Q: How Did Tolkien Envision Gondorian Armor?

ANSWER: There have been many reader discussions through the years concerning the types of armor J.R.R. Tolkien used in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. For the most part the only armor references are to chain mail, chain shirts, helmets, a panoply or two, and one burnished vambrace. Even before Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movies were produced there were sometimes contentious discussions over how much plate armor should be envisioned in Middle-earth.

Artist John Howe (who was one of Peter Jackson’s design artists for the movies) has long depicted the use of plate armor in Middle-earth in his artwork, even though there is absolutely no textual support for his style. Howe may have influenced Jackson’s use of plate armor in the movies, but that need not have been the case.

In a book like The Lord of the Rings the writer is free to distinguish between cultures and time periods through various narrative structures and techniques. Movies are more visual and audiences have to grasp contextual concepts such as time period and culture very quickly. The Peter Jackson movies used very clever visual techniques to help the audience make the transition between time periods and cultures; the use of plate armor in Gondor most likely complemented this diversity-in-style technique, and may have seemed acceptable because of the popularity of John Howe’s art. Many audience members would have been expecting to see plate armor.

Chain mail is a very ancient form of armor. Mail was first used around the 4th Century BCE. Chain mail was in widespread use throughout Gaul and the classical Roman world by 100 BCE. Many readers mistakenly believe that chain mail was a medieval convention, and this mistaken notion is reinforced by a misunderstanding of a passage in Letter No. 211, which J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to Rhona Beare in October 1958. Ms. Beare had asked Tolkien a number of questions, and apparently had wondered if the Rohirrim resembled the Norman (and Anglo-Saxon) soldiers of the Bayeux Tapestry. In reply, Tolkien wrote:

Question 4. I do not know the detail of clothing. I visualize with great clarity and detail scenery and ‘natural’ objects, but not artefacts. Pauline Baynes drew her inspiration for F. Giles largely from mediaeval MS. drawings — except for the knights (who are a bit ‘King-Arthurish’)† the style seems to fit well enough. Except that males, especially in northern parts such as the Shire, would wear breeches, whether hidden by a cloak or long mantle, or merely accompanied by a tunic. I have no doubt that in the area envisaged by my story (which is large) the ‘dress’ of various peoples, Men and others, was much diversified in the Third Age, according to climate, and inherited custom. As was our world, even if we only consider Europe and the Mediterranean and the very near ‘East’ (or South), before the victory in our time of the least lovely style of dress (especially for males and ‘neuters’) which recorded history reveals — a victory that is still going on, even among those who most hate the lands of its origin. The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’, in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chainmail of small rings. † Sc. belong to our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages which blends unhistorically styles and details ranging over 500 years, and most of which did not of course exist in the Dark Ages of c. 500 A.D.

Tolkien is not saying that he modeled the Rohirric warriors on the Bayeux tapestry — rather, he is only conceding that visually the depictions on the tapestry are comparable to what the Rohirrim would have dressed like. As for any warrior wearing chain mail, you could find plenty of suitable examples from Roman statuary and bas-reliefs just as easily.

As for Prince Imrahil’s vambrace, which some people have used to argue for Tolkien’s use of plate armor, it should be pointed out that the first vambraces were made of leather and worn over chain mail (and thus the vambrace passage in no way constitutes by itself proof of the use of plate metal armor in Middle-earth). In general Tolkien’s descriptions of the arms and armor of various peoples in Middle-earth are so generic and achronological that one can easily make comparisons with arms and armor styles used across a historical period of nearly 2,000 years in Europe and Asia. In fact, the Wilkinson Sword Company even experimented with using chain mail for bullet-proof vests in the early 20th century. Such use may have been limited to the African campaigns and was apparently not very effective. I don’t know if Tolkien was aware of modern applications for chain mail.

The 1 or 2 uses of “panoply” are curious. Tolkien only seems to use them to describe characters from the First Age in the Wars of Beleriand. Bilbo’s song about Eärendil in Rivendell is one such example. At the beginning of the second verse Tolkien writes: “In panoply of ancient kings, in chained rings he armoured him;…” Clearly the reference to chained rings implies that Eärendil’s armor is not really a panoply such as the ancient Greek hoplites or their predecessors wore. Rather, Tolkien seems to be using the word here to mean “splendid array”, a use attested to 1829 and with which Tolkien was probably familiar.

If you are simply curious about what type of armor Tolkien gave to his Gondorian soldiery, focusing on chain mail with various appropriate accoutrements is best. If you are perplexed by the use of plate armor in the movies, you’re not alone. I cannot speak for Peter Jackson but I think my explanations are pretty sound (as best I can recall, I was not asked about the types of armor that should be used or if I was the exchange was very brief and inconsequential). If you are writing fan fiction or running an adventure for role-playing gamers, your imagination should be your guide. If John Howe and Peter Jackson can put plate armor on Gondorian soldiery then you can, too — it just won’t be canonically supportable.

And what about Imrahil’s “full harness” company of knights?

In the chapter “Minas Tirith”, when the reinforcements are marching into the city, Tolkien writes: “And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses.”

Some people use this passage to argue that the “full harness” can only refer to plate armor, which is not true (in a historical sense). The word “harness” can describe many things, including different types of armor. The expression “mail harness” has certainly been used by highly qualified academics, including the late Maurice Keen, an Oxford historian who edited Medieval Warfare: A History. Many modern history enthusiasts incorrectly associate the word “harness” only with plate armor, but as the passage I excerpt from the book below reveals, armor changed greatly over time, especially after the 12th century.

