A military historian on the Siege of Gondor

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

More from Devereaux- this time analyzing (scathingly) the movies' Helm's Deep campaign and battle (short version- if movie-Theoden had "fought many wars," he sure didn't learn a single thing from any of them!)

Cool! It took me a few days to get through it (but still felt like less time than the Helm's Deep sequence in the movie... ). I liked that (part of) the takeaway was "the Witch-King was an idiot because Jackson didn't understand the books; Saruman was an idiot because Tolkien deliberately wrote him that way".

I did not need reminding about "cavalry charge down a 45-degree slope directly into a wall of pikes" being Gandalf's strategy for victory, though.

He also made an interesting comment somewhere early on: that the Battle of the Hornburg is somewhat sparse on details, because Tolkien deliberately avoids his characters As-You-Know-Bob-ing at each other, and there's no conveniently ignorant hobbits around to be explained to. I put that together with my own memory that the battle seems to mostly be told by its lulls - Aragorn talking to Theoden, Legolas and Gimli counting shots, etc - and that it's explicitly a battle where the viewpoint characters don't know everything - doesn't Aragorn spend half of it thinking Eomer's probably dead? - and remembered just how very different Tolkien is from his successors and imitators.

hS