Dr. Bret Devereaux

Now, that's obviously something of a perilous situation to be in.

That's a lot of ground for your army to cover.

You really do want some superiority in numbers or quality or ideally both to do that.

But what we're told is essentially Sauron's army is so big that he has enough forces to face in and face out at the same time.

And Elrond, you know, is just isn't given an opportunity to break in, which really speaks to just how dramatic the difference in forces is.

Which is, of course, I think confirmed to us that by how long it takes Numenor to show up.

And so what they think is necessary to make a difference.

Yeah, five years is a really long time.

I would say, as a historian, normally if I would see a lag like that of five years, my immediate question would be, what else is going on?

Normally, if you see that kind of a lag, you're going to poke your sources and find out, oh, there was a major revolt happening over here that required more immediate attention.

For Numenor, that seems unlikely to be an issue.

They don't have other imperial possessions there.

One of the things Tolkien may be thinking is, you know, Numenor's ships.

We don't get, I think, detailed descriptions of the kinds of ships they have, but certainly the impression we get is that these are large sailing ships rather than something like, you know, sort of my specialty is in Mediterranean galleys.

And you can produce a large galley fleet over a winter, and indeed states regularly do it.

Famously, the Ottomans lose basically their whole navy at Lepanto, and they're back out at sea the next year with basically a whole new navy.

It's not nearly as good as the one they lost, but they remain weakened for some time, but they just build a new navy.

You can do that with galleys.

It is a lot harder to do that with large sort of age-of-sale warships.

partly because they're larger and more complex to construct, and partly because you need to build them of aged wood.