[Rumil]

Hi again,

lots of interesting points here, I agree with Kuruharan that Saruman could have equipped the Dunlendings with armour. I've always seen the Dunlendings as similar to the 'Barbarians' who fought the Early Imperial Romans, ie Britons, Gauls, Germans and Dacians. Mostly these warriors were unarmoured, though their cheifs and cavalry certainly wore armour and they had the technology to make decent chain mail, probably its a question of economics as chainmail is time consuming and expensive to make. Maybe there's a cultural aspect too. Strangely the wearing of hats amongst the Dacians was a mark of nobility, perhaps armour was only reserved for the Dunlending nobles and not allowed to the 'commoners'? Another thing is that the armour point is based on one of Christopher Tolkien's 'Author's notes', not sure how canonical this makes them, maybe one of the 'canonicity-heads' could comment? Nice point too on the mysterious fate of the missing batallion of Uruk-Hai, Mauhur's lads sound like good candidates. will have to read up before we move onto Eomer's battle.


Ah, Saucepan Man, you're quite right, I wasn't making myself completely clear, in the second post I was considering the total size of all Saruman's forces, as the hobbits saw them leaving Isengard on the way to the Second Battle of the Isen and Helm's Deep. Tuor, I also found that Gandalf had asked Treebeard for help with 10,000 or so orcs, meaning the forces at Helm's Deep. You can usually trust Gandalf for this sort of thing, but maybe he wasn't counting the men and wolves here? Anyway I guess this will be expanded upon over the next two subjects.

I'd agree that the scouting abilities of Rohirrim appear really poor in this battle, no doubt the mist contributed, was this maybe a 'device' instigated by Saruman?

On the eastern force, I can only speculate that the 3 eoreds and the levies were stationed south-east of the ford and were carried away by the rout of Theodred's cavalry returning over the ford, who were surprsed and caught in the flank. As you say, after the pursuing Isengarders drew off, these forces showed their courage by their willingness to return to the fight. I guess the cavalry mostly survived the fighting, but the levy foot might well have been sadly massacred.

As to what the Rohirrim could have done, I guess the first thing is to 'get there fastest with the mostest', they had a powerful army and if it had all ben mobilised and perhaps caught Saruman's forces on the plains of Rohan, I doubt that Saruman could have won, even if he did have significantly more than 10,000 troops. Shows you how important Wormtongue was!