What Siege Camp? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

This is the second part of our [your guess is as good as mine] part series looking at the Siege of Eregion from the second season of Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last week, we saw how the logistics of this sequence absolutely do not work: Adar’s army has to cover an absurd amount of territory moving at impossible speeds for infantry. Even if they could move that fast, the entire army would starve to death anyway, given the total lack of logistics. In contrast, the narrative from Tolkien’s written legendarium holds together because it stretches this war out considerably: decades of preparation, two years of initial warfare and then two years of siege, leaving plenty of time for creating supply depots, engaging in foraging operations, or securing supplies through diplomacy.

This week Adar’s orc army arrives in Eregion and begins the process of laying siege to the capital, Ost-in-Edhil: we’re going to look at the process of setting up for a siege, particularly a ‘deliberate‘ assault of the sort Adar is engaged in here. What we find is that both Eregion’s defenses and Adar’s assault are both astoundingly incompetent and slipshod. In a better story, that might be indicative of the main characters’ failings as commanders, but here, to be frank, it seems to be indicative of showrunners and a writers’ room that does not really know how sieges actually work outside of big budget Hollywood action sequences and has real trouble connecting cause and effect in their own plot. That’s not an uncommon failing, even if this siege sequence fails uncommonly.

So we’re going to be talking about about the absurdity of what Adar and Eregion are doing as well as talking about what they should be doing as they set in for a siege. This is a component of the narrative that has almost nothing written about it in Tolkien’s writings, so instead the book notes here are often going to point to situations where the right activities happen in Tolkien’s major siege sequences: the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Despite having these passages as blueprints, Rings of Power struggles and in the end fails to deliver either a realistic or a compelling siege sequence.

But first, as always, sieges are also 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! I promise to use your donations to fortify my camp and then circumvallate my enemies (mostly the academic job market, to be honest). 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 have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

A Deliberately Hasty Assault

Before we jump in to Adar’s plan, I want to review an important distinction when it came to siege assaults that we’ve discussed before: the difference between what Clifford Rogers terms ‘hasty’ and ‘deliberate’ assaults. Often when an ancient or medieval army first arrived at a fortified settlement, be it a city or a castle, they might try a ‘hasty’ assault – a quick, sudden effort to scale the walls mostly by surprise: if you could get on the walls and seize a gatehouse quickly before the enemy was entirely set in their defenses, you could end a long siege before it began. These efforts, using ladders, ropes and so on, were typically only undertaken with a few soldiers because they usually failed. But compared to a long siege, it might be worth rolling the dice on such a hasty assault where little of the army was risked. We looked at Helm’s Deep as an example of such a ‘hasty assault’ poorly handled.

By contrast, both the Siege of Gondor and the Siege of Eregion are not hasty assaults, they are instead deliberate assaults. There are a few ways to conduct a deliberate assault, but the key is that the besieger takes advantage of the fact that time is their ally to prepare such an assault. They might fill in moats, reduce enemy fortifications with artillery (catapults or cannon), build siege towers (‘belfries’ in most medieval sources), undermine walls with sapping or build large ramps to get over walls. Exactly what part of this ‘toolkit’ gets pulled out varies generally by the size and capability of the army in question – there’s a ‘big, well organized army’ playbook for deliberate assaults and a ‘small or weakly organized’ army playbook. But in both cases, the army is taking advantage of preparation.

And Adar is absolutely engaged here in a deliberate assault. He has brought a large army and established a quite permanent camp outside of Eregion. It isn’t a well defended camp mind you (as we’ll see, Adar’s defensive preparations are ludicrously bad), but setting it up clearly took a lot of work, since everything is dug out in trenches. He has also brought a lot of catapults and intends to bombard substantial parts of Ost-in-Edhil into rubble before staging his attack, which is itself predicated on some pretty absurd landscaping and undermining the wall to gain access to the city. And indeed, deliberate assaults of this sort generally proceed in stages, taking advantage of the fact that the attacker can work steadily in safety beyond the reach of the defender’s weapons to systematically dismantle defenses.

But before we get to Adar’s incompetent siege, we need to discuss another problem: Eregion’s incompetent defense, particularly:

How Did We Not See This Coming?

Here I want to jump ahead just a moment to the point at which the defenders of Ost-in-Edhil realize they are under attack. It’s this moment here where, as Adar’s catapults are pulled into firing position within sight of the city, one of the guards on the walls orders to “sound the bells, we’re under attack!”

