The Battle of the 5+ Armies

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by tom the eldest

I was quite confused that legolas and tauriel manage to travel from laketown to gundabad and back in two days,despite the the distance clearly larger than rohan to minas tirith.what worse is bolgs army.a massive orc army,no doubt carrying heavy weaponry,can reach erebor in one day,arriving just after legolas.the army is also onfoot,which remind me that rohan,with the best cavalry in middle earth,need three days to arrive to minas tirith(with some obstacles,of course).one must imagine that the orc is doing a painful forced march from gundabad to erebor(well the muscular orc vanguard did,and it looks like the run non stop from gundabad to erebor.poor thing

Throughout PJ's work, he has ignored or failed to comprehend Tolkien's dictum that "Days are days, miles are miles." T worked from Army manuals to ensure that travel rates per day in various terrain on foot and by horse were plausible; he even went back after the book was finished and drastically revised the whole intricate chronology leading up to the Pelennor Fields, where he had to restructure a vast number of moving parts - the Rohirrim, Aragorn, Faramir, Frodo, the Black Host, Gandalf - just because he noticed that some of them were traveling too fast to be realistic.... not that anyone would ever have noticed that the Grey Company took four days rather than five from Erech to Pelargir.*

To PJ, Middle-earth is about the size of Delaware. Thus Elrond can make it to Dunharrow in a couple of days, and Haldir's Elves can cover the 700 miles from Lorien to the Hornburg overnight. (related- in the Jacksonverse, everybody knows almost everything that's going on. Tolkien the signals officer knew that preindustrial communications were very slow and unreliable)

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* Sadly, the extra day he introduced as part of this process reduced Shadowfax' Great Ride to Minas Tirith from superequine to merely stupendous-- (a tiny number of) real world horses actually have covered 300 miles in 78 hours.