#any given place could have way more or way less people than medieval france bc it's not medieval france

[anghraine]

Just thinking about Gondor, as usual, and how wild it is that the (supposedly minority!) population of Gondorians who speak Sindarin and/or know Quenya at the end of the Third Age is likely higher than the combined number of all Elves still remaining in Middle-earth who can speak either.

Tolkien's specific statement is that more Men speak Sindarin or know Quenya than Elves do either, but while this group of Men would encompass people like the Northern Dúnedain, Théoden, etc, the letter directly links this to Gondorian usage of Sindarin and Quenya. That does make sense given the extreme population disparities involved; the vast majority of the Men in question would pretty much have to come from Gondor. Certainly, the only place where we actually see widespread, casual, local Sindarin usage among Men is Minas Tirith (though we know the linguistic patterns of MT are also characteristic of Dol Amroth and likely throughout much of Belfalas).

In addition, Tolkien tried to make sense of the limited evolution of Gondorian Sindarin by saying it's an acquired polite language among Númenórean aristocratic elites and scholars. In the actual process of writing LOTR there were various explanations (in one draft Faramir explains that Westron is a Gondorian conlang invented for dealings with other peoples, for instance). But Tolkien's standard justification for Gondorian Sindarin being so recognizable soon settled on an idea that Gondorian Sindarin is a language of the elites taught to them in childhood and used as a courtesy or mark of high status rather than evolving naturally.

I've always found this explanation a bit odd given that in the main narrative of LOTR, the Gondorian groups we see using Sindarin in full sentences/conversations rather than for specific names like Mithrandir or isolated words are mainly Gondorian soldiers outside of leadership roles. Faramir's men in Ithilien switch to "another language of their own" that turns out to be Sindarin. In the streets of Minas Tirith, "many" random soldiers call out to each other in Sindarin to gossip about Pippin. The almost entirely Gondorian armies following Aragorn praise the hobbits in Sindarin and Quenya.

But if we take Tolkien's statement at face value, the implication is that Númenórean elites in Gondor (i.e. a small fraction of the overall Gondorian population) outnumber the combined populations of all Sindarin- or Quenya-speaking Elves remaining in Middle-earth.

Many Elves have left or died, yes, but we're still talking about the Elves of Rivendell and of Lothlórien and all the ones scattered throughout Lindon, combined. If they really are outnumbered by Gondor's ruling aristocracy alone, I think the usual estimates of Gondor's overall population must be far too low. Tolkien simply noted that the population of Minas Tirith and its fiefs (presumably referring to Lossarnach, Anórien etc), while declined from the past, must have still been "much greater" than the combined Elvish populations of Rivendell, Lothlórien, and Lindon. That's not even getting into the more outlying fiefs of Gondor like densely-populated Belfalas.

(Alternatively, you could fanwank that Sindarin/Quenya are more widely spoken in Gondor than this and thus the population disparities, while certainly present, are not quite so extreme as this suggests. But that interpretation does require ignoring explicit statements from Tolkien in a way that something like theorizing population based on vague canonical suggestions is typically going to avoid doing.)

[dwellordream]

“...Today, most – though by no means all – free countries (along with a number of rather unfree ones) have shifted from mass conscription based militaries to professional, all-volunteer militaries. The United States, of course, made that shift in 1973 (along lines proposed by the 1969 Gates Commission). The shift to a professional military has always been understood to have involved risks – the classic(al) example of those risks being the Roman one: the creation of a semi-professional Roman army misaligned the interests of the volunteer soldiers with the voting citizens, resulting in the end (though a complicated process) in the collapse of the Republic and the formation of the Empire in what might well be termed a shift to ‘military rule’ as the chief commander of the republic (first Julius Caesar, then Octavian) seized power from the apparatus of civilian government (the senate and citizen assemblies).

It is in that context that ‘warrior’ – despite its recent, frustrating use by the United States Army – is an unfortunate way for soldiers (regardless of branch or country) to think of themselves. Encouraging soldiers to see themselves as ‘warriors’ means encouraging them to see their role as combatants as the foundational core of their identity. A Mongol warrior was a warrior because as an adult male Mongol, being a warrior was central to his gender-identity and place in society (the Mongols being a society, as common with Steppe nomads, where all adult males were warriors); such a Mongol remained a warrior for his whole adult life.

Likewise, a medieval knight – who I’d class as a warrior (remember, the distinction is on identity more than unit fighting) – had warrior as a core part of their identity. It is striking that, apart from taking religious orders to become a monk (and thus shift to an equally totalizing vocation), knights – especially as we progress through the High Middle Ages as the knighthood becomes a more rigid and recognized institution – do not generally seem to retire. They do not lay down their arms and become civilians (and just one look at the attitude of knightly writers towards civilians quickly answers the question as to why). Being a warrior was the foundation of their identity and so could not be disposed of. We could do the same exercise with any number of ‘warrior classes’ within various societies. Those individuals were, in effect born warriors and they would die warriors. In societies with meaningful degrees of labor specialization, to be a warrior was to be, permanently, a class apart.

