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From The Archives:
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Wrong image, showing page 136 not 137!
For anyone who doesn’t know, Tolkien actually addressed the question of what feeds the orcs of Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, when Sam and Frodo make some remarks about it: slaves and tribute.
So Gimlis’s strategy *would* work!
I honestly can’t remember if it’s in the published novels, but know in the lore (quite possibly unpublished in Tolkien’s life) it was also explained there were broad farmlands and a whole giant friggin’ lake hundreds of miles to the East in Mordor. *but of course, if it doesn’t appear in the published story, it technically doesn’t exist within that context*
The lake appears on the map, though Tolkien doesn’t specifically dedicate time to explaining the various supply routes supplying the armies of Mordor. Prof. Devereaux, a military historian over on the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, has two excellent multi-part series on <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/")the siege of Gondor and the battle of Helm’s Deep going over how Tolkien’s experience with war (both personally and professionally) really comes through in the narrative, and just how much thought he put into every detail about things like the movement of armies on foot in pre-industrial economies and the logistics thereof.
Semi-related, something I read not too long ago also pointed out that to Tolkien, orcs weren’t just some brutish barbarian horde as we might tend to think of them, they were industrialists. Intelligence at least on par with the other races of Middle Earth, able to make ingenious (if generally aesthetically crude) contraptions, but who apply that intelligence towards things like polluting factories and weapons of war. Orcish bread might not be good (in pretty much any sense of the term), but it’ll keep a body alive well enough, and they’re smart enough (or at least Sauron is) to organize things like industrial-scale agriculture and supply lines.
Bret Deveraux is great if anyone else needs a recommendation. I found him through someone linking one of those two battles’ posts.
The quote I refer to is in Return of the King chapter 2:
“Neither he nor Frodo knew anything of the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain by the dark sad waters of Lake Nurnen; nor of the great roads that ran away east and south to tributary lands, from which the soldiers of the Tower brought long waggon-trains of goods and booty and fresh slaves.”
It is directly addressed in the part of Book Six (that is, the second half of *Return of the King*) as Frodo and Sam are crossing from the Tower of Cirith Ungol to Mount Doom. There is an inland sea, the Sea of Nurn, marked on the map in eastern Mordor, and there are slave-worked plantations there. They don’t see it, but the narrator mentions it.
What? They ate the slaves?
And the tri-boots. There’s good leather in those.
“But, what do they eat?” Classic Shamus :)
“You can’t have a door on a country” is a pretty great line. Sauron really lucked out with the terrain generation when considering his base placement.
The terrain in the LOTR is the result of an enormous war basically between gods (the end of the First Age). Admittedly Tolkien didn’t have that entirely plotted out at the time, but he likely had some points jotted down.
My point is that Sauron is one of those gods (a Maiar). He might have been able to _generate_ some of that terrain during the war and have it go unnoticed at the time. So it likely wasn’t just luck.
BTW there are real-life versions of “only one way into this place”.
See the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria. They fought an enormous bloody (as in lots and lots of casualties) war there in World War I for control of the pass, since it was about the only passage over the Alps between the two countries.
In WW2, Germany annexed Austria, and then Italy allied with them. So there wasn’t a repeat.
Yes, they could have invaded Mordor from the south or east, but this would involve a long detour and invading or allying with those countries.
And since the West only had the one army, if they marched it all the way around they would leave the entire West open to Sauron, who could then just take over all of the West anyway.