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The Prancing Pony Podcast
415 – Saruman’s OPSEC Problem: Unfinished Tales with Dr. Bret Devereaux
01:51:11
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- [00:01]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing
- [00:04]
Alan Sisto
for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck.
- [00:07]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Me again.
- [00:08]
Alan Sisto
I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl.
- [00:23]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Love ya. So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.
- [00:53]
Don Marshall
Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends
- [00:57]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc.
- [01:11]
Alan Sisto
Good evening little masters, and welcome to episode 415 of the Prancing Pony podcast where we don't know our thangal from
- [01:18]
Don Marshall
our dear knife and neither of us can shoot with these massive steel bows. Folks, pull up a chair in the common room and join us. I am Don Marshall, the obscure Lord of the Rings Facts guy, and I am here with the man of the west who thinks we just took the wrong road, Alan Sisto.
- [01:36]
Alan Sisto
Well, you know, shortcuts lead to long delays or just slaughter and death in this case. But folks, join us as we try to pull everything together after the disaster of the gladden fields and bring back a friend of the podcast who's not only become our go to expert for all things military and Middle Earth, but who now holds the record. And I doubt it'll ever be broken for the longest extemporaneous talk at a PPP Moot. We have stories, Don.
- [02:02]
Don Marshall
I cannot wait to hear them. Many of you may know him as the author behind the amazing and brilliantly named blog, a collection of unmitigated pedantry, or if you'd like the acronyms, a coup. He is, of course, Dr. Brett Devereaux, an ancient and military historian, currently a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University. He holds a PhD in ancient history and an MA in classical civilizations.
- [02:29]
Alan Sisto
Of course, he's also a world class fantasy nerd and even a sci fi fan, which appeals to me, so he's definitely our people. While this suggests he should take up other hobbies, Brett has also appeared on Many episodes of the ppp. Six of them back in season seven. Three on the Siege of Gondor, three more on the Battle of the Plan or Fields. For those of you who want to go back and listen to those, Those are episodes 281 to 283 and then 288 to 290. And then he joined us last year in episode 363 when Matt was on the show with me for a real test of his patience on a full length episode interview.
- [03:00]
Don Marshall
We have asked him to join us today to talk about military formations, army logistics and much more going back to the history of Galadriel and Celeborn and leading up through what we just read, through the disaster of the Gladden Fields. Folks, gird your loins for battle and enjoy a full episode that I'm sure will be full of unmitigated pedantry. Welcome, Dr. Brett Devereaux.
- [03:25]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Thank you. It's great to be here. That was a very long introduction and as I found out at the last moot, I'm apparently the guest with the most guest appearances.
- [03:35]
Alan Sisto
You are now. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You have surpassed even John Garth
- [03:41]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
spit across so many episodes.
- [03:44]
Alan Sisto
That is correct. We enjoy having you. Our folks are going to really enjoy this one. We're going to cover a lot of ground today. We're going to go back to events covered earlier in this season. I want to actually start by talking about a few moments from the famous Second Age Rom com known as Aldarian and Arendus Aldarion, then serving as the Lord of the Ships and Havens under his father, Tar Meneldor, did a lot to grow Numenor's naval power, including the establishment of Vignalonde on the coasts of Middle Earth. But twice, first in second age 843, when he found it overthrown by great seas and plundered by hostile men. And then 20 years later, when he found it now wholly ruined, Great seas had brought to nothing all his labors to restore it. With that as background, talk to us about the importance of a harbor in Middle Earth for Numenor, even in this early stage of their history. And then why is it so hard to keep this thing in one piece?
- [04:34]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, I mean, so this is. Reading through this again is really striking that he has a series of voyages, Right. He'll go out and he'll come back and he'll go out again. And because he's a Numenorean, these voyages are often decades apart because he's at it for quite some time.
- [04:51]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [04:51]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But what it put me most in mind of thinking historically is something like the pattern of Portuguese expansion and exploration down the coast of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. And I think folks may be perhaps some listeners less familiar with this. I know in the United States we tend to focus on the exploration of the Americas, but European exploration down the coast was a major undertaking, mostly led by the Portuguese, with the Dutch and later the British following after them. And one of the patterns here is what we sometimes call ports and forts. Imperialism. So you send out an expedition. In the case of Portugal, these are going to be a mix of trading and raiding. So you have some boats, you put some trade goods on the boats. The boats are also filled with armed men. If you find someone who has something you want, you offer them the goods. If they don't take the goods, maybe you do a little pillaging, maybe you do a little piracy. These expeditions are usually in this period, that is, in the early modern period, they were private enterprise. So the king would contract somebody out. But that's like a businessman, usually an aristocrat, who is then basically in charge. He has a license to go out and do whatever. And what we see beginning in the 1420s, so it begins quite early, is the steady progression of each set of voyages goes a little bit further. And they're mapping coastlines and they're setting up small bases, these ports where they find a good harbor, they would usually negotiate with the local ruler because they don't have a lot of force. They'd get a trade concession and they'd be like, hey, we're going to drop a fort on this and we're going to create a small port facility, warehouse, to store goods and so on. And that will create a permanent trade connection and in turn create a stopover for the next way down. And when you get this sort of description of Eldarion as he's working his way down the coast in progressive voyages, this is what I'm thinking of. So they're in the. They're in the Canaries relatively early. They're really working down the coast of Africa in earnest in the 1440s. They're at Sao Tome in 1471. They're at the Congo river in the 14, I think 82. They round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. They get to the corn of Africa in 1499. They're in India in 1510, Indonesia the year after that, China in 1517. And they only make it to Japan in 1542, more than a century after they started. So it's that's dozens of voyages. So each voyage like, goes out, it's out for five years, it comes back, there's two years of getting ready, then you send another one out, it goes a little further down the coast, comes back and you're trying again over decades, pushing your way around with the goal always being getting access to the trade goods coming out of India and East Asia. Silk, spices, tea that European aristocrats really wanted. Now the challenge the Portuguese face as they actually get to these places is that they do not have anything those people are willing to buy.
- [07:57]
Alan Sisto
That's a problem.
- [07:58]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
The first Portuguese ships going to India are loaded down with wool cloth and, and the people in India are like, we have silk and cotton. I know we don't. It's like cotton the fabric of your life. What are you doing here? And so the Portuguese response is rampant piracy. The Portuguese have better warships and so they, they leverage that. Obviously, you know, Eldarion, at least the version we get, is a lot on friendlier terms with the residents of Middle Earth. Right? He and Gil Galad are besties, and so he's setting up somewhat more peaceful relationships. But that's also not, you know, wildly out of, out of turn here. Often these European explorers, like, they don't have the sort of military superiority as compared to kingdoms in Africa or in India to allow them to, like, force their way inland where they get their ports and forts. It's because they've asked for them and the local ruler has decided it would be beneficial to have a place to trade with these guys and we can sell some of our goods and get some of their silver or, you know, they may have goods that we want. Firearms eventually become a major trade good, particularly in West Africa. And so, and so this sort of network of ports and forts is sanctioned by local rulers who expect to gain some sort of advantage by it. And so you can almost see Gilgalad being like, it's probably going to be useful to have the Numenoreans able to send a military force in a pinch. It would be valuable for them to set up these at the same time, these sorts of small coastal port and fort settlements. You set them up and then you leave for 10 years. Things can go wrong in that intervening time. And one wonders when, you know, Tolkien is talking about, you know, Aldarian's, and I'm not going to try to pronounce it, but his, his, his harbor on the Gwa, you know, being just like, he leaves, he comes back and it's gone and he's like, what the hell? I mean, of course, you know, some of the famous examples of that are some of the early colonial foundations in North America. But, but this, this could happen either because the. The settlement just sort of fails or the local rulers that approved it turn hostile for whatever reason in large parts of Africa. It could just be that everybody died of malaria, the, the disease vector. And that was, was pretty harsh. But like, that could happen because you're gone for a really long time, right? Like the, the, the intervals between trade missions in these places could be years, which is part of why you needed a fortified settlement with a warehouse to collect goods over time and a port for the ships to come in, because you're going to spend a couple of years collecting stuff for them to pick up when they come through.
- [10:42]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [10:43]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And so, you know, very much it seems like he's setting up the same kind of network. And as we move forward, we certainly get the sense that there's a string of small Numenorean settlements up and down the coast which will eventually become kind of the, the embryo of the kingdoms in exile. It is where they're going to emerge from is because this network exists so there's a place for the exiles to go after the destruction of Numenor. I do also, just like the Mariner's Wife is also just such a fun story because it's like, it's exactly the kind of weird, just so story that would absolutely survive in like a medieval. Like this is like, I'm reading this and it's like, this is a really long story with a lot of personal details, the upshot of which, right. Like the just so at the end is like, this is why there are Numenorean ports on the coast of Middle Earth. And this is why women can inherit the throne of Numenor. Two facts that sort of kind of matter for subsequent stories. That's kind of all we're doing here. But we have all of this texture along the way because it's interesting. And I'm just like, yes, I can absolutely imagine this being a long discursis in historical, you know, some sort of Gesta Numenorianorum. There we go. Because you get like the Gesta Dane Ornam, the deeds of the Danes. And I was like having to work out. I'm like, okay, I need to put Numenorean in the genitive plural.
- [12:09]
Alan Sisto
I like that though. That works.
- [12:11]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Can you tell I've been teaching Latin lately?
- [12:15]
Alan Sisto
Well played, sir.
- [12:16]
Don Marshall
Still on Aldarian and Arrendus, but we're going to Take a passage from history of Galadriel and Celeborn. Here we read Tar Eldarian, the mariner king formed a friendship and alliance with Gil Galad. Eldarion had a great hunger for timber, desiring to make Numenor into a great naval power. So my question for you is, what would it take an island nation like Numenor to become such a great naval power?
- [12:45]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
A lot of trees.
- [12:47]
Don Marshall
A lot of trees.
- [12:48]
Alan Sisto
Lot.
- [12:49]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, yeah, a lot of trees. So this is. You know, I can imagine Tolkien thinking here with two sort of examples that are probably in his head. The first is a classical one, and the second is going to be an early modern one. The classical example here is going to be Athens. Athens, of course, had a large navy. It was famous for its large navy. You can go to Athens, you can look around Attica. You will not see an overabundance of trees. Critically, you will not see a lot of big, straight, tall trees that are good for ship timber. The fleets of Athens were built with timber brought from the north, mostly from Macedon and Thrace. And Athenian colonial connections up there were very important for securing those supplies of timber for the construction of ships. And you need a lot of timber to maintain a navy because you don't just need to build the ships, you need to maintain the ships. You need to replace rotted boards and planks and spars break and so on. So there is a continuing demand. The other example I can easily think of Tolkien working with here is English later British colonization in North America, where there were literally royal officials fairly early on in the thirteen colonies whose job was to walk out into the forest and mark every tree that would be owned by the king for the Royal Navy. Like, this is a good oak. That is a good oak. This is a good oak. Colonists don't cut down the trees I painted a little white mark on because those belong to the Crown. For future shipbuilding, timber demands could be really considerable. After the Danish fleet was destroyed during the Napoleonic wars, they planted an entire forest for the purpose of securing their timber supply on the understanding that it would take about a century. And I think it was like, in the, like, 1970s or 1980s that, like, the Danish Forest Service told, like, the Danish Navy, like, by the way, it's ready now.
- [14:40]
Alan Sisto
Literally, we're building a steel now, but okay.
- [14:44]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. I mean, the good news is now they have a great forest which are good for other things. But securing the timber supply could be a really critical strategic concern.
- [14:54]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
For these sorts of states. If you don't have local supplies of timber. Now, other major naval powers often did just if you are France, you know, you have enough wood of your own. You know, both Rome and Carthage can use local timbers. And if people are scratching their heads wondering how Carthage, located in North Africa, can use. Use local timbers, the word you're looking to Google is desertification. North Africa was rather greener in antiquity than it is now because the Sahara Desert keeps expanding.
