What are the possible drawbacks in terms of its ability to withstand sieges and incursions?
Or is this actually the pinnacle of castle design and the only reason we haven't seen it in real life is due to lack of resources and ingenuity during the time when it would've been most effective?
The first walls should be star shaped
Orcs would be fearless sappers, they'd just meatwave it through trenches leading up and blow the walls open.
The problem here is that the defenders can't reach anyone who's standing next to the wall with their bows, since the thing is curved the wrong way.
can't they dump rocks or burning oil or whatever on them? I mean yeah you're right starshape would be massively better though
Well, they can try, but it's a lot more difficult that way. The wall doesn't even have battlements, so just standing on top of it exposes you to a lot of potential abuse.
tho pretty challenging terrain leading up to it. if nothing else in the battle they had siege towers and shit but none of that worked out for them, they had to go through the gate. few hundred feet of vertical with cliffy rock foot hills. wall itself can't be damaged. like, not disagreeing with you that it's not an optimal defense pattern, though since it was an organic walled city not intended that way originally kinda realistic too.
I really hope the people who made these drawings weren't actually trained, because this is how I was making drawings when I was like 12.
That's just how medieval drawing were.
Pic related is more than 30.000 years old, the dude who made this was born in the wrong era.
>the animals on the right
Most of those were done by amatures. Only those super wealthy and interested in arts could afford to sustain their own artists for extended periods of time, and artists themselves were few and far between because every new artist on the market means even less work for existing artists.
There's periods of artistic moronation that come by every now and then. Just look at western animation these days, it's all disgusting pixarshit and calarts crap. Even the shittiest low effort toy commercial cartoon from the 80s dabbed all over it.
Early Medieval period people just lost all artistic ability in Europe. They literally lost the concept drawing perspective and depth.
Asia for example, didn't Chinese has concepts of perspective and depth, here is Chinese art that corresponds to early medieval period in Europe
frick that's the wrong image, I meant this one.
>posts an image with clearly no conception of perspective
What?
>frick that's the wrong image
It's frick alright!
Not to mention the besieging soldiers are chopping down the castle with scythes.
>Orcs would be fearless sappers, they'd just meatwave it through trenches leading up and blow the walls open.
first walls are literally invincible though, same stuff as that tower rainbow pride wizard was in. gate was only way in short of flying
Only if you have water mages.
If I remember right, the first portion built was the citadel at the top. Then the city grew up around it and finally the massive ring wall was built around the city after Minas Ithil got all spoopy. The whole thing you see as Minas Tirith wasn't purpose-built as a castle in that sense. It's more a very well-fortified city with a castle at the top.
Tolkiengays please correct me if I'm wrong here.
You are right.
Minas Tirith only grew becauae Minas Ithil and Osgiliath got fricked.
The citadel was merely a fort that would protect the western flank of Osgiliath in the beginning.
Star shaped walls, deep moats, extra ballista emplacements for AA and trolls, I think, would be worthy additions.
Also, a canal that would connect the city to the river of Osgiliath or cut a path to Dol Amroth for both supplies and speedy reinforcements.
This wound undoubtedly put the city on the level of Constantinople level of autism.
fortifications are worthless if you cannot man them properly.
Snow and rockslides cause continuous damage.
Orc probably would be insane enough to attack from cliff face or throw stuff from the top.
what do they eat?
Pelenor fields (the fields surrounding the city) were supposed to contain a significant volume of farmland, and were in the book protected by enormous walls on all sides. Also there is a huge river and major port within a days walk.
You never want to build a fortification such that an attacker can have the high ground.
Frick off, Dien Bien Phu is unbreakable!
Castles are about controlling an area.
That area appears to produce no food. Before modern transportation living far from food production was a death sentence.
An army would merely siege it by preventing long distance food imports.
ok
Road design is logistical nightmare.
I can see my house!
I wanna build it in C:S
I won't. But I wanna
I'd be more worried about avalanches in winter and rockslides in spring.
