This is the first part of our [I don’t know; a few?] part series looking at the Siege of Eregion sequence from the second season of Amazon’s Rings of Power and what we can learn by pointing out its missteps.
And I’m not going to bury the lede here: this entire sequence is a mess. It will not surprise anyone, given my response (A, I, II, III) to the first season of Rings of Power, that I came into the second season with low expectations, but Rings of Power still managed to unpleasantly surprise me, with ungainly narratives that still seem bogged down in getting characters from A to B and worldbuilding that continued to feel very flat. But at the center of that was a big siege sequence which absorbs most of the back half of the season, spanning multiple episodes. And this too is, to be frank, quite bad, both from a historical realism perspective and also from a writing, themes and narrative perspective. But we may at least learn some things about historical warfare by discussing the ways in which the siege does not work from a historical realism perspective.
As with last season, before we dive in, I want to deal at the beginning with the argument that because this is just a TV show (well, streaming show) it is unfair to judge it by the standards of films like the Peter Jackson adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. To which I noted last time, the first season of Rings of Power had almost the same total screentime and budget as Peter Jackson’s films, but did far less with those resources. Meanwhile, this second season of Rings of Power is reported to have been, somehow, inexplicably, mind-bendingly more expensive than the first. In short, these series are getting feature film levels of resources thrown at them, and I think it is fair to judge them on that basis.
This week, we’re going to focus on the relatively simple task of marching a massive army of orcs, complete with complex siege equipment, over roughly 650 miles of apparently largely unsettled terrain, unnoticed by anyone. Because even a journey of roughly 1,300,000 strides begins with a single step and ends with death by starvation roughly two weeks later, lost in a forest.
Somehow, things will go downhill from here.
But first, as always, logistics are expensive! If you want to help out with the logistics of this blog and my scholarship more broadly, you can support me and this project on Patreon! If you, like Eregion, completely lack scouts or information gathering of any kind and are thus regularly surprised when posts like this appear outside of your walls, ready to sack your homes, you can get a bit more warning by clicking below for email updates or following me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@[email protected]) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I am in the process of shifting over more fully to Bluesky than Twitter, given that the former has, of late, become a better place for historical discussion than the latter.
Paper and Screen
Before we dive in, this series is intended, in some ways, as a continuation of the Siege of Gondor (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) and Helm’s Deep series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII). In those posts, I sometimes contrasted the way that The Lord of the Rings books approached a given concept, scene or sequence as compared to how Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films tackled adapting it. I aim to do that here as well, at some points contrasting how Tolkien seems to have imagined the War of the Elves and Sauron with how Rings of Power has opted to adapt that material.
This immediately introduces a tricky new question however, because unlike Tolkien’s nice, finished text of The Lord of the Rings, the War of the Elves and Sauron and the fall of Eregion, as events in the legendarium, exist in a bunch of different places in various forms. As folks who deal with the larger legendarium will know, this material, often assembled by Christopher Tolkien from his father’s notes, are often unclear, incomplete or even at odds with each other. So I want to clarify at the outset here when I supply ‘book notes,’ my system for deciding between the various different bits of information in the legendarium is as follows (along with how I’ll cite them):
- Information in The Lord of the Rings (RotK, particularly the appendix) comes first, as this was a finished, complete work in Tolkien’s lifetime.
- After that comes information in the Silmarillion, particularly the Akallabêth: the Downfall of Númenor (Aka) and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age (OROP), which concern this particular period (the Second Age) in Tolkien’s legendarium.
- Finally after that comes materials in the Unfinished Tales (Tales, most notably “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”), Tolkien’s letters or other writings.
That has the advantage, of course, of privileging the LotR appendix material that Rings of Power had the full rights to. Often the immediate defense of this series is to note that the creators didn’t have the rights to use the full legendarium and indeed, that shows through – for instance with the capital of Eregion being always called “The City of the Elven-Smiths” because they didn’t have the right to use its actual name, Ost-in-Edhil, “Fortress of the Elves.” But there are a lot of things, like the basic timeline for the war, that they did have the rights to, but disregarded anyway, to the detriment of the end product.
And with that out of the way, onward!
Objectives: Orienting Orc Operations
We started our first siege analysis with the upper two levels of military analysis – strategy and operations – and we’ll do so again here. For those just tuning in, when we say strategy, this is the level of analysis where we decide what objectives are worth achieving and how to achieve them; we could sum this up with the questions “why are we at war? what do we hope to gain? and most importantly, should we go to war at all?” After all, it is rare that anyone smashes armies together simply for the joy of it. Operations are the next level down, often abbreviated to “where do we fight?” which focuses on the question of actually moving your military forces to the fight, because it turns out moving large armies is quite hard.
