways a *better* representation of the middle ages. Evne though they have plenty of their own issues.
I thought the mostly dull colours used in the show were the result of the involved thinking I terms of this trope:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealIsBrown
This is one of those instances where show runners at least know what they’re doing is silly but are trapped in the language of their profession. The showrunner for a knight of seven kingdoms:
‘While speaking at New York Comic-Con, showrunner Ira Parker explained how the show switches things up with a new, brighter tone. “When you look at the 14th-century, they love their colors. This is a very, very colorful period,” he explained.
…“It’s a tournament. It’s supposed to be fun and people showing off — we’re going to have a lot of color in that,” Parker added.
“I hope it’s not bright,” he said. “Bright is a very dangerous thing. We thought a lot about how dark to make this show, because obviously there’s been backlashes before. But the truth is, if you make it too bright it does read as a fantasy-ish fairytale. We’re trying to stay away from fairytale. We want it to feel like how we interact with the world. Sometimes it’s quite colorful; other times it’s actually quite dark…we want this to feel as real and gritty and as honest as possible” ‘
From:
https://winteriscoming.net/a-knight-of-the-seven-kingdoms-showrunner-brightness-color-game-of-thrones-spinoff
(There is overlap in set design and filming techniques that are being freely moved between here, but both inform the view of the world)
It’s a bit tragic because the Ira here gets the cultural essence of the period, but he’s slaved to his perception of audience expectations. And, presumably, what he can get greenlit.
@Terry
And if I were in his shoes, I’d probably do the same despite knowing that the clothing SHOULD be much more colorful, although I’d try to push the envelope a bit towards realism. At the end of the day what the audience THINKS is realistic matters more than what is ACTUALLY realistic. Hence the scenes of Gladiator where Russell Crowe endorses products getting cut despite Gladiators really doing that, as the audience would think it was too modern and unrealistic.
There is a reason why swords make that stupid “shring” sound when being drawn in just about every TV show/movie, filmic language matters even when it makes no sense.
@Bosh I think it’s worth noting that AKot7K is more willing than most fantasy shows to push against audience expectations for the genre (i.e., it’s the first time I’ve heard jazz music used as part of the soundtrack of a fantasy show). So it’s a bit more disappointing that they weren’t willing to push further in this area.
” my sense is that the ASoIaF/GoT community largely now understands that Westeros is not necessarily the gold-standard for ‘realistic’ medieval fantasy societies.”
I feel like you yourself were a significant part of that shift in understanding, so congratulations.
The thing is, ASoIaF sadly still is kind of that gold standard. Not because it’s especially good at understanding history, but because most every other fantasy series is worse (and this was even more the case in 1996 when AGoT game out). Also a lot of people (like the Pedant in this post) mix up book and show canon and blame the books for getting things wrong that it actually gets right, because they mix up the show and the book.
This series has been as interesting as I expected. Nice examples here as well, though with both Tolkien and Martin already discussed at length, I would have been interested to see other fantasy worlds dissected (or maybe different exemples from these two authors. What about the First Age Haladin from _The Wanderings of Hùrin_?)
Just as a side note: Elfhelm is apparently not from the East-mark, but from the Folde. In _Unfinished Tales_, he was in charge of the Riders from Edoras. He was put in charge of the first Éored of the East-mark at the Battle of the Fields of Pelennor, because Éomer was put in charge of the first Éored following the King. This is actually a nice example of reassigning a major aristocrat from one official assignment to another (rather than promoting somebody from below Éomer).
I think part of the point for this segment was to use very well known examples that will be familiar to almost any reader with even slight interest in fantasy fiction and many who normally don’t think of themselves as “fantasy readers.” Something from The Wanderings of Hùrin is going to be a bit more obscure.
If you’re looking beyond LotR I’d love to hear your thoughts on military organizations presented in the Malazan books and the Black Company books (if you’re familiar with either).
My main issue with the Black Company is the weird imbalance between the Black Company being around since forever, the Black Company constantly being in combat, and the Black company doing very little recruiting.
About aristocrats’ distance to peasants, just like with mercenaries, I wonder if it’s more because of professions. Maybe people of a job will relate more to other people of a job than his neighbors, so maybe smiths also relate more to foreign smiths than his neighbor peasants. This feels true, because merchants likely already have this dynamic. Also clergy.
the Gondorian Guard in the movies saw Armored Trolls at the gates and said fuck it, lets fight.
Yeah they are very well trained and disciplined.
but I do like the this is the vibe for Rohan and Gondor, one of the best looks with the slight visual errors for it, it helps give some structure to it all.
If the Northern soldiers are men of importance and station then they should march to the battlefield on horseback, even if they did fight on foot.
In the books Robb Stark uses the Northern heavy horse frequently and quite effectively as his arm of decision so we can pretty strongly infer that the upper class cavalry tradition in the North is quite well established even if they don’t become knights for religious and cultural reasons.
It might also be the case that the social lines between lower gentry and wealthy farmers is less strong in the North compared to the rest of Westeros. I’d cite Steelshanks Walton who is apparently an important Bolton client who gets used for important officer work, but is considered a farmer (likely an extremely well to do farmer both originally and by virtue of what his services to a major lord has given him).
Are Sworn Swords knights with another title / name or men at arms
Sworn Swords are a Martinism for official members of your retinue which basically means a man at arms (for example, the Hound is a Sworn Sword despite distaining to become a knight).
A sworn sword is any professional warrior that has taken an oath to permanently serve a specific patron as a dedicated bodyguard/enforcer. They’re often knights, or the cultural equivalent of knights, but there’s really nothing stopping a noble from employing a commoner man at arms as a sworn sword.
The most visible example of a commoner sworn sword would be Areo Hotah, a Norvoshi freedman (slavery is illegal in Westeros, so he’s no longer a slave) who was trained as a slave-soldier, was sold to Mellario of Norvos, entered Doran Martell’s service when she married him and remained in his service after they separated.
Piecing together how militaries in the Elder Scrolls work will be interesting, given the sheer volume of in-game sources and how every game except Daggerfall is scaled way down so as to be actually playable (in Daggerfall you can fast travel whenever, so its game world allegedly being double the size of Great Britain isn’t a massive hurdle).
And the sense I get from those is that of a heavily fragmented empire barely held together by the Septim and later Mede dynasties. There are a bunch of kingdoms, theocracies, and tribal confederations, and a pseudo-legislative body called the Elder Council between them and the Emperor. And it seems like a fragile arrangement, because the moment the central authority names even a little bit, all of these kingdoms, theocracies, and tribal confederations start warring with each other.
I hope he mentioned the Suikoden games.
They each involve a war, but more time is spent recruiting the army that fighting with it.
