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- [00:03]
Alan Sisto
You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns.
- [00:10]
Brett Devereaux
McDonald's breakfast comes first.
- [00:16]
Alan Sisto
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- [01:05]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Which kind of seems to indicate that we had nothing to do with it.
- [01:09]
Alan Sisto
Just about.
- [01:10]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Yes, folks, pull up a bench in the common room and join us. I'm Matt, the nerd of the Rings, and I'm here with the man of the west whose understanding of battlefield tactics is limited to the Total War video games, Alan Sisto.
- [01:23]
Alan Sisto
That's about right. But don't forget Warhammer 40K. Matt, I didn't play Black Templars for a decade.
- [01:28]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Oh, I would never.
- [01:29]
Alan Sisto
I mean. Folks, join us as we step away from Unfinished Tales tonight to bring back a friend of the podcast who's been our go to expert for all the battlefield moves since Sean and I first discovered his blog shortly after we started the ppp.
- [01:43]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
I'm kind of a Space Wolves guy myself, for the record, but Fenris. All right, all right. Now that blog that Alan mentioned is of course a collection of unmitigated pedantry, or if you like acronyms, a couple a title which already told us he was our people. Now that is of course the author Brett Devereaux, and he is an ancient and military historian who is currently a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University. He holds a PhD in ancient history and an MA in classical civilizations.
- [02:21]
Alan Sisto
Of course. Really, he's more than a historian. He's a phenomenal fantasy nerd, sci fi fan and accomplished gamer. I believe he lists among his most important accomplishments beating dark souls. He's also appeared on six episodes back in season seven of the PPP3 with you and I, Matt, when we covered the Siege of Gondor, and three more when Sean and I covered the battle of the Pollenor Fields. So for those who want to listen to those again, Those are episodes 281 to 283 and then again 288 to 290. But since it's been nearly two years and we've been talking a lot of battles, we knew it was time to have him back.
- [02:53]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
And for a full episode at that. You guys are in for a treat today. So he's here to help us make sense of all the battlefield shenanigans that we've tried to understand over the last 11 episodes. So buckle up, folks, and enjoy a long episode of unmitigated pedantry. Welcome, Brett Devereaux.
- [03:14]
Brett Devereaux
Thanks. Wonderful to be here. Wonderful to be back.
- [03:16]
Alan Sisto
We are going to have fun today. Well, folks, you know, we started this whole Unfinished Tales run before we got into Unfinished Tales. We started with the Lord of the rings and Appendix A3 two episodes on the House of Aoral sort rattling the holiday break. And I want to start with that story. It starts with an all too brief discussion of the battle of the Field of Celebrant, but we're going to talk about that at length when we get to Kirian Oral later today. So keep your powder dry for that one. For now, I want to start with something that we read in the history of the Eotheod before they become the Rohirrim. Many lords and warriors and many fair and valiant women are named in the songs of Rohan that still remember the North. And then later, when speaking about Rohan to Frodo and Sam, Faramir spoke of how Gondor loves the Rohirrim, right? Tall men and fair women valiant, both alike. And then there's a draft in the chapter the Passing of the Gray Company where Tolkien's notes indicate that there was a time in the past where Rohirrim women rode to war, he wrote, as they did in a like evil time in the days of Brego, son of Eoral, when the wild Men of the east came from the Inland Sea into the East Emnett. And then, of course, Eowyn herself claims to be a shieldmaiden and certainly fights as though trained for battle. Now, I know you've not yet seen the War of the Rohirrim, but I also assure you know that a woman features prominently and fights. I want you to tell us a little bit about the real world parallels, women warriors in these sorts of cultures.
- [04:39]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. So I think that the necessary background here is first understanding where Tolkien is coming from. Tolkien's cultural frame for the Rohirrim comes out of the sort of broad milieu of the North Sea in the early Middle Ages. Rohan's language, of course, quite famously is represented in the Text as Old English, you know, and this conceit is that it's being translated, but there it is. And the Rohirrim, while they're horsemen instead of seafarers, they borrow a lot from that milieu. Often this gets simplified to the idea that the Rohirrim are just like Anglo Saxons on horses. But the thing to keep in mind is that the Early English Anglo Saxons that Tolkien is working with are very much participants in a broader kind of North Sea Scandinavian inflected culture. Note, for instance. Right. That the. That Beowulf, the great Anglo Saxon Old English epic, takes place in Scandinavia, and it's about Yots and Danes. And so that sort of cultural space is fused. And here in Old Norse epic, we do see these. These figures later termed Skjaldmers, shield maidens. I'm probably mispronouncing that. I'm sorry, I don't. I don't read Old Norse.
- [05:51]
Alan Sisto
That's okay. Neither do we.
- [05:54]
Brett Devereaux
I've got two dead languages. That isn't one of them. And Tolkien uses that term in translation directly of Eowyn, so he's invoking that literary tradition. So female figures like this show up in the Norse sagas, perhaps world historically. Most famously Brynhildr or Brynhilda from the Volsan saga. Although today's listeners, the Skjeldmare they're probably most familiar with these days is from the Gesta Denorum is Lagertha, because she was in Vikings. But these aren't the only. The only figures. There are a number of others. They're not. It's not like every saga has one, but a lot of the sagas have one and some have a few. I should note the maiden part of Shieldmaiden here is usually, but not always operative. The sort of standard archetype here is that these are not yet married women. And one way that the shield maiden's tale often ends is after doing battle, she marries and settles down the elder. I'm going to mispronounce this, but Hervor, for instance, is an example of this kind of archetype. And obviously that is Eowyn's trajectory. The other trajectory is glorious death in battle. There are no other options.
- [07:09]
Alan Sisto
I'll take what's behind door number two, thank you very much.
- [07:12]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, I suppose I say there are no other options. Lagertha herself is probably like the weird option three, where you assassinate your husband and steal his kingdom. That's the last thing we hear about her in the Guest in Aorum is she marries Ragnar, is divorced by Ragnar, helps Ragnar in a battle anyway, and then after it's done, she is apparently remarried, she murders that guy and takes his kingdom and that's it, and she's.
- [07:36]
Alan Sisto
Off into the sunset, enjoying her retirement in the new kingdom. Yes.
- [07:40]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, no, exactly. But so these figures are really common in. In the sagas, and they're in that space now, as you might imagine, that has sparked considerable debate for a long time among historians about the historicity of these figures, because the. The. The scaled mare, the shield maidens in the sagas are. Are not historical figures. Generally speaking, we can't really be sure that Legatha existed. We can't be sure that she didn't. Right. And so you want something a little firmer to say if this is a cultural tradition, and we do have a few indications that it actually might be, and I think the scholarly consensus at this point has moved to a thing that happened. Certainly not often. It wasn't a normal thing to do, but it was a thing that that happened. We do have women warriors appear in some more clearly historical Norse texts, most famously here in the Greenland saga, where the tiny little Viking outpost in Vinland, which is to say North America, is getting overrun by the Skraelings, which is to say Native Americans. And we get Fraedris Ericksdaltar, who grabs a sword and goes to fight off while pregnant.
- [08:51]
Alan Sisto
Oh, wow.
- [08:55]
Brett Devereaux
And she charges forward while the men are retreating and shames them into giving battle.
- [09:01]
Alan Sisto
Oh, my.
- [09:01]
Brett Devereaux
We also have the occasional report from Byzantine sources that they are interacting with, you know, Scandinavians, quote, unquote, Vikings. You're always going to hear me put quotes around Vikings. Viking is a job, not an ethnicity.
- [09:14]
Alan Sisto
Exactly.
- [09:15]
Brett Devereaux
Now those guys are coming down the Russian rivers into the Black Sea and then into the Byzantine sphere of influence from there. And Byzantine sources recounting battles with some of these groups do occasionally report, often with considerable surprise, like, when the battle is over, they found that there were women among the slain as well as men. And they're like. I mean, to the Byzantines, they're like, what the hell?
- [09:36]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [09:37]
Brett Devereaux
They come from a cultural milieu where women definitely are not combatants on the battlefield. And you know, for a long time that literary sources were what we had. And you do run into some trickiness because, yeah, Byzantine sources also love their Amazon analogies. And the Amazons don't appear to have been a thing, although sometimes your Amazon stories are connecting to female combatants among some nomadic steppe tribes, the Scythians, which does appear to have been a real thing. We have some. Some burial evidence that that that was in fact a thing. More recently, what we've been getting, what we've been looking at pretty closely are burials of what appear to be Norse women with weapons.
- [10:24]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [10:24]
Brett Devereaux
And now I, I would note that burial evidence is also tricky because just because somebody is buried with something doesn't mean that they were using it. And in another cultural context, and we certainly do have female burials from contexts where we do not have a tradition of women fighting where they might be buried with a sword. And often what's probably being indicated is something like lordship, this is a ruler and the sword is an emblem of rulership. But we do now have a number of confirmed female burials. And if listeners are wondering why I'm making a point about confirmed. Usually when archaeologists excavate a burial, you can determine the sex of an individual usually from their bones. But that's not generally the process that you take when you've got a lot of these usually look at grave goods first. And so if you see a distaff, a spindle and some bracelets female. If you see a bunch of swords and armor, you did mail. But of course this question are there, right? Which means as an aside, you could have a situation where a female buried with arms could be classified as a male without anyone necessarily checking. So you're having a situation now where with both new excavations of, you know, Viking burials and reviewing old finds. Right. There's an increasing question, like, wait a minute, do we have any confirmed female burials with weapons? And the answer is yes. I mean, Most famously this 10th century burial in Burke, Sweden. And we've got a couple of others, or quite a few others actually now from the British Isles. And so I think the scholarly consensus has now gone as like, okay, we have literary evidence, we have evidence from historical documents, we have evidence from Byzantine sources, and we have burials of women with weapons. The balance of the evidence is to suggest that this is a real thing that existed in this culture, that women probably mostly pre married women in a culture, I must stress, where the nuptiality rate is going to be close to 100%. So it's a question of when, not if you get married for both men and women, that they are, that they are going to war. It's not clear that they were called scaldmare, shield maidens at the time. That term, as far as I understand it only begins cropping up in like the 13th century. It doesn't show up in the sagas to my knowledge. But again, I'm not an Old Norse expert, but. But I think on on balance. Yeah. I think we have to conclud among some of these Scandinavian peoples, these are cultures where some women. The indication seems to be aristocratic women, do fight at a certain sort of period of their life. One has to imagine, by necessity, at other times. And that, of course, implies that they're. That at least some women are being taught to fight.
- [13:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [13:13]
Brett Devereaux
And so the fact that, you know, Eowyn knows her business is not necessarily shocking in his culture. She's the king's niece. She's grown up in his household. And. And there might be an understanding that she might have to defend herself under certain circumstances. And so, you know, in the. In this culture, and the idea that she would be prepared for that is. Is not crazy. And Tolkien is drawing on this kind of rich literary tradition that has increasingly been backed up historically that we might assume to happen. Yeah. I mean, it's striking that there are cultures in which women fight in the sort of pre Gunpowder era. They tend to be few.
- [13:49]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [13:50]
Brett Devereaux
But Tolkien happens to be an expert in one of them, and so he's incorporated that. So, yes, there is a historical basis for Eowyn kicking ass and taking names.
- [14:00]
Alan Sisto
I like that. I like that a lot. All right, Matt, you've got a question.
- [14:03]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
All right, so we've got another character that features in the War of the Rohirrim film, but we're gonna stick to his book story for this question. That is Helmhammerhand. Now, after Helm killed Freca with his famous single punch, he declared Wolf. You know, that was Freca, Freca's son, who is rejected as a potential husband for Helm's daughter. He declares him the king's enemies, and then, of course, Wolf flees. But four years later, Wolf comes back at the head of an army of Dunlendings and nearly wipes out Rohan. Interestingly, the text says they were joined by enemies of Gondor that landed in the mouths of the Lefnui and Eisenhower, which I think strongly suggests that the Corsairs of Umbar joined in. Now, talk to us a bit here, Brett, about just how such an alliance could be arranged. I mean, it's not as though the Corsairs and Dunlendings are chatting on social media about how much they hate those Rohirrim.
- [15:03]
Alan Sisto
But they would be if they could.
- [15:05]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
But they would be if they could.
- [15:06]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [15:07]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
And, you know, Wolf was at least nominally a man of Rohan, after all.
- [15:11]
Brett Devereaux
Mm. So obviously here, as. As always, when we're working with, you know, appendices and unfinished tales and so on, we often get a text that is very thin.
- [15:22]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [15:23]
Brett Devereaux
And so the historian brain in me is always casting as to, like, what information do we not have that would flesh this text out? And, I mean, if I got this in a historical text, there are a few things that I would be noting. I mean, first, Frecka's effort to marry Wolf into the royal family, especially given his, shall we say, arrogant nature towards Helm. I think we would read this as an effort to seize power.
- [15:49]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:50]
Brett Devereaux
He's got some military strength. He is trying to pressure Helm into a marriage that will give his son a claim on the throne as a rival to Helm's sons. And that effort fails when Helm, one shot, knocks out Freca. Right. Just straight one punch. Man's Freca Ko, flawless victory. And then we're told that, like, Wolf is declared enemy, he has to flee. So you've got this sort of princeling who has some support in the sort of borderlands of Rohan and among the Dunlendings, who has to flee. And here I would note, right, four kingdoms with monarchies and succession. It's a good plan if you have. If you're an enemy of that kingdom, if you are Umbar, just simply hanging on to, like, one or two dispossessed princes of your enemies is just a great diplomatic option. And, of course, Wolf, as such a dispossessed prince, needs somewhere to go. If he just hangs out with the Dunlendings, there's a decent chance that Rohan will send an army to find him. Right. Helm is going to come over with all of his cavalry and come looking. So he might flee to a foreign court.
- [17:04]
Alan Sisto
Ah.
- [17:05]
Brett Devereaux
And if you're the Corsairs of Umbar, you're going to welcome him, even if you don't have any immediate plans to do anything about it. He is good to just have in your pocket.
- [17:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah.
- [17:15]
Brett Devereaux
Because you can deploy him at the right time. And we're told that Gondor is also badly pressed in this moment.
- [17:21]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [17:21]
Brett Devereaux
And so it may have seemed like the perfect moment to expend this asset. And, you know, from my own expertise, the Roman emperors loved keeping Parthian princes, like, dispossessed Parthian princes in Rome. And, like, at points, it feels like they almost have, like, a warehouse. They always have two or three of these guys ready to go.
- [17:40]
Alan Sisto
Oh, let me go check my Parthian collection.
- [17:42]
Brett Devereaux
Right, exactly. I'm just going to, like, flip open the book and, like, who. Who lost the succession struggle last time? And in the meantime, if you're a Parthian prince and you're losing A succession struggle. If you stay, you die. The only guy who has the power to put you on the throne is the emperor in Rome. He's the obvious person to flee to. And he's happy to host you. And so I wonder if this is what's sort of going on in the background, is that if you are the Corsairs of Umbar. Yeah. You host this guy. He could be useful. And then four years down the line, you sort of have your moment. You give him some ships, some troops, some money. You drop him off the lendings, join him. You've now neutralized Rohan as an ally of Gondor in a key moment by. You don't even really care. Like, does Wolf win? You don't really care.
- [18:32]
Alan Sisto
No.
- [18:33]
Brett Devereaux
You've just created chaos, which can be a workable strategy.
- [18:37]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [18:37]
Brett Devereaux
And certainly, once again, leaning on the Romans a bit. This is actually part of the Roman strategy in the long term for dealing with. This is somewhat earlier than my previous example for dealing with the Seleucid Kingdom.
- [18:48]
Alan Sisto
Oh, okay.
- [18:48]
Brett Devereaux
What is today Syria and Iraq, particularly after the death of Antiochus IV Epphanes. Like, the Romans are just perpetually meddling in Seleucid succession in ways that just maximize chaos. The Ptolemies are also meddling in ways that maximize chaos. And the result is the Seleucid kingdom just steadily begins to collapse because it can't get consolidated behind a single ruler.
- [19:14]
Alan Sisto
Interesting.
- [19:14]
Brett Devereaux
And in the event, the Romans will end up abolishing what's left of the kingdom by decree in 63, they're just like, by the way, you're done. Because it's become so weak.
- [19:23]
Alan Sisto
Time's up.