The reason we begin here is that military actions are, when they’re well planned, planned from the top downward through the levels of analysis: one first decides what overall state objectives are, then if they need a war to achieve them (these are both strategy), then how to move armies on the macro-scale to achieve those objectives (operations) and then finally how to manage individual smaller-scale battles and engagements to ensure those operations achieve their aims (tactics). So we ought to start by asking about the objectives of this campaign.
And already at this point, Rings of Power begins to fall apart.
The fellow leading this war (in the TV show) is Adar. Adar’s strategic concern, stated repeatedly in dialogue (mostly with Galadriel) is that if Sauron rises again to power, he will bring the orcs back under his control. Adar thus has no particular objectives regarding Eregion itself except that he knows Sauron is there. We also learn, quite early on, that Adar is incapable of recognizing Sauron if the latter is disguised – Sauron disguised as Halbrand infiltrates his camp and is released, his true identity unguessed – though it is not entirely clear to me if Adar knows this. Still, Adar evidently served under Sauron for some time before betraying him the first time around and stabbing him to apparent-but-not-actual death with a spiked crown, so he ought to be aware both that Sauron is a shape-shifter and also that as a Maia, he can’t be fully killed by normal means.
So Adar’s strategic objective (re-)killing Sauron. To this end, he settles on an operational design: marching to Eregion and besieging its capital, referred to in the show as the “City of the Elven Smiths” but which we’re going to refer to by its book name, Ost-in-Edhil, for simplicity. This is, simply put, a bonkers operation to embark on, given the objective. As we’ll see, the task of moving Adar’s entire army is an enormous one, Eregion is itself a major power and the city is difficult to besiege. Moreover, there is absolutely no reason for Adar to suppose, in the chaos of a siege, that his regular orcish warriors can even identify Sauron, much less kill him.
This operational design – a large-scale army movement over vast distances to accomplish a difficult siege assault against a distant land’s capital – is entirely wrongly fitted to the actual objectives Adar has. Instead, this is the kind of problem for which one might dispatch a small raiding strike force or an assassin; in the context of Middle Earth, this is a job for a heroic (or villainous) quest. A small force might move rapidly, undetected, gather intelligence about the political situation in the city to determine who is actually Sauron and then stage a quick, surprise raid against the target. An assassin might do much the same. Orcs might be less than ideal for this mission, but Adar conveniently has also absorbed a bunch of human followers (whom he brands, massively reducing their infiltration value) who might better pose as travelers or refugees in order to infiltrate the city. And of course, Adar himself is an elf, and so might be able to access the city personally in a way that his servants cannot. Notably, later in the series, even while Adar is clearly in arms assailing an Elven kingdom, both Galadriel and Elrond take Adar’s statements seriously; they don’t dismiss them out of hand, the same as they might the statements of an orc.
Instead, he sends a massive army he knows to be vulnerable to Sauron’s mind control and never, himself confronts Sauron, despite the fact that as far as Adar knows, exactly one being in Middle Earth has defeated Sauron so far, and that being is…Adar. Evidently Adar doesn’t need to stay in Mordor to administer his new orcish kingdom there, so it is baffling why he doesn’t make some effort to simply infiltrate Eregion (especially given that Sauron has just shown us that infiltrating Eregion is, in fact, really easy). Burning down an entire kingdom as a prelude for permanent occupation is one thing, but Adar doesn’t intend to stick around! Adar has no intention of setting up shop in Eregion: his orcish kingdom is explicitly to be in Mordor so when this is done he is going home.
Now a bad operational design does not make, necessarily, for a bad story. Saruman’s operation design for the Battle of Helm’s Deep, for instance, was quite bad – Saruman is a dummy-wummy whose plans fail because they are bad – but it was bad in ways that made sense for the character, overcomplicated in the ways a tinkerer might overcomplicate a plan, careless in the ways that a novice at military operations might be careless, thoughtless in the way a man spirit who was driven by bitterness, anger and above all envy might be thoughtless. Adar, however, has been doing both war and trickery for quite a long time and I think we are to understand in the show he is fairly good at both. He opens the season in a flashback successfully tricking and assassinating Sauron, personally, so he must have been quite good at this at some point. He also isn’t driven by overwhelming hatred of the elves: he talks calmly and negotiates with Arondir, Galadriel and, briefly, Elrond just fine.
It is perhaps fair enough that he would distrust the elves too much to try to do the otherwise obvious thing and reach out in a diplomatic capacity to the other elven kingdoms – remember, the elves here are fragmented and Celebrimbor is only one of their leaders and by no means the most important (that’s Gil-Galad) – to warn them of the danger and have them exert diplomatic pressure on Eregion. But I have to confess, I don’t see the character groundwork laid that would explain why Adar opts for such a counter-productive operation design, devoting immense resources to attack an entire kingdom for the sake of getting at a single Maia who may-or-may-not be hiding there.