- [15:24]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
But it was not very green. But it was green. Or it had forests. Concern here about. About maintaining timber is obviously a very real concern. And we get the sense that Numenor is not necessarily abundantly blessed with. With tall trees that make hardwood ship timbers are finicky. There are parts of the world that just don't have them. Like Egypt has trees, but it, for instance, has no native ship timbers. And of course, at the same time, we also hear that Eldarion is really concerned about what forests Numenor does have. Yeah, right. He's the keeper of the forest for quite some time. And you know, he's always planting trees, although to the annoyance of his wife, he's also always cutting them down.
- [16:06]
Alan Sisto
That's. Yeah.
- [16:08]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But this sort of concern for major naval powers that like the forests, become a major strategic concern is a big one again, because only some trees are going to be big enough, tall enough, strong enough, straight enough. Yeah, right. It isn't just the availability of wood, it's the availability of specific woods.
- [16:26]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [16:27]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
To build large warships with strongholds.
- [16:29]
Alan Sisto
That makes sense. Well, it's a good thing for the Elves that they did put together that naval power. In the history of Galadriel and Celeborne, we read about the invasion of Eriad or by Sauron in Second Age 1695. So this is roughly 8, 900 years after Aldarion's first voyages back to Numenor, or back to Middle Earth, I should say. And in the text we read gathering a great force, Sauron moved over Calenardhon. That's Rohan for the rest of you folks. To the invasion of Eriador in the year 1695, when news of this reached Gil Galad, he sent out a force under Elrond, half Elven. But Elrond had far to go, and Sauron turned north and made at once for Eregion. The scouts and vanguard of Sauron's host were already approaching when Celeborn made a sortie and drove them back. But though he was able to join his force to that of Elrond, they could not return to Eregion, for Sauron's host was Far greater than theirs. Great enough both to hold them off and closely to invest Eregion. Questions from this. There's a few of them. One, it's about 450 miles from Lindon to Eregion. So how long does it take Elrond's force to get there? The second question is going to be a little harder because there's not a lot of specific data as to where they were when the news got to Gil Galad. But how long might it have taken Sauron to arrive in Eregion once news reached Gil Galad? I mean, if his army's coming through Calenardhon and you spot that, okay, now we gotta get news to go Galad and then put together the army. And then for those of us who might not be as familiar with some of those terms, help us understand what Tolkien's saying. When Celeborn made the sortie to drive back the vanguard and why they couldn't go back. I'm assuming when they talk about closely investing at Regan, it has nothing to do with stocks and bonds.
- [18:12]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
No, it is not. It is not a, it is not a financial move to begin with. In terms of the, the, the timeline. The rule of thumb, when you're thinking about armies moving, infantry moving in large bodies, you want to think normally around 10 miles per day. So you're looking at something like a month and a half once the force is fully mobilized. Obviously, getting the force together might have also taken time. So even once Gil Galad gets news, it could have taken a couple of months to get Elrond's force to where it needs to go. Now, I will note, right, there's, there's some trickiness here with the timelines because on the one hand, the Unfinished Tales timeline doesn't give us a lot of dates. It just sort of presents events in sequence and you don't get a sense of really how long this is all taking. What I think is significant is if you bounce to the Appendices, open war begins in 1693, Second Age. The invasion itself is in 1695, and Eregion falls in 1697. At least that's when Celebrimbor is killed, right? Which is the final fall of the city, which suggests that this is a somewhat more extended thing. But you can see the trouble that that's going to create for Gil Galad, because you can imagine, okay, the war opens in 1693, but with the way that pre modern armies are going to wage war, that might not be Sauron's full host marching into, into A region. It's campaigns of raiding and agricultural destruction. We raid your farms and outlying settlements. You have to withdraw from those. That increases our ability to maneuver and so on. And so if you're Gil Galad, you're trying to get a sense of each as each campaigning season rolls around. Because you usually only fight during certain parts of the year when food and fodder for the animals will be available. The in Europe at least. The big limit here is you have to wait for the spring grass to come in which it doesn't match because otherwise you have to. You have to feed all your horses purely from grain. And the logistic challenge of that becomes very hard. So every time the season comes around like Gilgala, it's got to be thinking, is this the big one where I have to put my whole army forward or is this going to be another series of raids? Because it's very costly for Gilgala to put his whole army in the field. If he puts his whole army in the field and nothing happens, he's burned a lot of resources and gotten nothing. So I wonder if what's happening here is in 693 and 694 nothing happens. And then in 695 he only can start moving once Sauron started moving. And Sauron coming up from Rohan, he's got further to go.
- [20:49]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [20:50]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Once word reaches him. And so Sauron is able to get to Eregion, to the capital, which is Austin Edhill, and we'll talk about invest it. And is able then to block the relief force out.
- [21:02]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [21:03]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
At least that's the sense that I make of the timeline. And then he sieges it for two years, which is absolutely a thing that can happen. Long sieges don't usually run that long, but they can.
- [21:15]
Alan Sisto
The siege of Badadur was famously seven years.
- [21:18]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right. Shades of. Shades of the elite in the Odyssey, in the ten year siege of Troy. There. This is something you encounter more in the. In the Unfinished Tales, that these events taking place in the Second Age. Tolkien is willing to make them a little more legendary in character.
- [21:33]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
And a little less grounded. And I'm sure we'll see that again in some of these. These other things. In terms of what does it mean to invest a settlement? So invest here is a technical military term. You have invested a city, a settlement or a fortress when you have fully blocked off all access and egress from it. The usual way to do that is what's called circumvallation. So like if your army is outside of a city you haven't necessarily invested it. You've invested it when you've closed off all access to it.
- [22:00]
Alan Sisto
Okay, so like fully surrounding it.
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right.
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Alan Sisto
Completely. So that nobody can get in or out.
- [22:06]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. And the usual way to do this is what's called circumvallation, a Latin phrase that just means walling around, which is to say that you build a line of defensive works all the way around the perimeter of the target. And this is interesting, of course, this. The sieges really assaults that we get in the Lord of the Rings happen so rapidly that this isn't necessary. They're storming attacks. One very poorly prepared, one very well prepared. But either way, like, neither army has the logistics to sit around and wait two years. No, that's not in their operational plan. But here, Sauron has evidently arrived understanding that, like, I'm not going to take this place quickly. One imagines he's preparing this for a long time. Right. The One Ring is forged in Second Age 1600. He spent 90 years getting into position for this.
- [22:53]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
Presumably securing his control of what will eventually be Rohan, but probably also laying the logistics, groundwork, and everything else for his attack into a region. So he's prepared to sit outside for two years if it takes that long. And again, the idea of sieges taking that long is. Is. Is not wild. The Romans are sieging individual settlements in Sicily that long during the First Punic War, the Third Punic War, which basically is just the siege of Carthage, lasts three years. So often if a siege lasts that long, it's. It's because you're struggling to fully invest the target and they're still getting supplies through somehow. Because, you know, most cities don't have three years of grain sitting. No, but sieges can take a really long time, especially if you're being forced to wait out an enemy or forced to very slowly degrade their defenses. So what you're going to do when you show up, you're going to circumvolate the target. You're going to build a line of defenses, often just literally building a second wall outside of their first wall, but facing in. But then Sauron's also got to be worried about Elrond and now Celeborn, who are behind him because Kelborn has sortied out. So he's made a kind of an attack. And a sortie is an attack where you don't intend to stick around after it's done. So he has engaged the advanced elements of Sauron's forces. Evidently figured out if he didn't already know it, that the main force is too strong for him to oppose. So he beats up the front of Sauron's army and then gets out of Dodge. And we don't get details, but it's not hard to imagine situations where the way the battle develops, he can't retreat back into the city. Or alternately, he doesn't want to retreat back into the city because he wants to maintain the ability to maneuver and not get locked up. He's like, he knows the city is going to get locked up. Like, I want to stay broken out. There are defenders inside the city. They'll last for a long time. I want to stay out in the open while where I can maybe get around and cause some mischief. He loops up with Elrond. Sauron knows this has happened. So presumably, like we're told, he has a strong enough host to also block out Elrond. We're not told. But what I think we should assume he's doing here is contravelation, where now, having built a wall facing inward, you form your army into a donut with a second wall facing outward. One of the really famous examples of this is, is Julius Caesar's siege of Alessia, where he's got Vercingetorix's army in this hilltop fortress. And so he builds a, you know, Roman defensive line around the base of it. As you do, the Romans love themselves some field fortifications. And then because Vercingetorix has gotten messengers out to call for help and he knows a whole bunch more Gauls are going to show up behind him, he builds a complete second line of defenses facing outward to prepare for their arrival. And they end up trying to break through his forces and failing. And this leads to Caesar winning, as he usually does. But so you end up with two complete lines of fortifications facing in opposite directions and your army arranged as kind of a donut. Now that's obviously something of a perilous situation to be in. That's a lot of ground for your army to cover. You really do want some superiority in numbers or quality or ideally both to do that. But what we're told is essentially Sauron's army is so big that he has enough forces to face in and face out at the same time. And Elrond, you know, is just isn't given an opportunity to break in. Which I've really speaks to just how dramatic the difference in forces, which is of course, I think, confirmed to us that by how long it takes Numenor to show up. And so what they think is necessary to Make a difference.
- [26:36]
Alan Sisto
And we're starting to get to that.
- [26:38]
Don Marshall
Doctor, one more question or I guess set of questions from Galadriel and Celeborn. Here's that passage we're going to focus on. As soon as Gil Galad began to fear that Sauron would come with open war into Eriador, he sent messages to Numenor. And on the shores of Lindon, the Numenoreans began to build up a force and supplies for war. In 1695, when Sauron invaded Eriador, Gil Galad called on Numenor for aid. Then Tar Minas, dear. The king sent out a great navy, but it was delayed and did not reach the coast of Middle Earth until the year 1700. So questions from this what would the buildup of forces and supplies by the Numenoreans have included for something like this? Since it's the navy that comes later, Are they building up an infantry force or something like. Something like that? What would those supplies be? Because obviously they can't take food indefinitely. So is it weapons and armor? Is it wagons? Is it horses? And then finally, why would it take a navy five years to arrive from Numenor?
- [27:48]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, five years is a really long
- [27:49]
Alan Sisto
time, especially if you're an Elf and a Reggian.
- [27:52]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
I would say, like, as a historian, normally, if I would see a lag like that of five years, my immediate question would be, what else is going on on? Like, normally, if you see that kind of a lag, you're going to poke your sources and find out, oh, there was like a major revolt happening over here that required more immediate attention. For Numenor, that seems unlikely to be an issue. They don't have other imperial possessions. One of the things Tolkien may be thinking is, you know, Numenor's ships, we don't get, I think, detailed descriptions of the kinds of ships they have, but certainly the impression we get is that these are large sailing ships rather than something like, you know, sort of. My specialty is in Mediterranean galleys.
- [28:32]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [28:32]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And you can produce a large galley fleet over a winter. And indeed, states, you know, regularly do it. Famously, the. The Ottomans lose basically their whole navy at Lepanto, and they're back out at sea the next year with basically a whole new navy. It's not nearly as good as the one they lost, but they remain weakened for some time, but they just build it, build a new navy. You can do that with galleys. It is a lot harder to do that with large sort of age of sail warships, partly because they're larger and more complex. To construct. And partly because you need to build them of aged wood. You ought to build your galleys of aged dry wood too. But you don't have to. You can build galleys out of green wood. They won't be as good, but they won't fall apart. But if you try and build a man of war out of Greenwood, it's going to go poorly for you. And so part of what may be happening here is that the need to construct a sort of age of sale style navy from scratch demanded a lot of time. There really isn't a way to speed up the process of, of fully drying and aging wood. You just sort of have to put it on blocks and wait. I also again, one wonders like this is one of those time frames where I think Tolkien often when dealing with the Numenorean shifts into almost like heroic time, where stuff just takes longer for reasons that aren't entirely clear. I mean you see this again like you see this in the Mariner's Wife where like Eldarion decides to do something and then he's doing it for 15 years.