Wasn't the first wall supposed to be black since it was built like Orthanc
I believe only the gate was made with the same material. It's why they needed the big ram
>For the main wall of the City was of great height and marvellous thickness, built ere the power and craft of Númenor waned in exile; and its outward face was like to the Tower of Orthanc, hard and dark and smooth, unconquerable by steel or fire, unbreakable except by some convulsion that would rend the very earth on which it stood.
I stand corrected
peter jackson is a fricking hack
>Despite the Orcs engaging in a cowardly and disorganized retreat, many Easterlings and Haradrim held their ground and fought proudly to the death, delaying the Western host and allowing others to rout.
You will never see the battle betwen mix of Knights of Dol Amroth and Rohirrims vs Easterlings, fighting to the death over every single shed, burned farm and grove.
The Jackson movies were a thousand times more interesting than the tedious books and the Bakshi version was a thousand times better than the Jackson version.
I have never encountered a good fantasy read. Doesn’t fricking exist. It’s all garbage.
Death of western civilization, encapsulated in one PrepHole post.
Eat shit fantasycuck losers
Do you own a gun?
>t. literally moronic
>I so brain dead that I can't imagine things or let them play out in my head without a visual aid
It’s a garbage book. Crappy tedious writing. Try reading a real book and you’ll understand, dumbass
give me the title of your real book then
you contrairian jackoff
Just finished Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Currently reading Andrew Alexis’s Childhood and an anthology of ancient near eastern literature
André Alexis*
thanks i hate it
That looks amazing.
aislop
Yeah, the movies made the bottom level white too because they'd basically been coding black as "evil" for the entire movie and felt like it might confuse audiences, and felt like it fit the name "the White City" better.
is very lore accurate, the books describe Minas Tirith as being much wider than the movies and having green farms all around it to feed the city.
I feel being on a mountain like that is worse than being on top or in the open. It's easier to surround and siege the castle as normally the attacker had to take into consideration a sortie by the defender if they don't spread their troops enough.
The only way to redeem it is if the mountain has underground tunnels to allow supplies in and armies out.
inb4 muh concentration of defense
even with normal sieges, the attacks would be concentrated in a few points.
Was gondor really that low on manpower? Sauron hand access to all the pellenor fieds fter sacking the few soldiers in Osgiliath; there were no gondorian armies to contest him
Anon the ghost army from the movies isn't real. In the books Aragorn and co. were dicking around in southern/western Gondor and gathered an army there that struck against the orcs besieging the city.
>gathered an army there
Yes but why wasn't the army already there? if they had to gather it it seems it was an act of desperation.They had nothing between osgiliath and Minas Thirit
Because Denethor was a hack
To guard the coast against Umbar pirates.
That's because there was nothing between Osgiliath and Minas Tirith. It's just farmland.
Also Denethor was mindbroken by Sauron iirc
>That's because there was nothing between Osgiliath and Minas Tirith
There is a wall around the Pelennor. Faramir was tasked with defending it even though it was hopeless, he was wounded during the retreat.
Could have been a huge problem for the Rohirrim, but moronic orcs couldn't wait for the battle to end to break stuff so Theoden and his army just moved through the ruined sections.
>there was nothing between Osgiliath and Minas Tirith.
They had the BIG wall
My bad, I thought the wall reached up to Osgilliath and linked up with it.
Was abandoned quickly due to a lack of soldiers iirc
Not sure if this inspired the wall aroud Minas Thirith but the byzantines also made a wall to black the approaches of Costantinople (it didn't work)
*block
Maybe. Remember that Gondor also used a system of beacons to quickly spread around news of danger just like the Byzantines did.
My memory might be moronic, but I believe a lot of the aspects of the "exiled" Numenorian kingdoms in middle earth were inspired by the Romans. The western kingdom Arnor fell into ruin while Gondor in the east lived on like the eastern Roman empire, albeit in a diminished state
Not to nitpick but you could argue that the Eastern Roman Empire fared much better after the collapse of the West, not in a diminished state mind you.
Uh no, no one would argue for that.
The history of the Eastern empire post 476 is basically:
>Zeno keeps the place somewhat together but isn't very popular
>Anastasius reign is great and finally stabilizes the empire, there's wide prosperity and the royal cofferes are packed full. He also cultivetes good relations with the Western kingdoms, possibly naming Theodoric the Great as emperor of the West.