To take a guess, I think the problem here is that the writers want Adar to be at least somewhat sympathetic in his goals (defeat Sauron, avoid having the orcs re-enslaved), but also need him to foolishly hand-deliver his army to Sauron. That foolishness would make sense if he was the kind of leader who was bloody-minded enough to default to ‘Elf Genocide’ as a solution to all of his problems (this is the direction I would have taken the character), but then he wouldn’t be sympathetic enough for his downfall to generate pathos: he’d simply be a genocidal villain who got what was coming to him at the hands of another, even more powerful villain. That’s a tough circle to square, but I’m not sure I give the writers a lot of credit for the difficulty, because this is a problem they created for themselves.
Book Note: Because of course none of this is in the book material. Adar doesn’t exist at all in the legendarium; the assault upon Eregion is launched by Sauron for entirely different reasons. Sauron’s aim in attacking Eregion is both to conquer the kingdom, as he despises the elves for resisting his control (he desired “to set a bond upon the Elves and to bring them under his vigilance.”) and to recover the rings of power the elves had made and subsequently concealed (OROP, 287-8). In particular, Sauron’s goal in attacking Ost-in-Edhil and Eregion was the House of the Mírdain, where the nine rings were and where he might then torture Celebrimbor and the smiths to reveal the locations of the others (Tales, 228-9). Immediately following he “attempted to gain the mastery of Eriador” (Tales 229) and then “to make himself master of all things in Middle-earth and to destroy the Elves” (OROP 289). So the goal here was to seize the rings first and then either reduce the elves to servitude or destroy them.
That is a much more reasonable set of objectives to lead to an operational plan that includes sacking Eregion’s capital. As we discussed with the Siege of Gondor, attacking the core administrative center (there Minas Tirith, here Ost-in-Edhil) as a main objective in a campaign that ultimately intends to destroy a kingdom makes a lot of sense and was a fairly typical operational structure for pre-modern agrarian state-on-state warfare. The destruction of the main administrative center, especially if it came with the death of the rulers (in this case, Celebrimbor) might well be sufficient to end local resistance and enable the conquering force to consolidate the terrain which is Sauron’s objective, but not Adar’s.
Nevertheless, Adar settles on this as his overall strategic design: he will defeat Sauron by entirely destroying the capital city of Eregion and killing everyone to be sure. I really do want to stress, in terms of Adar’s incredible lack of planning: neither he, nor his soldiers have any way of identifying the shape-changing Sauron, so the plan really is “kill every living thing in Eregion and hope somewhere in there you got the right one.”
Marching Off Map and Screen
What really pushes that strategic plan into absolute, awe-inspiring absurdity is its operational implications. At the end of last season, Adar’s army of orcs had respawned in Mordor, having first been crushed by a falling tower, then slaughtered in a village ambush, then wiped out by a cavalry charge, then utterly annihilated by a massive volcanic eruption. I cannot stress enough this is an army of orcs we have seen apparently wiped out several times in the first season of the show, which appears to take place at most a few months, if not weeks, before the second season, which now springs back to life for the second season, undiminished and with a lot of brand new siege equipment they got from somewhere, I guess.
In any event, Adar’s plan is to march his army from Mordor to Eregion in order to lay siege to Ost-in-Edhil by surprise, keeping his army camped near the city until the right moment to strike.
So we might ask if this operational plan is reasonable from an operational and logistics perspective. We might do careful calculations of the population density of the route, the rate of march, the army’s ability to move supplies given its size and so on. Or we might just look at it on a map:
We’re actually being – if you can believe it – being overly kind here. What I’ve drawn there is the best route from Adar’s position at the end of last season, in the foothills of Mount Doom, to his end objective of Ost-in-Edhil, on the Sirannon River. However we see men loyal to Adar have camps near Pelargir in s2e3 (it’s the one Isildur runs into), and in s2e4, Isildur finds the trail of that army and runs into some Ents who report “an army of them [orcs], maiming and murdering as they marched.” Except Isildur is with Arondir and Estrid on foot (without much in the way of supplies and not traveling for long – they’re on a rescue mission for Theo), so they can’t actually be very far from Pelargir when they run into the traces of this army. Which instead implies an utterly baffling march route that looks like this:
So the show implies that what Adar’s Army does is march from Mordor (perhaps around Mount Doom? Perhaps further south?) either through what will be the Morgul Vale (top line) or somehow straight over the Ephel Dúath in order to get to South Ithilien for some reason, despite it being in the wrong direction and the easier crossings being to the north at Cair Andros. Then they ford the Anduin somewhere in Losarnach, thus moving just north of Pelargir so that Isildur and Arondir can find their trail, which is also baffling because the Anduin isn’t easily crossed south of where Osgiliath will be (this is, in fact, one of the central considerations of the planning of the later War of the Ring), but isn’t yet. Then they march north, around Mount Mindolluin (where Minas Tirith will be, but isn’t yet) and up into Anorien, before moving into what will be (but isn’t yet) Rohan; that region is known in this period as Calenardhon.
