A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
This is the second half of the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. Last week we took a look at how the leadership of these armies was drawn from the existing elite classes of their societies. As with … Continue reading Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVb: Cohesion
This is, at long last, the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission, IVa, IVb). last time we looked at the social status of hoplites and the implications that had for the political and social structure of the polis and even the very basic question of how many people there were … Continue reading Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part IVb: Training Hoplites?
This is the second part of a series taking a historian's look at the Battle of Helm's Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII), from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson’s 2002 film of the same name. Last time, we looked at the operations which led up to the … Continue reading Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part II: Total Warg