Bio-warfare In Middle-earth

[Zigûr]

I should have specified that I didn't actually mean radiation, just a poison which might spread through the atmosphere in a comparable way.

Concerning Sauron not using a plague again later, it seems to me that it could be argued that the reason he didn't may have been because he had already done so; his long term plan extended over thousands of years and the plague "stage" of it might be seen as a component which had its specific time and place of execution. Now swift and decisive military force was in order.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I should have specified that I didn't actually mean radiation, just a poison which might spread through the atmosphere in a comparable way.

Oh, ok, I see. Makes sense. But you would still face the problem of the poison spreading to your own people. Supply them all with antidotes? Or have so many that Sauron just doesn't care to lose a few?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Oh, ok, I see. Makes sense. But you would still face the problem of the poison spreading to your own people. Supply them all with antidotes? Or have so many that Sauron just doesn't care to lose a few?

Yes it isn't that convincing unless he just kept it away from his own people somehow (but that would be a very steady weather pattern). I like your suggestions about the pathetic fallacy as well as what has been said by Morth (and myself ) about medieval and ancient understandings of how disease worked.

Perhaps it was simply a disease which arose in Rhûn (where would Sauron have been in the Third Age without Rhûn to hide him and provide him with regular waves of Gondor-attackers?) and which Sauron encouraged to spread West, and perhaps the "dark wind" was a bit of weather he stirred up to increase a sense of doom and despair to motivate people to lose hope.

Or perhaps it was a spiritual malady like the Black Breath, far vaster in scale but not automatically deadly untreated as the Breath would be. What I mean is it seems some survived the Plague or did not become ill, while it appears that if one was afflicted with the Black Breath it seems that death was certain unless Aragorn turned up with athelas in hand.

[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.