But for the sake of all of our sanity, let’s assume that Adar didn’t accidentally take the wrong exit coming out of Mordor and march a full week too far South and instead took the more reasonable first route: a direct shot from Mount Doom, through the Morgul Vale, crossing the Anduin probably at Cair Andros, then following along the White Mountains of Ered Nimrais where the Royal Road will later be, over the Fords of the Isen, through the Gap of Rohan, and then northward through the Enedwaith to the Sirannon and Ost-in-Edhil.
As before, I’ve done my measurements using my paper Map of Middle Earth and by my reckoning that route comes out to, give or take, 650 miles. Is 650 miles a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network? No, obviously not. It is several times over too far to do this thing, so far, in fact that the logistics math doesn’t even work despite the fact that Adar’s army also moves absurdly fast.
We don’t have a good ‘clock’ for how long the events of season 2 take. Adar’s army only departs Mordor in s2e3 (they’re still preparing at the beginning of the episode), and by the end of s2e4, they are in Eregion to be spotted by Galadriel and Elrond’s reconnaissance party (who make no effort to warn Ost-in-Edhil, I might note). The best thing we have for a clock is Gil-Galad’s effort to alert Celebrimbor to the continued danger of Sauron: he sends a messenger in the first episode, becomes concerned at the lack of report from that messenger (shown dead in the second episode), at the end of episode 2, sending Galadriel and Elrond to go check it out, which leads to them encountering the orcs at the end of episode 4, where Galadriel is captured. By that point, to go by the map, Adar’s army is on Ost-in-Edhel’s doorstep (but not yet detected, which we’ll come to next week). All of that suggests this march was accomplished in weeks or even days, rather than months.
Put another way: Adar’s massive army covers 650 miles of unknown dense forest at about the same speed as Elrond and Galadriel’s small group of scouts moves less than half that distance (about 250 miles, by my measure) over known routes in friendly territory.
Is that reasonable? No, not even remotely close. As we’ve discussed, large bodies of infantry, moving over good roads in known terrain might make something like 10 miles a day, 20 in a forced march. But Adar isn’t moving over good roads and known terrain: he is, instead, being forced to cut a road through unknown and heavily forested, apparently largely uninhabited (save for the Ents) lands. And although we don’t see it yet, he is also bringing a substantial amount of siege equipment with him; even if his catapults are assembled on site, that is a large siege-train carrying their components.
Now, you might be saying, “well, do we know the entire route is forested? After all, when we see Rohan later in the timeline, it is a rolling grassland, rather than a dense forest.” And that would be a fair argument except that the show goes out of its way to briefly show us an actual map, which marks the entire route as forested, showing the path the orc army is clearing through the forest on the map. So the show is, in this case, explicit that the army’s route runs through dense forest which has to be cut and cleared as they go.
Now, armies do not generally take unknown routes through heavily forested regions at all because they have few means to reliably find their way through such terrain. Until the very recent past, armies had few ways to determine their location in an absolute sense; they might have maps (although they might not have them, or not have good maps), but just as often relied on local guides. As a result they are going to rely on the road network itself and local landmarks (mostly known settlements) to navigate. But heading ‘off road’ into a dense forest removes all of these systems of navigation. Worse yet, for armies moving supplies (or siege equipment) via carts or wagons, dense foliage is going to make that nearly impossible, requiring an army to cut a road as it moves.
In the rare cases where armies do cut a road through a forest – and it does happen, just not often – doing so is, as you might imagine, very slow, which is in turn a big problem because armies need to keep moving in order to keep foraging in order to keep eating. So this is an army that ought to be moving much slower than 10 miles a day, looking to cover 650 miles, so we might imagine a marching time on the order of 100 days or more to make the whole trip, potentially quite a bit longer given how dense this forest is. Instead, the show has the army buzzing along at something that seems close to 80 miles a day (assuming the trip takes, as it seems in the show, about a week), which is rapidly approaching the speeds where I stop asking, “how much did their horses eat?” and instead “how much fuel did their trucks require?” Although in this case, I’d suppose the fuel for their industrial logging equipment might be more relevant.
As we’ve noted, even with wagons and pack animals, armies could never carry more than a couple of weeks supplies with them at most and were otherwise forced to rely on foraging, which is to say taking food from the local population in order to sustain the army. But Adar has no population in his route of march to forage! Ents and their trees neither eat food that Adar’s orcs can eat, nor can the orcs eat them either. Wild game and gather – fruits, nuts and the like – are going to be woefully insufficient for Adar’s large army. We don’t know how large it is, but we have to assume many tens of thousands, given that he is heading off to besiege a large city and his victory is never meaningfully in doubt despite the arrival of significant relief forces.