Suikoden games tend to be less about how any particular society recruits its army internally than getting a lot of squabbling city-states in some recently-fractured region to unite against a larger external threat. Mostly a different thing, though it does map to a degree with the discussions of retinues-of-retinues and the issues inherent in devolved recruiting of getting everyone to actually show up when the army is indeed their own and not that of the state or alliance.
> these sorts of polities and their military systems do not durably scale.
Is there not scope to suppose that Westeros’ size was unnaturally supported by dragons, and in the event the polity failed to cohere once that support was removed?
The scene in which the little regiments of all the fiefs of Gondor are turning up and the crowd is alternating between cheering them and muttering “too few, too few” would have had very obvious resonances at the time of writing – think of wartime Britain, packed with contingents of Free French, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, Canadians, Norwegians and so on. Welcome allies of course, but too few, too few.
And the sentiment that “perhaps they would have sent more but they are worried about the defence of their own homes” would definitely have rung a bell with regard to the Australians, whose contribution to the war in the Middle East was – entirely understandably! – limited by the need to defend Australia against Japan in the Pacific.
many like the Czechs had already been conquered
At the time I’m thinking of, all of them except the Dominions/Commonwealth had been.
Except, arguably, the North, but we’re mostly going to leave the North out here and focus on the southern Six Kingdoms, for the sake of simplicity.
I think Dorne also seems to have more of a sense of “national” identity than the rest of Westeros (outside the North), though we don’t really see that much of Dornish commoners (or for that matter other commoners, really), so it’s hard to say.
You don’t consider societies with a high degree of Feudalism to be state societies. Where more exactly do you draw the line?
I think our great host epressed himself clearly here https://acoup.blog/2024/06/14/collections-how-to-raise-a-tribal-army-in-pre-roman-europe-part-ii-government-without-states/
“Monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain territory” may not be hip and cool but that’s what he thinks still works the best. While he does not discuss medieval vassalage-based polities he clearly points what makes Gaulish and Celtiberian polities non-state and Rome state.
Also note how he uses ‘feudal’ only in quotes – he clearly expressed in the past that mashing together a few very different medieval European systems as “feudal society” is unhelpful. With regard to military recruitment and command probably the relevant term is vassalage.
Thank you, it was not obvious to me it could be found there.
That entire series (How to raise a tribal army) works very well for understanding OGH’s take on state vs non-state. Kinda like his Sparta series was a decent primer on the tactics of hoplite warfare before he made a full series on hoplite fighting specifically.
If you really want to read everything he wrote about state vs non-state you can also check out his series on CK3 (Game modelling non-state society even though some of the societies it tries to model were really state) and EU4 (The other way around, game mechanics presume state organization, but some of the playable polities should not be states)
I’m interested in Lamedon and Ethir, which managed to send (small) bodies of troops of sorts without either seeming to have any recognized leader.
The leaders are staying behind with the presumably larger number of troops preparing to defend against the Corsairs of Umbar. Lamedon, Ethir, and similar are sending “token” forces to defend Minas Tirith not because they have great military significance, but because this is how the social bonds between the bits of Gondor are maintained.
It might also be the case that the leaders of those small contingents aren’t considered important enough to mention. Historical example is Welsh contingents in English hundred years war armies. We have records of an English army in 1347, which has just over two thousand South Welsh, at this time light infantry and longbowmen. They had organisation and officer type ranks but none of them were knights, so the (English) clerks didn’t bother writing down their names.
Devereaux gets the Rohirrim wrong.
And that’s not really his fault. He’s missing something that I didn’t see myself until Tom Simon pointed it out: the Rohirrim have two inspirations.
Their culture, manner of speaking, much of their language, and much of their description come from the Anglo-Saxons; their physical appearance owes more to the Norsemen. But their horse-culture comes from the Native Americans. In fact, I think we can say that, unlike Martin’s Dothraki, the Rohirrim really are inspired by the Plains Indians—with a dash of pure fantasy. I’ll come to that in a moment.
The Rohirrim are described as having herdsmen who “wandered much, living in camp and tent, even in winter-time.” There are a few towns, but they are relatively small. Even Meduseld is referred to principally as the Golden Hall, while the warrior and herdsman population ranges across a much larger country. Just look at a map of Rohan. You have perhaps four significant settlements, three of which are smaller than Edoras—which is itself a small town—and beyond them an enormous plain of grass.
And Tolkien says it explicitly. The dwellings of most of the Rohirrim lie southward beneath the White Mountains, while their herds and studs range across the Eastemnet. This is a mode of life immediately recognizable to anyone who has studied the great horse peoples, and the Rohirrim are the definitive horse people of Middle-earth.
They call themselves the Eorlingas, the descendants of Eorl the Young, but everybody else calls them the Rohirrim, the Riders. Their country is the Riddermark. Again, you can see the cognate with our word *rider*, with German *Ritter*, “knight,” and *Reiter*, simply “rider.” Even their earlier home, the Éothéod, just means “horse land”.
This also makes sense of Théoden’s general muster. He puts 6,000 cavalry into the field and, under better circumstances, could apparently have raised something closer to 10,000. That is difficult to explain if you imagine the Rohirrim primarily as a society of landed medieval knights, where you had 300-500 peasants to one knight. It makes much more sense if you think in terms of the population density and extraordinarily high warrior-to-population ratio found among societies such as the Mongols.
This lets me pick up one more howler from Devereaux’s discussion of the Siege of Gondor. He wrote that it is unrealistic for the Rohirrim to employ horse archers because mounted archery is a skill that must be learned from childhood: only people who more or less grow up in the saddle can do it properly. Since, in his reconstruction, the Rohirrim have transitioned into a settled society, they ought to have lost the skill.
That is bollocks for two reasons.
First, societies that have transitioned all the way to the internal-combustion engine and electric light still have horse archers. You can watch mounted archery in modern Mongolia and Hungary.
Second, horse archery is clearly present in the text. Read *The Two Towers*. The Rohirrim’s way of fighting is immediately recognizable to anyone who grew up watching classic Westerns. They ride up, shoot from horseback, turn away, and disappear out of range, leaving the Orcs’ arrows to fall uselessly behind them. Even their first encounter with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli has this quality: an ever-contracting circle of horsemen closes around the three travellers until the Riders halt with their spears pointed inward. Visually, it could have come straight out of a classic Western.
So in the end I have to say that Devereaux is simply wrong when he insists that “the Rohirrim are not the Mongols,” particularly when he uses that premise to argue that they could not cover something like sixty miles in a day.
The Rohirrim are the Mongols—just the Mongols on steroids.
And this is where the dash of pure fantasy comes in. The great limitation on historical horse peoples was the horse itself. Steppe warriors were generally relatively light men riding relatively small, hardy horses. Tolkien removes that constraint. The Rohirrim’s horses are the Mearas, brought out of the West by Oromë himself.
