rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-16 11:56 am
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-16 11:56 am
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So THAT'S what was going on!
There's a funny bit in Biggles Fails To Return in which Ginger, impersonating a Spanish onion-seller in Monaco, shares some bread and an onion with a local. The local nearly spits out the onion, appalled at its sharpness, and asks Ginger where the heck they came from. Ginger is forced to quickly come up with an explanation of why he has English onions rather than the presumably sweeter Spanish ones.
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
I've been reading books for more than forty years, and this is the first time I realized that when characters take nothing but a loaf of bread and a raw onion as journey provisions, or eat bread and a raw onion for lunch, they're eating something like a sweet Vidalia onion, not the onions that make your eyes water and would be torture to eat whole and raw. I did vaguely wonder why they were always eating raw onions rather than, say, a raw turnip that at least wouldn't be actively painful to eat, but I supposed, without really pausing to interrogate it, that people in times past were so horrendously deprived that eating a raw onion for lunch barely registered!
This made me think about other bits in books that make more sense with context, whether that context is new information, other books, or just more life experience.
In The Once and Future King, the boy Wart, who will become King Arthur, is going on and on about the glory of fighting. Merlyn argues with him, then "seems to change the subject" and asks Wart which he had liked better, the ants or the wild geese. The chapter ends there. When I read the book as a child, I took that literally: Merlyn was frustrated with the Wart and changed the subject.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I realized that the geese were peaceful and didn't believe in national boundaries, and the ants were totalitarian and had the motto "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." Merlyn wasn't changing the subject, he was winning the argument... but the Wart, like me, missed the point.
More recently, I listened to Watership Down on audio, read by Peter Capaldi. I had mixed feelings about his performance, but while listening I suddenly understood something that I never had before, and I must have read that book twenty times.
In the warren of the shining wires, Silverweed recites a poem. It's quite beautiful and initially seems fantastical, with a rabbit asking to accompany the stream and become rabbit-of-the-water, accompany the falling leaves and become rabbit-of-the-earth, accompany the wind and become rabbit-of-the-wind. Finally, he openly asks to join Frith and die. Fiver is horrified at the poem (the others don't understand it) and says it's taking something true (all rabbits must die) and making it into something twisted and perverse (making the pursuit of death seem beautiful).
I always wondered about that poem. The final verse is straightforwardly what Fiver says the whole poem is about, but the earlier verses aren't clearly about death - they seem much more in the vein of other rabbit legends where magical things happen. I had puzzled over it, and finally decided that they're in the real world, so asking to be a magical being like a rabbit of the water or a rabbit of the earth was asking to go to the magical realm after death. But that never felt quite satisfactory to me.
Then, listening to Capaldi read the poem, I suddenly understood. Silverweed is talking very poetically about something that isn't a fantasy or metaphor at all. When he says he wants to go down with the leaves and be rabbit of the earth, he means that he wants to die and have his body decay and literally become part of the earth, and eventually, as it breaks down more and more, the water and the air. No wonder Fiver was horrified!
Have you ever understood things in books long after you first read them?
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No, please do! (I mean, if Rachel doesn't mind.) Because I have no strong opinion on the matter and am willing to be convinced, especially as I've never read the entirety of the evidence base with this question in mind. So all I've got is what I remember from the last time I did serious Tolkien scholarship on other topics, and that was almost 10 years ago now.
