Bio-warfare In Middle-earth

[Leaf]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Plagues were once considered magic or "God's Wrath".[...]

Maybe that's what "happend" in this case as well. I think there's the possibility that those plagues might have been natural phenomena that were wrongly associated with Morgoth/Sauron by the people of the West. All we get is their (reasonably biased) point of view which turned into lore and, at some point, was written down by gondorian scribes as history.¹ It's entirely reasonable to suspect that, due to the existing threat and dire circumstances, all sorts of disastrous events were mystified and (re)interpreted as of evil and unnatural origin.

There's, of course, no way of proving that this might be the case, but I think that this thought is interesting nonetheless.

Edit:

1: You can find a way more detailed description of this process in the Note on the Shire records in the prologue of the Lord of the Rings. This text explains how the appendices became part of the recorded history.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Leaf

Maybe that's what "happend" in this case as well. I think there's the possibility that those plagues might have been natural phenomena that were wrongly associated with Morgoth/Sauron by the people of the West. All we get is their (reasonably biased) point of view which turned into lore and, at some point, was written down by gondorian scribes as history. It's entirely reasonable to suspect that, due to the existing threat and dire circumstances, all sorts of disastrous events were mystified and (re)interpreted as of evil and unnatural origin.

There's, of course, no way of proving that this might be the case, but I think that this thought is interesting nonetheless.

Yes definitely an interesting way of looking at it. While Morgoth is the most overtly "Satanic" character, in Letter 175 Professor Tolkien refers to Sauron (indirectly) as "the Devil" and it seems quite possible to imagine him quite naturally being blamed for all sorts of misfortunes throughout the Third Age which would be seen as the Middle-earth equivalent of the Devil's work (although given that all evil derives from Morgoth, I suppose Morgoth is the one who's ultimately to blame.)

It's also noteworthy that as we know, in Gondor Sauron was referred to as "Nameless" and one "who we do not name". The latter in particular seems to suggest a degree of superstition, does it not? But I'm unsure if this is because the name is seen as unlucky or if it's because Sauron was regarded in the culture of Gondor to be an abomination unworthy of even the recognition of a name. It's worth noting that Denethor regarded Sauron as "another potentate" like himself (Letter 183) which, if that was consistent with the views of other Men of Gondor, suggests a more political motive of disparagement: that Mordor was the "Nameless Land" because in their view it was not a legitimate nation and Sauron was "Nameless" because he was not a legitimate person (if that makes sense).

So the question might be: were the Men of Gondor superstitious? Would they see a natural plague as a deliberately instrumented weapon of the Enemy?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The mind of pre-Enlightenment man would consider plague spreading by the air (often in conjunction with earthquakes or volcanoes), by sight, or by touch, but knew nothing of the actual method of transmission.

Why "pre-Enlightenment"? The alleged "Enlightenment"* had nothing to do with it; microbial pathogens weren't discovered until the Victorian age.

Europeans knew well enough what would happen if they gave blankets infected with small-pox to Native Americans.

Actually, they didn't; because what they thought they "knew" was that the Indians would become infected, and in that they were quite mistaken. Rather like Columbus and the Flat Earth this myth is impossible to kill; the story of widespread Evil Whites causing mass epidemics with their smallpox blankets grew out of a single, and entirely unsuccessful, incident, an attempt by Lord Amherst at the siege of Ft Duquesne in 1758. (The smallpox virus cannot survive outside a living host and thus cannot be transmitted via inanimate vectors)


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*I say "alleged 'Enlightenment'" because Voltaire and his fellow salon wankers contributed in real terms very little to human advancement; the Bloomsbury circle or Warhol Factory of 18th-century France. The REAL Enlightenment, the one in which the modern world was created, occurred in the 17th century and was led by men like Newton, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke.

[Andsigil]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Actually, they didn't; because what they thought they "knew" was that the Indians would become infected, and in that they were quite mistaken. Rather like Columbus and the Flat Earth this myth is impossible to kill; the story of widespread Evil Whites causing mass epidemics with their smallpox blankets grew out of a single, and entirely unsuccessful, incident, an attempt by Lord Amherst at the siege of Ft Duquesne in 1758. (The smallpox virus cannot survive outside a living host and thus cannot be transmitted via inanimate vectors)

Thank you. I, too, get tired of hearing this time-worn fallacy.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Why "pre-Enlightenment"? The alleged "Enlightenment"* had nothing to do with it; microbial pathogens weren't discovered until the Victorian age.