Unlike the steppe ponies of the Mongols, the Mearas can carry very large men in mail armour across enormous distances. This makes the Rohirrim the fantasy equivalent of a Death Star with its exhaust port welded.
And that helps explain something else. The Witch-king is not a fool. He sets aside entire formations of his army – his best troops, the men of Harad and their cavalry and Elephantry – just in case the Rohirrim might arrive on the battlefield, because if they do, and nothing is prepared to stop them, they will simply wreck his Orcs.
Can’t resist adding a little 🙂
In “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien writes:
“Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows…”
And that he “had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow”
Also, I don’t think Rohirrim ever refer to themselves as knights, just as riders. That’s a distinction that matters! Knight means “servant”, as does Samurai. It’s status connected to serving a lord. On the other hand, the Rohirrim refer to themselves as riders because that is what you are if you are Rohirrim.
(Yes, I know, Eowyn tells her brother to make Merry a knight, but Merry isn’t Rohirrim)
Their whole society makes sense if you think of them living in groups of herders/hunters moving around their plains, and killing any orc dumb enough to stick his head in. It also explains why they are so prickly about any strangers coming into their lands (pasturage!)
(Further etymological note: they name their lands Eastfold & Westfield. Fold = field)
“Further etymological note: they name their lands Eastfold & Westfield. Fold = field”
No, this is not correct, see below – the etymologies are distinct. Fold comes from falæd, an animal pen. Field comes from feld, folde, meaning open land.
“Since, in his reconstruction, the Rohirrim have transitioned into a settled society, they ought to have lost the skill.
That is bollocks for two reasons.
First, societies that have transitioned all the way to the internal-combustion engine and electric light still have horse archers. You can watch mounted archery in modern Mongolia and Hungary.”
This is comically missing the point. There is a real difference between “a handful of enthusiasts have learned the skill of horse archery against static targets only, in their spare time” and “we can raise a mass army of military horse archers very quickly because essentially our entire population learns horse archery against live targets as children”.
“The Rohirrim’s way of fighting is immediately recognizable to anyone who grew up watching classic Westerns. They ride up, shoot from horseback, turn away, and disappear out of range, leaving the Orcs’ arrows to fall uselessly behind them. ”
This is wrong, both in the books and in the films. Some – not most or all – of the Rohirrim are described as shooting from horseback. But they are emphatically not an army of horse archers, they are an army of armoured cavalry. When they encircle the Hobbits, they do so at spearpoint (or rather lancepoint, I suppose). When they finally defeat the Uruk-hai, they do it with a charge, not by attrition with arrows. When they arrive at the Pelennor Fields, they charge into the enemy as a formed body and defeat them with shock effect.
You’re wrong about their fantastic nature as well. The Rohirrim do not cross vast distances. The march from Helm’s Deep to Minas Tirith is only about 300 miles and the formed army of Rohan do it in five days – well within the bounds of possibility for an all-mounted army, even of armoured troops on large horses. British cavalry in 1914 estimated a speed of advance of 5 mph, but, crucially, they had only one horse per man (plus a few remounts), and so led their horses for fifteen minutes in the hour. The Rohirrim would have brought spares and could have rested their horses by swapping mounts, allowing them to maintain a much faster pace.
The limit is not “my horses will break” but “my horses need fodder” – the Mongols had ponies that could survive on grazing, while bigger horses need additional food, which is obviously a logistic issue.
@ajay,
I swear, you are being tiresome for the sake of it.
Yes, why _would_ armies cultivate and preserve individuals with specialised, highly dangerous talents? Special forces are a complete fantasy. Crazy idea that a horse people would preserve the single most deadly form of combat before the repeating rifle.
Incidentally, neither I nor Tolkien ever wrote that all the Rohirrim are horse archers. The Two Towers, Chapter 3: The Uruk Hai: “A few of the riders appeared to be bowmen, skilled at shooting from a running horse.”
Here is Devereaux. “The Rohirrim are an agrarian society -they have villages, we’ve seen them – not a nomadic one, meaning that the Riders of Rohan have all learned to ride horses as a secondary war skill…”
Right. The horse lords living in the rider land, who came from the other rider land, who are known to absolutely everyone else as the riders – they have riding as a secondary skill. Earlier in the same paragraph he gives as reason for this objection that horse archery is either something “one learns from a very young age as an essential skill for living (or something deeply embedded in culture)…”
Both apply to the Rohirrim.
As to your comments on the native American way of fighting and the way it is shown in Westerns, here is The Two Towers
“Soon the three companions found themselves in a ring of horsemen moving in a running circle, up the hill slope behind them and down, round and round them, and drawing ever onwards”
Right. Never seen that in a Western!
Also, the midnight raid the Rohirrim pull.off on the Uruk-Hai looks a lot like “counting coup”, with the difference that the Rohirrim have no interest in proving themselves to the Orcs, so they just kill.them.
I did some more poking around and found that Tom Shippey suggests that the long travel by boat, by canoe, in Fellowship is right out of The Last of the Mohicans. He is echoed in this by a chap called Roger Echo-Hawk.
So, yeah. What was that you were saying about comical?
To me transhumance and possibly some agriculture seem to be the most plausible mode of subsistence for the Rohirrim. They are mentioned as sending a troop of 6,000 but nothing says so much more would be feasible.
@Lena,
I agree with you. Transhumance gives the structure to their kingdom and existence and preserves the horse culture.
Re:the Muster, there is a footnote in Unfinished Tales “The Rohirrim had increased since the days of Folcwine, and before the attacks of Saruman a Full Muster would probably have produced many more than twelve thousand Riders,”
Thank you, then we know from the author they could not have provided more.
To me transhumance and possibly some agriculture seem to be the most plausible mode of subsistence for the Rohirrim.
Transhumance, yes, maybe, but that’s different from being a nomad. The Rohirrim have at least one fortified town (Edoras) and several smaller villages, and they also have several large fortresses for use as refuges. Not very nomadic.
They have large horses, which need fodder (not just grazing), and you need agriculture to produce fodder. We also know they have grain of some sort, probably oats, because Hama suggests that Grima Wormtongue might want to carry a sack of meal up into the mountains. When the folk of the Westfold evacuate into Helm’s Deep they bring “beasts and their fodder” – they grow fodder and store it in bulk for the winter, when their herds and flocks will be brought down off the hills. We don’t see much of their livestock but they definitely have it. “Fold” as in Westfold means an enclosure for livestock, in particular sheep.
Large horses don’t need more nutritious food because they are larger. They need it because they work harder.
The original wild horses were probably the size of Przewalski’s horse. Present-day riding horses can weight up to twice as much. But I don’t think the differences is large enough for the efficiency of the horse’ digestive system to matter. The largest domesticated horses weight more than three times as much as Przewalski’s horse. However, these were bred to be working horses and not for riding.