One thing I remember is this passage from the letters:
Also to be Prince of Ithilien, the greatest noble after Dol Amroth in the revived Númenórean state of Gondor, soon to be of imperial power and prestige, was not a ‘market-garden job’ as you term it. Until much had been done by the restored King, the P. of Ithilien would be the resident march-warden of Gondor, in its main eastward outpost – and also would have many duties in rehabilitating the lost territory, and clearing it of outlaws and orc-remnants, not to speak of the dreadful vale of Minas Ithil (Morgul). I did not, naturally, go into details about the way in which Aragorn, as King of Gondor, would govern the realm. But it was made clear that there was much fighting, and in the earlier years of A.’s reign expeditions against enemies in the East. The chief commanders, under the King, would be Faramir and Imrahil; and one of these would normally remain a military commander at home in the King’s absence. A Númenórean King was monarch, with the power of unquestioned decision in debate; but he governed the realm with the frame of ancient law, of which he was administrator (and interpreter) but not the maker. In all debatable matters of importance domestic, or external, however, even Denethor had a Council, and at least listened to what the Lords of the Fiefs and the Captains of the Forces had to say. Aragorn re-established the Great Council of Gondor, and in that Faramir, who remained by inheritance the Steward (or representative of the King during his absence abroad, or sickness, or between his death and the accession of his heir) would [be] the chief counsellor.
The things that strike me as interesting here are "even Denethor," which makes it sound like Denethor was ruling in a *more* centralized fashion than a Numenorean monarch, and "at least listened to what they had to say." In my experience of European polities, a monarch (even what we would call an "absolute" monarch--another one of those fraught terms that historians would like you to know does not mean what you* think it means) has a council and has to listen to what they say, and is the interpreter and administrator of laws but not the maker. A head of a federation (like, say, the Holy Roman Empire), has to do a lot more than listen to what the council says!
Philosophically speaking, Tolkien was a big fan of a hands-off monarchy, and he represents Aragorn as that type, the good kind of monarch, and Denethor (and Boromir) as way too hands-on controlly for his tastes. Denethor is in some ways at the end of a decline, and Aragorn a restoration of The Way It Should Be Done.
Which makes me wonder if that's what Tolkien was getting at with Aragorn re-establishing the Great Council. This kind of thing is done by monarchs ceding power, sometimes to devastating effect (see also the French Revolution). Denethor may be delegating less than a Numenorean monarch, not more.
but tl;dr I would argue by DENETHOR's time it's been a pretty voluntary federation for a while just because Minas Tirith/Anórien as a region really can't . . . enforce shit on anyone, they're under way too much pressure from their actual enemy.
This happens, but it can also go the other way! My period is the period of monarchs using the pressure of external wars precisely to turn loose federations of nobles and strongmen into absolutism and centralization. Making the monarchy stronger was a not infrequent excuse for starting or getting into a war, and if the war was already there, a common way of harnessing it.
And personality-wise, Denethor strikes me as someone who would very much like to turn a federation, if that was what he inherited, into a centralized government, as well as someone who was intelligent and subtle enough to harness a war or the threat of war into getting the control he wanted.
He's also less peripatetic than I would expect of someone of his personality trying to hold an inherited (this part is key) voluntary federation together.
On the other hand, I don't see (or remember seeing, at least) the bureaucracy I would expect of someone with a centralized state or trying to centralize his state. And that's not just my period speaking--Diocletian, for example, tried to pull a crumbling Roman Empire together precisely by instituting/ramping up the bureaucracy.
(Speaking of Roman emperors, Denethor's "Unlike my son, I don't mind being called Steward instead of King, I just want the power" attitude reminds me of Augustus's primus inter pares.)
Granted, the palantir would compensate for some of the bureaucracy as well as some of the need for a peripatetic court, but not all of it in either case.
I would be interested in your counterevidence, since you've obviously read with this question in mind! I'm just pulling things out of my hat at random.
* You the average person, not you, the well-informed
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I have very little doubt that Denethor rules Minas Tirith and Anórien (the region/province that is to Minas Anor [aka Minas Tirith] as Ithilien was to Minas Ithil) extremely autocratically; he may even be making overall decisions that way, and Dol Amroth in particular given Imrahil's specific choices and loyalties (Denethor was his brother-in-law) may hew extremely close to that.
But bluntly by the list of the arriving reinforcements, plus the sheer number of people (and supplies) Aragorn is able to gather up from various places after dealing with the Corsairs/the threat of the Corsairs, outside of Anórien and Dol Amroth, lotta people who are technically enfeoffed to Minas Tirith ain't showing up.