- [19:24]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. But for this, there's sort of prolonged period where the Romans are casually encouraging internal dissension. And so, you know, this is a sort of play. And we might imagine the leadership in Umbar, and I don't know if we ever get a clear description of what the political situation in Umbar looks like, but, you know, this is sort of a standard tool of strategy.
- [19:46]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [19:46]
Brett Devereaux
As you say, they're not on social media. So chances are this is happening because Wolf fled there.
- [19:51]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. And that is an interesting addition that I don't think had crossed my mind, but it makes absolutely perfect sense. Like you said historically, if he just hung out with the dunlendings, he was going to get found. So you flee and you go to an enemy of your. Your. Your. Exactly. An enemy of my enemy is my friend. And in this situation, I hadn't even considered looking at this from the bigger perspective of the Gondar Umar conflict. But absolutely, Umar is going to put him to work to neutralize Rohan so Rohan can't come to Gondor's aid when they are assailed on all their coasts, as I believe the text says. So, yeah, makes perfect sense. And at the same time, it prevents Gondor from coming to Rohan's assistance. Now, moving on real quick, still connected to Helm Hammerhand. And an interesting thing where I thought, well, wait a minute, what about this idea? We have talked on the show about this idea of Were Guild. Tolkien mentions it a number of times. We've tried to explain the concept as best we could. Now, Helm Hammerhand might not have intended to kill Freca. You know, one punch, I'm not sure. Now I'm hearing Bullwinkle. You don't know his own strength. So this sort of negligent homicide is the kind of activity, the kind of thing that, if it weren't involving a king at the very least, would normally call for were Guild. And the concept is not alien to the Rohirriam folks might remember that we talked about Gondor Steward Turin ii, he's said to have sent to Folkina a rich wereguild of gold when Folkina's twin sons died in battle helping Gondor. So maybe tell us a little bit about Weregild, maybe flesh that out a little bit more for us and then whether a king could ever even owe Wereguild in the first place.
- [21:29]
Brett Devereaux
So Wereguild, the basic way to understand Weregild, Wereguild is first and foremost politically. It is a system to avoid feuds. The goal is to avoid the blood feud, where you answer somebody's crime, usually a violent one, with your own. And this escalates and, you know, forever. And the idea is a payment of. Of usually money, you know, precious metals, will end the question. And we have in all sorts of Germanic law codes, because this is generally speaking, a Germanic institution, you will. You will get big lists of like, here is the. The money value necessary to. To solve to expiate a given. A given crime. And there are. You're essentially treating every possible sort of crime like a property tort, in that everything is answerable with a fine, up to and including murder. But, I mean, that does also mean that, like, there are wear guild payments for, like, negligent homicide, accidental death, if you build a house and it falls down on somebody and that sort of thing. And of course, you know, famously, one of the ways to read these codes is that the were guild payment often differs based on the status of both the person who did the crime and the person who the crime was done to. That said, the exchange of weregild also seems to pick up ritual significance. Right. It expiates the stain of the crime, the moral and religious injury. And this is something we find in a lot of pre modern legal systems is the idea that the commission of a serious crime entails two kinds of harm, right? There is the harm to the victim, but then the individual who did the crime is also in some way ritually polluted or. Or bad in some measure. This is in ancient Greek law that the term for this ritual pollution is miasma. And that has to be. So even if you can get the victims to agree that everything's fine, like for certain crimes you need to. There needs to be a religious process to expiate the guilt. And for extreme crimes where that's not possible, they're kicking you out of the community regardless because you'll attract the wrath of the gods. You know, in this you see a similar sort of bipartite notion of guilt in medieval Catholic practice, where there is both a kind of like an earthly penalty to sin and a heavenly penalty to sin. You've got to sort of make good with the justice system, but you also need 53 Hail Marys, right. I'm being very flippant and apologies to Catholics, right. But that's the sort of the same kind of. Like there are two modes where Gil notionally fixes both. At least that's my understanding of it. And you can sort of see this as a king. Helm has no one to pay were guild to. He is the authority from which these rules flow. And so he doesn't make amends with Frecka's family, he kicks them out of the kingdom. He's the king. He is the source of these rules. And yet nevertheless, I think almost you can sort of sense in the structure of the narrative. And Tolkien is imitating a way that we see these narratives structured in historical documents, like immediately following upon this crime is the downfall of Helm's house. And it's a downfall that is supernaturally inflected. Not only do enemies come at just the wrong time, but then the earth functionally dies under his feet, and the winter only breaks when Helm dies. For as long as he with his indomitable spirit refuses to give up the ghost, the winter will not relent and the season of Rohan's misfortune will not relent. Right, Because Helm is the problem, that he has breached the norms and he has to make amends and the only way that he can manage to make amends for a man so inflexible and indomitable as Helm is to perish. And here I think the breach, as I would understand it, though the text doesn't say this, is probably twofold. There is the negligent homicide, but there is equally the problem that Freca is at Helm's council by invitation. He is a guest. And so the principles of guest friendship have been violated by both men, Frecka by his arrogant and insolent talk, which of course produces the violent, the lethal response, and with the later death of Wolf, the destruction of his house. So Frecka violates guest friendship and he and his family line are destroyed for it. But Helm also violates guest friendship and he and his line are destroyed for it. Right? And thus begins. Right, because if I'm remembering correctly, the survivor is his is. Yeah, nephew. And so. And so I think, like, this is. This is sort of, again, in the skeletal structure, you don't get all of the theming built out. You know, you don't have the Greek chorus coming on in the middle to be like, and this is why you don't do this nonsense.
- [26:36]
Alan Sisto
You can use that Greek chorus every now and then. It's true.
- [26:40]
Brett Devereaux
I know, but the thematic structuring is so familiar to me that I'm like, ah, I understand where this story was going. And. And if it had been fleshed out into a full narrative, right, we would have gotten a lot more motifs around this because this is about twin violations of guest friendship. And Helm really can't just pay the gold to make the problem go away. And so the result is that there is both a temporal penalty to pay, right. Wolf makes war on him, but also a spiritual penalty to pay that, like, the very earth rebels against him because he has violated this norm. And, you know, and of course, in ancient Greek or Roman or for that matter, Christian religion, there are ways to expiate that problem, to remove that. That pollution in the Norse sagas, not so much. Right? They don't have as easy systems for the removal of that guilt. And so Helm has to expiate the guilt with a heroic death. It's the only way to do it. And so he, Right, he essentially charges out and they're like, okay. And he just doesn't come back. And then they come out later and they find him so inflexible that he is still standing, even though he is.
- [27:54]
Alan Sisto
Which is, you know, at first glance, heroic. But you're right, it is also an indication of his absolute inflexibility and his kind of incorrigible nature in that regard. Just completely. I mean, refusing to acknowledge anything that, you know, he might have done himself. That is a fascinating take on it. I don't think I'd considered the.
- [28:15]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, you could imagine. You could imagine, like, a fuller story that during the siege, he would have advisors being like, you need to do something, and he says no. And then eventually he's like, oh, shoot, this is actually all my fault. And so he rides out alone to resolve the spiritual problem. Right. You could imagine that sort of story structure which seems hinted at with, like, they stay and everybody's starving and Helm starving and whatever. And then he's, you know, his. His sons go out to forage and are slain. They don't come back. And then he goes out, but he goes out alone, which is sort of, you know, you don't go out alone if you're playing with something.
- [28:55]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. Even Helm Hammerhand, even with the. The myth of, you know, he bore no weapons so that no weapon could bite on him and that kind of thing. Fantastic stuff. And I think, Matt, you and I have seen the War of the Rohirrim. I'm seeing a little bit of what he's talking about showing up in the film. Not a lot, but.
- [29:13]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
But, yeah, not a lot. I. That is one of my. One of my things that I wish. I wish we would have gotten more of is, you know, Helm during the siege. But, yeah, there's some. Some interesting things that Brett has said today that I'm like.
- [29:28]
Alan Sisto
I do too.
- [29:29]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
I like that this popped up in the film.
- [29:32]
Alan Sisto
I know I haven't seen it yet. So, yeah, I'd say it did pretty good. After all, even without seeing it, you've already definitely commented on it.
- [29:41]
Brett Devereaux
Great.
- [29:41]
Alan Sisto
Right down the middle.
- [29:42]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Yeah. All right, Matt, now, sticking with. With Helm Hammerhand, and I love. You know, you brought up the. The point that the winter won't be break until Helm breaks, which is really cool that I've. I've never thought about it in that sense. But speaking of the winter, talk to us about the effect of an unexpectedly cold and long winter for both the sieging force, which would be Wolf and his allies, and on the besieged. So in this case, Helm and what's left of the Rohirrim at Helm's Deep.
- [30:18]
Brett Devereaux
So there are a number of different impacts that an unseasonably cold and long winter are going to have for armies in the field. And. And the thing, of course, to. To. To understand. So armies in the Pre gunpowder, pre modern past. I mean, they essentially they need three things to continue functioning, and that is water, which I hope is available locally because you're definitely not transporting it. It's heavy food. And then fodder for other animals. Winter impacts both of those second things in exciting and difficult ways. As a result, it was standard even when you're having a mild winter. Armies don't usually operate in the winter. And you'll often see in reading historical sources, you'll see phrases like they wintered at such and such a place or they went into winter quarters. And of course a modern reader doesn't know what that means and often just sort of glides over that. What that's telling you is that that army has prepared a position with supplies to last through the winter. And the reason here is not just that it's cold. You go into winter quarters. Even in warm climates, like the winters in Italy and Greece and Asia Minor are very mild and army still go into winter quarters. It has to do with the cyclical nature of the availability of food and fodder. So in most of these cultures in Europe, the primary crop is winter wheat. There are two varieties of wheat, spring wheat and winter wheat. They change in terms of when you plant them. Winter wheat is planted in October, November, and it is harvested in the summer, so it grows over the course of the winter, thus winter wheat. Now, the problem is if you have a really harsh winter that is going to delay, the crop on the other end of is also going to mean, right, your army, as it moves, is relying on its ability to pull food supply from the peasantry around you. They're watching their grain supplies and what they need to survive with a harsh winter. Their worry is that the main crop might fail. And so peasants are canny survivors. So you hide the grain, you do not let the army have it because you need it. And then of course, the army is going to try and take it by force, but that's always an imperfect system. The other crop you might be really worried about in this context is winter barley planting. Winter barley comes in, in March or April, and yeah, frost that lasts all the way into March could just kill it. And you're relying potentially on some of those early spring crops to bridge you over to the arrival of the wheat crop in summer. And so if it does not come, you are in, in trouble, so to speak. The other impact that we don't often think about because people do think about food we don't often think about is fodder. And here the issue is Green fodder, the campaigning season in the ancient and medieval world generally begins in March, in mid March. And it is less predicated on the availability of grain for your soldiers, although it is certainly timed relative to that. But you can start when the grass is green and growing. And the reason is that you have all of these animals with your army. You have the horses, your cavalry ride, but you also have pack animals moving your supplies and equipment. And you could feed all of those animals grain.
- [33:36]
Alan Sisto
And that means you don't have a lot left for your people.
- [33:39]
Brett Devereaux
Correct. And so instead, you're almost always going to want to split your animals between dry fodder, which is hay, hard fodder, which are grain or oats, and green fodder, which is grass. And so the issue here is, if you're in a climate where the expectation is that like the snows melt early and the grass is going to start growing in, you know, February or April and be ready for your horses in March, and it's March and there's still snow on the ground, you have a problem, right? Either your horses are dying or you're burning out your people food to keep your horses from dying. And either option is bad. I should note here there is, there are two key distinctions here between horses in the agrarian world and nomadic step ponies that are worth noting here. And I have certainly experienced lots of arguments as to if we should understand the Rohirrim as more like agrarian horsemen or more like step nomads. And the answer is they're more like agrarian horsemen. These guys are not Mongols. One, agrarian horses, in order to carry a heavily armored man into battle, generally speaking, are bred to be larger, feistier and stronger. The issue is that very early, already, by the early Iron Age, we're seeing cavalry horses that are sufficiently big enough that their nutritional demands are so, so high that they cannot subsist entirely off of grass. By contrast, the wee bitty step ponies that your, your step nomads are riding, your Mongols and your Huns probably can't support a fully armored man, but they are small enough that they can still, they're basically wild horses, they can survive entirely off of grass. So some amount of dry or hard fodder is necessary even when the grass is in the field for an army like the one that Rohan has. The second problem is step ponies are extremely clever. And if you put them in a grass covered field that is then also covered with snow, they will take their hooves and kick the snow out of the way and eat the grass. And for Whatever reason, almost no agrarian horse breed knows how to do this. If you stick up like a big old mustang or charger in a field where the grass is covered with snow, it will starve to death.
- [35:50]
Alan Sisto
Wow.
- [35:52]
Brett Devereaux
Because he will not be able to get at the grass. And so the snowfall is going to create serious problems here for both forces. Because this certainly seems like a pretty loose siege of what has, in this moment, become Helm's Deep.
- [36:10]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [36:10]
Brett Devereaux
Because we hear of parties going out and not being immediately opposed. So it's not like Wolf is camped outside of it. He has bases in the distance and they're contesting the space. You can do this. It prevents either side from foraging effectively. Yeah, but that's cavalry work. Both sides are going to have real trouble keeping their cavalry operational and their horses alive in a context where the green fodder isn't available. And then also, of course, finally, everybody's damn cold.
- [36:36]
Alan Sisto
Well, yeah, I.
- [36:38]
Brett Devereaux
You know, you're also dealing with. Right. These are. These are communities where their heating option is. You cut down some trees and you light them on fire.
- [36:47]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [36:48]
Brett Devereaux
These are not, you know, robust heating options. And the combination of extreme cold exposure with malnutrition is a recipe for. For fatal diseases.
- [36:58]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [36:58]
Brett Devereaux
It is in both humans and animals. And so I think you can see kind of all of that rapidly grinding down the morale and cohesion and capabilities of these two groups. And it's striking that when the winter does finally break after Helm's death, Wolf, who is sort of holding court in Etteros, is overthrown almost instantly. You can tell that he's every bit as worn down as. As Helm's forces were in the Hornburg. That he is, like, casually overthrown by.
- [37:28]
Alan Sisto
Like, you know, frail off and four people.
- [37:30]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, like frail off and like, six guys. Yeah. And, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, absolutely. Like, this would be. This would be a. Like a terrible moment to have a really harsh winter. And it would also explain, like, the recovery from this moment might be slow.
- [37:45]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. And the text tells us that as well. Right. They did poorly in the dearth that followed. Yeah.
- [37:50]
Brett Devereaux
Because, you know, you've. You've potentially lost not only early harvest crops. Right. But this could really damage the. The wheat crop. Right. Which isn't going to have grown properly. The frost will have killed it. And so you're gonna have a bad harvest. This is going to impact your horse herds, which is Tolkien does. I think elsewhere in Unfinished Tales, he shows an attention to the. The Rohan supply of horses.
- [38:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [38:14]
Brett Devereaux
Which is obviously a key military resource, but like an event like this, it's going to take time to rebuild those numbers.
- [38:20]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, well.
- [38:21]
Brett Devereaux
And so you know, all of this is going to have lingering effects.
- [38:24]
Alan Sisto
Well, that was a great set of discussions on the House of a Orel. We're going to take a quick break, folks, and when we come back, it's going to be time to get into Kyrian and Aorol. Matt When I think about businesses that are just blowing up, you know, selling through the roof, like Allbirds shoes or Gymshark where I bought some stuff, the first thing that hits me is that they sell a great product or maybe it's a cool brand. But something that people often overlook is the business behind the business that makes selling. And for shoppers, buying simple. And for millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.
- [39:06]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Fact is, nobody does their selling better than Shopify, the home of the number one checkout on the planet. Their shop pay boosts conversions by up to 50%. So way fewer carts are abandoned and more sales go.
- [39:20]
Alan Sisto
So if you're looking to grow your business, your commerce platform has to be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on their feed or in your store.
- [39:30]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.
- [39:33]
Alan Sisto
Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Gymshark uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com pony all lowercase.
- [39:43]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Go to shopify.com pony to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com pony Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real.
- [39:56]
Alan Sisto
And so is the relief from EBGLIS. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit epglis.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. All right folks, important changes here, so if you usually skip this little bit, please hold off on that. We are going to get back to more Prancing Pony Podcast pedantry. But before we do, we want to remind you there is a lot more talk going on at the Prancing Pony Podcast than just us.