I am not clear how any of that is responsive, to be frank. If you agree with me, great. If you don’t, could you be clearer about what you don’t agree with, and why?
Remember the Rohirrim are military aristocrats. They have *plenty* of time to train horse-archery if needed. (as did many settled peoples, persians, manchu, etc.)
Or the Poles, Russians, Lithuanians… basically every sedentary state in Eastern Europe developed a horse archery tradition to counter steppe nomads, usually compensating for numbers of archers with heavier armor and support from other units.
The entry requirements for archery, even horse archery, are somewhat overblown. It’s not so much that you can’t train for it, it’s that most people can’t take time to train for anything unrelated to growing food in an agriculturist economy, particularly a highly stratified one. The eastern European aristocracy could easily add horse archery to their curriculum, but the peasantry could not, and that’s where the gap between nomads and agriculturist comes in; every adult nomad can ride and shoot, less than 10% (high end of military aristocracy population) of adult agriculturists can possibly do both. Agriculture supports a more dense population, though.
Rohan has faced horse archers before, the wainriders who fought on chariot and other easterlings who Frodo sees armed with bows on horses from Amon Hen, and had some horse archers among both Eomer and Theodreds forces. Tolkien also makes explicit mention to them in the unfinished tales among Eorls force sent to relieve Gondor many centuries prior, and the unfinished tales is also the source for Theodreds company of mounted archers. Eomer has a few horse archers in the two towers, so it remained textual, albeit possibly diminished over time.
I think the best peg for Rohan is the Poles mixed with Anglo saxons for cultural influences. Ultimately they don’t perfectly map to anything, but their homeland is most similar to the eastern extent of the north European plains of the eastern European plains; I think the central lowlands of poland map best because it’s bounded by rivers to the east and west and by mountains, forest, or the sea to the north and south.
I think it is good they don’t match exactly to any real life culture. They may have been especially influenced by Anglo-Saxons because Ronald Tolkien was familiar with them.
“Some – not most or all – of the Rohirrim are described as shooting from horseback.”
I don’t think we can say anything too concrete about the numbers. They HAD archers, and the archers were integrated into the battle plan rather thoroughly–thoroughly enough that they could rely on archers to carry the fight for significant periods of time. You see this with Eomer’s battle with the Uruk-hai, where Rohan harassed the orcs throughout the night. They also used archers quite effectively during the delay action at Helm’s Deep. This suggests that there’s a significant number of archers, enough to make real battlefield gains.
That said, the default is still spears and cavalry charges. We never see any truly Mongolian tactics being used, in the books or films; Rohan integrates archers more than one would expect, but cannot in any way, shape, or form be called a horse-archer based military.
I would also contend that Rohan has a lot more foot soldiers than people assume. Possibly the soldiers were trained in fighting on foot and on horse–the equivalent of dragoons–or the foot soldiers were based on the lower ranks, but they were there. We can tell that because Rohan had no problems fighting on foot at Helm’s Deep. They could arm, armor, and effectively use infantry tactics. If you haven’t had to do that, it’s not as simple as “Here’s a shield, go have fun”! I forget how much in the way of cavalry they had at the Black Gate, but there wasn’t much for cavalry to do so it’s likely they went dragoon there. This, of course, implies a certain amount of settlements not seen in the books–an implication born out by how much the burning of the Westfold hurt Rohan psychologically.
I think there are a few important things to remember when interpreting societies through the LOTR books. First, we don’t see all that much. The Fellowship is, essentially, a special ops force on a stealth mission, not one of Charlemagne’s knights riding around trying to observe society; they’re going to miss a lot. Cavalry is obviously hugely important to Rohan, so of course the king’s soldiers will be cavalry, but again we see strong evidence of other sorts of troops. Second, there’s the conceit of translation, which means the narrator isn’t 100% reliable. This leaves broad room for alternate interpretations. That is a feature, not a bug, to my mind–Tolkien was writing a myth, and myths get re-interpreted to fit the needs of the culture doing the interpretation. Finally, the force going to Gondor was explicitly the swiftest force they could both muster and deliver to the field of battle. This is going to filter for cavalry, because cavalry moves faster than infantry. That gives a false impression of Rohan’s forces. Not a mistake on Tolkien’s part, but an acknowledgement of military reality that distorts what the Hobbits see (and therefore what we see) of Rohan’s military.
“The Rohirrim do not cross vast distances.”
To add to this, we actually see discussions of logistics in the books. Theoden points out that they can only go so fast, because 1) they need to avoid being seen by a known enemy force that would delay them too long even if they won, and 2) horse and rider need to be fit for battle once they arrive. They intentionally choose a route to accomplish both of those things, and rely on local friendly(ish) peoples to help them get there. They go fast–and Shadowfax does travel at fantastic speeds–but the average Rohan horse is just a really good horse, and they know this, and they actively plan campaigns around this.
“This is comically missing the point. There is a real difference between “a handful of enthusiasts have learned the skill of horse archery against static targets only, in their spare time” and “we can raise a mass army of military horse archers very quickly because essentially our entire population learns horse archery against live targets as children”.”
I will also point add that Rohan is in routine contact with a heavily infantry-based military society in the form of Gondor. While Rohan will likely primarily be cavalry, and Gondor infantry, skills transfers are inevitable when fighting together. It’s not like Rohan was on an island completely cut off from everyone; they were a part of a vibrant culture with numerous cultural interchanges. Remember, Rohan being closed off to outsiders WAS WEIRD. It was something Aragorn and Gandalf both note as a change, and Eomer gives Aragorn specific reasons why it happened. Prior to the war Rohan may not have had wide-open borders, but they certainly allowed strangers to come in, particularly to help with the military; Aragorn himself rode with Rohan under other names in the past, in Theoden’s father’s time if I recall correctly.
So even if Rohan did heavily emphasize cavalry, they’d also have incentives (highly variable by region) to produce an infantry tradition as well. They’d certainly know about infantry, and have experience fighting with and against it; the skills wouldn’t be lost. I imagine that those areas closer to Gondor would have a heavier emphasis (still secondary) on infantry, whereas those areas less suitable to growing grain (and thus more suitable for grazing) would emphasize cavalry more.
“I imagine that those areas closer to Gondor would have a heavier emphasis (still secondary) on infantry, whereas those areas less suitable to growing grain (and thus more suitable for grazing) would emphasize cavalry more.”
One thing to note is that Middle Earth doesn’t resemble our world in one major way: population density isn’t only bounded by carrying capacity, but also infrastructure and habitation time, even for agriculture. If you look at a map of middle earth the region between Gondor and the Shire should be absolutely bursting with agriculture, it’s literally all oceanic climate like western Europe, but between active conflict, plague, and simple population growth time it’s mostly depopulated. Rohan is similar-the entire region is in a breadbasket climate like that of Ukraine or Poland. That’s not necessarily enough to make it suitable for intense agriculture by itself, but most other indications are excellent for grain raising as well.
