The Elendilmir worn by the Kings of Arnor had not the ancientry nor potency of the original; there’s got to be a joke in there about Alan and Don, right? Join The Man of the West and The Obscure Lord of the Rings Facts Guy as we conclude our two-part look at The Disaster of the Gladden Fields from Unfinished Tales. Isildur realizes he can’t live with or without the Ring, Aragorn discovers a piece of ancient Númenórean history, and Saruman is a naughty wizard. We wonder what the Ring makes invisible, decide neither of us will take part in The Isildur Challenge, and wonder if Aragorn can count. Also: will Don write a new TTRPG campaign?
Recommended Reading
Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) (William Morrow, paperback)
[…] of Space to talk about insurgencies, protest movements and pushing back against the state, and with The Prancing Pony Podcast to talk about some of the military aspects of Tolkien’s Unfinis… (for two hours because I had a lot to […]
[…] of Space to talk about insurgencies, protest movements and pushing back against the state, and with The Prancing Pony Podcast to talk about some of the military aspects of Tolkien’s Unfinished … (for two hours because I had a lot to […]
[…] of House to speak about insurgencies, protest actions and pushing again towards the state, and with The Prancing Pony Podcast to speak about a few of the army elements of Tolkien’s Unfinished T… (for two hours as a result of I had lots to […]
[…] of Space to talk about insurgencies, protest movements and pushing back against the state, and with The Prancing Pony Podcast to talk about some of the military aspects of Tolkien’s Unfinished … (for two hours because I had a lot to […]
This seems to have become unplayable/unavailable on both Spotify and Apple Podcast
Alan here; I’ve just tested on both platforms (both on my iPhone and Mac) and could not replicate the issue. Both pull from the same RSS (as does this website, where it also plays), so the problem may be in the apps themselves. One thing we’ve found can help is unsubscribing/unfollowing, closing out the app, then reopening and resubscribing/follow. Let me know if that helps, or if the problem continues – thanks!
I’ve tried all of those and none of them worked yesterday, but both versions magically started working again today for no obvious reason. Oh well. I guess it could be my ISP or just one of those unexplainable glitches.
On a semi-related note, I was listening again to check out Dr. Devereaux’ remark about steel bows since I wanted to comment about that when the episode first came out but forgot since I was busy back then. Historically there _were_ steel bows in India, shaped in imitation of local composite recurve “crab” bows, but interestingly they seemed to have been _less_ powerful than horn-and-sinew composites of similar size and shape; their main value probably lay in the way they could be stored long-term in armouries with little fear of them either rotting or drying out too much. They’re probably also quite different from what Tolkien had in mind since there was nothing “hollow” about them, but it’s an interesting point of reference to show that steel bows were not restricted to crossbow prods.
Extra-long arrows — longer than the archer’s draw length — were not terribly rare either, and in fact we know that Manchu arrows were so big since they usually had a couple of inches of extra length projecting past the archer’s bow-hand thumb. So even accounting for Numenoreans being a whole foot taller than medieval English longbowmen, part of that could have just been extra arrow length, maybe to make it easier to standardise production (e.g. just one length of shaft that’d be long enough for 99% of the force’s archers).