OxBlog

Friday, January 10, 2003

# Posted 10:31 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

PEJMAN GETS MEDIEVAL ON THEIR A&*%$: Pej defends Tolkien on the charge of being an escapist Luddite.

Pej says that, in fact, the defenders of Helm's Deep made reasonable use of technology in holding off the orc hordes. Yet you don't have to be Advanced Dungeons & Dragons expert (which I once was, circa 1991) to know just how awful the defenders' tactics were. If you read the first reader response to Pej's post, you get a pretty good idea of just how many simple medieval technologies might have helped Aragorn etc. hold off the hordes.

But the real Luddites are the ones who built Helm's Deep (or Peter Jackson's version of it). Who the hell puts just one door on the main gate of a massive fortress? But if you read this, you'll see that old Pete isn't all that interested in being faithful to the reality of Middle Earth.

CLARIFICATON: Reader AH e-mails to remind me that there were, in fact, two doors at the main gate to Helm's Deep. The second door is the small (weak, unreinforced) one that Aragorn and Gimli slip out of. So, to be clear, what I meant to say is that I expected the architects of any decent fortress to have two doors one behind the other at the main gate, so that if the first were broken down, the second could be defended.

Moreover, the positioning of the doors makes a big difference. If any of you have visited the Old City of Jerusalem, you will notice that the gates to the City have outer doors that are perpindicular to their inner doors. If that's hard to imagine, just think of a small, covered L-shaped passageway connecting the two. Now why go to all that trouble? Because if someone (orcs, Babylonians, whoever) tries to use a battering ram, they can't fit it inside the passageway that leads to the inner doors. Oh boy. If the widows of Rohan read this, Aragorn is going to get slapped silly.
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