- [29:58]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [29:59]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And you're like, yeah, was that really, was that 15 years of stuff you had to do or. Because they have, you know, because they're, they're heroic and bigger than life in this way. So it takes a long time. Time. And so rather than a long time being 18 months, a long time is five years. But, but if Numenoreans have neglected their naval preparations and really do need to build a large fleet from scratch, this might take a really long time. And one of the challenges here is that they are moving a large army. The logistics of moving an army by sea, especially if you need to move it all at once rather than doing, you know, shuttle runs, get, get pretty, pretty wild pretty fast. Because you know, a large sailing ship, you can put a few hundred men on that, which sounds like a lot until you're talking about an army of 20, 30, 40, 50,000 men and you're suddenly talking about dozens, hundreds of ships. The Roman invasion force that carries their army to North Africa during the First Punic War. This is 256bc is some 350 ships. Wow. Transports and warships all total. They have less marine carrying capacity because they're or ships. So they have more rowers. But you really large number of ships in order to move a large army and it might be a real scramble to get them. The way your historical sort of early modern European rulers with age of stale style fleets would do this is that they would draft every Merchant ship they could get a hold of.
- [31:32]
Alan Sisto
Right.
- [31:33]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
You'd hand some amount of money to the captain. Maybe it's a reasonable amount, maybe it's not. But you're pointing a gun at him.
- [31:40]
Alan Sisto
Exactly.
- [31:41]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And you'd be like, you know, your ship is now moving troops. And so you would, you would pull up your merchant marine. And this is part of why the English, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, Right, had powerful navies and like France didn't. Do you have access to a large number of merchant ships that are just hanging around that are doing merchanty stuff.
- [32:00]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [32:01]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
In order to move. Move an army. Even then, the amount of army that you can move over such vast distances might be relatively small. Listeners who are familiar with their sort of American Revolutionary War might notice that the armies that Britain sends to try and put down the American Revolution are a few thousand here, a few thousand there. They seem absolutely paltry compared to either the armies you see in something like the Seven Years War, war that comes before the revolution in Europe, what the. What the continental powers can deploy there, or of course, something like the Civil War later, where the armies are order of magnitude larger. And you know, part of this is obviously like the 13 colonies themselves don't have that many people in them yet. But two, the amount of military force that you can actually project across the Atlantic, which is sort of the distances we should be thinking of. Right. Because Numenor is way on the other side of the sea, is relatively small. You can't do shuttle runs. You have to send these guys all at once. They have to be loaded with enough provisions to make a journey that might last weeks, months. So you're limited to how many guys you can put on a given ship. Some of those need to be warships to escort the force. They're loaded with cannon and sailors to manage the cannon and so on and so forth. And so your sort of army throughput gets really small, really fast. And so the Numenoreans seem to have a sense, given that when they arrive, they arrive with an army that is incredibly large and strong. They seem to have a sense that, like, we need to send a lot of guys or we're not going to get anywhere. And we know they're right because Elrond and Celeborn are both pretty good at this and have an army of elves and didn't get anywhere. If they want to have an army that's going to do more than sit and watch, they need to send a very large force. And it may have taken a long time to scrape up enough Ships to simply carry a force that large.
- [33:45]
Alan Sisto
That makes sense. I am curious what the. What it looks like for that buildup, though. Gil Galad says, hey, we might need some help. It looks like Sarah might be coming. So we read that they began to build up a force and supplies for war up in the north, in Lindon. What are they doing, like, practically speaking, are they establishing, you mentioned earlier, ports and forts? Are they establishing, you know, military forts and starting to man them and doing early shuttle runs? Are they just building like a logistics chain? What. What sort of prep is going into that on the northern part of the shore?
- [34:18]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. So what you can do, in what order you can do it all matters because everything comes with logistics, costs once you start doing it. Yeah. So if you move a bunch of guys, you have to feed and supply them now. So you might not want to move all of your guys first. Also your guys might not want to be away from home, though. So you have a lot of different things that you need to be doing in a different sort of sequence. One of the early things that they would probably be looking to do is first you want to build up supply magazines because you're going to have a large army arriving. That army is going to exceed the local food production. And so what you need to do is you're going to want, like, granaries, you're going to want to have built up that sort of that food production, that system to be ready to meet them. The other thing that you're probably going to be thinking about, because this army is going to arrive with a large age of sail fleet, and that fleet is going to have a long voyage to get to you. They are going to arrive with all sorts of wear and tear. Those ships are going to carry spare spars and sails and wood, and they're going to do what they can, but it would be really convenient if they arrived and you had a whole bunch of that stuff ready to go. I wonder if Tolkien is thinking about, for instance, you know, in the 1700s and the 1800s, Royal Navy facilities along the Thames, which are absolutely massive, you know, warehouses storing hundreds of thousands of barrels of ships, biscuits, so that ships coming in could just load up and then head out enormous amounts of sales. Ropes, spars, spare masts, right, those break in heavy winds. And so they might be building up all of that sort of material in Lynden so that, like, when the fleet arrives, so that we can support it logistically, we can maintain it. And of course, that process is probably going to involve expanding the number of you need carpenters, you need sailmakers, you need just tons of dividors to move stuff around and carry stuff. You need to develop the extraction and processing to churn out whatever kind of foodstuffs you're churning out. Again, my brain always leaps to some form of hardtack or ship's biscuit. Because you keeps forever. There are century old pieces of hardtack that you can still eat.
- [36:32]
Alan Sisto
I was going to say you might not want to, but yeah, there is
- [36:34]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
like Civil War era hardtack that is still technical, technically edible. Because like hardtack, what hardtack is, is it is salted bread that is twice dry. There's no moisture in it, so it doesn't rot. And as long as you keep it dry, it stays dry.
- [36:47]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. Whoa.
- [36:48]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And so I think there's a. I can't remember if it's a Danish or Norwegian museum that has a. A piece of hardtack, I want to say, from the 1840s on display.
- [36:59]
Alan Sisto
You could eat it if you. Oh, my goodness. You probably need about a gallon of water for every bite of it, but.
- [37:04]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Alcohol is probably a good plan there.
- [37:08]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, probably.
- [37:11]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But the upshot is you can throw this stuff in crates and it will keep. You know, the downside is that all sorts of annoying bugs will get into it. But the secret upside is that this is protein for your sailors.
- [37:23]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah. Because there's not a lot of protein in the heart attack.
- [37:26]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, no, exactly. Right. It's not like. And there are all sorts of delightful stories of how, you know, premodern soldiers and sailors would. Would work their hardtack. You know, during the Civil War, the standard thing to do with hardtack was that, you know, you'd make camp, you'd break out your heart attack, and you had. Because it's the Civil War, you had coffee. And so you'd start the water boiling to mix your coffee, and you'd be mixing your coffee and you would soak your hardtack in the coffee and all of the. Which would. Which would make it soft so that doesn't break. You need to soak hard tack before you eat it.
- [37:57]
Don Marshall
Yeah.
- [37:58]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And all of the bugs and stuff in your hardtack would come out and float to the top of the boiling water where you could scrape them off and throw them away.
- [38:05]
Alan Sisto
Oh, my goodness.
- [38:07]
Don Marshall
Oh, my goodness.
- [38:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And this was just a standard. A standard rhythm of life. Yeah, this is just what you did. And you know, on ship you might use grog for this purpose, which grog is watered down alcohol.
- [38:19]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, my goodness. That's on that appetizing note folks. Go get yourself some and we'll be right back. When Sean and I started this podcast all the way back in 2016, it was just a small little project, but as it grew over the years, I quickly discovered just how many hats you have to learn to wear. It can be overwhelming when you're starting with something new. Your to do list just keeps growing and growing and you need the right tools to help you. For millions of businesses around the world, that tool is Shopify. Shopify helps you get the word out like you have a professional marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling, managing inventory and shipping, processing returns. Shopify provides world class expertise in all of these and can help make your business run smoother. From inventory to payments analytics to store templates. Tackle all the important tasks with Shopify. No need for multiple websites or figuring out which platform has the tool that you want to use. It's all in one place with Shopify. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com shop pony go to shopify.com pony that's shopify.com pony
- [39:55]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
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- [40:55]
Alan Sisto
Now. Soon we'll get back to more with Brett and more recent questions we've saved up for him. But before we do, I want to take a minute to thank the amazing community that has grown up around this show. After all, there is a lot more talk going on at the Prancing Pony podcast than just us.
- [41:07]
Don Marshall
The PPP really does have a warm and welcoming listener community. If you've got questions or you just want to talk about how much you love Middle Earth, Be sure to check out our Common room on Facebook and across all social media. On Facebook, just look for the Prancing Pony podcast. Yeah, there's a page, but you're going to want to join the group for
- [41:26]
Alan Sisto
that great fan community that's right now on every social media platform besides Facebook. We're simply Prancing Pony podcasts. You can even find our subreddit at R. Prancingponypod. And folks, please check out my daily show, Today's Tolkien Times, on YouTube and all your favorite podcast apps. That's where you can get your daily Middle Earth fix with everything from Middle Earth Map Mondays to Word Nerd Wednesdays. Be sure to watch or listen@YouTube.com prancingponypod all right, Don, we got some more questions, don't we?
- [41:53]
Don Marshall
We do. We do. We move now to the Hunt for the Ring, which, of course, Matt and Alan covered over four episodes pretty recently. Can you talk to us about Saruman in this time frame? Trying to trick Sauron and the Nazguls, preparing for war against the Rohirrim at a time when he should be pouring all of his resources into finding the Ring? Why is he, as you put it, a dummy whammy whose plans failed because they were bad?
- [42:25]
Alan Sisto
Best line ever.
- [42:29]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
I really do like that line. So Saruman's problem almost invariably is that he makes these intricate clockwork plans that require every component element to succeed in order for the plan to have any chance at success. And in the event, almost everything goes wrong. But when you actually piece them apart, any component part that went wrong would cause a huge problem. What's striking is that in, in the Hunt for the Ring, in Unfinished Tales, we get a little bit of insight that we don't get from the. From the Lord of the Rings, specifically, that even when the before the Witch King even knows where the Shire is.
- [43:12]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [43:12]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Sauron is aware that Saruman is betraying him. Which puts the failure point for Saruman's plans really early.
- [43:22]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, it does.
- [43:22]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And speaks to. Speaks to this. And just to sort of back up on this, like, Saruman's fundamental problem is having betrayed both the free peoples and Sauron, he is in a position where at best, it is get the Ring or die.
- [43:39]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [43:40]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Because if he doesn't get the Ring, he's not militarily strong enough to prevail against Rohan and Gondor on his own or to prevail against Sauron on his own. And so he either gets the Ring and then the other part I have in the decision tree is. And the Ring works like he thinks
- [43:55]
Alan Sisto
it does, which is a big if.
- [43:58]
Don Marshall
Oh, big if.
- [43:59]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, big if. I mean, this is. This is right. Saruman has, you know, his 10 is 10,000 ish uruks, orcs and wild men. And what I would. What I would note is that we see Sauron respond exactly. To the problem of 9,000 men at arms plus Gandalf. So. Plus Maya and then Aragorn, who he thinks has the Ring.