As we discussed back when we picked apart Game of Thrones‘ “Loot Train” battle, the main question for foraging capabilities is the local population density, but in these dense forests, that’s basically zero. Meanwhile, Adar’s large army would probably – some back of the envelope math – need something on the order of 20-30 people per square mile in order to have enough food locally available to forage. That’s not quite dense urban terrain, by pre-modern standards, but it is certainly agrarian terrain; that population density is about the average for the American South in 1861. This is an army that cannot take a month-long detour through a forest without starving (or preparing the route in advance); indeed it almost certainly cannot even take a week long detour through a forest without starving, given that we see nearly no large wagons.
In short, this march, which Adar’s army accomplishes off screen is pretty flatly impossible: it would take months to cover the distance for an army that would probably be starving within days of setting out. And that’s assuming the more sensible route, rather than what the show implies, which is that the army comes quite close to Pelargir, a larger settlement likely full of much needed supplies, which it then avoids and does not sack, prefering instead to starve to death.
In the show, we meet some Ents upset that the orcs have hacked and burned their way through their forest. In reality, we’d meet some Ents upset that they had to deal with burying the bodies of tens of thousands of starving and dead orcs, somewhere in Anorien at the farthest.
Sauron’s Slow Wars
Book Note: Even between the appendices, the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, we get at most a skeletal description of the fall of Eregion from Tolkien’s own pen. That said, we get relatively more about the operational context of the siege of Ost-in-Edhil than most parts of the war and it has none of the problems that the show created with Adar’s unsupporting lightning march through dense old growth forests. Just as replacing Sauron with Adar created problems of motivation for the writers (which they failed to really solve) not present in the books, so too it created operational timetable problems.
Whereas Adar proceeds, as above, very rapidly, Sauron is willing to move very slowly in attacking Eregion. Unsurprisingly, an immortal spirit-being in existence since the dawn of the world is able to think on even longer timetables than the Elves. The exact timing of events differs a bit between the appendices and Unfinished Tales, but as noted above, we’re going to follow the appendices. In that timeline, the rings of power begin to be forged in Eregion, under Sauron’s disguised guidance, in Second Age 1500 (S.A. 1500). He leaves Eregion sometime before S.A. 1590 to forge the One Ring and in his absence, the Elves forge the Three Rings. The One Ring is then forged in S.A. 1600 and the Elves immediately sense it. In response, Sauron changes his plan to one of conquest rather than control through the rings.
Sauron’s base of operations is, I should note, already Barad-dûr in Mordor; its construction was begun even earlier, in S.A. 1000. Unlike Adar, Sauron does not immediately open his war on the Elves, even though the moment he forges the One Ring in c. S.A. 1600, they are in a state of hostilities. Instead, he spends approximately 90 years getting ready for what will be the War of the Elves and Sauron, which he launches in exactly S.A. 1693. That’s a long gap and we’re not told what Sauron is doing in that period, but it would make a fair bit of sense if the answer was, “steadily consolidating allies and control in Calenardhon (that is, Rohan) to provide his army a route to Eregion.” No real historical polity moves quite that slowly to prepare for a military operation, but there’s quite a lot of things Sauron might have been quietly doing in that period. He could have been consolidating the loyalty of the people living in Calenardhon, even perhaps quietly facilitating the creation of roads and routes that might enable his armies to move through the region. As his plans grew closer, he might also have established magazines – supply depots, in this case, of grain, not ammunition – so that his army, rather than foraging along the route, could move from one grain stockpile to the next to sustain its supply, allowing a quicker march. He might even have established something akin to the Spanish Road that Spain used to move troops to Flanders during the Eighty Years War (1566-1648), a network of agreements, supply bases and routes enabling troops to move over foreign territory.
Sauron then opens his war in S.A. 1693 (RotK 415) but does not immediately rush to besiege the capital. Instead, it is in 1695 that Sauron “invades Eriador” (RotK 416; Tales 228 – note that the war beginning two years earlier is a detail not included in Tales). Then the fall of Ost-in-Edhil, represented in Tales as if it happens immediately in 1695 is, in the appendices (RotK 416 again) clearly noted to happen (as it involves the death of Celebrimbor, a dated event) in 1697, two years later. Then Sauron takes two more years to consolidate Eriador (the larger region of which Eregion is a subunit), a task completed in S.A. 1699. The appendices timeline is a bit more extended than what is implied in Unfinished Tales (though it doesn’t directly contradict anything in Tales) and is, I think, to be preferred.
This is a much more reasonable operational plan. Sauron presumably spends decades building the alliances necessary to both assemble his armies and pave the road from Mordor to Eregion. He opens direct hostilities in S.A. 1693, presumably marching his main forces from Mordor to southern Eriador in that year and then perhaps engaging in operations to both consolidate his logistical position (perhaps bringing over the peoples of Enedwaith and Minhiriath in this period). But he might also be engaged in late 1693 and 1964 in an attritional strategy, drawing out Eregion’s forces and wearing them down in smaller engagements. The normal way to do this in pre-modern warfare would be a strategy of agricultural devastation, targeting smaller outlying villages and rural populations, which might both force the enemy to battle but also deplete the local resources – men (well, Elves), grain, supplies, craftworkers – available for the defense as populations move to get out of the war zone. During the Thirty Years War, repeated instances of this sort of ravaging created depopulated zones in parts of the Holy Roman Empire over time. We’re told in Unfinished Tales that Celebrimbor is actually able to drive back Sauron’s initial forays into his lands and that may be in this period or perhaps the two years after (Tales, 228).
