The Two Towers: stinky siegecraft

Finally got around to seeing the latest installment of The Lord of the Rings last night. I'm not about to review the whole film; the various divergences from the books have been widely discussed, and by and large I concur with the opinions expressed here.

One thing that bothered this pedant were the absurdly shabby defenses of Helm's Deep. Where was the moat or ditch? Dry ditches were a feature of the earliest earthwork defenses, so no excuses there. And water ran right through the fortress, so why not a proper moat? And what about the lack of a drawbridge? Even early fortifications had removable spans so as to deny access to entrance gates. Here there was a nice stone bridge instead. Then there was the single gate blocking the entrance. By the time European castles were made of stone, there were invariably multiple barriers, turning the space in between into a killing zone (arrow loops in the walls, murdering-holes overhead). Then there was the ridiculously small gap between the inner and outer curtain walls, both of which were on a level. Inner walls should overlook the outer walls, in case the latter are taken, and they should not be so close that a scaling ladder can be used to bridge them. And though I'm sure the bare-stone aesthetic would have won out regardless, it's worth noting that fortifications were never all masonry: wood and leather defenses invariably gave additional cover and concealment for defenders atop walls and towers.

Not that the defenders in the movie were doing a very good job. In preparing for the attack, why didn't they pile up stones to drop on their assailants, and forked sticks to push off scaling ladders? What about preparing cauldrons of hot water, oil, pitch, or lead? Piling earth and straw in front of weak points likely to be targeted by battering rams? OK, maybe I'm expecting too much from a bunch of pseudo-Anglo-Saxon horsemen, but if they've got a famously impregnable fortress, you'd figure they'd have at least some idea how to use it.

Movie archery also gets my goat, and this film is no exception. Dramatic convention or no, having a mass of archers holding their bows at full draw while awaiting a signal just ain't how it was done. Nor is there any reason to have archers shoot in volleys -- that practice came in with firearms, which were slow to load and produced blinding clouds of smoke ("fire!" meaning "shoot!" also postdates firearms -- and is a usage still avoided by many archery purists). And what was going on placing archers behind the curtain wall, shooting blindly up and (it is to be hoped) over the heads of the defenders? A more ineffectual practice is hard to imagine, but then, there did seem to be a general shortage of arrow loops at Helm's Deep.

Corpses, too, were in short supply. Hard-fought medieval battles over narrow fronts inevitably produced piles of bodies so high as to be serious obstacles to remaining combatants. Perhaps a little too disgusting for the silver screen, however -- though it might just have been a matter of too much work for the CGI crews. My wife independently commented that the battlefield looked mighty tidy after the siege was broken. Perhaps the movie should have stuck closer to the book, where the trees of Fangorn swept through and presumably composted any orcs in their way.

Finally, I cringed at the scene where Aragorn literally cuts in on Eowyn's sword drill. Sure, it gives Eowyn a little extra blade time plus a dramatic face-to-face with Aragorn, but for anyone habituated to arms it was as if Legolas had been shown picking his nose. Every armigerous society in the history of the world has maintained a strict etiquette of weaponry. The precise details may have varied, but one thing is always the same: you just don't mess with someone else's weapon. Similarly, you don't draw a weapon against someone without intending to use it, and you never preemptorily cross blades without thereby signalling lethal intent (in premodern Japan, merely knocking scabbards was a mortal challenge).

Posted by David on January 3, 2003 7:06 PM