[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I agree with you, although whether or not it's stupid is a matter of opinion rather than knowledge. The fact that the armies which opposed both Sauron and Morgoth did not designate their soldiers by number must be significant, as I believe I hinted above. Tolkien's service under arms was not a happy time for him, as indicated by some comments in his published letters and the lecture 'A Secret Vice', and his fiction constantly romanticises a style of military organisation that was already obsolete by the time of the Norman conquest. In LotR particularly, we see that the armies opposed to Sauron are based on leadership by consent, a personal relationship between a commander and his troops, and a very loose system of rank. Mordor's forces, on the other hand, use a numbering system, presumably the more easily to file information about indiscretions, and although they have no clear ranking system we can see in them the dissociation of the soldier from the cause that we see in a lot of First-World-War literature. The Commander in Chief and his lieutenants are distant figures of terror, whom the average soldier is unlikely ever to meet, and all equipment is of poor quality and a standard pattern. My point was rather that the use of the phrase 'name and number' is strikingly modern, and probably found its way into Tolkien's head during his time in the Lancashire Fusiliers.

I would guess that Tolkien was not alone in his dislike of the modern tendency for everything to have a reference number. A common feature of fantasy is a tendency to take place in a pseudo-medieval setting, in which soldiers are volunteers, kings are ring-givers and nothing has a number. What is often forgotten is that the army which fought William of Normandy at Senlac was itself largely made up of conscripts, required by law to serve in the army for a certain space of time. The first detailed survey of the English population, made solely as an aid to taxation, was completed in 1086, and if it does not assign a number to each household this is probably more due to the cumbersome nature of the Roman numerical system than any sense of the individuality of those surveyed; indeed it reduces each household to a financial unit.

In fact Tolkien's armies of light owe more to literature than history. Apart from its reliance on horses, Rohan in particular has an army such as might be portrayed in an Anglo-Saxon poem, although by the eleventh century it would probably not have been seen on any battlefield. Even Gondor seems as though it should be led by a high-medieval vision of King Arthur rather than someone so sordid as the Black Prince. What is truly arresting about that one orc's reference to 'name and number' is that it associates Mordor with the 'real world' of industry, organisation and technology. Good is associated with an idealised society from a literature that has long fallen out of the mainstream, evil with the world that the author had experienced. The message is, I think, clear: the modern world tends to dehumanise and standardise, and we would all be better off living in a medieval poem or an idealised vision of nineteenth-century rural England. The fact that this would be just as intolerable to some people as the industrial world is to others is probably the greatest flaw in the book, and accounts for a lot of the deep-seated opposition to Tolkien as a writer. However, it is a sad fact that whereas many people seem to be able to agree on what is wrong with the world, very few are able to agree on a solution.