Part of this is down to simple population dynamics, as Tolkien has imagined a world still young in some ways. The population of middle earth might only be 10 million or so, less than the population of just Europe during the Roman empire. Some parts of it are as populated as the urbanized Mediterranean, but others are basically empty.
In essence, middle earth is a land before the big agricultural population explosion we see between the absolute earliest histories and traditional antiquity. Almost all the history we work off of has fundementally different rules, where there’s a large base of people who exist almost everywhere that you can possibly live, ready to fill in any demographic holes. Middle Earth lacks that.
All this to say it’s not just if the region can grow wheat, but if it is inhabited at all. After the war of the ring I’d expect to see a lot of homesteading up the rivers, and new population centers springing up over time, eventually supporting larger infantry armies. Unless there’s a new aristocracy which constrains this; that’s likely the struggle of the fourth age, the developing social structure and inequality of the new mannish kingdoms now that they’re out of survivalist war mode.
Agreed about population density. The area west of the Misty Mountains is particularly egregious–it WAS inhabited, several thousand years ago, but at the time of the War of the Ring was totally empty.
That said, Gondor and Rohan seem to have avoided that. Gondor had a lower population than one may expect, but it was still a vibrant empire with large population centers in multiple regions. Likewise, while Rohan would naturally have a lower population density due to their reliance on horses (which take a lot of land), you still see significant populations capable of producing large numbers of armed men (the Muster wasn’t nearly all of the armed men, just the ones the regions could spare). And we know that Gondor and Rohan frequently were allies in wars.
I think the other question we have to contend with in LOTR is, what constitutes a populated area? Moria is considered abandoned despite containing thousands of Orcs. The Ettenmores were considered a wasteland because of the vicious inhabitants. We know the Rangers frequently dealt with hostile creatures, as well as having their own settlements and culture. Elves tended to avoid contact with Men, to the point where Eomer barely considered Galadriel real and knew nothing about her. Then you have the Old Forest, which is inhabited by….well, I always assumed they were Ents or Hurons or something of that kind. Sentient, anyway, but in a fundamentally alien manner. Same with the southern reaches of Mirkwood.
To put it bluntly, LOTR is incredibly racist, to the point where it considers habitation by certain races to not count. This isn’t without reason, but it should inform our interpretation of the works. An area inhabited by Orcs and Trolls and evil trees should count as inhabited, and that dramatically ups the population count.
I think it’s important to remember that, again, the Fellowship is on a secret mission and actively avoiding people. They are intentionally going to places where the populations are thinnest. This is going to give a falsely low impression of the population.
The other thing to bear in mind is the amount of land that’s uninhabitable in general. On their way to Imladris the Hobbits encounter multiple swamps, for example. I wonder how much of Middle Earth actually IS inhabitable.
” If you look at a map of middle earth the region between Gondor and the Shire should be absolutely bursting with agriculture, it’s literally all oceanic climate like western Europe, but between active conflict, plague, and simple population growth time it’s mostly depopulated.”
It is interesting to compare this area with New England, and other temperate zone colonies in the Americas. With so much more land per person the colonists could afford substantially larger families than the folks back home. The population growth rate was (excluding further immigration) about 4% per year, with a doubling time of 25 years.
So if the Shire have been around for ~ 15 centuries, that is sixty doubling periods, and the population should have grown by a factor of around a million trillion. If we only give it five centuries, that is 20 doubling periods, and the population should have f=grown by only a factor of a million.
Similar arguments apply to the villages of the Rangers, the Breelanders, etc. There should not be a lot of Wild left, over the timescales implied by the appendices of LOTR. Exponential growth is something about which human intuition is very misleading.
> The other thing to bear in mind is the amount of land that’s uninhabitable in general. On their way to Imladris the Hobbits encounter multiple swamps, for example. I wonder how much of Middle Earth actually IS inhabitable.
Most of Eriador inhabitable, based on the ruined and sparsely populated cities. That said it’s possible that there’s more swamp and such, and we’re meant to understand that it hasn’t been cleared, drained, or otherwise tamed yet; if this were earth that’d be a partial explanation at best, but the geography is different.
It’s more realistic that the pressures of Saurons wars are keeping population low.
> I think the other question we have to contend with in LOTR is, what constitutes a populated area? Moria is considered abandoned despite containing thousands of Orcs. The Ettenmores were considered a wasteland because of the vicious inhabitants. We know the Rangers frequently dealt with hostile creatures, as well as having their own settlements and culture. Elves tended to avoid contact with Men, to the point where Eomer barely considered Galadriel real and knew nothing about her. Then you have the Old Forest, which is inhabited by….well, I always assumed they were Ents or Hurons or something of that kind. Sentient, anyway, but in a fundamentally alien manner. Same with the southern reaches of Mirkwood.
I agree. I think this means we don’t really know how to answer this textually. It seems that orcs need food and water comparable to people, and dwarves and elves might seem broadly comparable to men, but have no idea how we translate this to human habitability or population estimates given the magic and wildly different subsistence patterns. Dwarves and misty mountain orcs seem to live underground, and while some type of cultivar might exist that can thrive without sunlight somehow we certainly can’t estimate how it’d work because it ain’t alive on this earth. If they do conventionally farm outside their homes or trade the problem becomes logistics; the mines of moria are too intricate, it takes too long to traverse them to work on the surface and sleep in them at night. If I remember Tolkien suggests both are at work; the dwarves farm something like potatoes and trade with neighbors who farm traditionally to supplement this, but we just don’t know how this works. And elves do farm and feast, but they also literally fade into spirits over time so who knows what their actual food intake is like.
The estimates I’ve seen tend to work based off of what we know of the mannish kingdoms and their populations, because the unknowns with other species and races are overwhelming. Tolkien just doesn’t really care about them enough to devote enough time to them. Hell, at points he seems to have toyed with making orcs basically evil spirits that might not even really be alive, so who knows? As you say there’s a bit of racism in how Tolkien is willing to dismiss them.
I don’t think this actually matters for the point at hand though; most of middle earth isn’t inhabited by orcs or magic species, but either uninhabited or claimed by men. At least in the third age.
The bigger point is the simple math of doubling. Every indication suggests eriador should be inhabited by millions of hobbits, they’ve explicitly had hundreds of years to double in relative peace, they’re excellent farmers, and we see multiple examples of large families (Samwise has *13 kids*!) so we ought to see hobbits bursting from the seams, or periodic mass starvation if they’re that dedicated to their borders.
