True, and I'm assuming that Saruman could easily have accomplished these things with his hordes of slaves and devious mind.I like to imagine when reading the book that some of his slaves did have firearms. After all, goblins and orcs do like explosions.

Not likely ... as I understand it, a lot of the advances in chemistry and metallurgy that made guns stop being primarily psychological weapons that were often more dangerous to their own side were made by chance, and the rest were largely the sorts of things that are impossible to develop until the previous "generation" has been developed into usable tools. And, as the example of the Chinese demonstrates, you have to imagine the possibility.

Also, for "hordes of slaves and devious mind," Sauron is a far more likely candidate than Saruman ...

Remember that The Lord of the Rings supposedly takes place in Earth's remote past, and guns would fit into that even worse than the milieu already does.
More to the point, even the most primitive guns have a powerful psychological effect, especially on horses. The Rohirrim would have been routed as soon as they began to charge, if not before.
And if they had firearms, they'd have cannon---it's my understanding that you need basically the same technology to make both, and cannons are easier to get right---and those, rather than battering-rams and ladders, would have been the go-to weapons in the sieges of Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith. (In fact, there's a notable lack of any distance weapons in Middle Earth other than bows and thrown rocks---if I were trying to take either of those fortresses, I'd want atapults at the least.)

The attack on Minas Tirith, at least, specifically mentions catapults. I'm not sure about Helm's Deep, but if there weren't any there, it's at least the more reasonable attack to have lacking them.

Well certainly there wouldn't have been many guns, but Saruman was known for his ingenius devilry (such as blasting powder) and might have invented a few. Sauron didn't really care what his slaves fought with, he just cared that there were millions of them. In the movie, Saurons forces are all ragtag, while Sarumans all have the same armor and are more organized. Early guns did have a more psychological impact, but I don't think the Uruk-hai and wargs would have minded them much. Saruman just seems like the mad-scientist type. Of course, at Helm's Deep, it was raining, so guns would have been useless.

I didn't know that lotr was supposed to be earth, that's very interesting. All the same, technology can be lost. I think it's possible that people before Noahs flood people could have possessed guns, and then lost the technology later.

Really? (/goes and checks ...) Indeed, there is one mention. But still, that's the only place we see any sort of ranged siege weapon.


Actually, since there's a mention in the passage that Arien cited of firebombs, Saruman might well have gotten the device he used at Helm's Deep from Sauron, or have made it in imitation of Sauron's work. And we know from Gandalf's shows in the Shire that fireworks are not unknown---and Saruman "has left the path of wisdom" by the time he starts breeding the Uruk-Hai, as Gandalf says.

Don't let the movie cloud your judgment on that point. But in any case, Saruman's army is very new while Sauron's been building his for centuries. And, most importantly, Saruman wanted to have his army look impressive, while Sauron wanted everyone to serve him and fear him---and guns would have been invaluable on that latter point.

My point was that if Sauron (or Saruman) had guns, this would have rendered the Rohirrim utterly useless at the Pellenor Fields or in any of the other open-field battles, where instead it took massive armies of orcs to match them.

Not to me; everything he does to Orthanc is explicitly described (by Gandalf, who would know) as being done in imitation of Sauron, whether it maes any sense for him or not.

Muskets, maybe ... cannon, probably not, I think. It'd be easy enough to shelter them enough to keep the powder dry---if Saruman didn't provide some magical powder that works even when wet.


The issue isn't the loss of technology (it's inarguable that much of the antediluvian technology and knowledge that survived the Flood was lost in the next few generations), so much as the other indications---gunpowder is the sort of thing that would end up in legends and oral history (like dinosaurs probably became "dragons" in legends), and we'd probably see some explosion-crater or something in the Near East.