>Justin I mostly follows Anastasius policies and keeps the peace
>Justinian launches his massive imperial renovation program, spending all the wealth that his predecessors accumulated in rebuilding the capital and fighting wars. The invasion of North Africa is a great success, the invasion of Italy is a shitshow. The plague then wrecks the empire.
>Justin II is a schizo moron and losses everything Justinian gained
>Maurice stabilizes the situation again with great difficulty
>Phocas betrays Maurice, kills his entire family and the empire starts to crumble under his reign
>Heraclius defeats Phocas and fights a devastating war with the Sassanids for decades. Finally manages to defeat the Persians before they both get attacked by the Arabs. Egypt and the Levant are lost forever.
From that point onwards it is all downhill.
At most you could say that the empire was doing fine in Anastasius and Justin I's reigns, but even Justinian's reign is questionable with the plague and the Gothic wars being a disaster.
stop you killed him, he's already fricking dead
Original anon you replied to.
It really depends on how you want to frame the argument
For example:
Influence/prestige (at least until ~800) i would consider not too diminished. A lot of the germanic successor kingdoms looked east for recognition and legitimacy
Land area controlled, especially after Arab Islamic expansion and especially after Manzikert - extremely diminished
You could, and historians frequently do, debate this for the next 10000 years
It was also done by the Athenians (the Long Walls).
Weren't the long walls just the connection between athens proper and their port in the pyreus?
Yes, when people mention the Long Walls they think of the Athens/Pyreus road, but there was more to it. Athenians just liked building walls.
did they even have enough people to man these?
they build those to keep the spartans and other greeks out
the greeks weren't very good at offensive siege warfare when they where build. So you didn't have to put nearly as many men on them as you'd think.
the wall building that Athens sparked off changed that tough and by the time of Alexander even the sea wouldn't save you from a land assault
They were super effective. Spartan coalition never came close to assaulting it. Athens, with it's vast naval advantage could keep supplying Athens for ever, while enemy did their futile yearly incursions into their territory. Then they went crazy, started to massacre nearby islanders, turning everyone against them, and then they decided to invade Sicily. Which is another point, they were as futile in assaulting Syracuse as Spartans were in sieging Athens. It's possible that Greeks were just very bad at sieges.
Tolkien had a thing against Turks. He noted that in several of his letters. Mordor is practically Turkey.
The walls of Constantine literally saved the city about a dozen times what the frick are you talking about you fricking moron. They were impregnable for hundreds of years
he's talking about the Anastasian walls, a corollary to Rammas Echor.
The Anastasia walls enclosed an area of 4000 square kilometers. The size of fricking rhode island. They were way bigger. Rama’s echor would be indeed more comparable with the theodosian walls in terms of defensibility
The anastasian walls (that block the larger area around costantinople) did frick all, it was almost immediately abandoned
Denethor fricked up. He was a "powerful" man in the LOTR sense IE has a similar set of abilities to Aragorn or Boromir. He wasn't the descendant of the king, but he was from a noble family.
His motivation was to protect Gondor at all costs. Hundreds of years without a king led him to believe a king coming out of the woods to save the country was itself a trick of Sauron. He was corrupted by Sauron through the Palantir, same as Saruman.
>He was corrupted by Sauron through the Palantir, same as Saruman.
I don't think corrupted is the right word for Denethor. He was too strong-willed for Sauron to catch and dominate him like he did with Saruman, so instead he let him watch all the armies he was sending against Minas Tirith.
>He was corrupted by Sauron through the Palantir, same as Saruman.
No he wasn't. He literally possessed a stronger will than Saruman, a literal Maiar. So while Saruman broke like a b***h and became Sauron's slave, all Sauron could do to Denethor was drive him to despair by making it seem the situation was hopeless (which it was, good guys could only win via the literal intervention by the God Almighty).
IIRC there is a whole chapter in the books about that. Minas Tirith gets reinforcements from its province but not nearly as was expected. It's explained to Pippin that the corsairs of Umbar are threatening their coasts and most of the men are stuck defending their ports. Part of Sauron's plans.
