Branch thread: Tolkien's military technology

[blantyr]

There are lots of ways I respect Tolkien and love his works, but I don't see him as a serious historian or familiar with how technology changes. I see humans as expansionist. Give them a frontier, they will expand to fill the open territory. Given technology, it will be improved. The further along the technology is, the faster it will be refined.

Middle Earth isn't necessarily like that. The Elves in the beginning were perfect, and it all goes slowly downhill. I see the ancient legendary armor being the result of a legendary will enhanced craftsmanship that the humans would call 'magic.' As the elves of Lorien made boats, cloaks and even rations at a level unheard of even in Frodo's day, they once were able to make armor far beyond what humans can.

And if a plague wipes out the population of a good sized part of a continent, it doesn't recover in a century or two, the effects are still there indefinitely.

But that isn't why I read and reread Tolkien. Those are unimportant themes not near the core of his work. Suspension of disbelief isn't hard.

[Rumil]

I agree blantyr,

that Tolkien was not interested in many of the nuts-and-bolts aspects, such as population size, economics and trade. But he was certainly aware of the evolution of weapons technology, only too intimately, and wanted little truck with it in his sub-created world. Having seen the 'improvement' of weapons first hand in the trenches; machine guns, poison gas and quick-firing artillery, maybe its not so surprising. Though a few elements do appear in his very early works on the Fall of Gondolin. He was also appalled by war-planes, and maybe they are part of the inspiration for the fell cries of the Nazgul?

As many have said, weapons technology didn't really change much over the vast majority of human history. Spears were much the same at Troy as Isandlwana. Alright there were changes and improvements, iron for bronze etc, but at the end of the day its a big pointy stick. The big change is gunpowder, and we do have a hint in Middle Earth with Gandalf's fireworks and flash-bangs in the Goblin cave and the blasting charges that Saruman sent to the Hornburg.

Orald has a good point that things were generally peaceful in Middle Earth. Though I expect that there were lots of smaller conflicts that just didn't rate a mention in the 'Tale of the Years'. Also the population is just ridiculously low, regardless of plagues etc. Think of how quickly Europe recovered from the black Death, or how swiftly North America was conquered and settled by Europeans. Malthus indeed!

Alfirin, interesting on the atlatl, but I'd guess that Tolkien wanted to keep a consistent 'Western dark-age/early medieval milieu', partly due to his great interest in the Saxons, so no atlatl. On the darts, shafts and arrows, its notable that authors used to use these terms pretty interchangably, certainly darts was often used to translate javelins and pila from the Latin. Also I guess it gives a little welcome linguistic flexibility whe describing a battle. Regardless of this, darts were indeed used in warfare occasionally, the late Romans employed martiobarbuli, basically scaled-up heavy darts. Re-enactors say that they are longer ranged than the javelin, but less accurate, good for drenching an area in projectiles, but not much use to hit individual targets.