This is generally the biggest logical problem with Tolkien’s world building-too much time. It works in broad strokes given the repeated cataclysms which can wipe out entire civilizations, but it breaks badly with his depiction of regions isolated from war or disaster for long times, particularly given the climate he’s created.
” Every indication suggests eriador should be inhabited by millions of hobbits, they’ve explicitly had hundreds of years to double in relative peace, they’re excellent farmers, and we see multiple examples of large families (Samwise has *13 kids*!)”
Well, we don’t actually see that many examples of large families, and Samwise’s family is Fourth Age – explicitly an age of unprecedented flowering, growth and prosperity. Think about the five main characters we meet – only two of them have any siblings at all. Bilbo, Frodo, and Merry are all only children, and Bilbo and Frodo both die without issue. Sam has five siblings, Pippin has three, but Pippin’s father inherits the Thainship from his great-uncle Isumbras, who dies without surviving issue – Isumbras has only one son, and his son has only one son, and both die before Isumbras.
Hobbits also have longer generation times. They aren’t seen as adults until the age of 33 and they tend to bear children in their late 30s, 40s or even 50s – almost double the generation time of a human.
And there may also be Malthusian constraints! Hobbits are great farmers, but they are also great *eaters*, so they may not be able to sustain the same population density as humans on the same land.
To Terry:
The elves fade away only under mental stress which can eventually kill them. Otherwise they can die directly from violence (decapitation, destroyed vital organs) or accidents (drowning, falling of a ledge). Without those possible causes of death they can live for tens of thousands of years. So it seems likely they have food needs somewhat similar to humans. I think it has been stated how many cakes of lembas bread they eat per day compared to the hobbits. The later eat approximately 2/3 more than humans compared to their size.
To Ajay:
I though Bilbo had as sibling who was one of Frodo’s parents. However, I may have misunderstood this. Frodo being Bilbo’s closest living relative would explain why he takes over his house when Bilbo disappears to Rivendell. Anyway, the hobbits could have developed a cultural tolerance to a considerable number of people remaining unmarried to avoid overpopulation.
“…most of middle earth isn’t inhabited by orcs or magic species…”
That’s kind of my point, though: Isn’t it? The Old Forest is. Moria is. We know there are other portions of the Mysty Mountains that are. We know that the Ettenmores are inhabited by trolls (which seem to have a low population density but drive out other groups). And we know that there are wandering bands of Orcs as well–enough that they can cause Bilbo’s group and the Fellowship serious problems. I’d have to do some deeper reading, but it seems that many of the “uninhabited” areas actually have a fair number of people living there. None of these are considered “inhabited” but all seem to have significant numbers of people.
If you have a low population density and a group that keeps harassing you (Type I warfare), would that be sufficient to keep populations low?
Population density is remarkably low, I’ll grant you. But that can be attributed to a few things. We don’t see many of the people that helped Rohan get to Gondor either, but that’s more an indication of them being skittish rather than them not being there. Maybe Orcs are the same–avoiding people unless they are either driven or have overwhelming numbers. Trolls are necessarily going to be low-density beings because of their subsistence style.
Our narrators aren’t exactly reliable in this either. And here I don’t mean the conceit of translation. Gandalf makes it clear there are humans in Isengard, but we know nothing about where they come from, how many there are, etc. Which makes sense, he doesn’t particularly care, but it does mean we know that there’s more population than we can see through the eyes of the characters.
As for the racism, yeah, Tolkien really struggled with Orcs. If they’re beyond salvation it breaks Catholic views on salvation–unless the Orcs aren’t really alive, but that violates a number of scenes where they certainly ACT as if they were alive. It’s complicated. And it’s complicated in ways I love about Tolkien’s writing. It’s something you need to chew on, with no clear answer because the question is non-trivial.
“I though Bilbo had a sibling who was one of Frodo’s parents.”
No – that confused me too. Though Bilbo and Frodo commonly call each other uncle and nephew, that is not their literal relationship. They are barely related – Bilbo’s great-grandfather is Frodo’s great-great-grandfather. In fact they are as closely related to Merry and Pippin as they are to each other, all having the same common ancestor – the founder and patriarch of the Baggins family, Balbo.
Ronald Tolkien may have been a racist. Yet he was against colonialism and forced segregation and abhorred the Nazis. This still made him better than some contemporary authors which were hateful bigots.
“Ronald Tolkien may have been a racist. Yet he was against colonialism and forced segregation and abhorred the Nazis. This still made him better than some contemporary authors which were hateful bigots.”
I never said Tolkien was a racist. I said that the view of what counts as populated is inherently racist, because the CHARACTERS are racist. Makes a bit more sense in the context of LOTR–the different races are more akin to different species, and some of them were intentionally designed to be evil (by Morgoth). There’s actually a fair bit in the books about how stupid racism is (such as Legolas and Gimli, or Faramir and Eowyn).
My point was only that the characters have such a built-in understanding that certain groups don’t constitute people that it will have an impact on what’s considered inhabited areas. The good races want to genocide the evil races anyway (look at how Orcs are treated vs Men when they are captured after battle), and portraying the territory claimed by evil races as uninhabited is a fairly classic way of encouraging encroachment.
“If you have a low population density and a group that keeps harassing you (Type I warfare), would that be sufficient to keep populations low?”
Generally yes, middle earth isn’t irrational or inconsistent because of low population density so much as it indicates a very different world. However those populations which have been undistributed for centuries are exceptions, which basically means hobbits. To a much lesser extent some of the men populations also count, but most are stressed or appropriately sized.
The issue is that a cultural taboo could explain why they have a low population, as it does with dwarves and possibly elves, who just choose not to have many kids. However we don’t see such a taboo; yes there are small hobbit families, but then there’s the Tooks, who have a large clan, and Sam the prolific. The harvests might be unusually good after the war of the ring but that doesn’t answer why the hobbits don’t outstrip their resources then starve or try to colonize the surrounding lands. There should periodically be too many hobbits for the shire, and they should either have horrifyingly bad years or expand to avoid them.
We’re basically left with a very strange problem where either hobbits have to have undisclosed cultural practices and extremely good predictive abilities that let them perfectly mold their replacement rate, which isn’t impossible but isn’t textual, or the textual taboo against leaving the shire is so strong it periodically wipes out entire generations, which they just quietly accept. Either is extreme, and the explanation that it’s not a consistent story fits better.
This isn’t surprising, hobbits are very much a fantastical element which exists for the story, not really the world-they very distinctly feel bolted on, and I think this is borne out by their relatively late addition to the legendarium. Tolkien needed country squires for his story so invented a race of rural English farmers, but they don’t quite fit.