Now, thematically, presumably, this moment is meant to parallel Celebrimbor’s own lack of awareness: just as Celebrimbor is unaware of the threat approaching him, so too the city knows not their peril until it is too late. Except – and I feel like this may be a separate addendum on this series – that theming makes a bit of a hash of Celebrimbor’s better story in the legendarium. Celebrimbor isn’t unaware that he’s taking a risk trusting Annatar (he’s told this by wiser elves), nor is he unaware that what he’s doing is at least a little morally suspect: he does it anyway because this is a story about hubris (in the modern English sense, rather than the Greek sense). Celebrimbor, infected by the same overweening arrogance and ambition of his ancestor, Fëanor, disregards the risks, shoves wiser leaders (Galadriel, in Unfinished Tales) aside and does it anyway. The show fumbles Celebrimbor’s moral culpability by giving Sauron actual mind control powers and preventing word of the threat reaching him. Celebrimbor’s heroic but futile death is thus not tragic but redemptive: it is the payment not for his mistakes but for his sins. But that’s a point for another essay.

But for now, that’s neither here nor there. What is here is a giant army of orcs and the really important question of why no one spotted them before this.

Generally speaking, large armies of infantry cannot simply ‘show up’ like this. Such an army on the move does so many things which are going to give away its approach that a city is likely to have at least some warning before they show up and indeed those hours or days when it is known a siege is likely but has not yet been laid are some of the most crucial. We actually watch this play out in both the Siege of Gondor and Helm’s Deep, with the book treatment of the Siege of Gondor being the most complete. Of course Denethor knows where the enemy blow will fall – he can read a map as well as Sauron – but we also see a sequence of preparations once he knows the enemy army is on the move. Now Denethor has some supernatural means to get that information, but even without them his preparations wouldn’t have been much delayed: Faramir’s scouts would know the moment the enemy started moving in Ithilien and could have had word back to Minas Tirith within 24 hours, riding hard.

What do those preparations look like? Of course part of it is signalling for help, which in the book narrative begins before Gandalf and Pippin even arrive at Minas Tirith: they see the beacons lighting while riding towards Minas Tirith. As a result, while their numbers are much reduced by the threat of the corsairs, Minas Tirith’s Gondorian reinforcements arrive long before the Witch King has breached Osigiliath. Meanwhile, the defenders also look to move as many non-combatants out as they can and Tolkien reports the trains of wagons and fleeing civilians on foot being moved out of the city. That isn’t just humanitarian: those people eat food and you do not want them as a burden (or an unpredictable, chaotic element). At the same time, as the enemy army moves forward, the people in the rural hinterland of the city are going to flee to the safety of the walls (and indeed, these must be many of the civilians Denethor is moving out of the region entirely). Most importantly, the city is going to want to absorb every last bit of food in the countryside, both to be able to last for the siege, but also to create a barren countryside to starve the attacker. In some sieges historically, such as the Siege of Antioch (1098), which we’ll return to in a moment, this included cutting down all the trees you could to deny the siege attacker the materials to build towers, ladders and so on.

The good news for the defender is that seeing a siege coming usually didn’t require some complex network of watch-post, scouts and spies (although those can still be pretty darn helpful and were used). Large armies preparing for major sieges aren’t subtle! While a small cavalry force can often ‘outrace’ the word of its coming, moving faster than rumor and refugees to surprise settlements, large bodies of infantry cannot. Not only do they move too slow, but the ripples they create in the agrarian countryside are much more intense and so far more obvious. You simply can’t conceal the food demands of 30,000 infantry moving through an area.

What would the defenders of Ost-in-Edhil see in the hours or days before the arrival of Adar’s army?

Assuming there’s no system of watchposts or messengers – a fairly typical well a large kingdom might keep an eye on its frontiers – the first indicator that something was amiss would be what I’ve termed ‘reports.’ In this case, refugees from outlying settlements would begin arriving: small groups of fleeing civilians, folks who know the landscape very well because they live there and who are unencumbered by an army’s size or baggage could move a lot faster than the core of the army. Their reports are likely to be confused: they’re not scouts and they didn’t see the main army’s marching column, but rather became aware of it as foraging or raiding parties hit their villages. So they might not know how large it was, or where it was heading, but they would know that an enemy army was on the move in the neighborhood.