Aragorn eventually gets the ghosts to follow him to Gondor's biggest port (this city is more populated than Minas Tirith I think) which is assaulted by a corsair fleet. The pirates are jump into the water out of terror, the ghosts disappear since their oath is fulfilled, Aragorn fills the ships with Gondorian soldiersn now free to help MN, and freed slaves then move north toward the Pelennor, showing up just in time to turn the tides of the battle.
The actual current heartland of Gondor is on the other side of the mountains. Minas Tirith's historical location did not correspond to the current geopolitical situation. It was based on a time where Osgiliath was the capital and most of this map was part of it's empire. What they fail to mention in the movies is that a fricking plague wiped out half the population hundreds of years ago plus nonstop war, both civil wars and wars against the East have devastated the population. Gondor in LOTR is the equivalent of a post-apocalyptic society trying to reorganize. The surviving heartland is the former frontier of the empire that didn't get hit so bad by the plague, strife and war. We never even get to see it in the books other than Aragorn passing through it at breakneck speed off-page with the Dead following him.
So yes and no. Most of Gondor's military is not at Minas Tirith because it is defending the actual population centers from the coastal invasion from Umbar. And Denethor didn't need the full might of Gondor to defend Minas Tirith, that was the point of the city. Sauron's forces could break themselves on Minas Tirith with minimal defenders. But Sauron has fricking magic that was beyond what Denethor could strategically account for.
Why didn't the fellowship just take a boat to Gondor? Looks like it would have been easier than walking through all the terrain.
Also I remember from the first movie that Gandalf goes to some library to study the ring before coming back to the Shire. Was that Mines Tirith? It's a little funny if he just casually made that trip himself in ten minutes and then it takes 3 movies for the fellowship to get there.
Did you not read the books or what I just said? The Corsairs of Umbar had pretty much decimated Gondor's navy and were threatening Gondor's entire coastline with invasion with impunity. Which is why Gondor's military was spread out across the entire state instead of massed to meet the hosts of Mordor.
According to this image, Aragon, Legolos and Gimili had quite the coastline trip and they seemed okay. I don't even remember this part in the movies.
Fug
It's in the extended version. They get out of the kingdom of the Dead after a shower of skulls forces them to run for their lives. They see the pirate fleet and burning city, at what point they seem to lose all hope, but than the Dead King comes out and says they will fight. After that the 3 heroes shout from the shore to the pirates, that the pirates are denied entry into Gondor. The pirate lord responds: who denies us passage?. Aragorn responds: me. Than the pirates laugh and say: you and who's army??. And than the Dead come and exterminate them, while Aragorn says: this army.
Did you only see the movies? Because RotK completely went off the rails from the book. Aragorn used the Army of the Dead to defeat the Corsair's battlefleet at sea not win the Battle of Pelenor Fields. The coasts were cleared for their voyage afterwards to Minas Tirith. The closest this has ever been portrayed in cinema is the first fricking Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
That was a great movie. Literally every other Pirates movie was dogshit, though.
Battle of the pelennor fields is destroyed by this inconsistency. There's no undead there, it's Gondor's Knights (practically absent from the movies) that hold the line, then the Rohirim do the Polish charge from the Siege of Vienna.
It does completely undermine the timely rescue, sacrifice and whole fricking plotline of the Rohirim. For no fricking reason. Like the Elves at Helm's Deep.
God I just looked up this scene and it is dogshit. You have the opportunity to portray a literal army of the undead that moves around accompanied by a choking fog and chill that attacks a naval fleet at sea and scourged the sailors off the vessels into the depths of the sea. And that is what you get. Pete Jackson was a fricking hack and any time he deviated from literally portraying what was spelled out in the books the result was film diarrhea.
How did the Rohirm and their horses stop the easterling elephants?
Blinded them with arrows and herded them into fire ditches. In the books they aren't so huge, just basically elephants.
>Also I remember from the first movie that Gandalf goes to some library to study the ring before coming back to the Shire. Was that Mines Tirith?
Turns out it was. Whilst in the movies this departure is a fairly short one, in the books Gandalf is gone for 17 years, searching for answers. He eventually finds an account of Isildur, buried deep within a library at Minas Tirith.