- [41:13]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
That's right, the PPP has an amazing listener community. They're always coming up with great questions and discussions across all our social media spaces. Check out our Common Room on Facebook, our dedicated subreddit, Instagram, Twitter and Blue Sky.
- [41:28]
Alan Sisto
Something new and something else new now on Facebook. Just look for the Prancing Pony Podcast. Follow the page to get the news, but you're going to want to join the group for some great discussions.
- [41:36]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Or if you prefer Reddit, find us there at R Prancing Pony Pod On Twitter, bluesky and Instagram, we're simply Rancing Pony Podcast.
- [41:44]
Alan Sisto
And here's the new bit folks. Please do not forget at Prancing pony pod on YouTube. So much there, folks. First, the brand new PPP plays live streams where twice a week I'll be streaming Lord of the Rings online, playing Magic the Gathering, Lord of the Rings or Journeys in Middle Earth. Or I'll be building Middle Earth in Legos or Games workshops, Battle for Etteros Minis. Whatever it takes, we're just going to have Middle Earth fun twice a week.
- [42:06]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
YouTube.com is also where you'll get Alan's daily Tolkien content from his short format show today's Tolkien Times. Now, more than 400 episodes, most around eight to 10 minutes, with everything from Mailbag Monday to Third Age Thursday to Silmarillion Saturday.
- [42:27]
Alan Sisto
Now you can also get the TTT in podcast form wherever you listen to this show, but be sure to check it out along with PPP plays@YouTube.com prancingpony pod.
- [42:36]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Okay, with that out of the way, let's get to the meat of this conversation here with Brett, the battles that are mentioned or described in the story Kyrion and Eorl and the friendship of Gondor and Rohan.
- [42:49]
Alan Sisto
It's quite a mouthful, isn't it?
- [42:51]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
It is, yes. It's a very long title.
- [42:52]
Alan Sisto
We'll just call it Kirian and aorl.
- [42:54]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Yeah, we'll go. We'll go with that from now on. And even though Kyrion and Aorl don't get together until 2510, the story we read began with the establishment of the Aotheod. We want to start there going back almost 900 years to 1635. The Northmen were hit hard by the great plague and were still quite a bit weakened when the Wainwriters began attacks 200 years later in 1851. Now, the first question from all of this, we spoke about how the Black Death killed anywhere between 30 to 60% of people living in Europe. How did that real world plague impact wars over the next couple centuries? Were there smaller armies? Peace through necessity and unexpected death? What. What were we looking at there, Brett?
- [43:43]
Alan Sisto
Forget about peace through strength. Peace through Black Death works.
- [43:48]
Brett Devereaux
I mean, so. So interestingly, we do see some ongoing conflicts that at. At points during this, you know, particularly some of. Of of the wars between England and France do kind of pause because nobody can put together an army that can engage in offensive operations. You know, that said, warfare is based on surplus manpower. And one of the oddities for these sorts of population contractions and the way that populations react to them is that you end up with surplus manpower fairly quickly. Right. Land falls out of cultivation as population contracts. And it should be noted in one of the oddities of the Black Death, of course, the land you drop out of cultivation is the marginal land. It's the land that's not very good. And so, ironically, a catastrophic decline in population can mean an increase in production per capita. Like, one of the real oddities of the Black Death is that it improved living standards for the survivors markedly. So we also see, like, among other things, the Black Death, the value of labor goes up.
- [44:50]
Alan Sisto
Oh, yeah.
- [44:51]
Brett Devereaux
If you're one of the surviving farmers, you can demand a much better deal from the big fancy lord who owns your land. But that could also leave land uncultivated in areas that will get described in our sources as deserted. I think it's striking, for instance, that this plague hits, and we hear it described this impact on the north. But then almost immediately, the next thing we hear is that Gondor is beginning to contract its territory. And that put me in mind less of the Black Death and more actually of something like the Antonine plague, which hits the Romans in 180s and 190s.
- [45:28]
Alan Sisto
Okay, yeah.
- [45:29]
Brett Devereaux
One of the things that in the aftermath of the Antonine Plague that we start to hear the sources complain about is that there are areas that Used to be densely peopled in the Roman world that are not as densely populated anymore. And you know, eventually we get much later on the other end of the third century crisis, we're going to have the Romans essentially busing in foreign peoples to fill up the spaces that are empty. Which is of course exactly what Gondor is eventually, eventually going to do with the a lingos is bust them in to feel they're like, there's nobody here in this spot. So it's all yours, buddy.
- [46:06]
Alan Sisto
And that one, that to be the oath on the top of the Halloween.
- [46:10]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
All yours buddy.
- [46:10]
Alan Sisto
All yours, buddy. In Quenya, no less.
- [46:15]
Brett Devereaux
Right. Going to have to get somebody who's better at conlangs than me to figure out in Quenya what it's all yours buddy is that was something that kind of knowing how this is going to go over the next couple hundred years that it put me in mind is like, ah, here is the demographic crisis that is going to be followed by military crisis, that the large imperial state is going to respond by inviting in new sources of population in order to get a new supply of military manpower. Yeah, in the form of obviously Rohan's armies. And so to me I was like, ah, it's fantasy. Antonine Plague. I don't know that that was, that was what Tolkien was necessarily thinking, although there's, there's no reason he couldn't have been. I mean we talk a lot about Tolkien being of course deeply immersed in, in Old English and, and Norse literature, but he had the sort of classical education you would expect from someone who taught philology at Oxford. He was very conversant in Greek and Roman texts. He read Greek and Latin very well and he knew them. And so I think that, you know, there's no reason to suppose that he would, that these references are not also in his toolkit. And I think they do show up. And so, you know, in particular this repeated recourse to the idea that like the, you can tell that the kingdom is failing because there are empty houses and empty fields is a repeated motif in later Roman literature, the agri deserti, the empty fields. And of course Roman emperors are looking to fill up those empty fields and they will bring in Germanic speakers to do so, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. And so this is kind of the context that, that I read it in where I'm like, ah, yes, okay, so this is, this is an indicator of, of decline. Now in this case, the busing in of some barbarians is going to work great. And I do feel the need to notice like as a Roman historian. With the exception of the Vandals and the Huns, the. The quote, unquote barbarians crossing the Roman frontier were almost always bused in by the Romans. Yeah, they're being invited. And in a lot of cases in the. In the near term, they are solving significant, like, military problems. The Romans are going to successfully push the Huns back out of Roman territory with an army mostly made up of Germanic speakers. Right. Like, that was a successful effort. So I think there's a. There's a lot of complexity that gets subsumed into this. Barbarian invasions. It's not that simple.
- [48:41]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, interesting stuff. Interesting. Well, the next thing that happened, of course, was when the Wain riders attacked. The Northmen, of course, bore the brunts. That's when King Narmacil II got his army together, pulled together a few Northmen fight alongside him. He went to fight the Wain riders. That would have been in 1856, in the battle of the Plains. He got killed. His army was defeated, and like you mentioned in an earlier question, Gondor started to shrink. This is when they started pulling back their borders. But an interesting thing happened in the Battle of the Plains. We read that the escape of the army of Gondor from total destruction was in part due to the courage and loyalty of the horsemen of the Northmen under Makhari, a descendant of Vidugavia, King of Rhovanion, who acted as rear guard. Now, we've kind of danced around this a lot, Matt and I, over the last several episodes, because we've noticed a lot of important rear guard actions in Tolkien. We see another one in the Battle of the Fords of Isen later on. And my mind always goes back to Hurin and Huor and the men of Dor Lomin forming a rear guard, giving their lives to enable Turgon to escape to Gondolin after they're near Nieth. It's not something that we see in a lot of detail, but we see it mentioned a lot. So I would love for you to kind of get our listeners up to speed on what a rear guard action typically looks like. How do you measure the success of an action that's typically part of a retreat? I mean, you don't have a rear guard unless you've lost or are losing. And are they typically as important in primary world history as they seem to be in Tolkien? I mean, they're. They're crucial in these battles that we see in Middle Earth.
- [50:06]
Brett Devereaux
I think I would start to say that when Tolkien crafts his battles, he is Riffing off of, musing off of identifiable battle tropes and motifs from historical battles that we know. But you can sort of see that there are particular kind of heroic motifs that Tolkien likes a lot and he likes using. We get lots of sieges where a relief force arrives just in time. Yes, I think we'll come back to this in a second. But Tolkien likes also this kind of shove of push and pull. The side that is losing is being pushed back. Often I think he has them pushed back further than I might normally expect, although not necessarily crazy far, but like, okay, that's a lot of push. And so rear guard actions are also one of these things that Tolkien likes because obviously the storytelling impact and the moral stakes of a force that is attacking to enable another force to flee. Right. Giving your life for another. It also has those good Christian thematic vibes, is all there. That said, I mean, this is something that some armies would do with varying degrees of success. So, for instance, the Roman army of the Middle Republic quite famously engages in three heavy infantry lines. The last heavy infantry line, the Triarii, only fights if things are going really, really bad. And sometimes their job is to essentially provide an opportunity for the rest of the army to get out of dodge and to make a kind of orderly retreat. That doesn't happen very often, but it does sometimes happen. Alternately, we'll often see troops posted at the camp for a pitched battle. And, you know. Right. Their goal is to kind of cushion a defeat. Though frequently you're defeated so badly that the enemy just then rolls over your rear guard. And it doesn't. It doesn't much matter, but it certainly can be the case. And even in battles that are reported in our historical sources as truly crushing defeats, there is often a significant amount of the defeated army that makes it out. And there's a big difference between making it out, melting into the countryside and making it out in one piece. So, for instance, one of the greatest Roman defeats, 216 is the battle of Cannae. This is Hannibal's great victory. But something like a quarter of the Roman army extricates itself from the battlefield. About 20,000, 10, 20,000 men, depending on the sources, or different as the casualties and size of the army. There's a whole debate about whether there were twice as many legions of the legions will double side. And we don't need to get into that.
- [52:50]
Alan Sisto
That would be pedantic, wouldn't it?
- [52:53]
Brett Devereaux
But. But it would be Polybius pedantry instead of Tolkien pedantry. Wonderful. Yeah. It'd be the wrong place for that.
- [53:00]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [53:00]
Brett Devereaux
But the result is a decent chunk of the army is actually able to flee. Despite the fact this is famously a double envelopment action. Hannibal has turned both flanks of the Roman army and sort of bear hugged them to death. Death and. But nevertheless, like a significant chunk of the Roman army is. Is able to to flee, reorganize and regroup in a nearby fortified town where that component is eventually able to be to be rescued. And this being the Romans, those guys are shamed for having not died on the battlefield. They're organized into a pair of legions, the Legiones Canensis, the Legions of Cannae. And they're packed off to Sicily as a punishment post because like you should have, you should have died when everybody else did. Though I will note that ends up being very. Their escape ends up being quite valuable. Those two legions are, God help them, still in Sicily 14 years later because this is a punishment position. So they're not coming home. When Publius Cornelius Scipio, soon to be Africanus, is putting together his invasion of North Africa and these are part of the forces he pulls to be part of that invasion force, recognizing that these men who were disgraced will take any opportunity to get their honor back.
- [54:17]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [54:17]
Brett Devereaux
Now, not every. Most societies are not quite as hardcore as the Romans are. About like, you should be dead. What the hell are you doing here?
- [54:25]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [54:26]
Brett Devereaux
And some of that I will note, the Romans are not always that hardcore about it. And some of this I think must be just the grieving process of the huge losses from can I. And all the families that have lost their sons. And why is your son alive? Yeah, kind of, sort of a venomous, toxic kind of environment nevertheless. Right. Like those kinds of rear guard actions could matter. And extricating some part of your army as a viable fighting force restricts the options your opponent has. And this is tactically speaking, what a rear guard action is doing. If you can keep part of your army as a viable, dangerous fighting force on the battlefield, which your opponent cannot do, is recklessly dispersed to pursue you.
- [55:10]
Alan Sisto
They have to stay in order too. Then they have to remain in that.
- [55:13]
Brett Devereaux
Formation and that slows them down. Right. Battle formations don't move fast. And if you're in all of your armor and kit, that slows you down further. And so that rear guard force can then enable the retreat of your force, which can then be potentially reconstituted and you're not left in a position where you have sort of nothing to oppose the enemy's subsequent advance.
- [55:36]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [55:36]
Brett Devereaux
And this, I mean, goes to right like that the Wainwriters are pressing and they win, but then they don't overrun the kingdom.
- [55:44]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [55:44]
Brett Devereaux
Well, why? Because there's still an army. And if you advance deeper into their territory, into conditions that are maybe more favorable to them, you might find your victory reversed on you. And so the rear guard action can actually be pretty substantial. That said, Tolken likes successful rear guard actions. I think we might come back to this at some point. The fords of the Eisen.
- [56:04]
Alan Sisto
I think we might.
- [56:05]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. Tolkien loves his successful rear guard actions, and there are maybe more of them in Tolkien than we would expect. Rear guard actions like this often fail. It is very hard to hold together a rear guard force like this one. All the guys in the rear guard know that. That they're gonna die. Like, that's. And the army is collapsing around them. And so it's very hard to hold them. To hold them together. You know, this is something that is to bounce over to the book, the Lord of the Rings books for a second. That comes out really clearly in. In the book version of Return of the King that is somewhat lost in its film translation. Faramir's rear guard effort.
- [56:42]
Alan Sisto
Yes.
- [56:42]
Brett Devereaux
That like, truly a captain of men.
- [56:44]
Alan Sisto
Yes.
- [56:45]
Brett Devereaux
To hold that together. He holds that together to within a couple hundred yards of the gates of Minas Tirith. This rear guard over. And of course, his defense of the causeway forts has enabled the rest of the Osgilia force to withdraw, which is, you know, if you're the Witch King, this is a disaster because every guy that gets away is now going to be up on that damn wall. And Faramir is able to hold his rear guard together across the retreat. But this is, of course, because he's Faramir, captain of men, and, you know, he's amazingly good at it. And he still has to be bailed out by a sortie at the end because this stuff is hard. And it's. Of course, it's the moment that he, with his force of personality goes down, that rearguard begins to come apart, which is also, you know, we see that a lot in our historical texts. And on the one hand, aristocrats be aristocrating that the authors of our historical texts are aristocrats. And so they tend to see victory as the product of aristocratic virtue rather than, say, the results of, like, the regular soldier. On the other hand, the way that the tight social bonds in these societies work, it really may be the tight ties that these men have to Faramir himself personally is what is holding them emotionally, psychologically, in position. And when he falls, then like all is lost and things begin to fall apart very quickly. And you can see that, that sort of situation. And you can imagine that, right, like the Mahari with his, his sacrificial rear guard action, he too must be a heck of a captain.
- [58:11]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [58:12]
Brett Devereaux
And you know, in the end, is it somewhat successful?
- [58:14]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, indeed. Well, and of course I'm thinking of all of those other ones where it is, you know, aristocratic and that's, it's a Hurin and who are. Yes, the men of Dor Lomin are there too. But it is those two and their loyalty to Huron and who are that enable them to, to, to provide that, that, that action. Protecting Turgon.
- [58:34]
Brett Devereaux
You even get, you even get this wonderful line when. And I love this bit and I hate that I understand why it dropped out of the movies, but I hate that it dropped to this movie. This wonderful moment of vulnerability when Gimli and Legolas are telling the story of traveling with Aragorn through the paths of the dead and then beyond. And I think it's Gimli who admits he's like, it was only Aragorn's will that held me there, that Aragorn had such force of personality and Gimli is a preposterously brave fellow. So it's being communicated here is the supernatural terror of the army of the Dead, that it was only this sort of intense leadership that Aragorn shows that is able to hold anyone together in that context. Even when the dead are on your side because they're just supernaturally terrifying. Yeah, it would be, I guess the Lord of the Rings online joke, right? Gimli needs to get more. What is it? Hope gear.
- [59:27]
Alan Sisto
He needs a token. He needs a hope token. Plus five for 30 minutes.
- [59:30]
Brett Devereaux
I have not played LOTRO in ages, but I remember that.
- [59:36]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, a lot of fun. A lot of fun.