I suppose a response to this is that Elves, being Elves, don’t need outlying settlements, but it’s not clear to me why that would be true. Elves clearly inhabit their forests, glades and vales in Middle Earth, they don’t just live as ultra-dense points of population in cities. And while Elves might be somewhat fantastic in their ability to subsist dense populations on fairly small footprints, its clear they do, in fact, subsist. They seem to eat the standard variety of medieval foods and of course famously bake bread. I think there’s no reason then to suppose that Eregion would be devoid of population outside of the main center at Ost-in-Edhil.

And of course, as discussed last time, if the forests on Adar’s march were really so empty as the show suggests they are, that solves the Elves security problem anyway because it would mean that Adar’s army would starve long before they could traverse the kingdom to reach the capital.

A bit closer, fires and smoke of two sorts would be significant warning signs. If an army is burning crops or village structures, smoke on the horizon might mark their passage. We actually get a scene where Sauron, still in disguise, sees these on the horizon; I think we’re supposed to infer that he sneakily doesn’t tell anything but this is a city of Elves, with famously keen eyesight so it is hard to imagine the soldiers didn’t also see this.

Alternately, the glow of an army’s campfires can be visible quite a ways away. While a human on the ground is only going to be able to see a campfire for a couple of miles, a large army needs a great many campfires (to provide heat but also to cook their food) – that might not seem like a lot of illumination, but we’re talking about societies with few sources of artificial light at night, so the glow of those campfires would stand out on most nights, potentially even over the horizon. It would thus be almost impossible for Adar to conceal his army directly across the river from the city (as he does here), particularly given that his army lights large bonfires.

Now with unobstructed lines of sight, a host of camp fires might be visible for dozens of miles. Now on our Earth the curvature of the earth limits the direct sight range to just 3 miles or so. With a decent watch tower (50ft up) that distance becomes almost 10 miles. Now there’s an odd complication here: Middle Earth before the Fall of Númenor is flat, rather than round (the ‘straight road’ to the West won’t be rounded off until Númenor sinks). Under those circumstances even a single large bonfire might be directly visible for 20 or 30 miles. I don’t have exact figures for how far away the horizon glow of a few hundred or thousand campfires would be, but my sense from the sources is that it is generally more than a day’s march, to the point that the ability of Steppe nomads to move without lighting fires – not shared by orcs who do, canonically, need to cook their food – allowed them to surprise enemies by moving over the horizon: the lack of camp fires would lead enemies to assume they had fled.

Given the slow rate we’d expect Adar’s army to move (6-8 miles per day), fleeing civilians might give Ost-in-Edhil a few days notice that he is coming, while the sight of smoke on the horizon and fires might give them something like a day’s warning (or perhaps a few hours) that he’s in the neighborhood if, for some reason, they sent out no scouts once the panicked survivors of raids in the countryside began filtering in.

What would not happen is exactly what we see: Adar’s army revealing itself as it marches out of the forest to the edge of the river just a few hundred yards from the outer walls of the city. A large army would almost invariably be detected many hours if not days before this point, even just using the Mark One Human Eyeball, much less the Mark One Elf Eyeball.

Book Note: As discussed last time, this problem is entirely avoided by the longer time frame of the war. The Elves do detect Sauron’s approaching host and a force under the command of Celeborn (absent in Rings of Power) advances to meet them: “[t]he scouts and vanguard of Sauron’s host were already approaching when Celeborn made a sortie and drove them back” (Tales, 228. By this time Galadriel and Celeborn who had been ruling Eregion, had been effectively overthrown and replaced by Celebrimbor and his smiths, the Gwaith-i-Mirdain (Tales, 227). Galadriel had left, taking her daughter with her over the Misty Mountains to what would be Lothlorien but at this point is known as Lorinand, but Celeborn had remained behind and evidently took part in the doomed defense of Eregion.). So Sauron’s host is detected, its vanguard repulsed by Celeborn’s sortie and some time passes – two years – before the fall of Ost-in-Edhil and the death of Celebrimbor. During that time, evidently, there was no shortage of warfare in the open, as both Elrond and Celeborn’s forces are active in the area, as Sauron has to hold off both (Tales, 229) in order to invest Ost-in-Edhil – a feat that, as we’ll see, Adar will fail miserably at, but it won’t matter because in Rings of Power nothing really matters.

Just Walling Around

Instead, we see Adar’s arrive arrive outside Ost-in-Edhil undetected and even more baffling seems able to encamp for some time (hours? days?) in the forest directly across the river without detection, like a TV character who only becomes visible when the camera swings around to reveal him standing, undisguised in the open in the middle of the room. Perhaps no one could see them because the terrible lighting.