- [44:26]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [44:27]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And his response is to play with them before springing the trap. The one being in the story who knows how the One Ring works does not think 9,000 men plus one ring is enough. And so this is. I know that there's debate amongst the community on this point but I actually think all these characters we see who imagine and we see Gandalf think this way and Saruman think this way and Galadriel thinks we have the goodbye at the Ring. And the wise characters are like, it would tempt me and I should not do that. But they're like, but I probably win. Right? I think they're all wrong. I think they're all wrong. I do not think the one ring plus 10,000 guys is enough to win. And the reason I think that is that Sauron is the only person in a position to know the answer to this equation. And he doesn't think it's remotely close. He is not even a little bit threatened by Aragorn's advance. He does nothing to harry him as he advance. He invites him into the trap. He is supremely confident that his victory is at hand.
- [45:24]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [45:24]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And so I think that Saruman's plans can't work from the get go because he is fundamentally misassessed how the One Ring will work. And my guess, actually, we'll get to the Gladden Fields in a second is because the One Ring remains part of Sauron. I'm not sure it could be used against him. I think that's a lie that the Ring tells everyone who's ever near it is, you could use me against Sauron. The Ring is Sauron. It is working to his purposes at all times.
- [45:51]
Alan Sisto
It's a piece of his will. Yeah.
- [45:53]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And so I don't think it adds to your power. One witness. Saruman imagines that if he put the Ring on. I mean, he says this to the Witch King when he shows up at the door. He's like, if I had it, I would command you and you would obey. And I'm like, would he, though?
- [46:08]
Alan Sisto
You know, Tolkien even actually chats about that in a letter because, you know, Frodo in the Samoth Naur puts the Ring on and Sauron's like, oh, crap, right? Sends his guy. Tolkien actually answers a hypothetical question. What if Frodo was wearing the Ring and then Asgil arrived and they got there, they would feign obedience to him, get him to come outside where Saruman would then come and bring the hammer down. Like, they would know we have to pretend to obey him, but we're not actually going to. And that's almost precisely what would happen with Saruman.
- [46:37]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right. And you can say, well, Saruman, as the same sort of being as Sauron is, maybe he has more power in this regard. Certainly it is the case. You'll note that Saruman's voice works on the Witch King in this passage, is it works on everyone else. And so he certainly has more power. But, yeah, I mean, if you're Sauron, if you thought that Gandalf could rip the Ring off of Aragorn's finger and then unseat you, you would not be quite so confident as Aragorn's army approached the Black Gate.
- [47:05]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [47:05]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And he's so confident. So my view, and I know this is not universally accepted, is that Saruman is proceeding on a false assumption about how the Ring works and so none of his plans could be successful.
- [47:17]
Alan Sisto
But even if he was right, like you said, every single element.
- [47:20]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, everything has to succeed because he needs. He needs a situation where in sequence, he needs Sauron to wreck Gondor while he defeats Rohan and gets the Ring so that he doesn't then immediately get bulldozed by Sauron. Yeah, by Sauron. And of course, we get sort of beautifully in the Lord of the Rings or horrifyingly, depending on how you want to think of it, the scale difference between what Helm's Deep looks like and what the Siege of Minas Tirith looks like. And you're like, oh, wow, this guy was not even playing the same game. No, we don't get. We don't get numbers put on the Witch King's army, but it is at least an order of magnitude larger. It's also, the Witch King shows up with a giant magic battering ram. Elephants, catapults, siege engines, boats, an entire Corsair fleet. In addition to his main force, there's, like, all of these bells and whistles that Saruman does not have.
- [48:19]
Alan Sisto
He's got 10,000 orcs. And that's it.
- [48:21]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And that's it. And some ladders and one bomb, one One.
- [48:26]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, he does one bomb.
- [48:29]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And for, for Saruman. Right. The. From a strategic perspective, the, the question of the fancy strategic term that we break out here is we call optionality. How late do you preserve your decision making ability and Saruman as a weaker third power attempting to navigate two stronger powers, the free people on one side, Sauron on the other. Right. Optionality is really important. It's unlikely that he's going to be able to remain fully independent. So you want to preserve your ability to leap one way or the other as long as you can. Saruman instead, out of, I think just raw hubris and ego commits almost immediately to alienating both. And, and it's remarkable how early he does this because in that passage by the time he is talking to the Witch King. I don't at this point. Has Frodo even left the Shire yet? I don't think he has.
- [49:22]
Alan Sisto
No. No, he has not.
- [49:24]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Saruman is already committed. He is already at that point betrayed Sauron. And Sauron knows. And given that Saruman does not come to talk to the Witch King in person, Saruman suspects Sauron knows. So they are both kayfabing their friendship at this point. But they're both pretending and they both know they're pretending. And at the same time he imprisoned Gandalf and Gandalf escaped. So the wise of the free peoples also know. Yeah, he is committed in both directions. He can keep one Rohan out of the fight for a while but if like the free peoples win then eventually Eland or Gadriel or Aragorn or somebody, Denethor who somebody is going to roll up.
- [50:09]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [50:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And any one of those people can wreck his army and, and take his like. Because you know, Rohan is not like the strongest power here and he will fail to defeat them.
- [50:20]
Alan Sisto
Yes.
- [50:21]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
So he is by far the weakest. And so he is a weak power behaving like a strong power and it goes predictably badly for him.
- [50:29]
Alan Sisto
Yes, it would.
- [50:31]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And I want to stress, I don't think this is like plot holes. I think this is Tolkien writing very kind of clearly about a certain kind of personality and the ways that it can go wrong. Both in the sense that Saruman has a lot of pride, just overwhelming pride. It comes out very clearly when he speaks to Gandalf and especially when he speaks to Theoden.
- [50:53]
Alan Sisto
Oh yeah.
- [50:54]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
That you can tell that it has just been eating away at him that these lesser beings, these men have been able to make rules for themselves while he, a higher being, has not been able to tell them what to do. And he knows so much better than they do. And then he gets promptly put in his place. Which is brilliant. But. But there's that pride and that arrogance. But that also. Right. He is. He's a tinkerer and an engineer and he thinks in those ways. Right? Complex, elegant, clockwork solutions to problems which almost always neglect the human aspect. It doesn't. For instance, and this comes up in the Hunt for the Ring. It doesn't occur to him that the Witch King might pick up his servant Wormtongue and pump him for information and that Wormtongue might not be an entirely reliable fellow. So. So Saruman does this cool misdirection of like I don't know where the Shire is. Presumably as he's puffing on his pipe from the Shire and like whatever. And it comes to nothing.
- [51:54]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [51:55]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Because he hasn't thought through like who does in my organization know who the Shire is? And are any of them in a position to get picked up by this undead monstrosity and then squeal?
- [52:07]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, because he will.
- [52:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Because if you made that list Wormtongue would be the top name on the list.
- [52:13]
Alan Sisto
If I've got Wormtongue in the tower, fine. But if he's out and about.
- [52:18]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Problem. And you might want. Once you get a hold of him again you might immediately want to be like anything interesting on the trip.
- [52:27]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, exactly. And that's just Wormtongue. Because don't forget about the squint eyed Southerner at Bree who is sort of his chief go between. Between him and the Shire who also ends up getting captured and who knows all this stuff.
- [52:39]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right? And so operational security, not OPSEC problems. You know he sent the whole battle plan to the Witch King on signal.
- [52:50]
Alan Sisto
Oh that's great.
- [52:51]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But he neglects the human element over and over again he neglects this sort of the questions of personality because to him people are easy to manipulate. They are clay and putty in his hands and he doesn't. In his. In his arrogance. He increasingly doesn't see them as people but as things, as pieces. He's moving around on the board and so he is wholly unprepared for situations where they don't move the way he expects. Yeah.
- [53:14]
Alan Sisto
Let alone giant talking trees. He's really not prepared for those.
- [53:18]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Staggering, staggering strategic incompetence.
- [53:22]
Alan Sisto
I mean they're right there, man.
- [53:24]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
They're right there. He has spent a decade needling them while he's making his army slowly annoying his neighbor. And then when he goes to war he doesn't even have scouts in their general direction. So convinced is he that his voice and his charisma will hold them in thrall, that like he doesn't even have some kind of thin screening force, he is entirely unprepared for them to move. Just staggering strategic incompetence. It's great, but perfectly in keeping because he doesn't view nature as powerful in that way. And so it makes never occurs to him that they're powerful. He again, he sees them as a resource and maybe an obstacle, but he isn't prepared for anyone else to make a decision, which is, it's wonderful to see sort of his decision making flaw and his moral character flaw. They're the same flaw coming together.
- [54:19]
Alan Sisto
Absolutely. I love that. And we could spend the whole day just talking about Saruman because that's some of your best writing and I really enjoy every single time we get to talk about it. But I want to move on for now to the chapter that Don and I just covered. This is the Disaster of the Gladden Fields. We've got a lot of really cool battle things to ask about and we will ask about them. But first, logistics. You talked about 10 miles a day for ancient armies. Numenorean and Gondorian soldiers traveled in eight spells of a league with short breaks at the end of each league. They called that Alar L A R or Sindrin Daur, originally meaning a stop or a pause. But now it means the length of time you go before you pause and one hour near midday. So that made a march of about ten and a half hours in which they were walking for eight hours. So they'd walk for an hour covering three miles, which is doable, especially if you're six foot four on average. Take a short break of about ten minutes and do it again after lunch. They'd keep up that pace. How does that compare with, you know, similar armies in pre modern times and their marching capabilities? Talk about 10 miles a day. This is double that, right? 20, 20, 21. 24 miles a day.
- [55:24]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. So it's a small company.
- [55:27]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, 200 men.
- [55:28]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
200 men. Now, of course we should note it's, it's 200 fighting men. So. Yes, you know, you can safely assume that there, there are more people there. This is probably a force of three to 400 people moving across the countryside. They're infantry, so it's not. Yeah, if this, if this were knights, then, you know, multiply by five. But. Right, but these are, these are, these are infantrymen, so you don't need people managing a ton of horses. But you know, it's safe to. Safe to bet that like, at least, you know, 25 to 50% of this force is going to be non combatants. So three, 400 men probably moving around. But that is still, as armies go, quite small, and the smaller you get, the faster you can move. Camp breakdown and set up is quicker. With smaller force, you also physically take up less roadway. I think folks don't think about that. But, you know, if you imagine an army that is, you know, 20,000 men.
- [56:23]
Alan Sisto
So let's say Elrond's army coming from Lindon that we talked about at the
- [56:26]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
fourth, that army might occupy 3, 4, 5 miles of roadway from end to end, which means in the morning after you've broken up the camp, especially once you've added carts and wagons, they take up ton of space in the morning. That means that the last guys leaving camp have to sit there for several hours watching 5 miles of army march past them before they can get on the road and go. And at the end of the day, the front of the army gets to the camp, they're probably setting up the camp, but they need several miles of army to come all the way back in. And so that eats up time. So a smaller force can move much more quickly. You know, 20 miles a day for infantry is brisk. But again, these are, these are heroic sort of figures. 20 to 25 miles a day is, Is what got Stonewall Jackson's army termed foot cavalry. But it was possible.
- [57:20]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. Yeah.
- [57:21]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Now the other advantage that these guys have is they're moving basically straight up the Andrew.
- [57:26]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [57:27]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
While the infantry might be marching on foot next to the river, their supplies could be in rafts. They're moving up river so they can't float down it, which is annoying. But the easy thing to do here is you take your horse early, you mule, you attach a rope to them, you put the other side of the rope on the raft, you put the raft and you. The animal pulls the raft upstream. You know, classic, classic way to do this. If you go to, to certain, now usually unused but certain canal locks in the American Northeast, you'll see they have the walking path for the. There. It would be mule that would pull the rafts if they were going up the locks rather than down the locks for canal systems. That's how you do that. And you know, that makes it easier to move your supplies. You need fewer animals to move your supplies. Your army is smaller, it's quicker. So, I mean, I think this is a heroic pace, but not an impossible one. I think for the full journey I did it out and it's, it's what, 300, 400 leagues, which is 600 to 800 miles.