- [59:38]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
All right, so let's turn to king Kalimekdar, that is Narmikil II's son. Now he would eventually seek to avenge his father's defeat and death. Marhwini, the leader of the former Northmen now the Aotheod, gave him news about the Wainriders plans to attack Calenardhon over the shallows of Anduin. In that same message, he told the king about a potential slave revolt. Captured Northmen who would revolt against the Wainriders were Gondor to attack. Now, this slave revolt didn't go quite all that well. Most of them perished in the attempt for they were ill armed and the enemy had not left their homes undefended. Their youths and old men were aided by the younger women, who in that people were also trained in arms, is what the text says.
- [60:31]
Brett Devereaux
Which, given that our. Given that our Wain riders are our Scythian step nomads. Exactly have our Scythian warrior women.
- [60:38]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
There we go.
- [60:39]
Alan Sisto
I love that because they are so clearly those step nomads, just as the Eotheod are essentially Goths before they become Anglo Saxons.
- [60:48]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Right, yeah. So, so again, there we've got the warrior women, but in, in this particular instance, we want to focus in on the idea of the slave revolt or an uprising. Are they ever successful? Was, was this a doomed action in the first place with, you know, the Northmen selling their lives simply to help ensure that the Wainwriters are. Are weakened somehow?
- [61:11]
Brett Devereaux
Okay, so the grim news here is that there is, in the whole of human history, there is one successful slave rebellion. It is the one that got us the country of Haiti, is the liberation of Haiti. That is it. Slave revolts almost always fail. What I actually find really interesting in this context is actually Gondor's willingness to encourage this kind of a revolt.
- [61:39]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [61:39]
Brett Devereaux
In order to gain a strategic advantage and to at least like, theoretically plan on supporting it. Even though that doesn't work out in the end. One of the things that often surprises students looking at the ancient or medieval world is do you have these societies that all have varieties of non free oppressed underclasses, whether these are slaves or serfs or what have you. And students are always expecting, like, well, clearly someone will exploit this obvious vulnerability in these societies. And then no one ever does. And the reason, of course, nobody ever does is that no one questions these social systems because they are ubiquitous. When you've got, you know, 11 different slave societies clubbing each other over the head, nobody is interested in, in ending the institution of slavery in these societies. It usually doesn't occur to them. And if it did, there would be an understanding that it would be dangerous at home to do it abroad. And, and so like this in particular is striking. The one, of course, very famous exception is the Theban war against Sparta in the early 4th century. The Theban general Epaminondas defeats a Spartan army at the Battle of leucture in 371. And then, rather than marching on Sparta itself, he marches straight past Sparta into Messenia, which is the other half of Spartan territory. The Spartans had captured this territory centuries earlier and had reduced its population to slavery, what the Spartans called Helots. Sparta is actually kind Of a, and this is one of my hobby horses. Sparta is a horrific society, probably the least free society in the ancient Mediterranean. Some 65 to 85% of the population is enslaved in a status of slavery that our Greek sources openly admit was the worst in all of Greece, which is a really low bar. But what Epaminondas does, he recognizes that the weakness of Sparta is that so much of the economic underpinning of their social system, because the Spartans themselves are a wealthy leisured elite, that they, they aren't allowed to work. They subsist off of all the slave labor. So he rolls into Messenia, declares the Messenian helots free, creates a new polis, a new political city state for them called Messenia, naturally. And that just cripples Spartan power forever. Now what's striking is that like Epaminondas is not an abolitionist. He doesn't believe in like the theoretical end of slavery. He makes for instance, no effort to free the helots that are in Laconia, the old Spartan territory. He leaves them there. What he's recognizing is that, well, yeah, but the Messenians are a distinct ethnic group. They're a distinct people, people that deserve to be independent. And so you can almost see the, the Gondorians being like, yeah, but these aren't enslaved wainwriters. These are enslaved Northmen who deserve to be free of Wainwriter tyranny. And so we're not attacking the institution of slavery, which we don't hear that Gondor has. Presumably they don't, but we don't. But they could. Instead we're attacking the idea that this people can exercise sovereignty over those people. Now in, you know, in the event it doesn't work. And, and that's not surprising. This is the perpetual problem that slave revolts face, is that they're, while they are often, you know, these societies have large numbers of, of enslaved workers who are prepared to revolt. They don't have weapons and they don't have organization and they aren't prepared and it's very hard to get. So if you read for instance, the narratives we have of the two Sicilian slave revolts in the late 2nd century in Roman controlled Sicily, in both cases the, the slave revolts concern is like, how do we get weapons? We need large quantities of weapons to be able to fight the almost inevitable Roman army that's going to show up. And so you get things like, you know, the revolting slaves will roll into a town and they will, you know, pillage and murder everything except for the artisans who are immediately put to work making weapons and these sorts of negotiations. Now, in the end, it doesn't work. There are two slave revolts in Sicily. They both proceed along similar lines. That the initial small local Roman force is overwhelmed and defeated. The Romans proceed with a series of half measures that don't work and then eventually send a major Roman field army which wins easily. Easily. Because these, you know, these guys, they can't get. They just can't get enough weapons and armor and equipment to be able to go toe to toe with a major Roman field army. And I think we're going to get to. Once again, we get to the fords of Eisen here in a second. How rough it can be to be unarmored light infantry pitted against armored heavy infantry. But it's rough. So this is something that. It's striking that the attempt here is made. And. And one. One wonders if. If Tolkien has Epaminondas in the back of his mind.
- [66:23]
Alan Sisto
I like that possibility because you're right. I think we do tend to forget that even though Tolkien's kind of favored area is Anglo Saxon and Germanic, he definitely had that classical background, that classical education. He would have known a lot of that history. And I think it does us well as readers to remember that and keep that in mind that it's not just. We don't need to look for parallels only in that part of history. So. Interesting stuff.
- [66:49]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. And Epaminondas may not be a household name today, but if you read ancient Greek literature, which, of course, Tolkien reads.
- [66:58]
Alan Sisto
A lot of ancient Greek literature.
- [66:59]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah.
- [66:59]
Alan Sisto
I mean, I'm thinking of his time at one of his schools. I'm trying to remember which, off the top of my head, he was involved in the apostics, and they used to do these recitations of plays. They would translate into Greek. They would take an English play and turn it into Greek and. And give it there. Or they would do, of course, the original Greek, and he would have it all memorized. I mean, it's just fantastic stuff. All right, well, coming back to the Wainwriters over the next 45 years, the text tells us that they licked their wounds and plotted their revenge before they came back in greater numbers and with Allies in Third Age, 1944. And it's that upcoming battle between the Wainwriters and Gondor that I really want to spend some time on in terms of just kind of digging into the tactics and things first. I want to talk about Ondoher's actions. He's the king of Gondor. At the time in the north as he approaches the Dagger Lad to fight against the approaching Wainriders. We'll get to the southern army and Earnil later. Now, for whatever reason, the text says that news of the northern assault did not reach Ondoher until the enemy was drawing near. The vanguard had not yet reached the gates of Mordor. The army was still apparently traveling in column through the narrow lands of Ithilien. You mentioned earlier formations and how they don't move very fast. Talk to us a little bit about army movements and formations for those of us who don't play total war or similar games. What is a column formation versus maybe more of a battle ready formation? How does, how do they differ? What are the strengths and weaknesses of those formations? And then just with a little bit of hindsight, what should On Deher have done to increase his likelihood of survival and success? Did he just not employ recon? I mean, how does the news not get to him? And what does that lead to in terms of the destruction?
- [68:37]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, so here we're getting, I think to a level of operational complexity that may even eclipse the total.
- [68:42]
Alan Sisto
I think so.
- [68:43]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Right.
- [68:43]
Brett Devereaux
So on Hare is clearly moving quite a large army, given the way the subsequent battle plays out. And I think what we should understand is that he's probably moving an army sufficiently large that it's not moving in a single column, but that he's got several columns stacked down the road. This would be, this would be normal if you put too many soldiers in a single columns. The problem, right, at the end of the day, everybody has to make a camp and go to sleep. And then at the beginning of the day, you have to begin marching your army out of the camp. Now, you know, an army of thousands of men may take up several miles of road space, but that means that whatever's behind them has to sit in the camp and wait for several miles of army to walk out the front door before they can. And so you reach a point usually around 20 or 30,000 is the threshold here where you start having to split your army up into multiple columns just in order to keep it moving. And so we might imagine there may be some separation between these columns. And so you would have. And here is where you will get the van or the vanguard, the main body, and then often a rear guard moving as three separate units all moving down the same row in sequence. And so what's happening is onto. Hare is reaching the southern end of where he wants to do his battle. He's not quite there yet with his vanguard but the main body of his army is a few miles back down the road, and he thinks he has time to get his whole army up into the plain, encamped and formed up. The Wainriders have actually been pretty clever. What we're told here is that they proceeded south from the Sea of Rhun and then across, across the mountains, across the north of Mordor. Those mountains will have shielded their movements in the sense that underher scouts literally can't see them because they're on the other side of these big mountains. One also wonders, because the Wain riders are a sort of pastiche of different periods of step nomads, if they're doing one of the crazy tricks that step nomads can do. Most armies, when they camp, have to light fires to cook their food, to bake bread, and cook whatever rations they have. But nomadic logistics are different. A step nomad who's going to have anywhere from five to nine horses connected in a string, it's literally called a horse string. So he's riding the front run, and he's got the others trailing behind him. He could do a lot of interesting logistics. Step nomads, generally speaking, when they go to war, they go to war with mares, not stallions.
- [71:25]
Alan Sisto
Oh, okay.
- [71:26]
Brett Devereaux
And so with 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 horses, there's a good chance that at least one of them is lactating at any given time because they're mares. And so he's bringing his logistics system with him. And so for a while, he has horse yogurt. The other thing he can do is, you know, obviously they can hunt game as they move, and you can actually place the raw meat under the saddle that you are riding in. And the motion of riding in the saddle will press the liquid out. It will pull in the sweat of the horse. It will press that out. That leaves the salt of the salt water and the saline of the horse sweat, and it salts your beef.
- [72:04]
Alan Sisto
The salted pork is no longer particularly good.
- [72:08]
Brett Devereaux
I know, right?
- [72:09]
Alan Sisto
I think I'm a vegetarian for at least the rest of the day. Woo, man.
- [72:13]
Brett Devereaux
The term for this is saddle jerky.
- [72:15]
Alan Sisto
Oh, man.
- [72:16]
Brett Devereaux
And it is edible. And the Mongols. Do we actually have some. Some amusing Islamic and Christian sources who will see Mongols do this. And they're. And they're like, they're really confused because what they see is a Mongol reach under his saddle and just pull out some beef, and they're like, are you eating your horse?
- [72:33]
Alan Sisto
This is great. Oh, my goodness.
- [72:36]
Brett Devereaux
Mongols could even, in order to retain hydration in small amounts Drink the blood of their horses.
- [72:45]
Alan Sisto
Wow.
- [72:45]
Brett Devereaux
Because horses can withstand periods of dehydration longer than humans.
- [72:49]
Alan Sisto
Wow.
- [72:49]
Brett Devereaux
And again, you've got five to eight of them. So you can spread out this burden across them. The results of all of this is like nomad logistics. Be different. But that Mongol armies can make unsupported logistics. Lunges across grasslands lighting no fire.
- [73:06]
Alan Sisto
Wow.
- [73:07]
Brett Devereaux
Which means they can just show up places where another army, you would see the campfires in the distance and then a little closer. And now they're here over the course of a few days. Whereas it's. There's nothing. There's nothing. There's nothing. The Mongols are outside of your city and your host. The Mongols would even do things like they would move out a visual range of a city and encamp without campfires, like, just over the hills. And the city would be like, hooray, the Mongols have retreated and opened the gates. And then, boom, the Mongols are back. And so, you know, I wonder if this isn't, you know, we get the description of they're using the mountains to. To screen their advance. Standard operations even for agrarian armies. But I wonder if some of this, you know, surprise Wainwriters isn't a bit of that step. Nomads moving without campfires and showing up ahead of time in places that they're not expected. Obviously better scouting arrangements might have been wise onto her. Might have been smart to send a flying column of cavalry to get to the battle space perhaps days ahead of him and to confirm that it was clear. But encounter battles like this do happen, and they're sometimes unavoidable. I mean, these guys don't have aerial photography, they don't have satellites, they don't have gps.
- [74:16]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. They can't just task a bird to spot the.
- [74:19]
Brett Devereaux
It is possible for these armies to stumble into each other. And in this case. Right. It seems like the Wainwriters have very intentionally aimed to produce that result. They want an encounter battle and they get it.
- [74:30]
Alan Sisto
They do indeed. Not only did they come along the mountain range like you talked about, shielding their advance, that's also not the direction where they had previously come on to. Harry is said to have expected it to come from a different direction as it had come in the past. And you know, the Wainwriters, learning from that lesson because they got beaten that time, decided to mix it up a little bit and like you said, combine that with their ability to do these step like logistics. And no wonder it was unprepared.
- [74:55]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Yeah.
- [74:55]
Brett Devereaux
And just to say, you may well imagine the Almost horror and shock that you get from settled agrarian sources watching Mongol armies that they're pretty sure are eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their horses as they rampage across the. The terrain, destroying everything before.
- [75:15]
Alan Sisto
Is that a. That's a psychological weapon that you under in a way. Were the, were the Mongols aware that what they were doing was adding to the terror of their presence in. In.
- [75:26]
Brett Devereaux
I mean, Lord knows, the Mongols efforted to add to the terror of their presence Makes sense, but it's striking. I mean, for both the Huns who show up in Europe in the late Roman period and the Mongols in the Middle Ages, the sources that we have for the period are like, this is the wrath of God. The Roman writers encountering the Huns are like, you know, by this point they're Christian, like, oh, this is the apocalypse end times. You know, God is closing up shop on the Roman Empire and creation itself. And the Mongols are greeted sort of similarly. You know, the arrival of a step host like this could be really terrifying. Now, the good news if you live next to the steppe is that these sorts of hosts don't emerge often. The nature of life on the steppe tends to create a lot of very small, very fragmented political communities that aren't huge threats to you. But every so often you get a charismatic leader like Attila or Genghis Khan who puts them all together and hits you with them. And there's not a lot you can do to stop it. You know, it doesn't happen often. You basically just have to wait for that guy to die. In the fact that step nomads have partable inheritance to ruin everything for them. Which is what always happens when Attila dies. His three sons split his empire between them and are casually mopped up by the Romans. And Chingis heir Oged Eye keeps it together for one generation and then after him, fragmentation, you know, perpetual step process problem.
- [76:50]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Now, when the Wainwriters vanguard reaches onto here, in the story here, you know, we, we read that the battle didn't last very long. Andohere had only time to turn and face the assault with his right flank close to the moranin and to send a message to another commander, by the way, when the chariots and horsemen crashed into his disordered line. And it says he was utterly unprepared to meet a charge of horsemen and chariots in great weight and was himself killed along with his son. And much of that portion of the army is routed and ends up in the dead Marshes, which is not where you want to end up. Spoiler alert. I'm curious, what would it have been like to face not just a charge of cavalry, but also of chariots? And how much more time would Ondoher have needed to not be, as it says, utterly unprepared? Yeah.
- [77:51]
Brett Devereaux
What to expect when you're expecting cavalry. Yeah. This battle is probably unrecoverable by the time onto her is aware that he is in a battle. The rule when it comes to cavalry, and this is also true for chariots, but I'll talk about chariots in a second. The rule for cavalry is, is this infantry, in good order, that is cohesive, can resist cavalry. If you can keep your infantry together in a reasonably tight formation, cavalry cannot move you no matter how hard they try. You cannot, no matter what total war tells you, you cannot smash infantry out of position by hitting them on the front in that way. However, if you are scattered, if you are not in formation, your host and the reason for this, you can understand the sort of the, the, the kinetics of this, that the, you know, horseman is coming in. It doesn't require like, it can help, but it doesn't require like an overlapping shield wall or a hedge of spears. The Romans defeat cavalry charges with legions. Where the men are not overlapping shields. There's. They've got decent space to use their weapons. There's actually decent lateral space. The Roman legion fighting formation is not widely spaced out, but decently spaced out. Each man occupies like five, six horizontal feet. So not like all bunch shoulder to shoulder. You can still stop a cavalry charge with that. And the why is psychological. If you're the horseman charging in like, okay, if you roll in at full speed, you're going to slam into that first guy. You're maybe going to trample him or push him out of the way, but then your horse's momentum is basically spent. It's going to start coming to a stop. And you are now surrounded by infantrymen who in this context are more mobile than you on an unarmored horse. And many of them can attack you at once because your horse and you are very big. You're going to die. You're just going to get pulled off your horse and die. This happens, for instance, like famously at Agincourt. The French cavalry charge reaches the English line and we're told some of the French knights end up in the English formation because they committed fully to the charge, like they slammed in. And so they end up in the English formation pulled off their horses, killed or captured almost immediately. Yeah, right. It doesn't disrupt the formation very much. Like, they just hit it and vanish. However, if you can disrupt disorder, that formation by catching it unprepared, by panicking some of the men, then what you can do is your horse comes in, is you can weave through the open spaces, striking as you go, never slowing down enough for them to really get a hit back at you. You. And if you have a lot of horsemen doing this, you can sweep disordered infantry away. Very low casualties to you, ruinous casualties to them, and none of those individual infantrymen can do anything to resist you, because your horse will just trample them.