In any case, Adar remains concealed in the forest long enough to establish a semi-permanent encampment there, apparently unnoticed by everyone. But the form of this encampment is remarkably poorly suited to the task. The orcs appear to encamp by clearing small parts of the forest, digging trenches in them, bracing those trenches with wood boards (from the trees, presumably) and then throwing up their tents inside of the depressions that creates. This is a remarkably labor-intensive method of encampment which is somehow more vulnerable than just stretching some canvas between the trees – after all, should an enemy reach the lip of the trench, they’d have a considerable advantage against the orcs inside the trench. We’ve mentioned this before, but in pre-gunpowder warfare, trenches are not for being in, they’re for blocking enemy movements. You want the enemy to be fouled by your ditch, not for you to be stuck in it.

And these camps aren’t linked together in some coherent network either. Rather, they seem to be strewn almost at random along the forest (although at least on the reverse slope of a hill, so they’re not plainly visible by the enemy – though as noted above, the glow and smoke of their fires would be anyway). Meanwhile, Adar constructs no defenses to shield his encampment from attack or to block egress from the city. Indeed, on this latter point, at the end of the siege, significant numbers of Elves – any one of which could have been Sauron in disguise – will successfully flee the siege.

Remember: Adar’s entire purpose here is to trap and kill a single being he knows can shapeshift and who he knows he cannot necessarily identify. For that to have even the remotest change of working, he needs to be very certain his blockade of the city is complete. Instead he fails to blockade the city at all.

So what ought Adar be doing in the early days and hours of his siege? Generally speaking, there are three initial tasks for a besieging army that have to be accomplished before you can prepare for a deliberate assault and Adar needs to do all of them. He needs to first, establish a fortified camp as a base for his army, then he needs to circumvallate (‘wall around’) the enemy and then he needs to contravallate (‘wall against/away’) his own siege works.

The first step is establishing a fortified camp for the attacking army. The attacker wants to keep the army consolidated in one main camp for command and control reasons – soldiers scattered widely over a vast area are hard to control and might get up to all sorts of counter-productive mischief – and so siege plans almost invariably include a primary fortified camp. Those fortifications might vary based on the situation: Roman fortified camps are quite famous for having a distinctive ‘playing card’ shape regardless of where the Romans put them and for being quite well constructed. Medieval military camps might be quite a lot simpler, often with tents clustered on the basis of various retinues, with a basic palisade or sometimes just a circle of wagons defending the perimeter. Nevertheless, a siege camp was so important that basic fortification of the main camp was often done even before the execution of a ‘hasty assault,’ which, as you will recall, aimed to take advantage of the lack of time for the enemy to prepare (Rogers, op cit., 116-7). After all, even an army that was far stronger than a defending force might be vulnerable to sudden attack while they were unprepared (sleeping, at meal times and so on) and being in a siege meant being in close contact with an enemy for long periods, so a fortified camp was a must-have to prevent those surprises.

Of course Adar does none of this. You can see in the image above his core camp is just a ditch with some tents in it, while the bonfires of his other camps are scattered, seemingly at random in clearings in the forest. If any effort has been made to fortify this position (and no, putting your own tents in the ditch is not a form of fortification prior to gunpowder) we do not see it.

Once the army itself was minimally secure with a fortified camp – potentially several if it was a large army besieging a large city, as in this case – the next step was to make sure the enemy couldn’t easily leave the besieged settlement, accomplished by building inward-facing fortifications running parallel to the defender’s walls, a process called circumvallation, since the attacker is ‘walling around’ the city. Now this practice might strike the reader as strange – why does a besieging army that is much stronger than the besieged force (otherwise we’d be fighting a pitched battle instead) need to wall the weaker, besieged force in?

The answer is that there are quite a reason reasons it might benefit a besieged force to ‘punch a hole’ in the besieger’s lines, however briefly. Moreover, the raw amount of land area the besieger is encompassing, even besieging just a castle or a small town, is substantial, making it impossible for the besieger to concentrate their forces at any one point along the time. Without fortifications, the defender’s army might thus be able to massively outnumber the attackers at a given point – suddenly and without warning, rushing out of their defenses – and break through. That might be in an effort to break out – that is, for the besieged force to escape the trap and break out back into open terrain. But equally it might be an effort to create a gap in the siege lines through which supplies or reinforcements might be moved, lengthening the siege. Finally, defenders might try to break the siege lines at a point where they see siege engines or other works being constructed, rushing out and overwhelming a small number of defenders to destroy catapults, siege towers and such.