The Lord of Lossarnach brings about two hundred fighters, rather than two thousand, because while he's willing to show up he's Noped out of taking more than two hundred fighters away from the defense of, well, Lossarnach, his actual province. The Lord of Ringló Vale sends three hundred under one of his sons; Morthond at least shows up in person with both his sons, but he's only got a few hundred people; ditto Pennith Galen. The coastal province of Ethir sends "some hundred or more [men], spared from the ships"; Lamedon sends "a few grim hillmen without a captain". Anfalas has a couple hundred, almost none of them with any equipment except "the household" of the lord.
Conversely, after scouring the Pelargirs, Aragorn is able to bring up over four thousand from the provinces he passed through, and that's only a couple of them.
The state of the stores in Minas Tirith pretty solidly indicate that the various provinces have been equally conservative in what supplies they've been sending, at least for the last while.
The fact that they're ABLE to do so indicates at least a generation where Minas Tirith is not commanding a centralized, professional army of any capacity - even by the collapse of the Empire, Roman emperors and pretenders and generals WERE able to command the vast majority of legions to pick up and abandon their long-term stations, because of the systemic and continued centralized discipline. Denethor is not running that kind of political enterprise.
You're totally right: monarchs (and Denethor is absolutely acting as one, regardless of his specific title) throughout history have used The Threat of War to increase their power. And six hundred years ago his great-great grandfather might've done the same. Denethor can't: he's logistically fucked.
The monarchs of your period were able to do that because of the way that warfare worked, and also because of the politics of the era, which were very much those of each state against ALL the other states, and was a warfare of - increasingly - either professional national standing armies, or (at the beginning of it) extremely professional mercenaries.
That meant if Count Such and Such said "actually, your majesty, go fuck yourself", King So and So could (and usually would) be able to take direct military action against them - and indeed had frequently spent the early 16th and late 15th centuries doing exactly that, and teaching the nobility to Not.
That is in no way shape or form the situation that Denethor is in. Denethor is in a flat zero sum conflict against an enemy who wants to (and will) absolutely obliterate him and his entire realm off the face of the planet and who has very explicitly been fighting a war of attrition with Gondor on exactly those terms since before the death of the last king of Anárion's line - and is winning that war at this point.
If Angbor of Lamedon decides - as he did, in fact - to go "fuck it, me and my army are staying here because bluntly I care way less if Denethor and Minas Tirith fall and die than about the threat to my actual province" and as a result only a handful of presumably the most overall-patriotic-yay-Gondor bother going north to the muster, Denethor can . . . do exactly bupkiss. If Angbor is sending less grain because he's making sure the stockpiles for Lamedon come first, Denethor can also do exactly bupkiss.
Because Denethor has no military capacity to enforce anything and hasn't for at least as long as Boromir's been an adult and probably longer ("those who shelter behind give much praise, but little help"); even Ecthelion, his father, is desperate enough that "Thorongil" can wander into the city without family or history and out of pure personal capacity become a major military commander who can go "I'm taking a fleet to go smash Umbar" and . . . do that.
No, the councils involved did not have de jure power, and theoretically Denethor controls the whole realm, by law and by structure; de facto, the reason Denethor listens to what the Lords of the Fiefs have to say is because if they start flipping him off he can't do shit, because he has no way to make them do fuck all: he cannot divert military forces from dealing with Sauron and trying will just mean Gondor is Over. He has no legal requirement to allow them a vote or anything, but he has a pragmatic and logistical absolute need to keep them on-side; if they aren't on-side, Gondor is Over, and relying on the cultural investment in the Idea of Gondor without any military backup to deal with breakaway regions means that you really can't put too much pressure on it without it shattering.
Similarly Denethor does not have the logistical ability to have a heavily centralized administration: the roads aren't good enough, there aren't enough people to man road-guard stations, or to be part of a centralized administrative network. We see that as we follow Gandalf and Pippin riding to Minas Tirith from Rohan. The provincial fiefdoms HAVE to be doing most of that; and as a result, again, all that Denethor has to rely on to make sure they're playing ball at ALL is going to be this idea of Gondor as a united Realm.