- [80:36]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [80:37]
Brett Devereaux
And so I think this is clearly what happens to Onto her. Gondor's infantry is good enough that in good formation, it can withstand a cavalry charge, but he doesn't have time to get them into that formation. He barely has time. He's got to deploy from column into line, which is a tricky task under the best of circumstances. And the best he can do is maybe turn some of his forces to face the incoming charge and hope for the best. And they don't hold together. It would be very hard to do. It would be surprising if they did. These sorts of encounter battles are catastrophic. I'm reminded actually of an engagement during the siege of Antioch in the First Crusade, where a relief force, I want to say from Aleppo, but I think that's wrong. I think it's from Damascus. Anyway, the Crusaders are besieging the city of Antioch, and a Muslim relief force is coming up the road, and the Crusaders don't know that that's there, but they're running out of food, so they dispatch a large body of knights with their mounts to go foraging. And the mounted knights hit the front front of this incoming relief force. It's an encounter battle. Neither side is expecting the other, and the relief force just crumples one unit after the other after the other, all the way down and is totally destroyed. Yeah, because it's just each unit gets overrun by this heavy cavalry hitting it one after the other, and there's. It's never possible to put it into formation. And the Crusaders essentially destroy this relief army in just like a single catastrophic day, and then go back to besieging Antioch, where they're actually not having a lot of luck at this point. They'll get lucky eventually, but not right now. And so, like, I imagine something similar here, where onto Harris, just his vanguard gets caved in, and he loses control of the battle instantly. There's not really anything he can do. Remember this guy's command options. He can't, like, hit pause Flip to the aerial view and order everyone to move. He has to yell orders and send messengers and like all he has time to do is warn the other parts of the army and then it's done. The other thing is chariots. And, and here I'm going to. Somewhat unusually, I don't think Tolkien quite knows how chariots work. That's fair. Tolkien sources don't know how chariots work either. So the great age of chariot warfare is the late Bronze age. Talking about 1500 BC to around 1100 BC. By the time there's some excitement, our sources for the next several centuries are bad. By the time we can see clearly again around 900 BC, we're starting to see the emergence of true cavalry. If you have true cavalry, there is not a lot chariots are going to do for you. A man on a horse is a lot more useful than a man on a chariot. Chariots come first. And for folks wondering, wait a minute, why would you ever attach a cab to a horse before you had the idea of riding it? And the answer is that if you attempt to ride a wild horse, the first and 15th thing it's going to do is try to murder you. And it will probably succeed.
- [83:33]
Alan Sisto
And the 2nd through 14th as well. Yes, yes.
- [83:36]
Brett Devereaux
Horse breaking is hard. So it takes a while to figure out how to ride horses as opposed to attach them to things that they pull. And the sort of. The popular image of chariots is that they're like super battering rams. That's how they work in the Total War Games.
- [83:50]
Alan Sisto
That's true. They do, yeah.
- [83:52]
Brett Devereaux
But actual war chariots are built for speed, they're light. I think the we have the Egyptian desert is an amazing thing. Wild stuff survives in the extremely arid conditions of Egypt. And so like we have complete Egyptian Bronze Age chariots. Like the cab that is just. It survives, it's made of wood, it survives whole. And these things like, they weigh, I think it's like 55 kilos.
- [84:18]
Alan Sisto
Wow. Not much at all.
- [84:19]
Brett Devereaux
100, 110 pounds. Yeah, they're real life. It's a wood frame and the thing you stand on is made of wicker. It gives it a little bit of a bounciness. So you have kind of shocks. Yeah. Because you don't have any shocks on the wheels.
- [84:32]
Alan Sisto
Well, no.
- [84:33]
Brett Devereaux
The other thing to note is that the wheelbase is wide, seven to eight feet for a two man chariot that is wide.
- [84:39]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [84:39]
Brett Devereaux
Which in the Bronze Age there is no weapon. You can reach past that. You could push a spear forward, but your horses are in the Way Right. The weapon you're using from a chariot is a bow or a javelin. Yeah, it's a ranged weapon. You have a driver and you have a javelin man. In a larger chariot, you might have a third fellow with like a shield to protect the other two. Just as a sort of social class thing. The driver is a blue collar professional. The archer is the aristocrat who owns the chariot. And if there's a shield man, he's another blue collar professional. Artists in the Bronze Age will generally omit the shield bearer and the driver and just show the aristocrat in his chariot on his own. There's a wonderful. I think it's on the Kadesh inscription where Pharaoh is in his chariot with his bow and he's just got the reins tied around his waist, like he's gonna hula hoop the chariot into battle. That is not how chariots are driven. But the artist has just omitted the driver because the driver is not an important person in the society.
- [85:37]
Alan Sisto
And now just seeing the Pharaoh doing a little hula hoop, that's great.
- [85:42]
Brett Devereaux
I mean, the funny thing is in the text, the pharaoh. This is the text of the battle. It's describing the battle of Kadesh. Although, like, the description is nonsense, it's all propaganda. But like the pharaoh, at points he's like, he's like, my army is so cowardly, they've abandoned me. I'm out here fighting all alone. I'm so alone. There's nobody around me. So I turned to my chariot driver.
- [86:03]
Alan Sisto
And said, sir, not appearing in this film. Yes.
- [86:08]
Brett Devereaux
And it's like, wait, I thought you were alone, chief.
- [86:12]
Alan Sisto
Exactly in the meaning of the word alone. Let me just clarify.
- [86:17]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, yeah. But the result is that it can be kind of tricky to figure out how these chariots function in battle because you don't want to charge them into the enemy. Unlike a cavalryman with a long spear, you can't really reach a weapon out in front of the horses. You also, you have two horses and they are both in the front of the chariot. If something should disable either of them, the chariot is inoperable. And by inoperable, we mean it is probably turning over itself and throwing you on the ground fatally. Like a chariot. Crashes are pretty hard to survive events. So this is a pretty fragile weapon system that it's very fast. And so the. The usual assumption is that these are actually skirmishing weapons. Now certainly you could get a whole bunch of chariots charging at an enemy to inspire fear and panic, and that seems to have been done as well. But the only time you're actually going to commit that charge is if the enemy is already running, running away, and then you're going to again, weave through them, shooting your bow or throwing your javelin at enemies that can't really fight back.
- [87:13]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [87:13]
Brett Devereaux
Now, the thing is, Tolkien would not have had abundant access to Bronze Age literature. He'd have some, and he's clearly aware of some. Instead, though, like, because Tolkien doesn't. I don't believe Akkadian is one of his languages. He has a lot. So I don't know. I have to check instead. Right. Chariots are going to show up in Iron Age language literature where they are the vehicles of heroes and gods. And this is a very archaizing thing. You see this in Homer, in particular in the Iliad. And Homer in the Iliad. Right now, Homer is a poet narrating an oral poem that is being written down probably around 750 BC about events that are supposed to have taken place in the 11 or 10 hundreds B.C. probably 1084.
- [88:00]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [88:01]
Brett Devereaux
Or, sorry, 1184. He knows that the heroes of his story ride in chariots. Nobody has fought in Greece with a chariot for a couple hundred years. By the time Homer lives, Homer has probably the only chariots he's seen are chariots used for processions. Because it's also understood that gods ride in chariots. He's never seen a chariot used in battle. He doesn't know how they work. And so he imagines chariots as little more than battle tasks. The hero rides to the battle and gets out of his chariot to fight, which is about like saying that, like a modern soldier rides to the battle in his M1 Abrams tank and then gets out to fight with his sidearm. Right. But like, Homer doesn't know how these weapon systems work. Nobody uses them anymore.
- [88:43]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [88:43]
Brett Devereaux
The descriptions we have of them of the Bronze Age are very sparse. And so it's not surprising to me that Tolkien doesn't have a great sense of how these weapons work. And he's kind of merging Bronze Age chariot based nomads, which were a thing, with Iron Age cavalry based nomads and the Wain Riders are a sort of pastiche of these two things put together. And I think if we want to get creative, we can imagine that maybe this is the transitional moment where true cavalry is emerging. But we still have some chariots on the battlefield. We do see that transitional moment in the early Iron Age, mostly in Assyrian military artwork, but mostly he's mashing together two quite different periods of sort of step nomad tropes to produce his Wain riders. To be fair, if they didn't have chariots, they couldn't have a cool name like Wain riders.
- [89:32]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [89:34]
Brett Devereaux
But they should probably either have just chariots or just cavalry. But so a chariot charge is also terrifying, but maybe less likely to sweep away an army the way that the onset of the Wainwriters dodge was.
- [89:47]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [89:48]
Brett Devereaux
And you know, I will say, like, Tolkien doesn't. Doesn't seem to me to have a firm grasp on how chariots fight. But then, like, no, nobody does. Even modern scholars attempting to, like, what are the mechanics of large scale chariot battles? I mean, the real answer is we can guess, but we don't know. I can, I can tell you, looking at these things, what they cannot do is that you can't hit anybody with them.
- [90:08]
Alan Sisto
No.
- [90:08]
Brett Devereaux
And you're not going to be like, riding around swinging your sword off the side because, like, the wheel is even further away from you. You. And the reason, if you're curious, the reason the wheelbase is that wide is so that these things can turn without flipping over.
- [90:19]
Alan Sisto
Right. I was going to say the stability, I'm thinking, you know, the little tiny narrow ones that. Yeah.
- [90:25]
Brett Devereaux
You see in movies. Yeah. They just flip over. Yeah. No, because the whole thing is these things are meant to go fast.
- [90:31]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [90:31]
Brett Devereaux
You know, you're going 30, 35 miles an hour in this thing and you try to do a sharp turn. It's not all that heavy, and it's kind of top heavy. You need a really wide wheelbase to keep it from flipping over. But the upshot here, I think, for the battle narrative is. Yeah, infantry being engaged out of formation by cavalry is basically screwed.
- [90:48]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [90:49]
Brett Devereaux
There is not a lot you can do under those. Under those circumstances.
- [90:53]
Alan Sisto
Okay. Well, interestingly, you know, you mentioned the Crusaders Night Force that just rolled up that entire relief army. I'm thinking a little bit about the Wainrider's initial success here being a little bit like that, just kind of rolling right on through, destroying, you know, killing King Ondoher, his banner and his son. But after the Wainriders, vanguard withdrew from battle to rejoin their main force in preparation for the primary assault, Tolkien throws us a little bit of a curve ball. He says that initial victory was now the beginning of their undoing. Tolkien's fictional chronicler here says that they had actually launched that first attack too soon and, quote, they had met with a success far swifter and more overwhelming than they had expected. Now, that ended up resulting in a longer delay of their main attack, which kept them from using their primary tactical advantage, which Tolkien indicates was just numbers. When is victory a bad thing? And what would you have done as the commander of the OP for here to ensure victory after the defeat of the center and killing of the king? You'd think that's it.
- [91:55]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. So. And of course, here's something somewhat annoyingly right, like the text breaks out before we get a really fulsome description of the battle and the wainwriters do end up winning the battle. So it's one of these, like the beginning of their undoing and like, in what sense? But certainly what's being described here is what in military studies come to go by the term of catastrophic success or a situation where things go right in unanticipated ways that you were not prepared for, often in negative ways. So here you have, right. Presumably the expectation was that the front of Gondor's army would not collapse and would not be driven off. Possibly the hope is that onto her would have been feeding forces in piecemeal to try and hold together as the strain built up on his front line. Instead, what seems to happen, right, is that the. The vanguard is basically destroyed. The back of the army gets the message that this has happened and deploys in a fillion in the relatively narrower and more hilly spaces, which is super bad news for an army based on chariots cavalry. And so, like, one wonders if this is if the issue here is that having sort of punched in the nose of onto her army so quickly, they lose the opportunity to lure the rest of the force out into favorable terrain and are instead forced to engage on difficult terrain. And, you know, obviously they succeed, but maybe this is a situation where they succeed, right, with too heavy casualties because this campaign is eventually going to get out away from them.
- [93:36]
Alan Sisto
Yes, it will.
- [93:37]
Brett Devereaux
And so, like, one wonders if this is a situation where they end up having to. To, you know, reduce this army that is maybe positioned on wooded hilltops, which is, I think, what we would expect in a thillion. My impression is that Ithelien is both hilly and wooded. And that's not. That's not great terrain for. For cavalry. And so you're like, what, you're dismounting and fighting your way up the hills. You might win, but it's going to take a while to take losses.
- [94:03]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [94:03]
Brett Devereaux
One of these points where, like, the text just breaks off at like the worst possible moment there's gonna be. There's a couple of those today.
- [94:09]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, there are, There are. And that's actually why we brought you here. It's like, all right, fill in the blanks. What this might have this had looked like.
- [94:15]
Brett Devereaux
Let me tell you though, as a historian, the text. Text breaks off at the worst moment is a thing that happens.
- [94:22]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, gotta figure that.
- [94:24]
Brett Devereaux
The example I can think of is we have two sources for the Battle of Pydna 168. This is the battle that will lead to the destruction of the kingdom of Macedon by the Romans. It's a very decisive battle. We have a complete narrative biographer, Plutarch. But one, you should never trust Plutarch on military matters. And two, it's a very short narrative. It doesn't seem to be like horrifically long, but it's often hard to figure out what's going. And it's like, oh. But we have Livy for 168 and Livy gives nice fulsome narratives that he's usually quoting from Polybius, who we don't have. His book is lost for this period. But Livy's narrative has a frustrating lacuna in that he narrates the two armies coming near each other. They camp near each other, they offer battle, they don't take battle. And then the next day there's like a skirmish around the water source and that begins to blow up into a large battle. And everybody's coming out and then dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And so the Romans are winning everywhere.
- [95:22]
Alan Sisto
Oh no.
- [95:26]
Brett Devereaux
That core narrative of the battle of what happened is lost. And so all you have is Plutarch and to try and make sense of it. And I think you can more or less reconstruct the battle of Pidna. My colleague Michael Taylor has a good article doing so. But yes, situations where the sources just cut off at the worst possible moment, they do happen.
- [95:45]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, well, Tolkien seems to do that a lot to us here in the appendices and in the Unfinished Tales.
- [95:52]
Brett Devereaux
The tales, they are so unfinished. Exactly.
- [95:54]
Alan Sisto
That's very apt named, folks. Yeah.
- [95:58]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Now, the law of Gondor around this time was that Ondoher's sons Artemir and Faramir, they're not allowed to go to war at the same time. And that's to ensure the survival of the royal line. But Faramir, we find, pulls an aow in. If Eowyn had been a colossal failure, that is, and he promptly gets himself killed in the battle after going in disguise. So speaking of, of this, this idea of, you know, ensuring that an heir is left behind, is this something that, you know, happens in the primary world? Do we have any examples of this working successfully or do we have any examples of, you know, this Faramir like, behavior where a line is wiped out because of it?