- [58:22]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. It's ends up being like about 900 miles I think is the total.
- [58:25]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Okay. So, so I did a little short. I can I measure on my physical map, you know, because I, I had them moving at about I think 18 or 19 miles a day. And I was like, yeah, but so like it's a doable pace, it's a brisk pace. These are, this is a small company moving at speed and we are told that Isildur is looking to move fast.
- [58:45]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, he has a very specific timeline that he wants to adhere to. Yeah.
- [58:49]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
That he wants to move. And, and I think it's interesting that like we can see like there are two things pushing him to move, move fast. Right. Both he's like, he really wants to see his family. He's left them in Rivendell. But also like you can tell he is, he is becoming really worried about this ring.
- [59:01]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah, he is.
- [59:03]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right. Like you know, what he did not realize a year prior, he has now begun to realize too late. You know, sort of the tragedy of the moment is that like Izeltor comes to the right conclusion too late. Yep.
- [59:16]
Don Marshall
Yeah. As a kind of follow up to this, what does the time of year come into play with this specifically in the more northern latitudes. So not just cold weather but like also availability of daylight when you get that.
- [59:31]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. Can be a factor. It's really hard to get a sense of exactly where Middle Earth is and like in latitude sometimes and you know, so like calculating daylight hours. You know, the, the good news is that like your marching times don't vary hugely season to season because yeah, you are losing daylight hours but that just means that you're like your, your dawn and twilight hours. That's camp set up and breakdown. Anyway. One does wonder if this contributes to the eventual surprise of this company. Right. That they're going to end up enveloped without quite seeing it coming. And it might be easier to do that especially given that you know, orcs move at night. You know, they have more, more moving time. I'm not sure it would be a, an enormous influence. Evidently it doesn't slow them down at all. Although I suppose it does add to the heroic nature of the march. The big advantage that they, they do have moving up the river is that they can bring their supplies with them so they don't have to forage as they go. And to be clear here when we say forage I don't mean picking berries off of trees. I mean beating up local farmers and taking their food.
- [60:39]
Alan Sisto
It's a new definition of foraging. Yeah.
- [60:41]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
When armies are described as foraging, they're not, they're not picking berries. They are extracting food from local populations. But he has a big river that leads to his big kingdom, so he can just put a whole bunch of food on a barge and pull it up the river. And he's not bringing very many animals because they're all on foot.
- [61:00]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit. Actually, we've got a question about the horses they use. Yeah.
- [61:04]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
So, you know, since they aren't bringing riding horses, they don't have to worry about it being the wrong season for the grass. Okay, right. And so that's, that's less of a concern.
- [61:17]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [61:18]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Because horses are a logistics problem. Even if you do have grass available usually. But at least if you have grass by the side of the road that they can eat, it reduces your need to bring feed. So generally speaking, so truly, wild horses, like step ponies, can subsist entirely off of grass. That's how horses work in the wild. When horses enter the settled agrarian zone of agricultural societies, agricultural societies almost invariably do the same thing every time, which is that they breed horses much bigger, larger and stronger. This is both to support big riders in armor, but also to do things like pull plows. And those bigger horses have nutritional requirements which cannot be fully satisfied by grass. And so they have to be stall fed. And so on the march, you need to supplement their grass with, with wheat or oats or what have you in order to get them enough nutrition to just sustain their larger bulk.
- [62:15]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, their bulk.
- [62:16]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But this is just not a problem for as old as first because he's not bringing a whole bunch of war horses. Warhorses tend to be huge chargers, industrious are massive, you know, to the degrees bringing pack animals. They're presumably smaller and hardier creatures.
- [62:28]
Alan Sisto
They are actually. Well, yeah, well, they are smaller animals. We'll find out a little bit more about that in a bit. Sildur did talk about wanting to get up there before a certain time of year. I want to say mid October was when he was targeting his arrival in Rivendell. I wonder if it maybe would have related to just to do with the mountain pass. Like if he gets there much later, the mountain pass is impossible to get over. So we've got to get up there before that pass closes. But yeah, that. It doesn't sound like it would have had too Much of an impact on his ability to march. Speaking of the march, let's look at the two choices that he had to make right before he left. Which route do I take? The shorter trip of 900 miles, which is mostly off road, or the 1500 mile trip that would have been on the roads, which of course he would have taken that path had he had. He had horses and he had cavalry. He chooses to take that off road because he had no horses fit for riding. Which is what led Don and I to talk about how the Numenoreans, and therefore the early Gondorians as well, were not exactly known for their cavalry. Yes, they loved horses. They could apparently summon them at need via their thoughts, which is pretty cool. But they didn't use them in war, at least not very much. We do read only by couriers and by bodies of light armed archers, often not of Numenorean race. So there are a few things to unpack here. We talked about the distance that this group, which we had originally thought of as just about the 200 soldiers plus the silder and his sons, but makes sense that there are, are some non combatants involved as well, the distance they could cover each day, given that distance and the fact that they were leaving in early September, was the other route even a possibility for a non mounted force given the time frame and then moving on after that. Speaking of not being mounted, why would the Numenoreans not have been a, an army that uses cavalry? And I think the, the answer is obvious, but I want to hear you talk about that because that should be entertaining. And then finally I was really fascinated by this use of light armed mounted archers, essentially skirmishers, but the fact that they were often auxiliary forces is even more interesting. So I want to talk about all three of those things. The first, the other route, was that even an option for them? What would that have looked like?
- [64:31]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Taking a long time?
- [64:32]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, 600 more miles. Yeah.
- [64:35]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right. And as I understand it, like as I remember earlier in the passage, he sent most of the rest of the army back by that time route.
- [64:41]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah.
- [64:41]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
The year before when speed wasn't an issue. And so you, I think you can tell by his choice, right. That's the safer route. And presumably the rest of his army is mostly on foot too, so you could take a foot force up that route. It's the safer route. It evidently would have been the wiser route. But he has reason to want to move fast.
- [64:59]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [65:00]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And I think that's the case. And, and here I, I have to admit, right, like the Text supplies that he wants to see his family. But I, like you, really kind of feel he is concerned. He is concerned. And you, you wonder what the shape of that concern is. We're not told. But, like, on some level, is he, like, if we take the wrong route, am I the long route? Am I even going to be in my right mind when we get there? Right. Because, I mean, we know that Frodo and Sam both feel and like, are aware of, of the Ring taking hold of them. Like, there is a point like Frodo's. We're like, I can't give this up.
- [65:37]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [65:38]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
He's still trying to destroy it, but he's aware that, like, it's in there and he can't. Even though he. It hasn't yet fully taken over, he feels it. You wonder if Isildura is in the same place where he's like, oh, yeah. Oh, we need to get there now while I can still, I think, take this thing off and hand it to somebody. Because, you know, if we take a route, it's much longer. We have to winter somewhere. So we have to wait a few months and then keep moving again. And, you know, I end up getting there not October this year, but October next year.
- [66:09]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [66:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Am I going to be. To be able to do what I need to do when I get there? And so you wonder if that's the reason why he makes the sort of disastrous decision to take the quick route. The quick and risky route.
- [66:22]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. I mean, the text suggests, oh, you know, it's not that risky anymore because Sauron's been defeated, but obviously they find
- [66:27]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
out whoopsie daisies the hard way.
- [66:28]
Alan Sisto
Exactly.
- [66:29]
Don Marshall
It was not so.
- [66:31]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, but it was not so. So, yeah. Talk to us a little bit about why Numenoreans are just not a cavalry force.
- [66:38]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. So, I mean, I think part of this almost certainly feels like Tolkien thinking with sort of historical exemplars. The Numenoreans are an island nation people. He may be thinking a little bit with the English who famously by the hundred years. Or a primarily infantry force. They were not always so. Or his own Anglo Saxons, also primarily an infantry force. But the Numenoreans are also like vaguely Roman. Right. I mean, for this sort of early medieval setting, they are the great empire of before that has collapsed and it's one weird eastern chunk is still going for some reason.
- [67:13]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [67:14]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Like they're the kind of the Romans of the setting. And this isn't like a straight one to one, but one sometimes feels a bit of Roman ness. Like the men in their stone houses kind of stuff going on here. And of course, the Romans were famously not great horsemen here. I will. I will push back a little bit. And note that the Romans were generally not short of cavalry. It's just that their cavalry sucked. Roman armies bring a fair bit of cavalry. It's just not very good. The Romans themselves, of course, figure that out. And so over time, they do see. Seek allied or subject peoples that, because of their cultural setup, is more oriented towards this kind of warfare, produce better cavalry. So in the middle and late Roman Republic, after the Romans defeat Carthage, they pull the kingdom of Numidia, this North African Berber kingdom under their control. The Numidians make great javelin cavalry. They're some of the. They're the best horsemen in the Western Mediterranean, some of the best in the whole Mediterranean. And we see Numidian cavalry detachments just show up regularly with Roman armies in the imperial period. We see as the Romans get into the near east and they're encountering, like Persian horse archers. They're like, yeah, this is great. And so they look to recruit those guys as they connect with the step. They're encountering steppe peoples or nomadic horse archers. They recruit those guys. And so we get things like a unit of Sarmatian horse archers deployed, deployed in northern England.
- [68:43]
Alan Sisto
Wow, that's long way.
- [68:45]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. These guys are coming from the Black Sea.
- [68:47]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [68:48]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And. And you see these sort of units. And so I think this is maybe what Tolkien is thinking of. And I wonder if his sort of reference is like, they don't have any riding horses. They don't have any internal cavalry. Quite famously, Julius Caesar has no Roman cavalry in his army in Gaul. He relies entirely upon Gallic auxiliaries for that. And it create. There's. There's this episode where that comes up because he is. He's going to a parlay with a Gallic chieftain. And as part of the agreement, they both agree they'll bring us a specific number of mounted bodyguards to the meeting. I think it's 100. And Caesar is like, well, I don't want to bring my Gallic auxiliaries because I can't trust them. So he takes 100 of their horses and sticks a hundred of his infantrymen on them and brings those guys and. And the legion in question, it's Caesar's favorite legion, his 10th legion turns it into a running joke where they start calling themselves Legio 10 Equestris Legio 10, the Horsemen. And. And they make a joke of it that the upper class in Rome were called the Equites the horsemen because they were men wealthy enough to buy their own horses to serve in war. And so the legion's joke was that Caesar had raised them all to this status. He had made horsemen of them. And so I wonder that being quite famous, if, if that's kind of in Tolkien's head is like Julius Caesar didn't have any cavalry either. Yeah, not that he could necessarily trust. And so this sort of, this sort of thing. And so like that kind of using auxiliary cavalry is, is not uncommon. I will note that also you see in China, the core territory of China over multiple dynasties produces great infantry, but not a lot of cavalry produce good cavalry. You need good horse lands, which means you need grazing. In China, the issue is its high density population. They are growing wheat and rice and horse can eat rice. And so internally, China struggles to produce good cavalry. But China is extremely wealthy. So it does the obvious thing. It buys. You go out onto the step and you're like, hey, step warrior, do you want some cool iron weapons and awesome silk clothes and some money?
- [70:53]
Alan Sisto
Sure, why not?
- [70:54]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Join the Han army and you're good to go. And so one wonders if the Numenoreans, right, their auxiliary cavalry are doing the same thing. They're like, we're not very good at this, but you guys are, you know, step people vaguely associated with, but not identical to the Wayne Riders. Do you want to be in our army? We'll give you a bunch of money. You know, legally distinct Wayne writers and, and you know, this is a sort of common thing. And the Romans are doing the same thing on their frontier too. Yeah, classic thing that the, that these states do. The other reason I imagine that Tolkien may be thinking like the Numenoreans are not a cavalry oriented people is certainly the impression we get of Numenor. It's an island, it's not very big. It's probably quite densely peopled. They probably don't have a lot of horse grazing land there either.