First of all, I have to say that this conversation is really fun. Okay, I really like both the movies and the books, so I was considering both. I'm not really a purist in any sense of the word, but each to his own. And don't muskets look impressive? Well anyways, I think the Rohirrim wouldn't have minded the guns with all the stirring music. Sorry, movie again.
In all seriousness, I didn't say I thought Sauron had these guns, so the battle at Minas Tirith would not have been affected. Just Saruman. I don't think that Saruman imitated sauron so closely that he didn't ever consider doing something that Sauron didn't do. After all, he wasn't really on Sauron's side, he wanted the ring for himself. I'm assuming that it was just normal powder too, and so it would have been a hassle to bring cannon in the rain. But again, I don't imagine that each and every uruk had a musket or anything like that. He might have just been experimenting with the possibilities. Now all this is just my imagination and part of the way I view the story. Nobody else has to see it this way. That's the beauty of books, really. Everyone comes away with a different picture in their minds.

Now about the Pre-flood guns. First of all, Noah and his sons were certainly not cutting wood and mining metal right after they got off the ark. For one thing, the trees had to grow back. They were just surviving, so it's reasonable to assume that much knowledge could have been forgotten. As for legends, I don't really know about that. I kind of thought it was things that aren't true that create legends, lol. I'm not really sure what you mean by craters in the near east. The flood was so incredibly catastrophic that it certainly would have erased traces of firearms or explosions. We don't even know that the pre-flood world was located in the area now known as the near east.

(That's usually "to each his own", BTW.)
The Lord of the Rings movies weren't as bad as some novel-to-film adaptations have been (though there are some really grating issues where Tolkien's original would have been plainly better especially in light of all the constraints of film), but for checking the plausibility of military matters Jackson (or whoever) doesn't have much credibility in my book, as after looking at a map of Middle Earth the "elves at Helm's Deep" thing looks essentially impossible from a logistical perspective.

It's not the Riders of Rohan that would mind, it's the horses they're riding. Unless a horse has been trained to ignore explosions (though I suspect the Black Riders' horses wouldn't mind), it'll spook and bolt.

I talked more about Sauron because I think everything you said as a reason Saruman might have developed them fits Sauron a lot better, and in any case Saruman was essentially Sauron's vassal so if Isengard had developed them Mordor would have gotten them in short order.

Yes ... but he developed Isengard into a "mini-Mordor," developed the Uruk-Hai because Sauron had orcs, invented "the White Hand" because Sauron had the Lidless Eye as his symbol, and so on.

Most likely ... but we know that wizards can do "magic" with fireworks and such (or that may just be Gandalf, if each of the wizards had a specialty).

Nor is Helm's Deep all that accessible. But if I were attacking a place like that, and I had cannon, I'd make sure to bring them along no matter how difficult that turned out to be. Even unreliable cannon can do the work of many battering rams, at a distance and far better.

This seems somewhat unlikely; from Gandalf's account of their meeting, his experimental interests center on taking things apart, not devising subtle improvements. (Note that this is a theological point on Tolkien's part: in Middle Earth, evil cannot truly create, it can only destroy, twiist, or imitate.)

That's an artifact of the Fall and the confusion of languages at Babel---one which God has used to his great glory, but still .. As I've remarked elsewhere, there are at least three sets of meanings in any literary work: the meaning that the creator intended for it to contain, the meaning that the reader---the "unsung collaborator," as Bujold puts it in an essay of that title---gathers from it, and lastly the meaning that it actually contains. The purpose of discussions like this is to bring the second set, for each reader involved in the discussion, as close to the immutable-but-not-yet-directly-knowable third set as possible.

I haven't done the math myself, but I saw a calculation using the relative ages given in the relevant chapters of Genesis that led to the conclusion that (IIRC) Noah was still alive when Abraham left Ur. Most knowledge was lost, but it was due to the presumably limited skill-set of the eight people who were saved, to ordinary forgetfulness, to changed priorities, and then to the confusion of languages at Babel, not just to the destruction of records and the difficulty of immediate transmission of skills.

Legends often grow up around a kernel of truth. (For example: "King Arthur" was probably a real person, Charlemagne was certainly a real person, but most of the legends surrounding their courts are probably fabrications. More to the point, most of the legends about dragons, giants, and so on probably aren't true, but there were such things as colossal reptiles and men who grew to be more than nine feet tall.)