- [96:47]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think. Of course, there is a concern that you, you, you know, if you. You've got your king and all of his heirs in one spot, you're. You're in a great deal of trouble. You know, ironically, at some points in French history, we see instead the reverse. The king stays home and the dauphin leads the army. You send the crown prince forward. But I mean, equally, you do get situations where armies will commit. The whole royal house is there and it's just a disaster. But, yeah, there is a tendency, I don't know of anywhere where it is a law. Tolkien here implies that, like, it is the law that he cannot go. I can't think of. And maybe some medievalist has a better example. I can't think of a place where it is a law. But there is a sort of broad practice that you're leaving someone and it isn't merely to make sure they don't die in the battle. But remember, these are societies without telephones and the Internet. And so the administration of the kingdom is often physically located in the court. Sometimes that court can move. Sometimes it is fixed in a. In a physical place. But you're not going to bring the court, always with the army. And so you want to leave someone you can trust running the administration while you're leading the army. And your ability to advise and contact them is limited. And, you know, if you're the king, you know, the crown prince is a. If he's an adult, is a pretty trustworthy person to leave behind, or vice versa, to sort of split those, because you don't want to hand it to, you know, your treacherous nobles. They will get up to all sorts of. Of shenanigans. And so there's also a strong administrative reason to do this. But this was something I thought was interesting because I read that and I'm like, I can't think of an instance where that was laid down in law. But it is custom, like, it is customary. You don't. Roman emperors also aren't usually in the same army with their son. The exception that exceptions that jump to mind are both from the year of the six emperors, which is Gordianus 1 and 2 in the same army and Maximinus Thrax and his son, both in the same army. And they come to grief for it both times.
- [98:54]
Alan Sisto
There's a reason why they call it the Year of the Six Emperors.
- [98:56]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, the Six Emperors. And it's none of those guys who are alive at the end of the year.
- [99:00]
Alan Sisto
It's not simultaneous.
- [99:02]
Brett Devereaux
That's exciting and crazy year. And in the end, the winner of Emperor Roulette is actually Gordianus iii, Emperor Roulette. And while we're here, the other two guys are Maximus Balbus and the amazingly named Poopy Anus.
- [99:20]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Oh, my gosh.
- [99:24]
Alan Sisto
All right.
- [99:28]
Brett Devereaux
Look, if I have a chance to bring up Poopy Anus.
- [99:31]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. How can you not?
- [99:31]
Brett Devereaux
I have to.
- [99:32]
Alan Sisto
You have to.
- [99:33]
Brett Devereaux
That's his name.
- [99:34]
Alan Sisto
Hilarious. And I think that's going to go in the blurb for the episode somehow. Speaking of royal lines with names have nothing to do with that. Once Arda Hare and his sons have died, there is of course no king in Gondor. And one eventually must be chosen. It ends up being the victorious Ar Nel. He defeats the Wainriders in the battle of the camp. Like you said, the campaign does eventually get away from the Wain Riders. He was chosen as the king of Gondor. But I want to give a couple of hypotheticals and get your take on what might have happened. The commander of the right wing was Minochtar. He was actually Ondaher's nephew and a grandson of King Kalimechtar. Earnil actually had to go two more generations back. He was a great, great grandson of Umbartical. Now, unfortunately, Menachtar was killed. He was the commander of the right wing that he sent the messages back. He's the one who, as you said, deployed the army in Ithilian. Much more favorable terrain. But at the end of the day, it still wasn't enough to stop them. If he had survived, he would have had a better claim to the throne. Right. Than Earnil. So that's question one. And then following on from that, what do you think might have happened with Gondor had Menochtar become king instead of Earnil? And then I'm going to throw one more at you, continuing with this line of speculation. What if everybody died as they normally did, as everybody in the text did, but so did Earnil in the battle of the camp. Would that finally have forced Gondor's hand to consider arvedui's claim from the north?
- [100:58]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, I mean, so this is one of those exciting things. And one of the things that I've actually never done is sat down and looked at the sort of the. The whole of the House of Elendil to sort of suss out the inheritance rules.
- [101:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [101:13]
Brett Devereaux
Now, it's worth noting, like, we tend to Think like, oh, of course there will be a solidly settled and clear. Like someone will have written down the rules of succession. But like, the English don't get around to writing down the rules of succession until quite late. There's, I mean, there's still. They are feverishly revising them after the death of Henry VIII in multiple directions. And so in a lot of cases, rules of succession are customary. You know, there's an understanding that, like, it's good if the new king is related to the old king and the closer the better. But there are also other considerations that, that come into play as well. One thing I just straight up don't know because I haven't checked is if Gondorian inheritance is Salak. So one of the quirks in Western Europe is that some cultures allow inheritance through the female line and some don't. And most notably cultures under Salic law do not. This causes. This is actually the cause of repeated friction between England and France, whose royal houses intermarried at various points. English succession could move through the female line and indeed women could and did inherit the throne of England. By contrast, French royal succession was Salic in nature. It had to be male line.
- [102:27]
Alan Sisto
Well, that actually is a very interesting point because Gondor does seem to have followed that Salic law in the sense that that was the basis for the rejection of arvedui's claim. Because arvedui's claim, he was married to Firiel, the daughter of Andeher. And one of his claims was, hey, you know, in Numenor we had queens of Numenor. It was ruled that the eldest child, regardless of gender, would inherit the. The throne or the scepter. And Gonder's like, well, we reckon it this way and it's only through the male lines. So in, in this case, Gondor, whether they wrote it down or not, or whether they just made it up at the time, which is completely legit. You know, they may very well have just been. Let's find anything we can to turn down our venue.
- [103:07]
Brett Devereaux
Right? Let's find a reason.
- [103:08]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah. I mean, they clearly didn't want to. To give the line back to Sildur's line, but yeah, they appeared to have been solid.
- [103:13]
Brett Devereaux
Well, I mean, it's worth noting when, when the French rival finally run out of Capets, right. Because the Capetians get extremely lucky and run quite a few straight generations with one viable male heir and no alternate claimants. It's really fantastic. You know, we get the problem. And this comes in the context of the wars of religion that they've got a Henry who's set to inherit Henrietta. And the problem is that he's Protestant. And there is a sort of a question of like, well, could we change the succession law so that we can use the female line to dance around him? And it's like, so the problem is that the next closest is check Stoats, Elizabeth the first of England.
- [103:56]
Alan Sisto
Oh, my.
- [103:57]
Brett Devereaux
And they're like, can't do that.
- [103:58]
Alan Sisto
No, that's not an option.
- [104:00]
Brett Devereaux
And then the problem is eventually resolved. Henry is famously, Paris is worth a mass. He converts to Catholicism and then they call it a day.
- [104:06]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [104:06]
Brett Devereaux
You know, so like, this could, this could be an issue. And it's worth noting that succession laws are often informal and sometimes somewhat chaotic. Macedonian succession. For Alexander the Great's ancestors, the only rule seems to have been that the heir needs to come from the Argyed dynasty, the Argyed royal house.
- [104:22]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [104:23]
Brett Devereaux
But beyond that, free for all, just about any Argyed seems to have been valid. Alexander's father Philip was not in line for the throne. He usurped his nephew to get it. And between Philip and Alexander, they murder most of their extended family for the purpose of resolving that issue. Which is part of the problem that when Alexander kicks it, the only two Argyeds remaining are a not yet born son.
- [104:51]
Alan Sisto
Oh, my.
- [104:51]
Brett Devereaux
Who will soon be an infant son, who will be Alexander iv and then Philip Arridaeus, a mentally disabled half brother that everyone understands would need a regent to rule anyway. And the result is that Alexander's general's murder both of those people and seize power. Because, like, obviously that's what you do, but, you know, obviously you just do some murder. Right. But that gives you the sort of, sort of awkwardness of succession law. You know, meanwhile, you know, jump over to the Romans, the Roman Empire, at no point between the foundation of the Roman imperial system in 31 BC and its final extinction in 1453, at no point do the Romans. 1450, 53 AD at no point do the Romans have a law of succession.
- [105:37]
Alan Sisto
Interesting.
- [105:37]
Brett Devereaux
There ain't no rule for 1500 years.
- [105:40]
Alan Sisto
There's no rule.
- [105:41]
Brett Devereaux
There's no rule.
- [105:42]
Alan Sisto
There's just guidelines.
- [105:44]
Brett Devereaux
Yes. Now the guidelines, like if the emperor has a biological son, that's obviously the first choice. If the emperor adopts another person as his heir, you usually go that way. Unless the emperor is wildly unpopular and currently the victim of a coup or an assassination, in which case maybe you also assassinate that guy. Near relatives are preferred over nobodies. But this is A problem that breaks out that, like, technically, anybody who can put together a big enough army is a viable claimant.
- [106:15]
Alan Sisto
That's a good point. I guess the question about Menochtar and Arno would come down to the relative size of their surviving armies.
- [106:21]
Brett Devereaux
Yes, they would. I mean, almost certainly. I think the difference in claim there might come down to, you know, your bigger army, diplomacy. And one assumes that, like, if Menachtar has just won the big battle, then his legitimacy is probably sufficient to carry him to the throne. If he has just lost the big battle but survived and then Yarnil has won it, you know, the nobility is not going to back him. He's a loser.
- [106:44]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [106:44]
Brett Devereaux
And the smart thing to do would probably be to both recognize Yarnals claim and then find an excuse to be very far away.
- [106:54]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah.
- [106:54]
Brett Devereaux
And then, you know, I mean, if all of them end up dead, then you. You immediately, you have this question, which is again, going to be described as the nobility. If you have no options, you have this other line. Do you invite them in or do you do what they eventually do? Do you go with the stewards?
- [107:09]
Alan Sisto
Do you decide that early on, maybe one generation earlier?
- [107:12]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, right. That that line is so foreign and unacceptable that you have to instead elevate one of your own, one of your present nobility.
- [107:26]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [107:27]
Brett Devereaux
And. And this is a thing we see through the Middle Ages, the sort of question when there is such problems. Do you invite in a foreign king? You know, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, we see these sorts of concerns. Or. Or do you elevate a member of your nobility? And both of those choices have downsides, especially if the foreign king auditioning for the role is powerful. Powerful. Right. If he's like a Habsburg, then he may respond to being told no by invading to press his claim.
- [107:56]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [107:56]
Brett Devereaux
And so, like, all of those choices are difficult. One has to imagine that when the nobility is still back in. In Gondor, you know, hanging out in Osgiliath and Minasirith, when they learn that, like, okay, one viable claimant has survived and he just won the battle, there is probably like a solid exhale of.
- [108:15]
Alan Sisto
Like, okay, so glad it came down to the easy pick.
- [108:19]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, right. This will not cause chaos. We can just pick this guy.
- [108:23]
Alan Sisto
Right. That makes sense. Fascinating stuff.
- [108:26]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
All right, Matt, so finally we're gonna start talking about Kyrion and Aoral. You know, the title of this section of the book. Now that we're all the way into this, however long we've been talking already, we learn about the desperate straits that Kieran finds himself in. More than 500 years later. So this is 2509. People who the text says are no doubt akin to the Wain Riders are preparing an assault. And Kyrion remembers the Eotheod, who unfortunately have moved out of the local neighborhood, which is the central vales of Anduin, and they're up north near the sources of the Great River. Now he chooses six volunteer writers to take a message to aorl, and only one of them survives the trip. That's Barondir. And he covers 950 miles in 15 days and runs out of food 13 days in, by the way, and that is 63 miles per day on horseback. Are there any comparable stories of incredible endurance that you're aware of? Is this possible? Or is Tolkien maybe stretching it a bit here?
- [109:44]
Brett Devereaux
So this is possible, but it is. It is on the outer edge of possibility, which is, you know, appropriate for a heroic ride. The, you know, your general rules of thumb is that a swift movement for a large body of infantry is about 20 miles a day. 10 miles is more normal cavalry can move around 20 miles a day normally and forced march around 40. And the Mongols can get up to 60 miles a day.
- [110:12]
Alan Sisto
Okay, so the Mongols could do 60 a day. But yeah, it's only a little bit more than that here.
- [110:17]
Brett Devereaux
So if he is a Mongol, he's good to go. Now he would, like we can think about the logistics of this. While he's presented as moving alone, he's almost certainly not moving alone. He would need several horses. You know, realistically, he probably needs himself. He probably needs. Because there isn't like a set of way stations to change his horses on the way up. You could actually, if you add that way station set, you could get faster than this.
- [110:42]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [110:43]
Brett Devereaux
But there isn't. And it's important to remember, like, whenever we hear about nobility moving in, like a medieval text or even in Tolkien, like, they're not actually alone. They've got guys with them. So you've probably got borondir, maybe his two or three grooms and their 15 horses. Horses, okay, Is what this group looks like. And they would be changing horses as they're moving in order to maintain that. That kind of speed. And again, I go back to. Right. Like I talked about the. The Mongol with his horse. String of five to eight to nine horses per rider.
- [111:18]
Alan Sisto
There's no way he's doing this on one horse.
- [111:20]
Brett Devereaux
No, not.
- [111:21]
Alan Sisto
If not, no.
- [111:21]
Brett Devereaux
You. You'd kill the horse.
- [111:23]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [111:23]
Brett Devereaux
So I thought, yeah, like a day in that horse would be done. No, you're changing Horses multiple times per day to keep up the speed in order to rest them. If you were riding to war, your warhorse would be in addition to this because you would not want to ride him down before the day of battle. But this guy's a messenger, so he doesn't need a war horse. But, yeah, it's possible, but it would be tricky. He would need a lot of horses. Now, the good news is he's moving right up a river and through a relatively rich river valley so his horses can graze as they go. To be clear, even at this speed, you're not like, at a gallop the whole time. Whatever the movies like to do.
- [112:01]
Alan Sisto
He would have been in that one stretch where he was chased by the orcs for half a day.
- [112:04]
Brett Devereaux
I mean, yes, presumably. Yeah, but. Yeah, and the other thing I think we can say about his horses is that evidently, as with most agrarian armies, they are stallions, not mares, because he runs out of food.
- [112:15]
Alan Sisto
Oh, yeah.
- [112:15]
Brett Devereaux
The canny Mongol would have brought mares, horse, yogurt. This is actually a difference because agrarian armies, generally speaking, fight on stallions because they're bigger, and nomads fight on mares because they're logistically simpler. But, yeah, like, this is, again, heroically at the outer edge of the possible. But, yeah, it's possible.
- [112:35]
Alan Sisto
That is so typical of Tolkien, heroically at the edge of the possible. I mean, it's even. Even Shadowfax, an essentially supernatural horse, and the journey that. That Gandalf made with Pippin from. From near Isengard all the way to Minas Tirith in such a brief amount of time, it's the same kind of thing. Like, even is that physically possible? And the answer is. Well, maybe just barely. You know, he's good at creating these just barely moments and making them.
- [112:58]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Well.
- [112:58]
Brett Devereaux
And I think. I mean, I think part of that is it's worth remembering that, you know, in addition to being immersed in the. In medieval literature. Right. This is also a guy that was a lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers.
- [113:11]
Alan Sisto
Yep.
- [113:11]
Brett Devereaux
And. And in that role, like, he would have. He would have had to. Here is how fast men can march. Like, he would have had a field manual that had tables of this sort of sort of thing. And. And so he would have had sort of some sense. And then, you know, he takes kind of the normal and he basically doubles it. And this is what his heroes do. And that does tend to put him on the outer edge of the possible. Yeah, and. Yeah, and it's never. I can't. I can't think of an example where it's just straight up insane. Where it's something like an order of magnitude.
- [113:43]
Alan Sisto
Right, right.
- [113:44]
Brett Devereaux
No one does 600 miles in a day. No, that. That only happens in the Rings of Power TV show.
- [113:51]
Alan Sisto
Boom. There it is, folks. Two hours in, we knew it was coming. Oh, good stuff. Well, you know, the amazing thing about Baronder, I have to say, is that less than two weeks later, he goes, yeah, I'll come down south with you to the Field of Calibration instead of, like, taking my retirement and hanging out at the northern end of the river. Because, man, I don't want to do that right again. But it's the Field of Calibrate that we want your help to sort of bring to life a little bit. Because the text, as you said, does the sort of. Right. The description of the battle is fairly brief. So brief I can literally restate it here. And I would love your help to kind of enable us to imagine this a little more vividly. I actually find some of this movement in particular to be hard for me to picture clearly. The text says, when Eorl and his riders came to the field of Celebrant, the northern army of Gondor was in peril, defeated in the Wold and cut off from the south. It had been driven across the Limb Light and was then suddenly assailed by the Orc host that pressed it towards the Anduin. So here I'm picturing the army is cut off from the south because the Wold is now to the south of where that army is now. They're attacked by the Orkos coming from the mountain that is from the west. So they're being pushed in this little triangular wedge between the Limlight river and the Anduin. All hope was lost when unlooked for. The riders came out of the north and broke upon the rear of the enemy. Then the fortunes of battle were reversed and the enemy was driven with slaughter over Limblight. Eorl led his men in pursuit. And so great was the fear that went before the horsemen of the north that the invaders of the Wold were also thrown into panic and the riders hunted them over the plains of Calenardhon. Now, the map is a little confusing here because if the enemies have cut off Gondor from the south and driven them north across the Limb light, how could riders from the north break upon the rear of the enemy? Help us see this battle a little more clearly if you can.