- [71:41]
Alan Sisto
You know, we talked about the difficulty of transporting large numbers of troops. I would imagine transporting large numbers of cavalry is even more complicated. I mean, that was one of my big gripes with Rings of Power was like, how did you show up with this cavalry force? Where did you put all of these on these ships? I mean, I know it's real, that's been done in history, but it's not an easy thing, right?
- [72:04]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
No, no. And, and critically so by, by way of comparison, like when the Greeks or the Romans are moving an army around, your ship can carry a couple hundred infantrymen or it can carry 30 horses and it cannot carry both. Yeah, like that's the exchange rate you're looking at.
- [72:21]
Alan Sisto
Wow. Like seven to one.
- [72:23]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, yeah. So moving. Yeah. And like, this is the thing we get noted whenever these invasion fleets, whether it's the Athenians invading Sicily or the Romans invading North Africa, like our sources will call out the horse transports because you had to specially refit your ships for horses.
- [72:40]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [72:41]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
You could throw your infantry on any damn warship and they would get where they were going. But you needed specialized horse transports to move your horses.
- [72:49]
Alan Sisto
And.
- [72:50]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And yeah, depending on the size of your ship, 10, 20, 30 horses on a ship and that's it, you're out of space. And unlike soldiers, the horses can't row, they can't man the riggings. They're not going to do anything for you. They're just there. They need a ton of food. They don't like being there.
- [73:04]
Don Marshall
Sailors ever.
- [73:05]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
You need stalls for them.
- [73:08]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [73:08]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Worst sailors ever. And so moving cavalry is just an enormous pain in the butt. And so the solution almost invariably is to seek local supply wherever you're going. Famously, what the Spanish end up doing in the New World is they bring over relatively small numbers of horses, whatever they can fit, and then they breed them in the Americas. And this of course gives us the American mustang, which is the quote unquote, wild, technically feral American horse, which is a descendant, you can look biologically of Spanish workhorses. You know, like cheap Spanish, like big, bulky, strong, cheap Spanish horses. They're all. Yeah. And that becomes the sort of the horse stock from which all of the other North American horses for the most part are drawn. And that there's a whole sort of second side on, like the logistics of horses on the American Great Plains where you have that. But like, yeah, you might want to, like, you want to develop local supply rather than trying to ship your horses continuously. And so one assumes Numenorean armies also arrive primarily as infantry forces. Yeah. There is a reason that there is no great history of cavalry based ship porno dummies.
- [74:24]
Alan Sisto
That does seem like an odd mix.
- [74:26]
Don Marshall
Sticking with the theme of horses here, you had touched on this a little bit earlier about how the horses were not riding horses. They did have horses, just not the riding ones. They were pack animals. You had mentioned they would pull the barge. How much food would that pack animal be able to carry? And realistically, like, because of the number of men that they had and the speed that they were going, like, what are the logistics of all of this?
- [74:56]
Alan Sisto
10 horses does feel Like a small amount. Even if they are pulling barges.
- [75:00]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
They are pulling barges. Yeah. I mean, poor skin pull a pretty big barge. So when I do logistics studies for ancient armies, I can usually treat a large navigable river as a functionally infinite supply of logistics acts. Access.
- [75:16]
Alan Sisto
Oh, wow.
- [75:17]
Don Marshall
Interesting.
- [75:17]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Okay, so the usual rule of thumb, of course, I'm gonna have to do this from memory, so I'm gonna get the numbers slightly wrong, but that you can. The cost of moving bulk goods is per unit distance by road, 20 by river, 5 by C1.
- [75:39]
Alan Sisto
Ooh.
- [75:39]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Okay, so just in a new. Enormous difference. So, you know, your pack mule, I mean, pack mule, carry a few hundred pounds of. Of food. Put him on a cart and you can maybe get a thousand, 2,000 pounds of food, stick on a barge and need 20 tons.
- [75:56]
Alan Sisto
Whoa. Oh, my goodness. Okay, right.
- [75:58]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Like you can, because he's not supporting the weight, right. He's moving it across a low friction surface. All he needs to do is beat the current. And so, you know, you can, yeah, river barges, you can load them right up. And so the logistics throughput of the, Of. Of the sort of riverine supply is really large. There is a point late in the reign of, of the first Roman emperor Augustus, where he has a major revolt happening in Illyrian, Pannonia, what today would be the northern Balkans. The solution that his general on the scene comes up with, and his general on the scene is Tiberius, who will be the second emperor of Rome, comes up to is that he moves. He's on the Danube. He moves both the armies, some of the armies that were up in Germany south and some of the armies that were over by the Black Sea, he moves them west and he concentrates just over 100,000 men in the Saba River Valley off of. Off of the Danube. And like during the campaigning season, he just rolls around foraging from all of the communities and eating up all the food until there is basically nothing. And then winter comes on. He just moves to his fortified bases on the river and supplies himself by the river. And so the rebels up in the hills just run out of food. Yeah, he just spends two years eating the province into nothing with his giant army. And then he's functionally immune to supply concerns because he has these supply bases on the Danube and the Sava that so long as he can keep the rivers open and with his huge army, it's easy for him to keep the rivers open and he can just run them out of supplies. So riverine supply is amazing if you can get it. The problem traditionally for most armies is that the rivers don't usually go where
- [77:45]
Alan Sisto
you want them to go.
- [77:45]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But Isildur here has a great advantage.
- [77:47]
Alan Sisto
Pretty much.
- [77:48]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
The Anduin goes exactly where he wants to go.
- [77:50]
Alan Sisto
It really does. I mean, straight up from Osgiliath right up the Anduin. I mean, he's got to navigate the Falls of Rauros, he's got to navigate Sarn Gabir. I mean, he's not going to be doing the barges through Sarn Gabbier over the falls because he's going up.
- [78:02]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But, but that's just a day spent portage. Yeah, you just, you just lift that stuff up and reload it on the other side.
- [78:08]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah.
- [78:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And that's happening generally in friendly territory. So you probably can get the locals to help you out with that. You may actually be linking up with a supply magazine that's already there. You may be loading the barges there for the first time, who knows? But yeah, the river really is going to clean up your supply access for this, John, pretty easily. And with a 200 person force, as opposed to, you know, a 2,000 or 20,000 person force, you know, you can get away with a lot, which is
- [78:34]
Alan Sisto
why only 10 horses might be necessary. I mean, and by the time they leave the river, really small number. That does seem like a small number. Yeah. You know, and of course, Tolkien leaves those details out, right. He doesn't talk to us about transporting the goods on the river. So for those of us who aren't necessarily knowledgeable about that, we don't, we're like, wait a minute, how can 10 horses carry enough food for even the 200 men for a 40 day journey? Like, that's an insane amount of food.
- [78:58]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, it's, it's a lot.
- [78:59]
Alan Sisto
I mean, I think we talked about it in the episode. You know, we were doing the calculations based on like how much Roman infantry, how much food they would carry. I think it was like two to three pounds per day per soldier. And I was doing the math and was like, wait a minute, you're going to have to, you're going to have to put, you know, tons of food on these horses for them to not need to forage. But who. You got barges and a river. Boom.
- [79:22]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. You got barges. You get barges in a river. No, and it's a huge difference. If you wanted to try to just wagon logistics, this thing. Yeah. To get 30 days tether, you'd need a wagon for about every six men.
- [79:34]
Alan Sisto
Oh my goodness. So you somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 wagons, which you're not going to pull with 10 horses.
- [79:41]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
10 horses. And if you want. If you want to double that again, to actually get all the way to Rivendell with your wagons. And I mean, good luck getting them over the mountains, but.
- [79:48]
Alan Sisto
Well, right.
- [79:49]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Probably your plan at that point is to abandon the wagons, but, yeah, you probably need a wagon. Probably a wagon per man. Unworkable.
- [79:59]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, totally unworkable. Wow.
- [80:01]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But riverine. Riverine logistics, man.
- [80:04]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [80:04]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Two guys. 200 guys to 2,000 guys. 20,000 guys. Whatever. It's a river. Until you're breaking the hundreds of thousands. Riverine logistics, basically unlimited, that is, so long as you have the riverboats and the river's navigable.
- [80:17]
Alan Sisto
Yeah. Which, other than those places like Serge and the falls, it absolutely would have been. And those are, like you said, short enough to do portage. All right, we've got some more questions after the break. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing, so you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing. You can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
- [81:03]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
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Don Marshall
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Alan Sisto
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
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Don Marshall
Catch the Savannah Bananas and other fan
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Alan Sisto
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Dr. Brett Devereaux
Let's go.
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Don Marshall
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Alan Sisto
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Don Marshall
Terms apply. We told you about the amazing PPP community after our earlier break. If you are a part of that community and you want to enjoy something even more special, come join the fellowship of the podcast on Patreon. You can get to be in the best discord community around. One that includes host hangouts and even live episode recordings.
- [82:25]
Alan Sisto
And of course, it's your support there that enables me to work full time doing all of the shows. The ppp, Today's Tolkien Times, Rings of Power Wrap up and my streaming show the PPP plays when you join. You also get episode postscripts ad free episodes, free merch and more.
- [82:39]
Don Marshall
And you can also join our Questions after Nightfall episodes or even appear as a guest in the north wing. Go to patreon.com prancingponypod to show your support and join the Fellowship of the Podcast.
- [82:51]
Alan Sisto
And don't forget to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And please recommend us to your friends. And you can do that directly on Spotify now. Just share the show with your friends there. All right, we're going to dive right back in Cool Military Formations Part 1 When Isildur and his men were attacked by orcs coming down the slope, Isildur has his men form what's called a thongile, described in the text as a shield wall of two serried ranks that could be bent back at either end if outflanked until it needed became a closed ring. Now a shield wall is something that even a casual movie or TV watcher is going to be familiar with. But how does it work in this context?
- [83:29]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, so a chill wallet two ranks deep is pretty thin. But but obviously he's quite badly outnumbered, so that may explain the desire to run thin. And it's also worth noting that that formation depth in these kinds of formations is not usually about like it is not a shoving match. You don't need the depths to like resist. Being pushed is mostly about morale and cohesion. So a very elite force of very dedicated soldiers who can't flee anywhere anyway, he might be willing to run the line pretty thin. So yeah, so a shield wall. There is a fair bit of scholarly argument over exactly what we should understand by shield walls. There's certainly they show up in, you know, beginning in Old English literature this is a phrase that appears it appears in Beowulf. A shield whale. I'm gonna utterly blow my old English Sorry guys. I do Latin and Greek, but a sort of thing but quite quite a lot of cultures stumbled upon the idea that if you've got a whole bunch of guys that are using really big shields and you put them all basically next to each other, you can create a really strong formation that way. And this is evidently what's taking place. But I would encourage people when they're thinking about a shield wall, Hollywood often gets this quite wrong in that it both places the men much too tightly. Now we're told here the ranks are serried. Serried here means close order. That does not necessarily mean shoulder to shoulder, as is often assumed. Part of the shoulder to shoulder assumption here is from gunpowder warfare, where the concern was in a musket formation, you wanted as much firepower per unit of width as possible, and so you really did pack the guy shoulder to shoulder. But if you're fighting with spears and swords, you need enough space to move your body, move your hands, and so on and so forth. And so the. The normal spacing for a kind of a shield wall, you probably want to think somewhere between 70 to maybe 90 centimeters per person in terms of total. Total width, maybe even a little bit more than that. The key for the shield wall is not necessarily that your shields are all touching, although they may be, but that because you have a big shield that covers your body and there's a guy to your right and a guy to your left, nobody can go around you.
