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Old 04-05-2004, 11:41 AM   #19
mark12_30
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RATES OF TRAVEL/HORSEBACK ROUTES FOR MIDDLE-EARTH
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Child of the 7th Age

An interesting resource. This is a list of travel times and suggested routes in Middle-earth for travelers on horseback. It's a resource linked to a fanfiction website. I can't vouch for the accuracy of every statement but it looks as if the creator put some time into this.


Travel times and routes in Middle-earth

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from Mark_1230

A few odds and ends on rates of travel:

USAMHI: armies on the march

On FOOT:
3rd infantry: 25 to 30 miles daily;
polish atrocities: 25 to 30 miles daily
bad day: 12 or 15 miles daily
at 3 miles/hour, six hours is 18 miles; 8 hours is 24 miles

Frodo: averaged 17 miles/ day from Bag End to Rivendell; Referred to by Fonstadt as "forced marches".

This from Littlemanpoet:
From the atlas of the journey from Hobbiton to Mordor. On 9/24 Frodo, Sam, and Pippin traveled 24 miles, stopping for supper and walking with Gildor and the Elves. They made 14 miles through the Midgewater marshes in one day (Oct. 3). On Oct. 18 Glorfindel pushed them through the night, on the East Road, and they made 30 miles on foot before they were allowed a 5 hour rest. Then they put in another 20 miles, on road again, the next day. Okay, that's something for on foot.


on HORSEBACK:
Horses:
This from Littlemanpoet:
Gandalf's and Pippin's ride took 3 days and covered 300 miles. (HRW: Incredible feat: only a tremendous athlete (Mearas!) could do this.)
The march of the Rohirrim by horse from Edoras to Minas Tirith had them going about 60 miles a day. (HRW: Another amazing feat. Use as maximum/ extreme.)
With horses swift as the wind: MEARAS or Akhal Teke:
Probe, an emperor of Rome, is known to have been presented with an Akhal-Teke horse that could cover the distance of 150 kilometers a day for up to ten days in a row. ( 1 km = 0.6211 miles ) 93 miles/ day.
Magyars'... horses, relatively small but very strong, had great speed and stamina. Each soldier had 3 or 4 horses, riding them in turn so as not to overtire any of them. Thus the army was able to cover 25 to 30 miles daily for weeks, whereas the western knight-armies rode a maximum of 12 to 15 miles a day for only a few days.
In the year 937, a Hungarian army of 8-10,000 light cavalrymen rode 5,000 miles in ten months. Unmatched achievement in military history, Ferenc Julier, Magyar Hadvezerek.

REGULAR HORSES:
American West: He marched with a large wagon train to carry forage for our horses, for we were to be gone nearly four months, and could not expect to find adequate pasturage along our route. We arose at 3 A. M., marched at 4.30, and halted for camp on the best water we could find, averaging thirty- three miles daily throughout the march.

By contrast:
Paul Revere ... jumped on a horse and began his "midnight ride" to Lexington. In two hours, he covered 13 miles.

SWIMMING:
Very Long Distance, Ocean: World record holder Diana Nyad swam 102.5 miles in "more than two days of nonstop swimming". Over 48 hours... rounding that to 50 hours; that's very roughly 100 mi / 50 hours = two miles an hour. (She crawled out of the water.)

Long Distance Ocean: English Channel: 23.7 miles, but the tide makes it more like 30 or 40 mi; Record is 7.3 hours; average more like 12 hours. Maximum speed: 23 mi / 7.3 hours = 3.3 mi/hr.

Sprinting: (From Guinness book of world records
... The record time for the 100 meter in a 50 meter pool was 48.21 seconds, which means that the average speed was only 2.07 m/s. The record times for the 50 meter and 100 meter races in 25 meter pools were both longer, respectively. A previous speed record set in 1971 by David Holmes Edgar was 5.05 mph (2.26 m/s), slightly less than the speed of Jager in his record setting race. Mark Spitz had an average of 4.367 mph (1.95 m/s) in setting the 100m record in 1972.

Last edited by piosenniel; 02-20-2011 at 03:20 PM.
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