Creating such a class apart (especially one with lots of weapons) presents a tremendous danger to civilian government and consequently to a free society (though it is also a danger to civilian government in an unfree society). As the interests of this ‘warrior class’ diverge from the interests of the rest of society, even with the best of intentions the tendency is going to be for the warriors to seek to preserve their interests and status with the tools they have, which is to say all of the weapons (what in technical terms we’d call a ‘failure of civil-military relations,’ civ-mil being the term for the relationship between civil society and its military).

The end result of that process is generally the replacement of civilian self-government with ‘warrior rule.’ In pre-modern societies, such ‘warrior rule’ took the form of governments composed of military aristocrats (often with the chiefest military aristocrat, the king, at the pinnacle of the system); the modern variant, rule by officer corps (often with a general as the king-in-all-but-name) is of course quite common. Because of that concern, it is generally well understood that keeping the cultural gap between the civilian and military worlds as small as possible is important to a free society.

Instead, what a modern free society wants are effectively civilians, who put on the soldier’s uniform for a few years, acquire the soldier’s skills and arts, and then when their time is done take that uniform off and rejoin civil society as seamlessly as possible (the phrase ‘citizen-soldier’ is often used represent this ideal). It is clear that, at least for the United States, the current realization of this is less than ideal. The endless pressure to ‘re-up‘ (or for folks to be stop-lossed) hardly help.

But encouraging soldiers (or people in everyday civilian life; we’ll come back to that in the last post in this series) to identify as warriors – individual, self-motivated combatants whose entire identity is bound up in the practice of war – does real harm to the actual goal of keeping the cultural divide between soldiers and civilians as small as possible. Observers both within the military and without have been shouting the alarm on this point for some time now, but the heroic allure of the warrior remains strong.

...But as I noted above, we’ve discussed on this blog already a lot of different military social structures (mounted aristocrats in France and Arabia, the theme and fyrd systems, the Spartans themselves, and so on). And they are very different and produce armies – because societies cannot help but replicate their own peacetime social order on the battlefield – that are organized differently, value different things and as a consequence fight differently. But focusing on (fictitious) ‘universal warriors’ also obscures another complex set of relationships to war and warfare: all of the civilians.

When we talk about the impact of war on civilians, the mind quite naturally turns to the civilian victims of war – sacked cities, enslaved captives, murdered non-combatants – and of course their experience is part of war too. But even in a war somehow fought entirely in an empty field between two communities (which, to be clear, no actual war even slightly resembles this ‘Platonic’ ideal war; there is a tendency to romanticize certain periods of military history, particularly European military history, this way, but it wasn’t so), it would still shape the lives of all of the non-combatants in that society (this is the key insight of the ‘war and society’ school of military history).

To take just my own specialty, warfare in the Middle Roman Republic wasn’t simply a matter for the soldiery, even when the wars were fought outside of Italy (which they weren’t always kept outside!). The demand for conscripts to fill the legions bent and molded Roman family patterns, influencing marriage and child-bearing patterns for both men and women. With so many of the males of society processed through the military, the values of the army became the values of society not only for the men but also for women as well. Women in these societies did not consider themselves uninterested bystanders in these conflicts: by and large they had a side and were on that side, supporting the war effort by whatever means.

And even in late-third and early-second century (BC) Rome, with its absolutely vast military deployments, the majority of men (and all of the women) were still on the ‘homefront’ at any given time, farming the food, paying the taxes, making the armor and weapons and generally doing the tasks that allowed the war machine to function, often in situations of considerable hardship. And in the end – though the exact mechanisms remain the subject of debate – it is clear that the results of Rome’s victory induced significant economic instability, which was also a part of the experience of war.

In short, warriors were not the only people who mattered in war. The wartime social role of a warrior was not only different from that of a soldier, it was different than that of the working peasant forced to pay heavy taxes, or to provide Corvée labor to the army. It was different from the woman whose husband went off to war, or whose son did, or who had to keep up her farm and pay the taxes while they did so. It was different for the aristocrat than for the peasant, for the artisan than for the farmer. Different for the child than for the adult.

And yet for a complex society (one with significant specialization of labor) to wage war efficiently, all of these roles were necessary. To focus on only the warrior (or the soldier) as the sole interesting relationship in warfare is to erase the indispensable contributions made by all of these folks, without which the combatant could not combat.

It would be worse yet, of course, to suggest that the role of the warrior is somehow morally superior to these other roles (something Pressfield does explicitly, I might add, comparing ‘decadent’ modern society to supposedly superior ‘warrior societies’ in his opening videos). To do so with reference to our modern professional militaries is to invite disastrous civil-military failure. To suggest, more deeply, that everyone ought to be in some sense a ‘warrior’ in their own occupation sounds better, but – as we’ll see in the last essay of this series – leads to equally dark places.

A modern, free society has no need for warriors; the warrior is almost wholly inimical to a free society if that society has a significant degree of labor specialization (and thus full-time civilian specialists). It needs citizens, some of whom must be, at any time, soldiers but who must never stop being citizens both when in uniform and afterwards.”

- Bret Devereaux, “The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and…”