- [85:51]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [85:51]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And so the protection of your flanks is not necessarily immediate and physical, although, again, it can be. But as much that the space around you is occupied in the sense that an enemy who tries to move through the interval between you and your mate to your right is going to get stabbed.
- [86:08]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, yeah.
- [86:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And so that's what protects your flanks. And then your big dumb shield is protecting your front. And so that's kind of what you want to think. The other thing that Hollywood loves to do with shield walls is stack them vertically.
- [86:18]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [86:18]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Like have the second rank, like, put their shields over.
- [86:20]
Don Marshall
No chance.
- [86:21]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
That is not a fighting formation. The Romans do something sort of kind of like that with the testudo, where they make like a little box of shields. That is a siege warfare formation. That is a thing you do when someone's going to be shooting down at you from, like a wall. It's not a thing you do in an open battle, whatever gladiator told you, at least not an open battle that's going well, if you're forming testudo, it's because somebody is plinking at you and you have no hope of getting into contact with them. And also you're at carai and you're all screwed up.
- [86:53]
Don Marshall
Okay.
- [86:54]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But so what you should understand here, right, is the front rank, these guys have their shields maybe close to touching, maybe just barely touching, maybe slightly overlapped, but probably not. Not shoulder to shoulder. There's some space in that rank and then there's probably a couple feet, and then the next rank is formed up the same way so that if somebody falls in front of them, the next guy steps up and you can see how you could bend the flanks back to make this kind of a crescent, bending it all the way back to make a circle, would be tricky. Tactically tricky, but not insane. Tolkien may be thinking, of course, of, you know, bayonet and musket armies forming square under battlefield conditions. Or he may be thinking of, in Scotland and parts of northern England, the schiltrom, which is a circular formation of. Of pikes and spears and shields, all facing outward. And a similar sort of. You can't flank me because I don't have a flank kind of. Kind of formation. Always the danger of those kinds of I don't have a flank formations is that they tend to get packed in pretty tight. And if your opponent can plink at you with something, you could be in trouble, whether that's with longbows, which is what the English would sometimes use to break up the schiltrom. Although it didn't always work great, the Scots do occasionally win. Or in the early modern period, the correct response to enemy infantry forming square was to. To blow the heck out of them with cannon.
- [88:21]
Alan Sisto
Cannon, yeah.
- [88:22]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, because you're just going to fling solid iron balls, you know, moving at half the speed of sound into the middle of that mass, and they just bowling pin the guys.
- [88:31]
Alan Sisto
Exactly. Because it's so densely packed, you're going to get multiple guys with every shot.
- [88:34]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
With every shot.
- [88:35]
Don Marshall
Okay, so then, cool. Military formations, part two. We also read what Isildur would have done had the conditions been better, either flat land or orcs having to ascend. In that case, he would have had his men form a deer knife and taken the offensive to cleave away through them and scatter them in disarray. The word means man, spearhead. So what makes this effective? And why couldn't he have done this under the present circumstances?
- [89:04]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, so, I mean, I read that as a wedge formation, and I have to admit, I mean, this is one of the things that I read it. I sort of raised my eyebrow a bit because a wedge is a really odd thing to do with infantry. Yeah, you do encounter wedge formations with cavalry. Macedonian and Thessalian cavalry seem to fight with wedges, at least some of the time, although not all of the time. But a wedge is a really odd thing to do, to do with infantry. The idea of an attack in a wedge, right, is that you're sort of. It's a concentration of force. It's hard to see how you do that with an infantry attack. But I think what we're to understand, right, is that he would have preferred to assume an offensive formation and attack, and you can See kind of why he might have preferred that. Given the differences in morale and cohesion between the two forces. He's badly outnumbered.
- [89:55]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [89:56]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
But his opponents don't have a lot of staying power. Right. Because when they engage their initial, they attack, they take some losses and they scatter. And they scatter so badly that he thinks he might have dispersed them and might be able to move again. So they scatter quite badly. And so he may be thinking, you know, ideally, if I was up on the hill in better terrain, I could deliver one really solid offensive punch, scatter these guys and then be on my way. But I can't because the terrain is terrible. I'm at the bottom, I'm bottom of the hill. This is not ideal. And so I have to endure their attacks. And that becomes a problem because they can attack, cohesion breaks down, they back up, they reform, they attack again, they can keep coming at you, which offsets your advantage in offensive punch and cohesion and allows them to wear you down, which is what eventually happens.
- [90:51]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, especially with that 10 to 1 numerical odds, or at least. Yeah, it certainly does. Now, you had to know this next question was coming. If you read the chapter, Isildur didn't have a lot of archers with him, unfortunately, but the orcs knew there were a few, and they are said to have kept at a distance, out of the range of the dreaded steel bows of Numenor. Now, the footnote there points us to more detail in a description of the island of Numenor. And this is where it gets interesting. In later days in the wars upon Middle Earth, it was the bows of the Numenoreans that were most greatly feared. The men of the sea, it was said, send before them a great cloud as a rain turned to serpents, or a black hail tipped with steel. And in those days, the great cohorts of the King's archers used bows made of hollow steel with black feathered arrows, a full l long from point to notch. So a 45 inch long arrow, we're talking almost 4 foot long arrow fired by a bow of hollow steel. Is this one of those rare times when Tolkien's imagination has gone a little bit too far, or is this within the range of physical possibility? Talk to us about bows, arrows, draw weight, all that good stuff.
- [92:01]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, he's let his. He's let his imagination get away with him again. This is. This is one of those elements that I looked at. I'm like, this is in the heroic mold. Yeah, clearly. I think what he seems to be thinking with are English Yeoman longbowmen of the Hundred Years War. And especially like that language of a rain of arrows or a hail of arrows is exactly how our sources from that period talk about, about the experience of being on the business end of large bodies of English longbowmen. That it was a rain or a hail just continuously coming in. That said, you know, as you said, an l is about 45 inches. That's, that's a lot for it for an arrow. Longbow arrows top out around 36 inches for really big guys. But of course the Numenoreans are really, really big guys. I know some, some big Manchu bows get out to two draws of 40, 41 inches. But that's the largest I know of. So those are just, those are kind of absurdly big. But then we're told that the Numenoreans are absurdly big guys. They're physically larger and heroically built.
- [93:06]
Alan Sisto
Their average is 6 foot 4. I mean that's huge.
- [93:10]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
So he's, he's given them jumbos because of course the length of your arrow is determined by the length of your jaw is determined by the length of your arms. And so if these guys are just physically huge, they have physically huge arrows. Bows of, of steel. No, at least not, not being pulled by people. Bow draw weights, if people know get, get pretty high, you're sort of war bow. So hunting bow draw weights, if people hung with bows often tend to be in the 50 to 60 pound pole range. You're like, if you, if you bought like a sporting bow, not for hunting for like target shooting. Those are often 30 or 40 pound poles. Warbows start at 80 and go up.
- [93:50]
Alan Sisto
Wow, wow, that's a lot.
- [93:52]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Because somebody's trying to kill you, you want as much power as you can get. And also these are societies that haven't yet invented the compound bow with all the cams and pulleys to make things right. Like a modern compound bowl with a bow with a 60 pound pole can actually put out a lot more energy than a medieval bow can. But, but yeah. So the, the amount of, of strength you need pulling it back, you need to put 80 pounds of force to get it back. And that's the bottom end for most at least Afro Eurasian warbows. My understanding is that pre contact war bows in the new world are somewhat lighter. Longbows go up from that 100, 120 and the sort of the upper end in 130, 140, 150. Step bows are similarly high. Now step bows are smaller, but they are composite. They Use multiple materials glued together to enable them to have pack more power into a smaller package so that you can fire them from horseback. But you can reach 150, 160 pound pull on a bow without using metal. Where we do get metal bows used is that there are steel crossbows where now the poundage here can be like eye popping 400, 500 pound pole. But you don't necessarily get the wildly more power that's implied by that because the power of a bow is determined by two things, the weight of the pull and the power stroke. That is the distance across which the arrow is being accelerated. And for crossbows this is much shorter. So the pullback of crossbows is way, way high, but the power stroke is smaller. They can absolutely punch really hard, but it isn't as hard as you might think. But you do get crossbows with, with metal bows. And then of course you need like a pulley and wind last system to actually crank that sucker back because human beings are not going to produce, you know, £400.
- [95:45]
Alan Sisto
No.
- [95:45]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And obviously you would not be using a 45 inch long anything on a crossbow. And so. And these are clearly like the implication here is these are recurve bows, not crossbows.
- [95:55]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [95:56]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
So I think the, I think the hollow steel bows is a kind of a, a sort of a neat embellishment of the sword that Tolkien particularly likes to do for the Numenoreans. I mean, depending on where and what unfinished material you read. They also occasionally have like flying ships. And so. Right. Like that, like Tolkien seems to have never fully decided whether the Numenoreans were ancient in her, heroic in character, or almost modern and industrial or kind of steampunky. And one wonders if he had to publish which way he would have gone. Because sometimes it seems like the Numenoreans have advanced technology and sometimes it seems like they are more ancient and heroic and sometimes they're a mix. This, this seems to me to, to strike into that space. What I do find interesting is this sort of like the Numenoreans are ever so briefly famous for their archers, which is just kind of an interesting Tolkien kind of varying the way he thinks about them because sometimes the Numenoreans feel like Romans and certainly. Right. Like when we get to Gondor in the Lord of the Rings, we're told their archers are kind of like. Of such. They have. Right. Their archers are not impressive. They're an infantry force, a contact infantry force. Which feels very romantic. But the Numenoreans have great archers, which feels more English, ironically It could also feel more Byzantine if you wanted to go in a different direction, but he's sort of varying his thing. Then again, the Numenoreans are around for a really long time, the Romans are around for a really long time. And exactly where the core strength of the Roman army is varies during the Republic and the early Empire. The Romans are very much an infantry centric force and sort of by the late Empire, cavalry is more important. When you push well into the Byzantine period, you have Byzantine cavalry that are fighting like armored Turkish horse archers. You know, they've adopted those forms and Byzantine armies use a lot more archers. They have a more quote unquote Eastern style of fighting because they're adapting to the situations they're in. And like those are all technically Romans. Yeah, and the Numenoreans are around for just as long, so maybe they have shifted the style of fighting. But, but this comment about the Numenorean bows really does feel like an evocation of English archers. And certainly because bow shot caps out around 200, maybe 300 yards, you can absolutely hang outside of bow shot and be relatively, relatively safe. You know, you're a longbow chucking a flight arrow. So an arrow designed for range, not for lethality, can probably put it out about 200 yards, plus or minus, or 300 yards rather. Plus or minus. If you actually want to hurt somebody, you're really looking at about 200 yards for, for maximum reach. These, you know, sort of heroic bows may do a little better, but you know, at 250 yards you're not actually all that far away from your opponent and you're still out of reach for bows. And so this is presumably what they're doing, that they hang out of bow shot while they assemble and get ready for that final kind of encircling crush.
- [98:58]
Don Marshall
Flipping the script from bows to the opposite. I have a question that Alan perked my interest on something last week. Last week, when Isildur flees and gets to the banks of the Anduin, he takes off his weapons and his armor, except for a short stabbing sword with a broad blade, pointed and two edged from a foot to one and a half feet long. My question is, was Alan right last week in saying that it sounded similar to a Roman gladius?
- [99:28]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
It sounds similar to how someone in roughly 1950 is going to imagine Roman Glad. That makes sense because it's, it's a, it's a touch too short. And one of the things that sort of the way that the kind of reception of the gladius has varied over time is that your kind of sort of first wave of like Victorian era historians and kind of early 1900s historians. Because the gladius particularly first the gladii that they have that they find first are Imperial era gladii, which are the shortest of the bunch.