And Tolkien was absolutely racist, in that he believed races existed and seems to believe that they had inherent stereotypical characteristics, two wildly believed ideas at the time. However I think it’s important to say he didn’t believe any human race had inherently negative or positive characteristics, nor that anything about race justified atrocities. Both views would have contradicted his morality too severely, hence he explicitly rejected each. He might have thought that there was a Nordic race and a Jewish race and a Black race, but he didn’t believe any of them was bad or worthy of subjugation or oppression. In fact part of what horrified him about the Nazis was the boldfaced assertion that it was the Nordic races destiny to oppress or exterminate the others, an immoral characteristic he viewed as a slight *against his own race*.
In other words he was racist, but not in the “all that’s left of my soul is insecurity, loathing, and contempt” sense that characterizes contemporary and modern capital R Racists.
It’s easy to see how it influenced his creation of races with mostly negative or positive characteristics, though.
To Dinwar:
It is true that both “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” are written from the point of view of the hobbits. They may not view the orcs or trolls as people despite them being evidently able to talk. “Specicist” is probably a better word in this context. Also, before the journeys described in these book the viewpoint characters had never been outside the Shire. An area only inhabited by settled people. Such a person might well assume that all “people” are settled. If he passes through an area were the humans (or possibly elves or dwarves) are nomadic and he does not came across any the area may then be mistaken for uninhabited.
To Terry:
I think the hobbits are intended as audience surrogates. The elves only ever reproduce with their one true love. If they can’t find their one true love they would not reproduce. For the dwarves the problem is their species being 2/3 male. It does not help that many men are married to their jobs or many women refusing to marry unless they can get the man they want. Consequentially, their numbers are decreasing due to a low reproduction rate at least during some time periods.
A pet idea of mine is that the various *non-human* races in Tolkien are to some extent a take on the traditional British class system as seen by an old-school conservative who approved of it: The Elves are an idealized version of aristocrats, the Hobbits are middle class, the Dwarves are, not always, but most of the time, “good”, “loyal” workers, and the Orcs are “bad”, “disloyal” workers. I understand that the class distinctions we see *among* Hobbits are an argument against my take, though.
Ronald Tolkien has explicitly likened his dwarves to Jews. Other fantastic sentient species could be inspired by other cultures or by religious concepts.
@Lena:
I know that the standard idea about Dwarves in fantasy is that they’re supposedly based on Jews, but I’m not sure I buy it, even though it was confirmed by Tolkien himself. That’s because as far as I can see, one of the most common stereotypes about Jews, both among Jew-haters and, in a different way, among many Jews themselves, at least in the Diaspora, is that Jews are supposedly a lot more about brains than muscles. And the typical depiction of Dwarves, in Tolkien and elsewhere, seems to be the *exact opposite* of that.
Dwarves are typically portrayed as more technologically advanced than other sentient species in the setting. On the other hand they tend to be physically stronger too. When I spontaneously imagine a generic fantasy dwarf I imagine a guy looking like a modern reconstruction of a Neanderthal with Viking clothes and hairstyle.
@Raphael
Before they were associated primarily in the public imagination with law and banking the stereotypical occupation for a successful Jew was a jeweler or armorer – someone who did a lot of skilled, fine-detail work with metal or stones. All those ‘Gold-‘ occupational surnames for a reason.
(Also doctors, but that one isn’t relevant to the discussion).
Tolkien’s dwarves also had a significant diaspora owing to the falls of several of their major kingdoms.
I don’t know if Ronald Tolkien’s dwarves are ever stated to be physically stronger than his other fictional species. This idea might be honour by association in later fantasy. They are associated with metalwork and it is beneficial for metalworkers to be. Which could have led to the idea of dwarves being physically strong. Possibly even stronger than other taller species.
“I don’t know if Ronald Tolkien’s dwarves are ever stated to be physically stronger than his other fictional species.”
Not stronger in the weightlifting sense, but they were designed by Aule to be “stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity, and they suffer toil and hunger and hurt of body more hardily than all other speaking peoples”.
To Terry:
I am not sure what you mean by “absolute earliest histories”. But you claimed that the Shire should be overpopulated in just a few centuries. Problem is the mentioned hobbits vary widely in how many children they have or if they have any children at all. So I doubt we can tell anything about the hobbits’ average number of children. Without this information we can’t make any calculation like yours.
Overestimates of number of (surviving) children can certainly lead people widely astray. I have read about such calculations of someone’s or some group’s living descendants. The calculation ends with more descendants than a given area has inhabitants. Then the person making the calculation concludes non-descendants in the area being rare. The result of the calculation exceeding the known number of inhabitants should instead indicate at least one fatal flaw with it.
One group being subject to such miscalculations are Wallon immigrants to Sweden. Around 1600 about a thousand people immigrated here from what is now southern Belgium. This was added to a pre-existing population of at least several hundred thousand. An estimate of about a million has been mentioned. However, this number might include Finland and Estonia too. Anyway, about a thousand Wallons settled in the part of Sweden where there was a concentration of mines in circa 1600. During the following four or five generations their descendants would have largely married each other. After this they would still mostly have married within their profession group (blacksmiths). I don’t think their descendants would have spread much across the country either until well into the 19th century. By then geographic mobility had increased significantly. It has been estimated that only 1% of Sweden’s current population actually descends from those Wallon immigrants. Which makes perfect sense to me.
Personally, I think the Rohirrim should be read as a mixed agrarian/nomadic population. It seems like they are divided between a primarily nomadic population of riders and shepherds that mostly lives in the eastern half (which is notably presented in the books as empty grassland without villages or any population, exactly what you’d expect from the pastures of a nomadic population) and a more agrarian population in the Westmarch (which is described with more mention of settled towns and fields, and seems to produce mostly infantry rather than riders).
Along the same lines, mounted archery seems to be a rare but extant skill among the Rohirrim (the narration specifically notes that some but not all of Eomer’s riders were firing at the orcs during the chase, and Legolas later mentions that the Rohirrim have good archers but not a lot of them), which again fits with the idea of a formerly nomadic population that has partially transitioned to agrarian life.
I was thinking of the possibility of that too. There have historically been peoples controlling areas with relatively little arable land and plenty of grazing grounds. These practiced some agriculture but were mostly herding.
In regards to the discussion of Rohan, I would like to add this cut line from Aragorn released in The History of Middle-earth, Volume 8.
“Somewhat short of ten thousand,’ answered Aragorn: ‘but in that count I reckon only men well-horsed, fully armed, and with gear and provision to ride to battle far away, if needs be. As many again there are of men on foot or with ponies, with sword and shield, or bowmen and light-armed men of the dales: a good force to defend strong places, if war should come to the land of Rohan itself.”
This suggests that roughly half of Rohan’s military force is cavalry, which is much more than would be expected if the Riders were just the society’s equivalents of knights and their retainers. However the equal number of infantry also illustrates a people more settled people than the Mongols. Based on the quote, some of those who are not Riders seem to be mounted infantry, but others are footman who do not own horses.