On the contrary, Lady Montagu Wortley observed inoculations for smallpox being conducted in the Ottoman Empire (the East always being way ahead of the West at the time), and pushed for the same program when returning home to England in 1718. Cotton Mather conducted smallpox inoculations in Boston in 1721. In 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner discovered immunity to smallpox could be produced by inoculation of patients with the cowpox virus.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Inoculation is not the same - remotely - as the germ theory of disease. It was practical, cause-and effect medical treatment, like the use of willow bark and quinine - and answered no questions as to how diseases are transmitted. Germs would have to wait for Louis Pasteur.

(It's worth pointing out that Lady Worley and Mather were working during the first quarter of the 18th century, still the era of the Genuine Enlightenment).

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I would also dispute "the East always being way ahead of the West at the time"

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Inoculation is not the same - remotely - as the germ theory of disease. It was practical, cause-and effect medical treatment, like the use of willow bark and quinine - and answered no questions as to how diseases are transmitted. Germs would have to wait for Louis Pasteur.

(It's worth pointing out that Lady Worley and Mather were working during the first quarter of the 18th century, still the era of the Genuine Enlightenment).

Certainly microbial pathogens were not "discovered" until the Victorian Age, but they did not discover these in a vacuum. The previous work of van Leeuwenhoek (commonly known as the "Father of Microbiology", who first reported characteristics of bacteria), Robert Hooke, and Spallanzani (who proposed that microbes move through the air and that they could be killed through boiling) were all men of the 18th century.

The "Genuine Enlightenment" has been a period that historians have marked as ending in 1789 (the French Revolution) and even 1804 (the Napoleonic Wars), what is your personal preference? Because I have yet to see any dates cast in stone.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

I would also dispute "the East always being way ahead of the West at the time"

As far as the use of inoculations (variolations), China is said to have practiced it since the 10th century, and, certainly from a scientific standpoint, I would say the Chinese and the Muslims were far ahead of the West prior to the Enlightenment, or at least the late Renaissance. I don't even think the point is debatable.

But I was trying to make a general point, not bicker about arbitrary dates of epochs that historians do not necessarily agree upon, and whether or not the "smallpox blankets" were effective is besides the point. The effort was made, at least twice; thus, an idea, however misconstrued, of biological warfare.

And the actual use of biological war dates back at the very least to the Black Death (most likely much earlier, but my study has been the Late Middle Ages), when Gabriele de' Mussi reported (a very detailed account much prized by Medievalists for its thoroughness) the Tartars had catapulted plague victims into the besieged town of Caffa in 1346:

“The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense."

They, of course, didn't know the nature of the disease, but knew what the effect could be, in much the same way as English longbowmen of the 13th and 14th century never drew arrows from a quiver, but rather stuck the arrows in the ground in front of them during battle. This served two purposes: 1) they could nock their arrows faster, and 2) the dirt on the arrow heads would make wounds much more likely to fester.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Um, Hooke (1635-1703) and van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) were men of the 17th century, not the 18th.

certainly from a scientific standpoint, I would say the Chinese and the Muslims were far ahead of the West prior to the Enlightenment, or at least the late Renaissance. I don't even think the point is debatable.

It seems to be very fashionable these days in a sort of postcolonial self-deprecation to portray the "barbarous West" relative to the glories of the Islamic world as if at the time of the First Crusade. But the fact is, Islamic intellectual progression in almost all fields had been stagnant since the 13th Century while Europe leaped ahead-... yes, even during the High Middle Ages ("Renaissance" is a term which has meaning in art history, but in little else).

As for dating the Enlightenment? I would say for a round number the nine decades from 1637, the publication of Descartes' Theory of Geometry and Discourse on Method, to 1727, the death of Newton. Although there were still ripples in the 18th-century pond, no real waves appeared until the Scottish Renaissance at the end of the century. One might push back as far as 1609 (Kepler), since he advanced a mathematical astronomy (which also, happily, was essentially correct for the first time).