- [115:40]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, I will admit when reading this, I had to pull up the interactive map of Middle Earth and zoom in and be like, Wait, where are the rivers? Yeah, because you've got. Because of course, you have the larger river, the Anduin, and then the narrow river that is the Limb Light, which is a tributary of it coming in from the west.
- [116:00]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [116:00]
Brett Devereaux
And what I take this to mean is that Gondor's army has come up north through the Wold, Right. It has been attacked. My brain is spacing on the name of these people.
- [116:13]
Alan Sisto
Oh, on the. The Balchoth. The Balchoth, yeah.
- [116:16]
Brett Devereaux
There we go. Yeah. They have presumably crossed the Anduin and they have attacked Gondor's army, which has then retreated across, continuing to move north right across the river. And then you've got that army then remain south of the river. And then the Orcs are pushing in from the west from the Misty Mountains, pushing them in. And so the. Our Errolingos are showing up in the rear of the Orc army and then flowing them across. And one assumes the limb light is a much easier to forward river. Right. These armies treat the Anduin as a wall.
- [116:52]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [116:52]
Brett Devereaux
But the limb light is crossable, but not easily. It's hard to get a sense of, with such a limited description of what exactly Gondor's army, which is presumably, as it usually is, mostly heavy infantry, is doing here. I'll be honest. Our ancient and medieval sources often, often describe infantry armies as being pushed or moved in this way. And even as modern historians, it's often very difficult for us to get a sense of what the actual mechanics of what that means looks like. Is, I think one example, for instance, that the Battle of Magnesia, this is a battle between the Romans and the Seleucids. The Roman left is at the very beginning of the battle, basically caved in by the Seleucid cavalry charge that is their major offensive force. But what we're told is that the Romans are pushed back all the way to their camp where they're. Then that part of their army is reinforced and then rallied and then fights a holding action while the Romans win the battle on the right. And the issue is always, to me is like the distance between the point that impact must have taken place and the camp is like a few hundred yards. And I'm like, how do you get pushed back and still have enough cohesion at the other end to be functional? Because it's clearly not a route. They're not like running willy nilly over the field. There's something that can be gathered together and make a resistance. Nevertheless, it's clear that it happened. It's clear that this Kind of push and pull happens. This may be, you know, not physical shoving, but soldiers backing up or backing off from a fight they think they can't win or what have you. So what seems to happen here. Right. Is initially Gondor south of the limelight. Like they realize that they're overmatched. And especially against a cavalry opponent. Yeah. Moving across a fordable water course to put a natural barrier between you and them makes a lot of sense. You're now essentially daring them to attack across this natural obstacle into your. Presumably by this point formed up heavy infantry. And that plan works right up until you get flanked by a whole bunch of orcs. Yeah, right. Who are on your side of the water. And as they press you back, create the opportunity for your opponents to also cross the limit. Like.
- [119:13]
Alan Sisto
Right. Because now they're able to cross it unopposed. They're not having to come across into your lines.
- [119:18]
Brett Devereaux
Similar to what Alexander the Great is doing at the Battle of the Grenicus, his first major engagement against the Persians. He makes this big effort in this case with cavalry to push across on the right and then sort of folds the Persians off the river, moving towards the left to enable his infantry and the rest of his army to cross before assailing the main Persian force, which is actually mostly Greek mercenaries on the heights.
- [119:42]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [119:42]
Brett Devereaux
It's not like a term of art or anything, but I. When I play strategy games, I tend to refer to this as jailbreaking the army, creating the opportunity to get them across the.
- [119:51]
Alan Sisto
The.
- [119:51]
Brett Devereaux
The obstruction. You'll sometimes hear this described as levering somebody off of a position.
- [119:56]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [119:57]
Brett Devereaux
So you now have a sort of combined enemy line that is probably in something like an arc following the limb light for some distance and then crossing it and then looping around into a kind of. Of broad crescent. And it is that. That the Erlingos coming down. I'm trying carefully not to call them Rohirram because they're not yet.
- [120:15]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [120:16]
Brett Devereaux
Coming down the Anduin and presumably coming down its west bank. They're going to show up behind the top of that crescent. Right. Because is facing down into that little triangle of land created by the joining of the anduin and the limb light. And just like onto her is basically like he is. His battle is unrecoverable by the time he realizes he has a problem. If a large body of heavy cavalry is appearing unannounced behind your already committed field army, you're done.
- [120:50]
Alan Sisto
Go home. Those of you who can go home.
- [120:54]
Brett Devereaux
Right. Yeah. That's not going to. That's not going to work. Unless you are Julius Caesar. Caesar. Julius Caesar does at. At Bibrochti. He's being attacked mostly by infantry, not cavalry. But he does manage the incredible feat of taking the back third of his army, flipping it around, and attacking in two directions simultaneously. Two opposite directions.
- [121:17]
Alan Sisto
Wow.
- [121:17]
Brett Devereaux
But that's nonsense that Julius Caesar does.
- [121:20]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [121:21]
Brett Devereaux
And I will note that if you read the text carefully, it seems like Julius Caesar has a huge help from his experienced junior officers, the centurions. They seem to be moving the units even before he can be giving the orders. So he's got a whole bunch of, like, sergeants who recognize the peril and turn around. These are things you can do with a Roman army that has a lot of combat experience and a lot of. And Orc armies are not this.
- [121:45]
Alan Sisto
Well, I was gonna say a professional Roman army. Very different from the Orc horde.
- [121:49]
Brett Devereaux
And the prop you're into. Right. Like, we get this description of then the slaughter as. As the army rolls south. And here you can see. Right. The problem. If you want to meet this oncoming heavy cavalry, you need to form either your infantry or cavalry into formation, and you need to meet them in good order. But the very thing disrupting your effort to do that is all of the Orcs running away through your lines, fouling your formations, physically getting in the way.
- [122:16]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [122:17]
Brett Devereaux
Of you trying to form up. And as you're not able to put your. Your position together. And remember, the Gondorians are still right there pressuring your front. So if you simply turn to face, you will have flanked yourself. I can, like, easily see a situation where this just becomes a cascading failure, where no one can quite get into position and the whole force falls apart. You know, once again, Tolkien loves these sort of surprise cavalry in. In your back attack situations a little more frequently than they happened historically. But, yeah. When you can actually get your cavalry to materialize directly behind somebody else's army. That's all she wrote.
- [122:58]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [122:58]
Brett Devereaux
That's almost impossible. And in this case, they're like they're behind a flank of the army rather than squarely behind the army. But once that flank collapses, the battle is clearly, at this point, unrecoverable and just begins falling apart. And then they push back across the limb light, which is clearly not much of a river, and into the Wold.
- [123:18]
Alan Sisto
Right. And that's what drives off the Valkoth. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. Because I had such a hard time picturing how the battle was flowing, and I knew that they saved the day. Like you said, that's what Tolkien does. He has a cavalry show up at the last minute.
- [123:32]
Brett Devereaux
At the last minute.
- [123:32]
Alan Sisto
I'm thinking of 40K and drop pods. We could just beam your enemy right there.
- [123:37]
Brett Devereaux
To be fair, at the Battle of Helm's Deep, it's infantry that shows up to save the day.
- [123:41]
Alan Sisto
Yes. Even if the film showed as a cavalry.
- [123:44]
Brett Devereaux
I know. Grump. Grump. Grump. Grump.
- [123:45]
Alan Sisto
Grump.
- [123:46]
Brett Devereaux
Grump. Grump.
- [123:46]
Alan Sisto
Where's Erkenbrand? Where was Erkenbrand?
- [123:49]
Brett Devereaux
Erkenbrand. The second most hard done by character in the film adaptation.
- [123:53]
Alan Sisto
After Glorfindel. Of course.
- [123:55]
Brett Devereaux
After Glorfindel of Gondolin. Yes. Correct.
- [123:57]
Alan Sisto
All right, folks, we're going to be right back. And when we do, we're going to talk about the battles of the Fords of Izen. Finally.
- [124:13]
Brett Devereaux
Over the past several days, three.
- [124:15]
Alan Sisto
Females have been found dead. Looks like someone's going after these girls.
- [124:21]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Then they have to know to watch their backs.
- [124:24]
Alan Sisto
Streaming now.
- [124:25]
Brett Devereaux
You really want what happened if it's when it happened to you? Exactly why I need to keep going on this.
- [124:30]
Alan Sisto
Starring Emmy Award winner, Amanda Seifried.
- [124:32]
Brett Devereaux
Worry about what you're gonna find.
- [124:34]
Alan Sisto
So am I. Long Bright River a limited series streaming.
- [124:39]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Now only on Peacock. I was never really a runner.
- [124:44]
Brett Devereaux
The way I see running is a gift. Especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Ann. I'm running the Boston Marathon, presented by bank of America. I run for Dana Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life, even with cancer. Join bank of America and helping Anne's cause.
- [125:04]
Alan Sisto
Give if you can@b of a.com supportan.
- [125:06]
Brett Devereaux
What would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not endorsement by bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025.
- [125:21]
Alan Sisto
Folks, if you're enjoying the PPP, please consider supporting the show by joining the Fellowship of the Podcast. It's what gives me the time and resources to work on making the show better. Every season when you join, you get the best discord community around and that includes live episode recordings, hangouts every month. You also can get episode postscripts. And boy, I'm telling you, there's going to be a lot from here. It's going to show up in there. You get ad free episodes, free merch and more.
- [125:43]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
You can also become part of our Questions after Nightfall episodes or even join us as a guest in the north wing. So Please go to patreon.com prancingponypod to show your support and join the Fellowship of the Podcast.
- [125:58]
Alan Sisto
And of course, you can always help us out by giving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and a rating on Spotify. And please recommend us to your friends. Now, we have just finished our three episode long look at the battles of the Fords of Isen. The first question for you, Brett, is related to Saruman. Now one of the first things that we read of yours was your description of his strategic blunders when it came to Helm's Deep in both the book and the film. He made a short sighted blunder here too. Saruman had ordered that Theodora would be killed at all costs. That's never a good thing to say at all costs because as a result, at the first battle, all his fiercest warriors were engaged in reckless assaults upon Theodred and his guard, disregarding other events of the battle which might otherwise have resulted in a much more damaging defeat for the Rohirrim. When Theodred was at last slain, Saruman's commander, no doubt under orders, seemed satisfied for the time being. And Saruman made the mistake, fatal as it proved, of not immediately throwing in more forces and proceeding at once to a massive invasion of Westfold. Finish the roast of Saruman here. How crushing a victory did he pass up by not moving in immediately? And was this connected to or like, you know, for similar reasons his failure to be present at the battle, just like at Helm's Deep later on?
- [127:14]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah, so I believe my verdict on, on Saruman is that he's a dummy woman whose plans fail because they are bad and that and, and that remains here. And yes, I think it's, it's striking. And again, I think this is not a mistake of Tolkien, but I think a brilliant bit of characterization that Saruman is an engineer and a tinkerer.
- [127:34]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [127:35]
Brett Devereaux
And a persuader. But he has never commanded an army before. No, he doesn't have the experience of it. And he is delightfully outgeneraled by a series of very workmanlike Rohirrim commanders. You know, because we're going to get Elf Helm and Erken Brand and then eventually Theoden, who, you know, are perhaps not as clever as he is or don't understand the universe as much as he does, but have actual experience commanding armies.
- [128:00]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [128:00]
Brett Devereaux
And one of the real problems here is, yes, Saruman sends out his, his forces under the command of lieutenants, and he does not command them or accompany them personally. And I think one can't help but feel that, you know, in his own kind of raging inferiority complex, he is aping Sauron who does this. And the difference is that Sauron has the Witch King to command his armies. Sauron has a highly capable battlefield commander who has been long tested over many, many wars and Saruman does not. And so yeah, you get, you get a campaign that is marked all over the place by missed opportunities and mistakes more broadly. I think it's really striking that Saruman is making in the decision to prioritize Theodred's death. He is making a whole lot of strategic choices which are not necessarily good strategic choices. And you know, here, you know, I've written about this but Saruman's plan is a clockwork mechanism which will fail if any one of the components fail. Yeah, he has a force out to recover the Ring. If he succeeds everywhere else and fails at that, then he gets bum rushed by the Witch King and is destroyed. And then he also has a force looking to overthrow Rohan. If he gets the Ring but loses to Rohan, he still loses. So he needs every element of this very complex plan to work. And they're all gambles. And we know they're all gambles because they all fail. Like every part of the clock comes crumbling down. And the decision to kill Theodred is one of these. Because yes, Grima can do his Grima thing for a while, but in practice killing Theodred functionally guarantees war with Rohan. Right. He has locked himself in to war with Rohan and with Gondor, whereas prior to this he had some optionality, I think, you know, if Saruman doesn't get the ring and his 10,000 orcs show up to defend Minas Tirith, who's going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Right. He sacrifices his optionality in this moment under the belief, which the text note was correct, that Eomer and Theodred are the leaders in the kingdom that could mobilize it against him. And he needs to remove them.
- [130:19]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [130:19]
Brett Devereaux
But he chooses to remove them in such a blunt and obvious way that he, he locks himself in to a set of strategic options that in the end he does not actually have a favorable outcome. So this is one of those really complex plans. But then having committed to it, having rolled the dice, he continues to hedge his bets. If you've committed to war with Rohan in this moment, then go for it.
- [130:45]
Alan Sisto
Then commit. Right, Exactly.
- [130:47]
Brett Devereaux
This reminds me of one of Partial and Tully's critiques of the Imperial Japanese Navy's planning of its carrier operations in 1942. And they quit that. What Japanese High Command did not realize is that there were only two kinds of battles in the Pacific. Those which rated none of their carriers and those which rated all of them. This is a common sort of like different splitting mistake. And Saruman is not understood is that he has two kinds of battles. Those that rate his full force without exception and those that do not.
- [131:17]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [131:18]
Brett Devereaux
And he shouldn't fight the second kind at all. And for the first kind there's no point in not attending personally. You're hosed if you lose anyway.
- [131:26]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. No half measures.
- [131:28]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. Instead he. He hangs in his tower to gnaw at the end of old plots. And you know he's going to lose control over both his operations or all three, I guess. The effort to get the Ring because his guys insufficiently informed grab the wrong Hobbits because they don't know what they're looking for. And so they don't know to check to like, do you have a small unadorned gold ring.
- [131:51]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [131:51]
Brett Devereaux
Because he can't trust them. But it's like if you can't trust them, then go yourself.
- [131:56]
Alan Sisto
Exactly right.
- [131:57]
Brett Devereaux
And he tells his commanders, like you need to make sure Theodred's dead. And so they're like, well, we killed Theodred and we've taken a lot of casualties doing it. So I'm going to back off. When in fact. Yes. This is the moment to commit.
- [132:09]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [132:10]
Brett Devereaux
There's. There's no reason. And you should. You should roll the forward and then, you know, detach a small force to pick off or at least isolate Helm's Deep and then blitz etter us. You've committed. Your enemy is unprepared. You're ready. Go. And he's not there to make that call. And so instead we have this. This long delay during which the fort is both reinforced and fortified.
- [132:36]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [132:36]
Brett Devereaux
When we next see it there are earthwork forts on either side of it which are going to make his, you know. Right. The eventual forcing of it much more costly. And so, I mean, I think it is really striking that Saruman is. Is brilliant and intelligent and persuasive. But he is not good with armies and he is not good with political decision making. Which is a tremendous irony because the thesis of Saruman's entire war is that the house of Earl with, you know, thatched barn where brigands hang out.
- [133:05]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [133:05]
Brett Devereaux
And their children roll on the floor. Right. These people are unworthy of lordship. Why should Theoden be in charge of a large state and not meet. And then he proceeds to demonstrate why.
- [133:17]
Alan Sisto
He sure does. He demonstrates it quite clearly. I think we've got one last question here. In the second battle of the Fords of Isen there Is, and we've hinted at this already, a difference of opinion between Elf Helm and Grimbold. Elfelm thinks that now that the fords are not only less important, but an actual trap, he's sort of the Admiral Ackbar of the Rohirrim. That's a trap. Sorry. But Saruman's ability to send troops down either side is definitely a problem. Grimbold doesn't want to abandon the Forge. He's a little bit old fashioned here. He's arguing that defending the east side of the river is going to put troops at risk of being flanked by any additional units that come down the west and cross over. Now it turns out, of course, all went ill, mostly because Saruman just had too many troops. I mean, quantity has a quality all of its own. But of the two of those, who.