This quote also indicates that many of their footman come from the valleys closer to the mountains. Others here have suggested that farming was more common there while transhumance was the mode of substance in Rohan’s plains, and it looks like this is what Tolkien meant to imply, at least when he wrote the line. The overall impression I get is that Rohan was a society in transition between he nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe and the settled Anglo-Saxons.
In regard to the presence of horse archers, Unfinished Tales describes Théodred with a company of them, but they only make up 1/10th of his mounted troops. Whether they are relics retained from the Rohirrim’s nomadic ancestors or developed to counter the Easterlings, archery is not how most Riders fight.
I wonder if the context in which a mounted archer appears might be indicative. There seems to be a sense that there are some men with some degree of practice and skill for shooting from horseback in aid of skirmishing tactics. But the fact that it doesn’t show up as the major tactical arm of their full-scale fighting force suggests that the horse riders of their society don’t maintain it as a standard that would allow it to be consolidated and applied as such.
I think there might be a realistic comparison in which not every Medieval army that ever had people fighting with longbows had them using them to a degree that warped how their arm bones developed, and could be used as a major (but not primary) wing of how armies were deployed.
[…] “them using them to a degree that warped how their arm bones developed” […]
I think this is why archers practicing almost daily during their upbringing were better than those which learned their professional skill as adult. This skeletal difference has been documented by archaeologists.
“Now the core landed aristocracy is going to be really small,”
“So while the number of lords and their families is small”
Actually, no.
We have several references (in the books!) to having quite large numbers of lower nobility with titular dignity of “lord”. Plus further large numbers of lower nobility who don´t have the title of “lord” but who do have hereditary landholdings:
* At the Field of Fire, we read that the allied kingdoms of Reach and Westerlands had 600 lords present on battlefield, 2/3 of whom from Reach. Making a rough estimate, some lords would have been unfit to fight for reasons of health (and sent their sons or other deputies who lacked the title “lord”), some would have been detailed to hold the other fronts (and may or may not have sent detachments), some deserted… a total of 1000 lords between these two kingdoms is roughly the region. Now add maybe another 300 average (like for Westerlands) for each of the other four kingdoms (Stormlands, Riverlands, Vale, North), would give 2200 without counting Dorne or Iron Islands…
* At the Great Council called by Jaehaerys to decide succession, we are told that the exact count of lords attending was not decided, because some lords arrived after others had left, but it was about 1300. Fits the estimate of 2000…3000 “lords” across Westeros – major military campaigns or events manage to get maybe half or two thirds of lords existing to turn up because of the aforesaid obstacles
* We clearly see that not all lords report directly to the paramount lord/ex-king of the kingdom. Manderlies of White Harbour report having 12 lords for vassals. Ser Eustace Osgrey reports that past Osgreys had 12 lords for vassals. At present, Lord/Lady Webber is a vassal of Lord Rowan. Thus, a kingdom with 200…700 lords existing has many of them sworn to other lords, not the paramount lord
* We also hear of a lot of “landed knights”. Such as ser Eustace Osgrey but many others. Manderlies report having 100 landed knights for vassals, so did past Osgreys. After the Battle of Blackwater, the numbers of attainted followers of Stannis was under 50 lords, but over 600 landed knights.
Given these points, it makes sense that Westeros has over 10 000, probably over 20 000 aristocratic hereditary landowners (landed knights) and every kingdom over a thousand. (There is an obvious need for some term to call a hereditary aristocratic landowner who is neither a lord nor a knight. North is likely to have some of those.)
> (There is an obvious need for some term to call a hereditary aristocratic landowner who is neither a lord nor a knight. North is likely to have some of those.)
The term is probably “Master”. The appendix of one of the novels lists a vassal of Lord Stark as the Master of Deepwood Motte.
One thing that Martin said he regrets is his over-use of the word “lord” and that he wishes he had used other noble titles to distinguish different levels of “lord.”
Overall I agree with what you’re writing here, I think it’s been too long since The Pedant has read ASoIaF (you can hardly expect him to reread five door stoppers just for a weekly post but still…) and he’s getting a lot of book and show canon mixed up.
“One thing that Martin said he regrets is his over-use of the word “lord” and that he wishes he had used other noble titles to distinguish different levels of “lord.””
Yes, he has. But the concentration on single title “lord” does make sense in the setting.
Rzeczpospolita had something like 200 000 “pans” – with the single title. And Rzeczpospolita strongly objected to introduction of other noble titles.
Westeros does distinguish between “lord” and “knight”. But avoidance of other noble titles can make sense in the setting. Kingdom of Reach had 500+ lords before Field of Fire (400 turned up). Note how Osgrey did have title “Marshal of the North March”.
The paramount lords having no special title, just “Lord Stark” etc. – but also titles like “Warden of the North” – makes sense because their previous title was “King” – which they lost to cut them down. Creating a special title for the ex-kings would have weakened the implications of them no longer being Kings. Also consider the titles of “Lord Manderly”:
*”Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith, Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, and Knight of the Order of the Green Hand”
I suggest that the lords who stand above the 2000…3000 pool of petty lords (like Baelish of Sheepshit) likely use individual, nonstandardized titles that are dropped in common circulation.
In this context the word “pan” should probably be translated to “lord” or “master”.
I just find funny that the Dothraky are meant to represent some kind of mongolian style steppe nomads… But they end up resembling and old person idea of a biker gang.
I think they are based on George Martin’s misunderstanding of nomadic peoples, really.
Yes, Martin’s understanding of nomadic people is really quite bad. He basically takes biased outsider accounts of nomadic ARMIES and builds their whole society off of that. It’s the equivalent of someone claiming that every American eats dinner in a communal mess hall every day.
The Israeli kibbutzim tried that and it did not work out.
Since cattle and horses are oftentimes mentioned together one might naively assume them to have more in common than actually is the case. In reality horses are unsuitable to breed as primary food source. They reproduce and grow too slowly for this. Horses have a gestation period of 11 – 12 months and grow up in 6 years. In contrast cattle gestate for 9 month and grow up in 3 years. I think this is possible because their digestive system is significantly more efficient. Bison have the same benefits in digestion and reproduction but are undomesticable. In these respects sheep are basically draught-adapted, human-sized cattle. As is typical for smaller animals they reproduce and grow even quicker.
Also, it’s important to note that sheep produce wool, which is a very valuable resource because it can be turned into comfortable textiles (cattle produce leather but not anything that can be turned into textiles, while goat-hair and horse-hair textiles are scratchy enough that they were famously worn as a means of religious self-mortification for penance).
Getting more of these relatively comfortable textile fibres was probably why woolly sheep were bred in the first place. Even today there are sheep breeds not providing much in the way of wool.