As it happens, the Númenórean-accultured-Idea of Gondor was really strong, and really powerful, and was actually enough to keep eg Lamedon and Lossarnach and the other provinces and crucially Dol Amroth at least willing to still participate, so that it seemed more valuable to them at all times to remain "Lord of Lossarnach, Province of Gondor" than it would to just say fuckit and become King of Lossarnach; and culture can in fact have that kind of power, and the IDEA of a Great Realm can have it as well.
But whether Denethor likes it or not (and I'd be willing to bet hard cash he doesn't), de facto, he has to work within a framework where whether or not the Lords of the Fiefs WANT to be part of Gondor is in fact the most important thing because he can't do shit if they decide they don't.
QED Angbor of Lamedon keeping four thousand armed men back because making sure Lamedon wasn't fucked up by the Corsairs was more important to him than making sure Minas Tirith (and thus, you know . . . Gondor . . . ) didn't fall.
And crucially: what's relayed to us by Pippin's POV summary of what he hears in the crowds watching? That was expected. "Ah. Nobody's sending even half their forces, because of the news of that fleet." They take that for granted.
Now to be clear: at multiple points in European history, monarchs with a much more hardcore centralized control over their nobility absolutely did strip areas of their military forces in order to win in the "core" of the kingdom, allowing outer regions to be BADLY raided and destroyed, dealing with the rebuilding and/or running the other raiding forces out AFTER they'd maintained their central hold and control. That absolutely happened.
When they couldn't do that, it was usually a sign that dynasty was on the way out; the ones that had that point of weakness and DIDN'T end up getting punted were usually smart enough not to ASK their vassals to be cool with their own lands being burned while Paris or Rome was saved, but solved the problem some other way, and then . . . worked on increasing their centralized control later.
So when I say I'm pretty sure that's what he's working with by the War of the Ring, what Gondor is dealing with by his era in general, I mean in the de facto world of logistics as evidenced by his actual ability to command forces and supplies - not the de jure world of "they have formal voting rights within a delineated official structure"; I'm looking at things with an interest of "how is the power on the ground actually shaking out", not "what does the cultural rule-book say".
Now on the upside the fact that it DIDN'T occur to anyone to radically change the cultural rulebook means that it's gonna be WAY easier for Aragorn to return a truly centralized function to the area! But.
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de facto, the reason Denethor listens to what the Lords of the Fiefs have to say is because if they start flipping him off he can't do shit, because he has no way to make them do fuck all:
But as I mentioned, absolute monarchs in my period also have to listen to their lords. I think I would summarize the difference like so:
- Can you make any given noble do what you want, but if you piss off too many of them you're looking at a coup, so you have to listen to them as a group? You might be an absolute monarch.
- Can you not make any given noble do shit, and you have to beg and/or bargain with each one for anything they give you? You might be the head of a federation.
was a warfare of - increasingly - either professional national standing armies, or (at the beginning of it) extremely professional mercenaries.
But sometimes this is how you got the standing army: by convincing your powerful subjects that the national emergency demanded troops, and then hanging onto them tooth and nail once you had them, and using them to your own advantage.
Your description of Gondor's internal situation actually reminds me a fair bit of Savoy when Victor Amadeus II came to power (1684): several distinct adjacent provinces that I think were possibly even more linguistically and ethnically different than Gondor's, powerful enfeoffed nobles running the show, poor communications even by the standards of the time in much of the area in question (we're talking about the Alps here), a fortified capital city (Turin) in a strategic location, powerful neighbors (esp. France) who want to conquer your state, nobles (like the Governor of Milan) who don't send the amount of requested troops to the head of state's aid during wartime, causing the head of state to complain, famine and general logistical difficulties.