In fact, you can quickly see how 14th century Italian plate armor was worn on top of chain mail in the pictures from this Italian castle Website. That transitional style is described in the excerpt below. And so one might ask if Tolkien could not have intended some sort of blended armor. After all, there is Imrahil’s “burnished vambrace”. But this is a matter of wishful thinking. There is no clear, explicit reference to suits of plate armor in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth writing. You might as well be looking for descriptions of the Model T car that Saruman’s chauffer drove around Isengard. People are projecting a desire for plate armor into the story. If Tolkien intended the reader to envision plate armor on Imrahil’s knights he certainly made it very difficult to justify such a visualization. All we know for sure is that everyone who wore armor was wearing some sort of mail-like shirt or coat; it may have been chain or it may have been overlapping (small) plates.

The essentials of the transition from twelfth-century mail harness to the fully developed plate armour of the fifteenth century may be briskly summarized. Iron plate or hardened leather defenses for the elbows, knees, and shins first appeared in the mid-thirteenth century, and during the following hundred and fifty years protection for arms and hands, legs and feet became steadily more complete. From the mid- to late thirteenth century, the torso of a well-equipped knight would be protected by a surcoat of cloth or leather lined with metal plates — a coat of plates, which by the mid- to late fourteenth century would be supplemented, or wholly replaced, by a solid breat-plate. Underneath, a mail haubergion continued to be worn, while it was still usual to wear coat armour on the outside, although there was much local variation in this. In England, for example, the surcoat was replaced by the short, tight-fitting jupon. Meanwhile, in the early to mid-fourteenth century, the visored bascinet with attached mail aventail to protect the neck was replacing the round-topped great helm and coif for practical campaigning purposes. Visors came in a variety of forms. The simplest, common in Germany and Italy, consisted of a nasal which when not hooked to the brow of the bascinet would hang from the aventail at the chin. Often, indeed, men fought in bascinets without any form of visor. With the development of a fully articulated harness of plate armour, the abandonment of the now largely redundant shield, and the stripping away of the fabric which hitherto had customarily covered the metal, we have reached the ‘white’ armour of the early to mid-fifteenth century. The emergence of plate armour also prompted a change in the knight’s arme blanche. The sword with a flat blade, which provided an effective cutting edge against mail, was gradually replaced during the fourteenth century by one with a stiffer blade tapering to an acute, often reinforced point, designed for a thrusting action against plate armour.

Further on:

While it may be tempting to attribute the emergence of iron plate armour to advances in technology, this would be unconvincing, since the skills required to produce such armour had existed in Western Europe since the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Rather, the transformation of the man-at-arms’ body armour during the later middle ages should be viewed as a response to the challenges of the battlefield. The defeat of heavy cavalry by armies fighting on foot was one of the most striking features of warfare during the early to mid-fourteenth century; indeed, some historians have identified an ‘infantry revolution’ in these events. This is not to deny that infantry had long shown its mettle against cavalry — as when the hedge of pikes of the Lombard communal militia successfully resisted the assault of the imperial heavy cavalry at Legnano (1176) and Cortenuova (1237). Effective military operations in the Latin East, as for example the celebrated march from Acre to Jaffa in August-September 1191, depended upon close cooperation between heavy cavalry and foot soldiers, the latter screening the knights and their vulnerable warhorses, with crossbowmen keeping Turkish horse archers at a distance. Yet what we see at the turn of the fourteenth century is something rather different: armies built around foot soldiers, with little or no involvement for aristocratic warriors, and bounded together by a solidarity founded upon common purpose and high morale. Armies of this kind triumphed repeatedly over the flower of European chivalry, with the trend being set at Courtrai (1302), Bannockburn (1314), and Mortgarten (1315). The vividly carved scenes on the Courtrai chest show the Flemish communal armies as well-equipped foot soldiers, uniformed, and fighting beneath guild banners. A wealth of pictorial evidence suggests that the urban militias of Italy were equipped to a similar standard. With the Scots and Swiss, however, we find smaller armies drawn in the main from the men of the countryside, peasant infantry fighting in the cause of independence. A front-like Scottish pikeman might have been equipped in mail haubergeon or quilted aketon, with an iron cap or kettle hat, and gauntlets, but most of those behind him in the shiltrom would have lacked body armour.

What we can see from these passages is that Tolkien did not include these kinds of late medieval tactics in his battles. He has chain-mail wearing Riders of Rohan charging en masse against enemy forces that lacked pikes and crossbows. He has chain-mail wearing Men of Gondor running and riding into battle against a wide array of foes without concern for protecting the cavalry against missile weapons and ambushes (which were a popular tactic used against armored knights).

Tolkien’s warfare is heroic and picturesque, but it is also relatively simple. The armies lined up and charged each other from the First Age to the Third Age. Aragorn and Eomer most likely continued to use that classical era, early medieval era style of warfare into the Fourth Age. While it may seem appealing to some readers to imagine Gondorian cavalry riding out in full plate armor against the Orcs and Southrons, Tolkien knew a great deal about medieval history and he himself had been a soldier. He would have understood how ridiculous that would seem to his contemporary readers, at least those who were educated.

Many people today hold to firmly entrenched beliefs about medieval warfare, Tolkien’s fiction, and Middle-earth in general that are simply not supported by the texts. You’re free to imagine Middle-earth working any way you wish but if you want to picture the arms and armor the way Tolkien probably did, you have to understand how the battlefield tactics he described would have depended upon the arms and armor being used. Would Sauron really have sent his servants into war after long preparation using the wrong arms and armor?

I’m sorry, but there is just no way to show from what J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that Imrahil’s knights were wearing full suits of plate armor.

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