No, I mean evidence of the use of explosives in the period between the flood and Babel---gunpowder is apparently not all that difficult to make if you know how, and we don't know what was carried onto the ark (other than the eight people, at least two of every kind of animal, and enough food for everyone), so if gunpowder or other explosives were known before the Flood it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to be used for "engineering" purposes soon afterward. (Though, like you said, resources would be quite tight for a while, so I think it'd be unlikely.) And that would leave definite marks on the landscape. (The protagonist of H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen deduces that the alternate-Pennsylvania he's been dragged into isn't the past from his knowledge of history, but deduces that it's not a post-apocalyptic future from the absence of gaps blasted through the mountains for the Interstate highways.) I specified "the Near East" because that's where the ark landed.

I could be wrong here, as my memory of this event is extremely vauge and plauged with mist, but I think I recall a small company of elves reaching Helm's Deep just before the Uruk-hai (though Haldir was not there -- I'm sure of that ).

Each wizard indeed have their specialities -- Gandalf was a specialist in fireworks, the smoking of pipe-weed (and smoke rings), and hobbit lore Also, Radagast the Brown had a special relationship with animals (or was it just birds? I can't quite remember what I once knew about Radagast) and Saruman is noted as a specialist in the lore surrounding the Rings of Power.. As for the smoking of pipe-weed and hobbit lore, I remember reading that none of the other wizards were experts in those fields though Saruman did secretly dabble in smoking pipe-weed. I cannot recall reading anything on other wizards being capable of the fireworks Gandalf was famed for, but I believe it would be reasonably safe to assume that Gandalf was the only wizard who had any skill in fireworks (and I believe it would be very safe to assume that he was the only wizard who was an expert in that field).

Wonderful conversation here, guys.

I just reread the Helm's Deep chapter, and no, no elves Perhaps you're thinking of later, when the Rohirrim are en route to Minas Tirith, and the elves arrive with Aragorn's banner and the advice to take the Paths of the Dead?

To each his own, yes. We often say things a little differently where I live. Saruman was building an army, and he had all kinds of metal, wood, and blasting powder. Because of this, I like to picture him expirimenting with guns. You mentioned Sauron having firebombs? Well to my mind, that could have been something more like greek fire. But that's just me. When you read a book and something is described, you picture it in your mind (at least i do). So say someone describes a valley. I make a mental image. That image is unique to my mind, and not the image anyone else makes in their minds, even the author of the work. That's why books are so cool. I'm not talking about the overall theme or "message" of the book. (Btw, I seem to remember reading Tolkien himself saying the the Lord of the Rings had no message?)
A lot of that depends on what pre-flood technology was like, and further what Noah and his sons were like. Let's think about Noah for a second. for a long time, he was alone in a world of evil. We don't know for sure, but i think he was kind of out by himself for a long time. He didn't have children until he was 500 (so how did he meet his wife, I wonder?) I think that if I lived by myself as the only righteous person left, I would be kind of a tortured soul. After the flood, when people started to grow in number again, I seriously doubt that he would have spread knowledge (or stories) of guns or other stuff like that. He just wanted his grapes, lol. But again, that's just how I picture Noah. Kind of a grim type. His sons might have been a completely different matter as well.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, yes gunpowder for making cities and so forth would leave signs most likely. I doubt they would have taken any on the ark though.

One more thing, book adaptations of movies aren't really about being as close to the book as possible. If you're just going to repeat the book detail for detail, you might as well not bother. some change is a good thing.

Metal to make the traditional gear (swords, armor, and whatnot), and wood to fuel the fires to forge that gear. And actually, it never explicitly says it was blasting powder, though that's the best and simplest explanation (it describes the explosion and says "a gaping hole was blasted in the wall," then Aragorn says "[T]hey have lit the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet."). I get "industry" and "mass production," not any real innovation---it takes at least a certain measure of wisdom to be clever, but Saruman has (as Gandalf says) "abandoned reason."

No, I don't think so: the sentence from which I got that reads, in full, "As soon as the great catapults were set, with many yells and the creaking of rope and winch, they began to throw missiles marvellously high, so that they passed right above the battlement and fell thudding within the first circle of the City; and many of them by some secret art burst into flame as they came toppling down."

But there is an image or a set of images that are the "true" ones, and those in the author's or a reader's mind are accurate precisely to the extent that they match the true ones. Just like a story set in a real-world place evokes images that are accurate precisely to the extent that they match the way the place really is (provided the story depicts them accurately).