And Victor Amadeus, who of all the rulers I've studied during my period has the personality most like Denethor, used this situation to turn his collection of provinces into an early modern centralized absolutist state*. When Louis XIV's France was threatening to invade and/or invading almost as soon as VA came to power (which I think was a much more immediate threat than Denethor faced--I seem to recall he had more lead time before the occupation of his capital), he used that situation to dramatically increase the size of the army, impose centralized taxation on rebellious subjects, build up a modern bureaucracy, etc.
You've made a convincing case that by the time Pippin shows up, Denethor hasn't managed to do this, but if he had, it wouldn't have been without precedent.
VA had one big advantage that Denethor didn't, which you alluded to: the foreign policy scene. Tolkien's wars are fought for principle. VA's wars were fought for land and wealth. Denethor didn't have the option of switching sides every few years to try to play Mordor and, say, the Corsairs of Umbar off against each other while he bought himself time to build up his army and consolidate his state. Saruman tried that, and we know how that ended.
But Denethor had the advantage of this "Númenórean-accultured-Idea of Gondor" that VA did not. His state was cobbled together over the centuries via inheritance and conquest, and his family didn't even have strong ties in some of the provinces, who were like "Who the fuck do you think you are?" He was actually trying to trade off some of his existing, more remote and less culturally bound, provinces for territory that would be easier to administer.
This has been an awesomely fun discussion, thank you!
* It's a continuum; "centralized" and "absolutist" usually mean "making sure the nobles retain enough power to want to go along with this program," "being smart enough not to ask your nobles to do anything they're not going to do," etc., not "one person has all the power."
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“who want to occupy your state”
I think there’s some crucial difference in stakes here that to my mind is a central factor: Sauron does not want to “occupy” Gondor in the way that rival states in the 18th century occupied or conquered one another, which was usually a matter of back and forth territorial control that often left huge parts of the local power structure intact, and were operating from very similar structures and understanding of power and how society was structured.
When the most likely result of a conquest is your exile or your own enfeoffment to a new overlord that just isn’t that much different than operating as you were now - when even where divided by language your neighbours shared a very similar basic structure of life, society and expectations - the stakes are seriously reduced both for you AND for your vassals as they weigh what course of action is most beneficial. Ironically this makes the increase in centralized power much more feasible if you’re ballsy enough to try it.
Sauron is not doing that. The threat here both for Denethor and for his vassals is existential: it is mass murder and enslavenent to the point of genocide, and the obliteration of realm, culture, way of life, all of it.
This results in very different calculus and available power pressures. (If you want to see equivalent you don’t want to look at Europe in your era; you want to look at people facing down the height of Roman, Persian, Mongol, Arabic, or Turkish juggernaut expansion at the strong point of their empires.)
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That said...not having an existential threat in my period can make local provinces *more* willing to deny their supposedly centralized head of state aid in favor of negotiating better terms with the invading enemy and sometimes just outright surrendering to them.
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I'm a systems librarian at a university so I can ILL just about anything.
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So Christopher Storrs, War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690–1720, talks the most about the centralization. (You will see that the actual picture is necessarily more complicated and also more debated by scholars than my superficial summary above.) Also Geoffrey Symcox's Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the Savoyard State, which is a biography that contained more material of interest to me and was a better starting point.
Warning: both works are quite dry, and I don't know how readable they are without background knowledge of the period. But if you're more interested in the internal affairs (of less interest to me) than the foreign policy (my main interest), the material in the book may be more self-contained.
There are colored maps in my foreign-policy-focused summary here that may be of assistance (the summary itself I'm not sure how helpful it will be; it assumes you've been in my friends' and my Frederick the Great salon for two years, and doesn't talk much about centralization).
I'm definitely happy to chat more on the subject if you end up wanting to!
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Visiting our salon will be even better than DMing me or emailing me, because
I think Selena's traveling internationally right now, so she may not be immediately available, but we definitely plot fiction in salon, so I know she'll pitch in when she's free again.
The currently active salon post is here (the old posts are in the tag). Feel free to pop right in and reply with a description of your fantasy situation and what you're looking for.
Welcome!
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Also, just so you know, salon came about in large part because I know basically ZERO history, and
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