Evidently, his position secure, Sauron escalates his operations in S.A. 1695 as this marks the beginning of the ‘invasion,’ which may simply mean that rather than seasonal raiding where Sauron’s forces return south to the Gap of Rohan or Enedwaith, Sauron’s forces moved into Eregion on a permanent basis. Yet it takes two more years for Ost-in-Edhil to fall and Celebrimbor to be slain. We’ll come back later int he series to what we might imagine, with some historical thinking, Sauron might have been doing doing the two years between his invasion and the fall of Ost-in-Edhil in a later part of the series. But for now, I want to note that for a large-scale expeditionary operation, this timeline makes sense. It probably didn’t take two years to move the army from Mordor to Eregion, but it might well have taken two years (which is to say, two fighting seasons) to establish a permanent base of operations in Eriador and weaken Eregion enough to provide for an invasion and continual presence. Pre-modern warfare could often be slow and creeping like this, with each side using strategies of agricultural devastation or attacks on smaller settlements to try to set favorable conditions for a battle or to lay the logistics prerequisites for a long, large-scale siege.
Meanwhile, of course, Sauron ends up aiming to consolidate all of Eriador (RotK 416, Tales 299), so a major multi-year invasion with a large army intending to set a permanent presence in the region makes a lot more operational sense than Adar’s plan to try to use an army to assassinate a single person neither he nor any of his men can identify by sight.
Building a Better March
So Adar’s operational planning here is a mess: the plot demands his army leap through trackless forest at speeds that would be the envy of Mongol raiding parties moving over the open plains, with no apparent source of supply – which they would certainly need even with their absurd rate of speed – or baggage train, despite bringing large numbers of siege machines, lunging through territory that is treated as simply empty, when it probably ought to be at least thinly settled.
Can we build Adar a better campaign? I think we can, even without resorting to the incredibly long preparation time-scales that we see Sauron, as a Maia, engage in. Indeed, we’ve actually covered historical examples of this kind of long-distance expeditionary warfare before, particularly in the context of the the Second and Third Macedonian Wars (200-196, 172-168). Something like the primary wave of the First Crusade (planning begins in 1095, the actual campaign runs 1096-1099) can also serve as useful historical comparanda, although the crusaders benefited greatly from Byzantine support both in providing a logistical ‘jumping off’ point at Constantinople and initial logistics support, as well as some naval resupply during the Siege of Antioch (1097-1098).
What we see in all three cases is that an expeditionary campaign like this moves in stages, with each stage establishing the logistical conditions to advance into the next geographic area. For instance, in the case of the Third Macedonian War, first, the Romans needed a strong diplomatic position in Greece to enable them to move armies to and operate in Thessaly; this was achieved through the victories of the Second Macedonian War. Then the Romans had to secure northern Thessaly – controlled by Perseus and his Macedonians – in order to provide the logistical jumping off point for operations to get around Mount Olympus. They secure northern Thessaly by 171, then clear the route through Tempe in 169 (which now allows direct access into Pieria, the southern part of Macedon proper) which finally sets conditions for the decisive battle at Pydna in 168.
The First Crusade likewise moves in identifiable, logistics driven stages. First the crusaders have to obtain (and hold) the support of Alexios I Komnenos (the Byzantine Emperor), who provides the market access and food supply to get the crusaders to Nicaea and then from Nicaea into Anatolia. The trip through the rest of Anatolia was difficult as the local Turks – under Kilij Arslan, Sultan of Rum – engaged in a scorched earth campaign to deny the crusaders foraging opportunities. The dire crusader supply position was aleviated once they crossed out of Anatolia into Cilicia because of Baldwin’s adventure in Edessa, which ended up with him becoming the local ruler – the First Crusade is a strange campaign – and thus able to assist in supplying the army as it turned south towards Antioch. The crusade runs badly out of food both besieging Antioch and then being besieged in Antioch, but naval resupply gets them through the first problem and the defeat of Kerbogha relief force (which had besieged them in the city) left the crusaders in control of the northern Levant by August, 1098, providing the logistics base for the final push southward towards Jerusalem in 1099.
I should note that is an absurdly brief summary of the very complicated First Crusade. But it gives a sense of the stages. Part of the reason the core campaign lasts from 1096 to 1099 is that the crusaders need to repeatedly secure their local base of supply, either diplomatically (Constantinople, Edessa) or militarily (Nicaea, Antioch) in order to proceed further.