Dude gandalf was gone for like 2 decades, Frodo is like 50 when he leaves the Shire.
Honestly most of the shit in the books could have been avoided if Gandalf wasn't dicking around so much.
Of course not. At the very least it's clearly extremely exposed to avalanches.
the buildings are too tall, they aren't properly protected by the walls and are vulnerable to catapults and other missiles. would probably be less of a problem if it wasn't built on such a steep incline, allowing better protection by the walls that are already there, or if they didn't waste so many resources on that giant wall around the Pelennor fields and just made the ones in Minas Tirith taller.
If a catapult fires over the wall it's going to hit a building anyway.
True, but it wouldn't be a head-on collision would it? besides, it might just hit the wall behind it instead.
>True, but it wouldn't be a head-on collision would it?
Do you think it's going to matter to the people in the building whether the roof caved in from straight down or from a bit to the front?
>besides, it might just hit the wall behind it instead.
At which point it's going to come straight down on the buildings.
Best version posted ITT so far.
Nasmith is the best illustrator of Tolkien's landscapes, IMO. Pic very much related.
This is my favourite depiction of Minas Tirith, by far.
>Nasmith is the best illustrator of Tolkien's landscapes, IMO.
This. His Beleriand stuff is amazing.
I wonder, could an orc force scale the side of the mountain, trigger some avalanches or shoot arrows down?
>I will send a team of one wizard, one Elf, one Dwarf, two men, and four Hobbits to Mt. Doom, the seat of power for our enemy.
>They will be carrying what is for all intents and purposes the only thing our enemy needs to conquer the world.
>This is a good plan.
Movielet confirmed.
In the books it's all but confirmed that Sauron will win if the status quo didn't change. Destroying the one ring was literally the last ditch effort to defeat him
Then send the ring with an army. It will have better odds than with 9 people.
Boromir brings this up. The problem is that they don't have the forces for a front attack and any large force will be seen by Sauron. They couldn't even send Glorfindel, the chadest elf and living being in existence, because he would be detected.
After watching the Hobbit movies, I was wondering why they didn't just give the Ring to Legolos and have him cartwheel on the heads of orcs all the way to Mt Doom. He was basically Neo.
I wonder what was Jackson's deal with Legolas. In FotR he was relatively grounded and didn't particularly stand out compared to the others. Then in TTW he did that dumb shield surfing thing and from then it got more and more ridiculous.
Maybe elves were actually like that in the books.
They aren't. Orcs in the books are super pathetic too, no bigger than hobbits. Even the uruk-hai (both variants, Sauron created them first) are "nearly man-high." Evil humans are the actually valuable part of Sauron's mustered soldiery.
What about the White Orc guy from the Hobbit movies? He was huge and not even part man.
Anon Azog was fricking dead by the time of the Hobbit. While the LotR movies took some liberties with the story, the Hobbit movies went completely off the fricking rails.
>Orcs in the books are super pathetic too
Comeon, they're not that bad. It's mentioned several times how surprisingly strong they can be. Like the one who skewered Frodo with a spear in Moria.
IIRC this one basically only showed up at the end of the book when the battle started.
Yeah, the hobbits kill several of them with relative ease.
I always figured it had to do with trying to figure out how to make 3 movies on one 300 page book
And he turned Gimli into a joke.
They discuss multiple options in the book. They can't just throw it in the ocean because there's shit in the deep that's scary af. They can't leave it with bombadil because he'd probably lose it and even if he didn't he to would eventually fall to Sauron. They even suggested just sending it to the undying lands but that doesn't help since Sauron is still going to win. It may take a decade or two, but he'd win
>Then send the ring with an army. It will have better odds than with 9 people.
It won't, because the realms of the West have been weakened so much that they can't muster an army that could threaten Mordor anymore, that's the entire point. And hiding the Ring won't stop Sauron and his armies. The only way to stop him is to destroy the Ring, and the only way to destroy the Ring is to send a small party that could theoretically reach Mount Doom undetected. The odds were astronomically low, even without taking the corrupting ability of the Ring into account, but what else could they do? Sure, if Sauron gets his Ring back they're fricked, but so what? If they don't destroy it they're fricked anyway.