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ElanorTX
Tol Eressea
Oct 22 2022, 3:30pm
Post #1 of 10
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Questions about beacons of Anorien
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Because I still don't have access to most of my JRRT material, I'm hoping somebody can help with a niggling question.
Context - beginning of Book V (vol 3) of LotR - Gandalf and Pippin are riding Shadowfax from Rohan to Gondor
Pippin spots fire and Gandalf explains the system of warning beacons
Q: why does he mention all seven of the Anorien ones as if he can see them simultaneously, and why east to west? In-universe, how difficult would maintaining such a system be?
Q re PJ RotK film version
There are more than 7 signals. Would someone please help me with the time sequence? The first beacon is lit in Minas Tirith in broad daylight, then the scenes get darker, until the last one appears in Rohan in morning light. How fast does M-E rotate (or the sun around it)?
"I shall not wholly fail if anything can still grow fair in days to come."
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Otaku-sempai
Immortal
Oct 22 2022, 8:33pm
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As to the last query, Tolkien affirmed that Arda is basically our own Earth. Hours are hours, days are days and years are years.
“Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.” - Tony Isabella
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Oct 22 2022, 8:49pm
Post #3 of 10
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Q: why does he mention all seven of the Anorien ones as if he can see them simultaneously, and why east to west? In-universe, how difficult would maintaining such a system be?
I assume that, in-universe, Gandalf mentioned all the beacons because he wanted to give a thorough answer to Pippin's question. Out of universe, Tolkien presumably wanted to deepen his readers' immersion in the world by elaborating on a part of its history, and providing even more Sindarin proper nouns. Listing the beacons from east to west makes sense to me since that's the order in which they are lit. Maintaining the system would not be nearly as difficult as PJ's ROTK makes it appear. The beacons are placed atop foothills of the White Mountains, all of them in close proximity to the Great West Road, not on remote mountain peaks well above the snow line. In the Unfinished Tales chapter "Cirion and Eorl," wherein the title characters visit the Beacon-hill of Halifirien, we are told of "Beacon-wardens" who were "housed in lodges in the trees near the summit, but they did not stay long, unless held there by foul weather, and they came and went in turns of duty."
Would someone please help me with the time sequence? The first beacon is lit in Minas Tirith in broad daylight, then the scenes get darker, until the last one appears in Rohan in morning light. How fast does M-E rotate (or the sun around it)?
Tolkien's Arda is supposed to be our own Earth in a fictional period of mythic prehistory, so its rotational velocity should be about the same. (In the real world, the lengths of both days and years are not static over time. However, Tolkien disregarded this for years in his calculations in Appendix D, where he gave the length of a year as 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds—the length of the tropical year when Tolkien was writing—though if Middle-earth really was our Earth thousands of years ago, it would have been a little longer.) I doubt Jackson and co. were thinking about this level of wonkish worldbuilding detail, though. More likely, they went with what looked cool.
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Timbo_mbadil
Rivendell
Oct 27 2022, 9:05pm
Post #4 of 10
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"not nearly as difficult as PJ"? Isn't what you quote from JRRT pretty much as it is in the film? (Yes, a little more dramatic in the film, for obvious reasons.)
Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with (…)
Robin Wood 2003, p. 49. "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan – and beyond". Columbia University Press, New York, Chichester, West Sussex.
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Otaku-sempai
Immortal
Oct 27 2022, 10:29pm
Post #5 of 10
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Another thing to consider is that, in the legendarium, the beacons had nothing to do with Rohan; they were intended to alert the citizens of the Fiefs of central Gondor. Riders with red arrows were dispatched to Rohan to call for aid.
“Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved.” - Tony Isabella
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Oct 28 2022, 12:42am
Post #6 of 10
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"not nearly as difficult as PJ"? Isn't what you quote from JRRT pretty much as it is in the film? (Yes, a little more dramatic in the film, for obvious reasons.)
The quote I gave is discussing the Halifirien, which is one of the foothills of the White Mountains, and is close to a major Númenórean road. PJ's beacons are vastly more remote, especially this one on top of a legit mountain peak that, in my layman's assessment, looks like it would require specialized equipment to reach. That's not at all what Tolkien described, and it's what I was referring to when I said the movie!beacons would be more difficult to maintain, particularly in terms of resupply.
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Oct 28 2022, 12:57am
Post #7 of 10
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Another thing to consider is that, in the legendarium, the beacons had nothing to do with Rohan; they were intended to alert the citizens of the Fiefs of central Gondor. Riders with red arrows were dispatched to Rohan to call for aid.
According to Gandalf's description of the beacon system, there were two lines of beacons: one to the north of the White Mountains, for communication with Rohan, and the other to the south, for communication with Belfalas (ROTK, V 1). We know virtually nothing about the latter, but the former were extensively discussed in the essay The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor, in which Tolkien reiterated that the "principal function [of the beacon system] was to warn the Rohirrim that Gondor was in danger or (more rarely) the reverse" (NoMe, p. 390; this is also quoted in UT, p. 315 n35). You are, of course, correct that Gondor also used the Red Arrow to call for aid from Rohan.
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Timbo_mbadil
Rivendell
Oct 28 2022, 11:43am
Post #8 of 10
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while I usually dislike it, let‘s give PJ a bit of leeway in terms of eye-candy here (it is one of my 2 favourite sequences in TTT :-)
Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with (…)
Robin Wood 2003, p. 49. "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan – and beyond". Columbia University Press, New York, Chichester, West Sussex.
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Oct 28 2022, 3:21pm
Post #9 of 10
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Nowhere in my previous posts in this thread did I deny that it looked cool. 
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jlj93byu
Rivendell
Oct 31 2022, 5:07pm
Post #10 of 10
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Another thing to consider is that, in the legendarium, the beacons had nothing to do with Rohan; they were intended to alert the citizens of the Fiefs of central Gondor. Riders with red arrows were dispatched to Rohan to call for aid.
It's an obscure part of the books, but one that I loved when I first read them. I wish they would have included the delivery of the Red Arrow in the film, but alas, we can't get everything we want. My Avatar image is actually a rendition of the Red Arrow being presented to Rohan.
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