Now in this regard, Adar has some geographic advantages and challenges, because Ost-in-Edhil, as shown in the show, is directly on the river (presumably the Sirannon), with rough heights to its rear. Now, few cities in history had such advantageous geographic positions as to have a large river to one side and a large mountain to the other, but conveniently for us one city immediately jumps to mind with almost this exact configuration and it was besieged twice in 1098 alone: Antioch. To give a sense of the geography, here we can see a map of Antioch in Late Antiquity, with the Orontes River to the west and Mount Silpius to the East:

By the 11th century, the city has shrunk significantly, with the result that less of its eastern flank was anchored in the river, but the defensive position was still formidable: the Orontes blocked most approaches from the West, Mt. Silpius most approaches from the East, confining attackers to a relatively narrow approach from the North around what would be the Gate of St. Paul. This was the problem the army of the First Crusade faced besieging the city in 1098 and then almost immediately after they capture the city, the problem the relief army commanded by the Turkish general Kerbogha in trying, unsuccessfully, to force them out again. Antioch was sufficiently big that the Crusader army couldn’t simply blockade the whole of it – the crusader army was large, but frankly not well organized like a Roman army would have been and the defenders had intentionally removed or destroyed timber building supplies around the city. Gabriel Moss put together a really solid map of the Crusader positions:

What the Crusaders do here is set their main fortified camps on the North-West side of the city, keeping them together for mutual defense. But of course that won’t complete the blockade of the city and they do need to seal the city from resupply and reinforcements. In order to accomplish this, they build a set of forts opposite the main gates – you can see Malregard and La Mahomerie marked on the map. These were small, wooden forts – little more than fortified towers – but enough to allow small detachments to prevent anything but a determined sally from breaching the siege lines. Connecting those positions required the establishment of a more convenient crossing of the Orontes so that the far side of the southern bridge could be secured, and for this purpose the Crusaders built a pontoon bridge (the ‘Bridge of Boats’) over the Orontes to link up their positions, which enabled the construction of La Mahomerie and its defense. That reduced the supplies going into Antioch into the inconsequential trickle that could make it over Mount Silpias; declining moral eventually enables one of the Crusader leaders, Bohemond, to suborn a traitor in the city, a man named Firouz, who allowed a small contingent of crusaders to scale a single tower and from there open a gate leading to the fall of the city.

We might expect Adar here to take a similar approach: establish a fortified main camp for the army and then construct fortifications at the ends of every bridge leading out of the city, thus containing the defenders and preventing them from sneaking much in the way of supplies or reinforcements through. Instead, he seems to maintain his main camp – in a large, disordered mass – well distant from the city until his final assault, which ironically is exactly the mistake Kerbogha makes when he shows up to besiege the First Crusade inside of the newly captured Antioch: Kerbogha also blocks the bridges, but sets his main siege camp to the West of the Orontes, rather than to the East (and so much further away), with the result that when the Crusaders do sally, they’re able to quickly overwhelm his forward forces and then quickly roll up Kerbogha’s forces one-by-one moving up the line.

That said, I should note that Adar’s army is clearly a lot larger and seems better organized than the First Crusade or really any medieval siege army. During much of the Middle Ages, deploying just a couple of large catapults would have been a significant effort for a besieging army, but Adar – in a move that feels rather more out of either the Classical or Early Modern period – deploys what seem to be dozens of catapults to barrage the city. If he has the organization, resources and manpower to do that, he ought to have a lot more tactical options than the First Crusade and fully circumvallating the city ought to be little problem for him.

Which would be good because at that point he’s certainly not done. The third, optional but in this case clearly important step was contravallation. Contravallation was when an army also built a second ring of defenses facing outward, turning the besieging force’s position into a kind of ‘doughnut’ with the target city in the center of the doughnut-hole. Not every army contravallates in every situation – the Crusaders at Antioch don’t, for instance. But this was an effective and standard response to an army conducting a siege that had to worry about either raiders or a relief army showing up behind them.