He does deny intentionally including any didactic message or "allegory" (in the popular, inaccurate understanding of that term), but note that this was in response to people trying to force a then-"current-events" system of symbolism on it. He's denying hiding a lesson or "meaning" in the work, not writing a story that presumes or organically conveys some truth. He sees the former as authorial tyranny forcing a "lesson" down the reader's throat, and the latter as something that the reader can find if it's "applicable" to that reader.


The point of adapting a book into film is to tell the same story in a different medium. Of course some changes have to be made, and can even improve the story. I'm not up in arms about combining Arwen and Glorfindel, or cutting the Old Forest sequence, for example, and the "Concerning Hobbits" opening was brilliant. But that freedom doesn't excuse changes that hurt the story, or are simply changes for the sake of making changes. The relevant Calvinist buzzword is "responsible freedom."

Right, and because it's a different medium, you have to make sure that it is the best it can be in that medium, so that's where good change comes in. It's great if you don't have to change a lot. One of my favorite movies is the 1990 version of treasure island, and it is almost line for line with the book. On the other hand, a recent movie (called John Carter) had to make a lot of changes, because the book it was based on was printed in a serial, so almost every chapter ended with a cliffhanger. It varies for story. The Lord of the Rings is just really long, so that was where most of the changes had to happen. Like Tom bombadil Or the scouring of the shire. I would rather have had them cut out the giant spider personally.
I guess we just disagree on Sarumans capabilities. And I think that while it wasn't "Greek Fire" that Sauron had, it was still kind of uncanny flame. Maybe it even burned on water.
So who comes up with the true mental images? If I make up a place in a story, and everyone who reads it sees it differently, who sees the "real" image? I don't really understand that.

The trouble with the "... it's just really long, so we had to cut all these bits" argument (which is otherwise reasonable) in this case is that they added so much needless action and such. The idea is to translate the essentials of the story to the new medium, but it feels like Jackson or whoever thought that "The Lord of the Rings could be a good story, if we only change this, this, this, this, and this ..."

I don't disagree that inventing guns might have been within Saruman's capabilities---but that wouldn't be consistent with his character. Much like the notion, which I mentioned some time back in another thread, that the Roman Empire could have gone to steam power and industrialized---if only it hadn't at that period deliberately and violently suppressed disruptive technologies.

Tolkien never says what any of these things is or how it works---which is entirely proper, as none of the observers whose point-of-view we're mostly getting could possibly know.

The truth is, of course, what God sees. It's quite common in mathematics and the sciences to know that a number (for example) exists, but to not be able to know for certain what it is, so we repeatedly measure to try to make our approximation ever more precise and ever more confident---and the same idea applies here, that there is a real meaning that is more than or different from what the author intended and that readers are trying to glean.

hey kingjon, I just realized we're from the same state
Anyway, what did the movies add as far as action? I guess the warg fight before helms deep wasn't in the book per se, but anything else?

All right, we disagree on Sarumans personality then. That's ok too. And that's kind of what the whole thing hinges on. I bet the elves could have found out how to make guns if they had wanted to. But you know elves. Enviromentally friendly to the last . . .

Right, and we don't know how Greek fire works either, or how to make it.

I still don't think that a persons mental picture of a place or character in a story is wrong, It's just what they see in their minds. It's not mathematics, it's just a story. Assuming it is fiction, of course. And I don't see how Babel affects that (unless the original language involved mind connections or something).

There were only a couple of scenes (or, rather, sequences) invented out of whole cloth---the attack on the retreat to Helm's Deep being one, and the battle at Osgiliath (with the unintentional funniest line of the whole series) being the other I can think of---but nearly every action scene, even in the backstory and flashbacks, was stretched out as long as (or, I would argue, longer than) the story would bear, while Tolkien (I think deliberately, if nothing else following the model of the ancient and medieval epics) mostly glossed over them. The book gives the impression of a story containing a few battle scenes; from the movie one might reasonably gather that the filmmakers thought the story was just an excuse for the battle scenes.


