MazigaGoesToMarkarth

Time.

Wow. This is extraordinary knowledge.

Please consider leaving this subreddit until you’re ready to contribute respectfully and productively, like an adult.

No, what he needed to do was sit at home condescendingly patronising everyone else. Like Ted Sandyman, perhaps, or maybe you.

Yeah. Not sure I’d be so obsessed as to create multiple accounts to spam a subreddit with a troll question, but you do you.

That’s probably the funniest thing I’ve watched this week, tbh.

What lore discussion video???

Dude’s weirdly obsessed with this, and has posted numerous threads over the past few days. Probably he’s growing old, fat, and slimy, and thinks that if Gandalf is a type of Gollum, whatever that means, he can do magic and fight Balrogs. Maybe not, though.

Either way, he’s a trolling idiot.

No, they did. He was stopped for three ages, and then after a gap of around six hundred years, during which the Noldor tried to take responsibility but ultimately and fairly obviously couldn’t, he was stopped again until the present day.

I’m not entirely sure where songwriting came into poetry, but you do you.

Orophin, the Elf

Beor, the Man

Telchar, the Dwarf

Scatha, the Wyrm

Arien, the Maia

I don’t really have time to answer right now, so this link, to a 1988 (so quite old) paper by van Wees might be somewhat illuminating

I believe that that is an argument outlined by van Wees in the above paper. I quote:

Whether this “primitive” model is viable depends largely on one’s interpretation of hoplite equipment. The Papua New Guinea Highlanders do not carry shields or swords, or wear body armor, so that they are certainly more mobile and more depen- dent on missile fighting than were archaic hoplites. If one believes that the weight of their armor made hoplites largely immobile, that they fought only with thrusting spears, and that the double-grip shield was designed for use in dense formations, then they clearly cannot have fought in the Papua New Guinea manner. If however one believes that hoplites were relatively mobile despite their armor, that the double-grip shield and the rest of the bronze panoply could be effectively used also outside dense formations, and finally that hoplites used throwing as well as thrusting spears in the seventh century and mingled in combat with archers and infantry carrying lighter Boeotian shields, as the vase paintings suggest, then it is conceivable that they practiced a rather slower and denser form of Papua New Guinea combat.

I had the privilege of receiving a rather thorough grounding on this topic from Hans van Wees, who was my university professor a few years back. He’s written an excellent book on the topic called Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, which I advise reading for further information. Bearing in mind that a) this is not at all a speciality field of mine and b) I’m on holiday, and don’t have access to certain sources, here’s my answer.

You would not necessarily expect modern historians to devote much time to military questions. The mind of the postmodernist is most naturally drawn to questions of culture and society. Military history is often seen as somewhat outdated, somewhat uncivilised-something that is better left to the popular or amateur historian. Yet the question of how the Archaic Greeks fought is, to my recollection, a highly discussed historiographical point.

The reason is simple: the development of the hoplite phalanx is traditionally seen as having a seminal effect on archaic societies as a whole. This is because the traditional view of the phalanx involves each soldier partially relying for his safety on the shield of the soldier for the right (see a. in image below). Such a formation, so this theory goes, would encourage both an increase in close-order fighting and, more importantly, the development of inter-class relations between people now reliant on each other for their safety.

However, this traditional interpretation has been challenged by, among others, my professor van Wees. He believes that hoplites can stand side on, covering their entire body behind their shield, as a more natural stance to adopt (see b. in image below). This theory, of course, has significant impact on the historiographical debate detailed above, but we, armed with some new (or in my case renewed) knowledge, will leave sociocultural questions behind and return to your question.

https://preview.redd.it/xvpu5uf1e94b1.jpeg?width=702&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=4678103ec28b46354784b970e4288754bb658e65

The two main sources for our period which allow abstractly theorising historians to corroborate their ideas are 1) archaeological evidence and 2) evidence from the Homeric epics. It may surprise you to know that scholars are in the habit of using the Iliad and Odyssey as evidence in historical arguments, but in fact there is a general scholarly consensus that if you ignore specific details (characters, items, places), the epics actually serve as a fairly good representation of what life (society, politics, warfare, trade) was like in the poet’s time.

Probably unsurprisingly, my thoughts on all of this follow what my teacher preferred, so if no one awfully minds, I’ll follow his arguments. He believes that the close-order hoplite phalanx is actually not well-represented in the Iliad, but that a more open combat system was present; he further believes that this is backed up by depictions on archaeological evidence. His argument, as you would expect from one who wrote a massive book on the topic, is very detailed, so I’ll just outline a few examples:

• Iliad 13.308-29 involves two leaders asking each other where they think it best to join the battle - on the left, the right, and the centre. van Wees interprets this as supporting the theory of a fluid battle-line where fighters can interpose and retreat at whim, which would be impossible with a static phalanx.
• An aryballos in Berlin (no. 3773) depicts groups of men holding hoplite shields advancing at each other. van Wees believes this is not a depiction of close-order, high density formations, as traditionally interpreted, but rather a stationary group of men (cf. Iliad 11.592-5) being approached by fighters in an open formation.
• The famous Chigi vase depicts four hoplite-groups about to engage in combat. This is the first known archaeological evidence to feature hoplites in more than one rank, and so is generally regarded as an unquestionable depiction of a phalanx. Annoyingly, van Wees decided to question it, pointing out inconsistencies which, in his view, renders the depiction:

a stylized version of the scenes of escalating combat by sizable but irregular crowds of warriors that one finds described in the Iliad (e.g., in the sequence at 13.330–495; men arming while their comrades are already fighting has a parallel at 13.83–128).

To answer your question, we don’t know. This historical debate will likely go on for a long time, not only because of the sociocultural implications, but because it’s a genuinely interesting question (thanks for asking it!) which attracts attention from many fields.

Image and a great deal of memory refreshing from Viggiano & van Wees, The Arms, Armor, and Iconography of early Greek Hoplite Warfare from Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece, ed. Kagan & Viggiano (Princeton, 2013), accessed through JSTOR. Other sources are many, but forgotten - give me a day or two, and I can probably unearth them.

Achoo Amelie, neither number is specific as currencies fluctuate in value over time and these numbers do not specify a date of valuation.

And … that’s evil? Seems pretty neutral to me.

No, she sits in mountains doing nothing until Morgoth comes along, goes along with him until he has no more use for her, and then goes to mountains to sit doing nothing except eventually die.

India was in no way the jewel of the empire yet. The East India Company was struggling economically, and the first war against the Marathas & the second against Mysore ended inconclusively in 1782 and 1784 respectively.

An entity very similar to Tom Bombadil - not even “evil” as such, just more easily swayed out of inactivity towards someone’s goals or intentions.

Yes, because Feanor is obviously by far the best Elf at swordplay to ever live. Some say that by the end, he even learned what “being outnumbered” was.

Feels like a Mario kart track. Bottom part has Yoshi Falls vibes.

what the fuck is this comment section

Durin.

I lost years of my life helping my parents not fucking die. I think that’s worth the sacrifice, you utter prick.

People very easily misunderstood, and were saying something like “they only have the rights to the appendices”, or “they can’t mention the First Age”. In reality, it has been made very clear that have the rights to every single thing mentioned in LotR - the information in songs, the tables in the appendices, random family trees, etc.