Dr. Bret Devereaux

Sieges don't usually run that long, but they can.

Right.

Shades of the Elite in the Odyssey and the 10-year Siege of Troy there.

This is something you encounter more in the Unfinished Tales, that these events taking place in the Second Age, Tolkien is willing to make them a little more legendary in character.

Yeah.

and a little less grounded.

And I'm sure we'll see that again in some of these other things.

In terms of what does it mean to invest a settlement?

So invest here is a technical military term.

You have invested a city, a settlement, or a fortress when you have fully blocked off all access and egress from it.

The usual way to do that is what's called circumvallation.

So if your army is outside of a city, you haven't necessarily invested it.

You've invested it when you've closed off all access to it.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the usual way to do this is what's called circumvallation, a Latin phrase that just means walling around, which is to say that you build a line of defensive works all the way around the perimeter of the target.

And it's interesting, of course, the sieges, really assaults that we get in the Lord of the Rings happen so rapidly that this isn't necessary.

They're storming attacks.

One very poorly prepared, one very well prepared.

But either way, like neither army has the logistics to sit around and wait two years.