More to the point, they've had one "disruptive technology"---the Rings of Power---end in disaster, and they tend to only be interested in constructive innovations anyway. The dwarves would be the ones I'd expect to be most likely to do it, as they're apparently the best smiths for everything except Rings, but they (like everyone else in the free world ...) are but a shadow of their former glory.


It's fairly obvious how it works ... it's oil-based, so it spreads and has to be smothered rather than doused with water. But it was spread (launched from a catapult or something), and then lit from afar (with a flaming arrow, usually); it didn't self-ignite.


The thing is, whether a story is fictional or not is irrelevant to whether or not there is a single set of meanings and images that it actually contains. (I only brought up math because that's a field in which this notion of a true thing that we can only approximate is very common.) That's why it's possible for us to have sensible conversations about stories that don't devolve into postmodernist relativism---we can go "take another measurement" to try to see who, if anyone, is right.

How we think affects how we talk, and how we talk affects how we think. (As the most obvious example, if there isn't even a word for something in your native language, whenever you come to a situation where that thing would be relevant or useful, you probably won't think of it.) And since Babel, even among those who nominally speak the same language "confusion" has continued to develop (in the form of dialects and "language evolution" if nothing else), so that confusion and misunderstanding are quite common.

Yeah, it seems like the dwarves would be more apt to invent guns, but were they really into ranged weapons? I don't remember a reference to a dwarf using a bow or anything. Dwarves in Narnia might be a different story. They were both good archers and worked with metal.

So what about a story that is illustrated? Ok, so let's say I write about a tower. Now this tower is in the story, so it doesn't actually exist in the real world, right? Seeing as it doesn't exist except in an individuals mind, how can one say that anothers mental image is wrong? Now the plot details and themes of the story are unchangeable, because they exist in the mind of everone who has heard the story, not just in one persons mind. That the tower is there can not be disputed. But what exactly the tower looks like can be.

I should also note that there are some ideas that readers find in stories because of something in their perspective ("paradigm" might be a better word) that probably aren't really in the story per se, but that the reader's aren't wrong to find there either. (Philosophy and literary criticism are complicated ... )


No, there's no such references---but at their height they had a lively trade with the elves and with Gondor, so that doesn't prove anything. And we learn very little about the dwarves' methods of warfare beyond what is said in The Hobbit.


Saying that something either "exists in the real world" or "doesn't exist (at all) except in an individual's mind" is a false dichotomy Many authors see worldbuilding (and writing as a whole) as "discovering" this "subcreation"---these aren't things that they are inventing, but things that, like everything in our world, have prior existence in the mind of God.
Note that I'm not saying that anyone (except God) will be able to in all cases say whether any particular mental image is right or wrong. I'm only asserting what seems to me self-evident, that there is a "true" one, and all our approximations are accurate insofar as they agree with it---to take your tower example, even if this never comes into the story or even your notes even tangentially, either the tower is 200 feet tall, or it's 300 feet tall, or neither, so if one reader imagines it as being 200 fet tall, and another as 300 feet, they can't both be right. (Why do I feel like I'm Professor Kirke here?)

Actually, if what the tower looks like exited only in each reader's mind, there'd be no basis for any "disputes" about it.

But we're getting way off the subject here ...

Rediscovering, hmm. It;s true that God exists outside of time (while controlling it), and therefore I guess you could say you were discovering instead of creating. So I think I know what you are trying to say here. When different people see something (like a sunset) they all see it differently, but there is a way it really is, apart from the workings of the human eye. As God sees it, as I believe you said before. So that's kind of like a story. I guess the same thing applies to movies, but it is far less pronounced than a book. I still think that is the cool thing about books though. i don't think there is anything wrong with that, because God created our eyes (and our minds eyes) and we will always have them.

Ok, so I looked at the topic, and yes we are way off. My original statement that started all this was a joke too, but these things happen. It's deep stuff. This is the kind of thing I used to think about when I ran cross country. It's a good replacement for "ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,".

Yeah, I skimmed through that chapter myself and the only thing I stumbled upon that might have created that false mental image was Legolas wishing that he had a hundred elves from Mirkwood (or the movie poisoned my memory ).


By the way, I love the conversation here guys, but we are delving into a grey-ish area of possible off-topicness and I just wanted to remind everyone (including myself) to stay on topic.