Book Note: This issue – the problem of preventing relief armies from arriving – is explicitly referenced in the treatment of the siege in Unfinished Tales. There we are told directly that a combined army led by Elrond and Celeborn was in the field, but “Sauron’s host was far greater than theirs, great enough both to hold them off and closely to invest Eregion” (Tales, 228). That likely means Sauron detached a large blocking force from his army. This might prevent the arrival of a relief force by blocking key routes, but equally it might do so by harrying Elrond and Celeborn, denying them the opportunity to forage. Ancient and medieval armies could practice this sort of ‘area denial,’ since these armies relied on foraging to remain supplied while maneuvering in hostile or contested terrain. The Romans quite famously do this to Hannibal after Cannae; this element of the Roman war effort is analyzed admirably by P. Erdkamp, Hunger and the Sword (1998), alas, not the easiest book to get a copy of.

Alternately, of course, an army might simply block the logical route into the theater, as the Witch King does during the Siege of Gondor. In particular, the Witch King attempts to block Théoden’s likely arrival by placing a large force – behind quickly dug field fortifications – on the road from Rohan through Anorien, near Cair Andros. Théoden is able to avoid this force by showing some excellent workmanlike generaling: he makes a pact with the leader of the Woses, Ghân-buri-Ghân, whose people live in the area and who shows Théoden a route through the forest unknown to the Witch King, which leads around his blocking force (RotK, 117). Théoden managing to casually sidestep this force is one of his best command moments in the entire trilogy and also neatly explains why the Witch King – otherwise a very capable commander – is caught so off-guard by the Rohirrim’s arrival: he had a force watching for them and had as yet received no word they were on the way and no reason to suppose they could simply dodge his waiting army.

Conclusions

Adar, for his part, ought to know these are concerns: the entire army of Eregion is inside the city, available to sally out (it will be prevented by Sauron, but Adar cannot count on this!) and right before he invests the city he captures Galadriel, part of a scouting party from Lindon, a large, hostile kingdom allied with Eregion to his north-west. Should Lindon dispatch raiders to harry his rear or worse yet a relief army to show up behind him while his army was occupied with the siege of the city, that ought to spell disaster. But of course, this is Rings of Power, so this both happens and also doesn’t matter. Likewise, Adar has reason to be worried that the Dwarves of Moria might show up, as they’re longstanding friends and allies of Eregion. This also happens, but, this being Rings of Power, also doesn’t matter.

We don’t even get the sense that Adar’s assault is ever rendered ‘touch and go’ by the arrival of a relief force. It is both unsatisfying as a story element and also makes no sense – even Julius Caesar finds himself in considerable trouble when a Gallic relief army shows up behind him at Alesia and is only able to salvage the situation because he carefully prepared for this by building an entire second set of fortifications in advance. Meanwhile, Adar shrugs off the arrival of an entire Dwarf Army like it was so many bullets against Superman’s chest, despite having no idea it is coming until it arrives.

And here I am struck by the contrast with both Helm’s Deep and the Siege of Gondor. In the former, the result of the battle is a clear consequence of Saruman’s (bad) decisions. Meanwhile, the failure of the effort to take Minas Tirith is a much more back and forth thing: the Witch King’s operation has a lot of elements to deal with known contingencies which the heroes actions one by one dismantle: Théoden side-steps the blocking force, Aragorn removes the Corsair fleet and arrives with reinforcements from Gondor’s southern territories (or the Army of the Dead in the film). In both cases, there is a discernible cause-and-effect as the battle wavers one way and then other other based on the decisions being made.

By contrast, in Rings of Power – not just in its sieges, but in the whole story – there is so much that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Elrond arrives with reinforcements – as opposed to in Unfinished Tales, where it does matter that he doesn’t arrive – and so equally it does not matter that Adar has failed utterly to prepare for such an eventuality. We’ll come back to this, I think, after this series is done, but equally a lot of the important moral choices don’t matter either, which is such a mishandling of Tolkien’s legendarium and its moral vision.

Instead, the creators of Rings of Power are so intensely focused on ‘subverting’ the Ride of the Rohirrim – a superior storytelling moment on its own than the sum total of their achievement here – that they, not once but twice have relief armies show up at the siege which do not impact the story or the siege in any way whatsoever. But they fail to lay the necessary predicates – to have Adar clearly anticipate this and plan for it – to make that cause and effect make sense.

Instead, Adar’s assault succeeds not because of Celebrimbor’s hubris (would different actions by the defenders have mattered? It doesn’t seem so) or Adar’s planning or Sauron’s clever machinations, but simply because the script says they must.

And next week, we’ll look at how Adar is going to get over the river Sirannon, the most absurd example of a plan succeeding despite all logic and physics because the script says it must.