- [134:05]
Brett Devereaux
Was right and why Elf Helm is right?
- [134:08]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [134:09]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. I mean, you know, like this is. And Saruman's tactical plan in both cases is to try and trap the Rohirrim on the ford using the fact that he has access to both banks and he flubs his operational timetable. So his. His east bank force shows up late. Although, you know. Right. Elf Helm is positioned to foil his plan regardless. Yeah. So I don't know that it would. It would have worked. Anyway. You kind of get what Grimbold is saying because this is a good defensive position. They built some earthwork forts around it. And he's like, you know, I'm put in mind of George Meade's exclamation at the Battle of Chancellorsville of I'm going to paraphrase, but by God, if we can't hold the top of the hill, we sure as hell can't hold the bottom of it.
- [134:54]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, right.
- [134:55]
Brett Devereaux
The Grimbold is like, if I retreat off of this good defensive position and remember, he's a Westfolk.
- [134:59]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, that's true. That's his area.
- [135:01]
Brett Devereaux
Yeah. Where else am I going to defend? Now the answer is Helmsdeed. The Hornberg. You're going to defend the Hornburg because.
- [135:08]
Alan Sisto
Like you said, an army can't go past there and operate because they've got this massive force sitting there ready to threaten their rear or their logistics.
- [135:16]
Brett Devereaux
But that means surrendering the entirety of the Westfold to enemy foraging and pillaging.
- [135:21]
Alan Sisto
Which of course, Grimbold is not so keen on that.
- [135:23]
Brett Devereaux
Not so keen on that. He's like, I. I'd rather have this fight here. And he may be thinking, he's like, look, they attacked before and yeah, we maybe got the crown prince killed, but we drove them off.
- [135:34]
Alan Sisto
Right. Right.
- [135:34]
Brett Devereaux
We have held this forward once and so both. There's no better defensive terrain between me and my home. And this is a good spot to fight. And I think we can do this. And what ends up right, blowing the plan is that Saruman's army is just way too big for these guys to really oppose in any open ground.
- [135:53]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [135:53]
Brett Devereaux
And of course the other, the other thing that for them is unknown. They don't know when Saruman is going to show up. And they may also. They don't know what's happening in Etteras, but they may also assume that Theoden and or Eomer is going to show up with more troops at some point.
- [136:09]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [136:10]
Brett Devereaux
And he may wish that we had held this very defensible and valuable position when he does. So we don't want to give it up too easily. Right. They don't know that Theoden is, is about to be moving, but Theoden is about to be moving. And Theoden's plan is to take his forces from Etteros and join up with them and with Erkenbrand to hold this forward. And it's a good. To be clear, Theoden's plan isn't a bad one. I mean it's inoperative because the fort is already lost by the time he's moving. But he doesn't, he has no way of knowing that. And his army plus Erkenbrand's force in the Hornberg plus Grimbull plus Elfheim probably is enough to offer a pitched battle on favorable terrain. They'll be outnumbered, but they have massive superiority in cavalry. And massive superiority in cavalry covereth a.
- [136:57]
Alan Sisto
Multitude of sins, especially when your enemy is led by General Saruman.
- [137:03]
Brett Devereaux
Yes. Polybius has a line where he says if you have a choice between being equal to your enemy in all aspects or being inferior to him in every aspect, but having a superiority of cavalry, you should should choose the second. Now it's a little amusing because the Romans are then going to beat everyone with a superiority of infantry. And Polybius documents this, but his point is fair. Having more cavalry really does help. And so like Theoden's plan is a reasonable one. And you almost wonder if Grimbold isn't also thinking, right, he has no way to communicate with Eomera Theoden.
- [137:39]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [137:39]
Brett Devereaux
But. But he can put himself in their shoes and ask what would I be doing if I were them?
- [137:44]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [137:45]
Brett Devereaux
He doesn't know that Erkenbrand's appeal for help has gotten squelched by Grima. Probably assumes that the death of the king's son means The Royal army is coming out.
- [137:54]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [137:54]
Brett Devereaux
And it is just somewhat delayed. And so I think, you know, it's reasonable for him to assume in that, like, what would I do in this situation? And like, well, if I showed up with Theoden's army and found out that we had abandoned the ford without a fight and now had to fight in the open ground of the Westfold, I would be pretty upset with me. So we should make an effort to hold this spot so that when the big army comes in, we can have this battle on really favorable terrain. Now, in the event Saruman shows up too fast, he couldn't have known that was going to happen. But there it is. And Elfhelm is correct that he's like, yeah, that all could happen. But like, under current circumstances, the west bank of this river is a giant trap. Now, in the event, Grimbold is able to fight his way out of the trap and probably the chaos that all of that creates is a net win for Rohan. As I know in my series on Helm's Deep, I guess I am a military historian. If I were a military historian analyzing this campaign, determining the moment that I would say is decisive. Like the, the moment at which Saruman loses is extremely early. And it is the moment after Elf Helm has been forced to withdraw off of this and and Grimbold has broken out and escaped. And it is Saruman's forces dispersed to pursue and pillage instead of remaining concentrated. And I'm like, there you go. That's when you lost. Because Theoden's concentrated army can now move freely through your dispersed force and arrive at the Hornburg with the reinforcements that mean you can't take it. And so in a sense, like, I think Grimbold has reasons to make the decision he's making, but his decision is worse than Elfheim's. But it kind of turns out in the event to have a weird chaotic, multi part running battle that just disorders Saruman's army and prevents it from opposing Theoden's forces. It closes. And in the end, right, Grimble's force is intact because. Right, he's able to create a shield wall defense inside of his earthwork fort. And the tool that Saruman has that could solve that problem are the Uruk. Hai. They're on the wrong side of the river.
- [140:04]
Alan Sisto
Yep.
- [140:05]
Brett Devereaux
So what he's got are regular orcs who are, I think that the text is something like they're just too small. They're not physically big and strong enough to break through the shield wall. And then he's got the Dunlendings who are big and strong, but lightly armored.
- [140:20]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [140:20]
Brett Devereaux
Which means these guys can charge and make a big impact. But you know, across the ancient and medieval history, light infantry that finds itself in extended contact with heavy infantry, horrifically one sided carnage.
- [140:34]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [140:35]
Brett Devereaux
Because like you think about it and folks think about it like, ah, yeah, like the guy in male armor has like, you know, plus 4ac or something. But, but like, yes, he is both less likely to be slain by the attacks of his enemies, but as a result he can fight differently.
- [140:50]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [140:51]
Brett Devereaux
He can be more aggressive. He can be like, I can be aggressive against you because your sword swing won't do anything when it hits my mail. And I just need to nick you and you go down because you're wearing a T shirt. It doesn't take a lot of force.
- [141:05]
Alan Sisto
No.
- [141:06]
Brett Devereaux
Though, as, as Tolkien notes in the text. Right. This is because the Rohirrim have access to Gondorian metalworking and that's where they're getting their mail.
- [141:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [141:14]
Brett Devereaux
And the Dunlendings just mostly don't know. And that is a question of wealth. Mail was extremely expensive as an army. It was really good. Super expensive. We have, we have, for instance, we have some documents related to the militia of Bruges in Flanders in the 1300s. And the average, and the, the well to do men of the city for its defense were required to equip themselves as having infantrymen with a, with a coat of mail. And the average price for a coat of mail was almost a year's wages for a skilled artisan.
- [141:46]
Alan Sisto
Wow.
- [141:47]
Brett Devereaux
If you were like a blacksmith or a candle maker in this town, like that was a major expense that you were required to undergo because of your status. But it's like, it's like, you know, taking out a mortgage to buy a house. Right. Like this is a major piece. And the Dunlendings are just too damn poor for anybody but their very most important people to be armored that way. Ironically, the inventors of mail, the Gauls, were in the same position. Mail is invented by the Gauls probably along the Danube river in what today is Hungary. And then it spreads out through the Gallic cultural sphere, which reaches through Austria, Switzerland, through France and northern Italy. But for them, mail armor was just the armor of chieftains and kings. You know, lesser men wore maybe textile armor, but, but only like, only very, very, very elite burials do we find male. The Romans are a wealthier society. They adopt mail from these guys and they begin mass producing it for their heavy infantry. And so you get this situation where like ironically, the Gauls Invent this defensive armor. But the Romans popularize it. Yeah, but the result is that when you have Gallic infantry fighting Roman infantry, if they do not carry them off at the first rush, if they don't just sweep the Romans out of position, if it becomes an attritional fight, it's extremely one sided because the Romans are much better armored. And this is what's happening with grim bold shield wall. And when it becomes clear that they can't get anywhere, right. They draw back. He gets that pause and then. Right. He's been keeping half an arid of cavalry in the middle, which is what you do. That's about 60 heavy horsemen is. And so you can imagine, right. He just opens the shield wall on one side and those guys maybe in two lines of 30, stirrup to stirrup come out. And his opponents aren't in formation to stop them. That punches a hole. He pulls his infantry through the hole. And they can't just mad chase because he has 60 heavy cavalrymen who aren't enough to drive off the enemy, but they are enough to buy the retreat of his army skirmishing behind it as he moves off. And this means that his probably 1000ish is my impression. Infantrymen are available for Erkenbrand to relieve Helm's deep later. So all of that to get around to the question. I think Elf Helm is correct and Grimbold is wrong, but in the end it doesn't matter very much.
- [144:14]
Alan Sisto
Well, that's certainly true. Yeah. And Grimbold's actions there, like you said, brilliant. The way, you know, with, with getting the heavy cavalry out there to screen the retreat of the infantry.
- [144:25]
Brett Devereaux
Well, and he ends up, he ends up taking Erkenbrand's place commanding the Westfolder cavalry at the Pelenor fields where he falls.
- [144:32]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [144:33]
Brett Devereaux
So he's rewarded for his, his excellent unit command. Whereas Erkenbrand is punted out of the movie in a crime against gods and men.
- [144:42]
Alan Sisto
Seriously man. Erkenbrand Glorfindel and Tom Bombadil.
- [144:46]
Brett Devereaux
I like Erkenbrand's character too because like you can tell the reason he doesn't go with the cavalry is that he's older. Yeah, but he is an older man and he is experienced. And you can also see, I think something of the character of the man that he comes in to take control of this. And one, he doesn't assert control over Elf Helm because Elf Helm isn't in his org chart and he knows that would cause problems. But two, he's like, I'm gonna let the two young men command the battle at the ford.
- [145:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [145:14]
Brett Devereaux
And I am going to make sure that Helm's Deep is prepared for a siege, and then I'm going to start gathering up the levy and get ready. You know, I think that's. There are frontline battlefield commanders, and then there are organizational commanders that understand people. Dwight Eisenhower never fired his weapon in anger at any point in his career, but he did beat Hitler.
- [145:34]
Alan Sisto
Yes, he did.
- [145:35]
Brett Devereaux
Because he could make George Patton and Bernard Montgomery get along, a feat that no other human has ever managed.
- [145:42]
Alan Sisto
I'm trying to imagine.
- [145:43]
Brett Devereaux
Get along is a strong.
- [145:44]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, I was going to say not shoot each other. There you go. That's not. Kill each other is. Is actually a victory if you're involving those two. This was fun. Matt, shall we sign off?
- [145:54]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Yeah. This was fantastic. Brett, thanks so much for. For joining us. It's always an absolute pleasure, always a.
- [146:01]
Alan Sisto
Blast, and so much fun.
- [146:03]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
So enlightening. Like, I learned so much, and I'm just sitting here. Like, if my classes in school were this interesting, I would have paid so much more attention to history.
- [146:14]
Alan Sisto
Seriously, it's like drinking from a fire hose. There's so much here I could have to go back and listen over and.
- [146:18]
Brett Devereaux
Over from your mouth to my enrollment's ears.
- [146:23]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
The fact that the American educational system failed me so badly in that I had never heard of poopie anus from Roman history. That's how you hook the crowd in. Come on. Like, we need to get a bit more theatrical with our education. That was marvelous.
- [146:43]
Alan Sisto
Fun times. Brett, it really has been such a pleasure to have you on the Prancing Pony podcast again. Thank you for coming back. I know you're super busy. I know you're writing a book. We deeply appreciate your time, and we hope you'll come back again soon.
- [146:54]
Brett Devereaux
I hope so, too. It was great to be here.
- [146:56]
Alan Sisto
Well, folks, that wraps it up for another episode of the Prancing Pony podcast. It also wraps up my time with my good friend, the Nerd of the Rings. It's hard to believe we've done 29 episodes together over the last three seasons.
- [147:06]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Holy smokes. I did not realize there was that many.
- [147:09]
Alan Sisto
That's wild when you combine all three years. Wow. But, of course, Matt's not completely gone. I can't get rid of him even if I tried. He's actually going to be back next week as one of my many guests for a very special Tolkien Reading day episode. The 10th Tolkien Reading Day episode we've done here on the PPP. I'll be welcoming Matt along with several of the fine folks that I've had the privilege of co hosting the show with. They're each going to do a reading from Tolkien that fits this year's theme, Fellowship and Community. So please be sure to come back next week for that very special Tolkien Reading Day.
- [147:38]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
That's definitely going to be a fun one.
- [147:40]
Alan Sisto
Oh, it is. Always is.
- [147:41]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Now Alan and I want to thank the members of Team ppp as always, Editor Jordan Rannells Barlam and Becca Davis, social media manager Casey Hilsey and someone who enjoys having a really long title event and Patreon, community coordinator Katie McKenna, graphic artist Megan Collins and website guru Phil Dean.
- [148:01]
Alan Sisto
Please take a minute to check out the prancingponypodcast.com that's where you'll find show notes, outtakes, Prancing Pony ponderings, as well as our online storefront where you can get PPP merch, including stuff with all the great episode artwork that Megan's been doing for the show over the last two and a half years.
- [148:16]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
You'll also want to visit our library page. The Prancing Pony Podcast is, after all, a podcast about the books, so if you're interested in a book we've mentioned on the show, you'll find a link for it in our library. We do get a small amount of compensation when you make your purchase, and we thank you for that.
- [148:32]
Alan Sisto
We also want to thank our patrons at the Kirdan's contribution tier. I'll start with Demay in Alaska, Chad in Texas, Lance in New Jersey, Paul in Colorado, Joseph in Michigan, Kathy from North Carolina, Carlos in California, Brian in the uk, Jerry from Washington, Joe in Washington, Irwin from the Netherlands, Ben in Minnesota, Anthony in Texas, Zaksu in Illinois, Sarah in New Jersey, Joshua in Massachusetts, Lucy in Texas, Keith in Alabama and Erica in Texas.
- [149:00]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
There's also Carson in Oklahoma, Vivian in California, James in Massachusetts, Ann in Kentucky, Sean in New Jersey, Mason in California, Maureen from Massachusetts, Olivia in London, Robert in Arizona, Nick in Wisconsin, Lewis in South Carolina, Thomas in Germany, Craig in California, Bailey in Texas, Kevin in Massachusetts, Julie in Washington, Bruce in California, Joe in Maryland, Nathan in Arizona, and Kevin in Pennsylvania. Thank you all so very much for your support.
- [149:31]
Alan Sisto
I'd like to add Grimbold in the Westfold, but I'm not so sure now that we've told him that he was wrong. But thank you folks. Appreciate your support.
- [149:38]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
Make sure you don't miss any episodes of the Prancing Pony Podcast. Subscribe now through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.
- [149:47]
Alan Sisto
And one last thing. As always, don't forget to send your thoughts, comments, and most of all, your questions for the next time. Brett joins us to barlamond@theprancingpony podcast.com and.
- [149:57]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
If you want your voice literally heard, just send us audio of your question. Visit pod inbox.com prancing pony pod and record your question for us. Please be sure to still email the question to Barlaman, though.
- [150:10]
Alan Sisto
Now, even though Barloman's been a lot more reliable lately, there is still a lot of mail to sort through. We'll get to you just as soon as we're able. As always, though, this has been far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable listeners. But until next time, this is the end.
- [150:25]
Matt, the Nerd of the Rings
We are going. We are leaving now. Goodbye.