So how might we apply this approach to Rings of Power? There are quite a few ways for this to go, but let me suggest one vision of an operational plan and how it might be implemented in the story.
Adar’s forces begin in Mordor and first need to secure a jumping off point. Instead of showing him preparing his army in the now volcano-ravaged Plateau of Gorgoroth, we might use Isildur’s escape from Mordor towards Pelargir as an opportunity to show Adar already building up a logistics base in the logical jumping off point: the Morgul Vale. Isildur might see stockpiles of food, animals and siege equipment being collected there once he escapes from those spiders (presumably intended to be some early version of Shelob’s lair?). This would be an example of Adar employing magazines – depots of supplies, mostly food (rather than ammunition) – to extend the movement range of an army. Because while armies are limited by the ‘tyranny of the wagon equation,’ a general can use wagons to build up depots with supplies along his route of march, so long as the territory is safe enough to ensure the enemy won’t simply destroy them.
Establishing those depots might take a few months and can probably furnish Adar enough supplies to get his army over the Anduin and into Anorien. But he’ll then need a new source of supply to rely on. Fortunately, he has a few months while his army assembles and his depots in the Morgul Vale build up. This might be a good time to use most of his human followers. Anorien and Losarnach are not empty, after all, they have a human population (which in the Silmarillion is altnerately laboring under the yoke of Sauron or living in wonder (and then servitude) of the Númenoreans). I don’t think Adar can expect to resupply his army simply by foraging this population, in part because the larger population centers, like, Pelargir, are too far south. But what he might be able to do is use his overwhelming military power and the fact that these human populations live well within his campaigning range: send human envoys to the people of Pelargir and all of the other settlements, demanding tribute, in the form of food supplies to be gathered (by his human followers) along the route of his march. The Romans often treated the cities of Greece this way, demanding that notionally allied (or even notionally neutral) Greek cities supply Roman armies moving past them as a condition of not making an enemy of Rome. A “don’t make me forage you” sort of diplomacy.
Thus by the time Adar’s army steps off, he has a full supply depot at the gateway to Ithilien and merely has to lunge to already filling supply depots in Anorien, filled up by the tribute of Losarnach, paid by those people so that Adar’s army goes west instead of south. Once again, Isildur might be able to witness this, arriving in Pelargir as the people toil under the demands to provide so much food for an army that would otherwise destroy them.
Adar’s next challenge is Calenardhon and here he has a problem. Even if we make this terrain rolling plains (because this is Rohan and I don’t see why its rainfall patterns would have been dramatically altered at any point during the Second Age), that is still poor territory for the sort of foraging Adar’s army might need and yet far enough away from Adar’s own starting bases that he is unlikely to have the diplomatic inroads necessary to repeat the trick he used in Anorien and Losarnach. But I think we can make this work for our story: Adar’s march over the plains of Calenardhon is doubly brutal. On the one hand, his army forages every bit of food it can as it moves, leading to immense suffering among the poor folk unfortunate enough to be caught in its path. At the same time, that forage is insufficient for the army’s needs and so we also see the march take a brutal toll on Adar’s orcs, a way of suggesting in the story that his monomaniacal focus on pursuing Sauron is coming at the cost of a brutal callousness towards his ‘children.’ These sort of harsh forced marches do happen in war, though wise generals avoid them whenever possible: the First Crusade’s march through Anatolia is one such example, but equally Alexander the Great’s brutal march through Gedrosia is another.
Adar’s army thus reaches the Gap of Rohan and the Isen watershed low on food, but we might posit this as a rather more densely peopled part of Middle Earth. The Isen, after all, is a major river and we learn in Tales that during the Second Age, the peoples of Enedwaith were numerous and warlike (Tales 252). In the legendarium, these peoples eventually side with Sauron, outraged at how the Númenoreans have despoiled their forests (for their ships, Tales 252-3); having Adar, claiming to be on a crusade against Sauron, fall upon them at this point might produce a similar result. Operationally, Adar is likely going to want to move his army rapidly into the settled areas, demanding that the towns and villages ‘surrender in advance’ by providing food to his army as tribute; when the warlike peoples of Enedwaith refuse, he storms their settlements and takes the food by force.
Now we’ll come back to Eregion’s dismal scouting soon, but this might provide an opportunity for another set of character beats: Celebrimbor is likely to be receiving reports – distant, confused and incomplete – about what is going on. That might begin with scattered refugees from Calenardhon arriving near the southern borders of his realm, telling confusing stories of strange invaders pillaging their lands. Then, somewhat later, clearer reports of sudden warfare in Enedwaith, of towns being sacked. But the confused and incomplete nature of the reports – which might not offer clarity as to who is doing the sacking – could provide Celebrimbor an opportunity to, a bit more reasonably, dismiss the warning signs of what is coming, removing the need to have Sauron engage in outright mind control as he does in the show. Instead, Sauron as Annatar might gently nudge Celebrimbor to dismiss the rumors of an army in Calenardhon as thinly founded, and discount warfare in Enedwaith on the grounds that the humans of Enedwait are always fighting anyway.