- [100:00]
Alan Sisto
Okay.
- [100:01]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
The swords of the Republic and of the late empire are longer. And then because it feels so much shorter than the sabers and rapiers that they're used to, often its shortness is somewhat overstated. And so, you know, yeah, you know, you know, foot and a half is what, 18 inches? It's not itty bitty, but, but that's on the, on the short end, I would think. I'm trying to do conversions in my head because I do blade lengths in centimeters. The, the description. Right. The broad blade, sharp point, two edged, like. Yes. Gladius.
- [100:34]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [100:35]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
That's what's, that's what's being, that's what's being described. Like you can, you can see the sort of Meinz or Pompeii type in your head. And that's almost certainly what he's thinking with. It's not as like Greek swords would be. It's not described as leaf shaped. We get later swords of, of western east that are leaf shaped like a Greek sifos would have been. That's the Greek sort of counterpart to the gladius. But it's also not long and parallel bladed like a len sword would have been or an early medieval sword would have been. For those playing along at home, Le10 is the fancy archaeological type name for the swords that would have been wielded by Celts and GS.
- [101:09]
Alan Sisto
Oh, okay.
- [101:10]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
So I said leten swords think like the guys fighting against Julius Caesar in the aforementioned Julius Caesar examples. Those are, we call them Latin. We tend to name archaeological type groupings after the first place we find them and the first place we found this sort of collection of different objects that are all similar that we then find all over the place was at Le 10, which is a lake in Switzerland. And so we call them the 10. And then you, you will. Chronologically, we'll talk about the 10 1. The 102 L10 3 is like chronological periods. So if I, if I say Latin here, Gauls.
- [101:46]
Alan Sisto
Okay. And how long would those have been? Just as a comparison with the sword that Isildur had kept, which if it's a foot and a half long, you're looking at what, maybe 50 centimeters?
- [101:55]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. And so your, your late imperial gladius is probably 60 centimeters. They could go as short as 50 in terms of, of we're talking here in Blade length. So you can always add about 14 to 15 centimeters for the hilt. For a one handed sword, those tend to be very consistent in size. Your republican gladius closer to 6570. Your latent sword 80.
- [102:20]
Alan Sisto
Okay. That's still wielded as a, as a one handed sword. It's not, we're not talking about a. Yeah, yeah.
- [102:24]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And that's about 80 centimeters or so of blade length is about as much as you're going to get out of a one handed sword. Even into the Middle Ages. Your nightly arming sword, your one handed sword is about that size. That's sort of, you've hit the, you've hit the limits of what an arm can do.
- [102:39]
Alan Sisto
That makes sense. I mean. Yeah, leverage is the thing.
- [102:43]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah. And if you want to push much longer than that, if you want say a meter long blade, you're going to extend that hilt and allow the guy to get his hands on it. And there are of course famously bastard or hand and a half swords that straddle that difference. And we get into exciting controversies over what exactly the hell is a long sword.
- [103:02]
Alan Sisto
And now I'm thinking of all my D and D sessions where as a paladin, I'm like, all right, how am I going to wield this thing? Sword and board. All right.
- [103:09]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Generally speaking, when we say long sword, we mean a dedicated two hander, as opposed to Dungeons and Dragons, which treats a long sword as a one handed weapon like. No, no, no, I own a long sword. It would be quite hard to wield with one hand.
- [103:22]
Alan Sisto
You'd have to be very, very, very strong. And Yes, I mean the further out that blade gets, the more difficult it is to keep it in position.
- [103:31]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, it's, it's also a balance question.
- [103:34]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [103:35]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
You know, one handed sword, the balance tends to be closer to the hand to allow you to control it really with your wrist. And often, especially for ancient one handers, the hilt is kept quite short so that it, it's meant to tightly sandwich your hand so that the guard is right up against the top of your hand and the pommel is right up against the bottom to create more contact surface.
- [103:56]
Alan Sisto
Yeah.
- [103:57]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
So that you have a little more purchase on it. Whereas with a two hander, you actually want to extend that hilt way out to give you a whole lot of leverage. And your, your left hand is way at the bottom of that. You don't hold it like a tennis racket with your hands together. Your left hand is way at the bottom to separate your hands as much as possible to get all that leverage and you're pivoting around your dominant hand, using your other hand to turn. And you know, of course folks can. There are whole YouTube channels on swords and wielding and stuff that are just like, go talk to them.
- [104:27]
Alan Sisto
Go down that rabbit hole. That's a lot of fun. Finally, I hope that it's only the orcs that could fight like this, but we read that they were flinging themselves against the Dunedain with reckless ferocity. The greater orcs leaped up two at a time and dead or alive with their weight bore down Adunedine so that other strong claws could drag him out and slay him. The text says that the orcs might pay 5 to 1 in this exchange, but it was too cheap. Any real world historical examples of forces that were willing to pay a 5 to 1 casualty rate but would still manage to win?
- [105:00]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
I mean, so Tolkien is, I think pretty clearly here riffing off of Herodotus's account of 30. Oh, it's worth noting that the Greeks don't win at Thermopylae. So I mean, it's a similar sort of thing. Now the, the tricky part here is that I think we generally think here that Herodotus is embellishing Thermopylae quite a lot and is maybe exaggerating Persian losses quite a bit. But we get this sort of implication of like waves and waves crashing on the Greek line and failing to having to, you know, multiple men, having to overwhelm individuals to, to bring them down. Generally in battles where we have better evidence, an attacking force simply isn't going to maintain cohesion while taking five to one losses. Like psychologically, they will fall apart and then be pushed back. That said, this sort of the way to kill these heavily armored men is to mob them down and get them on the ground. That certainly tracks. We see this, for instance, at a battle like Agincourt, where the solution for the English men at arms, particularly to the initial attack by French cavalry, is to pull these guys off of their horses, get them on the ground, and then at points they're being having their skulls caved in through their helmets with the fletching mallets that English archers carry, you know, your little wooden mallet for, for carving out your arrows. And so, you know, for a man that's really in full armor, especially plate armor, that kind of late medieval warfare. And again, Tolkien's playing with his time periods here because by the Lord of the Rings at least no one's, no one's got plate armor. Everybody's Got mail. But if you can get somebody on the ground, the ability to penetrate armor becomes a lot more possible. And so this idea that they're just, right, they're mobbing one guy down and then. And then the next guy and they're just taking accepting losses in the process of doing that. You know, certainly I think the. Accepting the, the casualty ratio is heroic and fantastical, but the idea that like, these guys are so heavily armored that the way to defeat them is. Is you've got to wrestle them to the ground. Yeah. That is how, how fighting against heavily armored opponents can, can work. You know, I think, but I think especially this idea of. Right. And he's made it a 200 man company rather than a 300 man force, though the historian in me needs to note that. Well, everybody talks about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. There were like several thousand other Greeks also. There were being like just off of camera. Right, right.
- [107:22]
Alan Sisto
And being.
- [107:25]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Because it makes a better story. Even when the Spartans hold for their sort of final doomed last stand. They're not the only guys there. But, but it was useful for Herodotus and sort of making. Was basically pro Greek propaganda to pretend they aren't. And so he just kind of lets everybody else fade out in soft focus. I feel like, like this is certainly what's being echoed is this, you know, sort of heavy infantry force being just sort of slow, fully worn away and inflicting absolutely insane disproportionate casualties in the process. But generally speaking, you know, we don't see that if you can inflict 5 to 1 casualties on your opponent, they usually kind of come apart even if they vastly outnumber you. The psychological impact of that is just not gonna, not gonna go.
- [108:09]
Alan Sisto
And I think at that point the only thing we can kind of throw in the mix there is that the ring was literally driving them mad. I mean, it's.
- [108:15]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Yeah.
- [108:15]
Alan Sisto
And that would enable them then to, to maintain that cohesion in the face of 5 to 1 odds. They're not even in control necessarily of themselves at that point.
- [108:24]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Right. This is, this is a fantastical story, but it's also, it's in a, it's in a fantastical narrative. There, there is a magic ring at play. And also the Numenoreans are superhuman.
- [108:35]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, they are.
- [108:36]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
And they're like openly described this way. Like in this passage especially, you get a sense that like these guys are huge and they're just like knocking these orcs right around. Like the orcs can't even really get to grips with them initially because they're physically bigger and so the reach of their swords and spears is longer. Right this earlier in the passage.
- [108:54]
Don Marshall
Dr. Brett Devereaux, thank you so much for your incredible answers today. This has been an eye opening thing for me. I always say I come onto this podcast and say I learned something new about Tolkien and it continues to be true because this is a new angle. I never thought I would look at Tolkien with.
- [109:14]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Well, thanks, thanks for having me. And I guess as the, as the participants in the last moot learned, if you just sit me down, I will start talking and I will not stop.
- [109:23]
Alan Sisto
Yeah, I was prepared for a five hour episode actually. So as always, it has been a real joy to have you on the show again. We enjoy having you here every time. Appreciate your time and we hope you come back again soon.
- [109:35]
Dr. Brett Devereaux
Me too.
- [109:36]
Alan Sisto
Well, folks, that wraps it up for another episode of the Prancing Pony podcast, but join us again next week as Don and I begin our look at the enigmatic Druidyne.
- [109:44]
Don Marshall
That's right, Alan. And I want to thank the members of the team. PPP Editor Jordan Rannells, Barleyman Becca Davis, Social Media Manager Casey Hilsey, Event and Patreon community coordinator Katie McKenna, graphic artist Megan Collins, Video editor Yonatan Leysens and website guru Phil Dean.
- [110:02]
Alan Sisto
And please take a minute to check out the prancingponypodcast.com that's where you'll find show notes, outtakes, Prancing Pony ponderings, and our new merch store where you'll get all sorts of cool PPP merch, including the incredible chapter art that Megan's been doing for us for nearly four seasons.
- [110:16]
Don Marshall
We are all about the books here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, so be sure to visit our library page. We try to make sure that any books that we have mentioned on the show are linked there for you to purchase. We do get a small amount of compensation when you do purchase and for that we do thank you.
- [110:32]
Alan Sisto
Indeed we do. We also want to thank our patrons at the Kir Dan's comment contribution tier. I'll start with Demay in Alaska, Chad in Texas, Joseph in Michigan, Kathy from North Carolina, Brian in the uk, Jerry from Washington, Irwin from the Netherlands, Ben in Minnesota, Anthony in Texas, Zaksu in Illinois, Joshua in Massachusetts, Lucy in Texas, Erica in Texas, James in Massachusetts, Ann in Kentucky and Sean in New Jersey.
- [110:55]
Don Marshall
There's also Mason in California, Maureen from Massachusetts, Olivia in London, Rob Robert in Arizona, Nick in Wisconsin, Lewis in South Carolina, Thomas in Germany, Craig in California, Kevin in Massachusetts, Joe in Maryland, D. Scott in California, Jeffrey in Michigan, Paul in Colorado, David from Connecticut and Teresa from Texas. Thank you all so much for your support.
- [111:19]
Alan Sisto
Indeed, thank you very much.
- [111:21]
Don Marshall
Make sure you don't miss any episodes of the Prancing Pony Podcast. Subscribe now through sponsors Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.
- [111:30]
Alan Sisto
One last thing. As always, don't forget to send your thoughts, comments and most of all, your questions for Brett's inevitable next visit to the Prancing pony podcast to barliman@theprancingponypodcast.com Barleyman
- [111:42]
Don Marshall
does have a lot to get through though, so we will try to get to yours just as soon as we are able.
- [111:47]
Alan Sisto
As always though, this has been far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable listeners. But until next time, we are here
- [111:54]
Don Marshall
with guests constantly learning about new things. I have been Don Marshall, the obscure Lord of the Rings Facts Guy here with the man of the West, Alan Sisto.