Meanwhile Adar consolidates his control over Enedwaith, resupplies his army and probably winters there, before opening his war against Eregion – still somewhat unexpectedly – the following spring. He still can’t, logistically, dash directly to Ost-in-Edhil because he must suspect its siege will take some time and so he needs to secure his logistics for that. Instead, his spring campaign might open with an effort to draw out Celebrimbor’s army (in the books, Celebrimbor is, in fact, so drawn out; Tales, 228-9) and over a series of smaller engagements in the spring and summer, slowly wear down Eregion’s army. At this point, Gil-Galad is probably sending Elrond with a relief force, but that takes time to prepare and move. Adar, having weakened Eregion, winters south of Ost-in-Edhil, supplied by his conquests in Enedwaith. Elrond leaves Lindon the following spring, but too late, as Adar launches his assault on Ost-in-Edhil at the same time. In the few months it takes Elrond to march his army, as quick as he can, to Eregion, Ost-in-Edhil falls and thus Elrond arrives just in time to see that Celebrimbor has been slain and his disheartened army is swiftly pushed back, leading Adar master of Eregion.
The whole timeline might then be:
- Year 0, Fall and Winter – Supply depots in the Morgul Vale prepared. Adar winters in Gorgoroth, Isildur escapes to Pelargir to find Adar’s men already pressing it for supplies.
- Year 1, Spring: Adar moves his main base to the Morgul Vale in early March, picking up his supplies and setting out into Ithilien as quickly as he can. He has as many supplies as he can carry, which is still only a few weeks worth – enough to lunge to his new depots in Anorien.
- Year 1, Late Spring: Adar crosses the Anduin and picks up his supplies in Anorien and western Calenardhon, which by this point his human servants have had almost a year to prepare them.
- Year 1, Summer: Adar’s difficult march over Calenardhon. It’s a bit more than 250 miles through the Eastfold and Westfold, but Adar’s army is big and moving a siege train and so likely to move fairly slow (6-8 miles a day), plus he’s having to forage as much as possible simply to stay afloat. It might thus take most of the summer to make the crossing, badly straining his supplies.
- Year 1, Fall: Adar arrives at the Isen and demands the submission of the people in Enedwaith; when they refuse he falls upon the country with pillage and slaughter to get the supplies he desperately needs.
- Year 1/2, Winter: Adar winters now in Enedwaith, consolidating his control over the conquered settlements there and stockpiling for the coming war.
- Year 2, Spring: Adar launches his ‘surprise’ invasion of Eregion, seizing smaller outlying towns and pillaging south of the Glandiun, with the aim of denying the kingdom the supplies it needs to resist.
- Year 2, Summer: Celebrimbor sends to Gil-Galad for aid and marshals out his forces to engage Adar. The result is a series of smaller engagements as Celebrimbor disperse to try to defend outlying settlements from Adar’s raiding parties; the attrition begins to weaken Eregion’s armies.
- Year 2-3, Winter: Adar winters south of the Glandiun in striking distance of Ost-in-Edhil, pulling supplies north from Enedwaith. Celebrimbor prepares for a siege. Elrond readies to march.
- Year 3, Spring: Adar’s assault reaches Ost-in-Edhil while Elrond is still marching; the city is invested in late March and falls in May. Elrond arrives too late to save Eregion in early June.
To which the response might be that showing an extended campaign in film is quite hard as compared to simply having armies teleport to each other and then engage in Big Single Battles. But a skillful use of the medium can accomplish this sort of thing! It is possible to represent the slow progress of a ‘long war’ on screen; the second season of Arcane does this twice, representing the slow progress of what is essentially a counter-insurgency mission through montages suggesting that we’re skipping over what are likely weeks or months of operations. Another film that does this fairly well is actually…Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. We hear Boromir speak of Gondor’s long fight against Mordor at the Council of Elrond and, in the extended cut, we see a flashback to the recapture of Osgiliath, an early stage of that fighting. Then we see skirmishes along the Anduin as Frodo passes through in The Two Towers, so that when Sauron’s main effort finally comes in The Return of the King, the audience knows it is the culmination of fighting that has been going on quite some time.
Stretching out the time tables of Rings of Power‘s second season to encompass a few years would actually solve quite a lot of problems, like the speed with which Ar-Pharazôn (who, in the book timeline, isn’t going to take power for another 1,558 years after the fall of Ost-in-Edhil) consolidates power, the corruption Durin III’s ring works on him, and Celebrimbor’s fall and repentance, as well.
Instead, what we get is a massive orc army teleporting halfway across Middle Earth in the space of a single episode. Armies do not work this way. But, alas, getting our orc army to Ost-in-Edhil is merely the beginning of the problems with this siege.
