Dr. Bret Devereaux

They seem to have a sense that like, we need to send a lot of guys or we're not going to get anywhere.

And we know they're right because Elrond and Celeborn are both pretty good at this and have an army of elves and didn't get anywhere.

If they want to have an army that's going to do more than sit and watch, they need to send a very large force.

And it may have taken a long time to scrape up enough ships to simply carry a force that large.

Yeah.

So what you can do and what order you can do it all matters because everything comes with logistics costs once you start doing it.

So if you move a bunch of guys, you have to feed and supply them now.

So you might not want to move all of your guys first.

Also, your guys might not want to be away from home though.

So you have a lot of different things that you need to be doing in a different sort of sequence.

One of the early things that they would probably be looking to do is first you want to build up supply magazines because you're going to have a large army arriving.

That army is going to exceed the local food production.

And so what you need to do is you're going to want like granaries.

You're going to want to have built up that sort of, that food production, that system to be ready to meet them.

The other thing that you're probably going to be thinking about, because this army is going to arrive with a large age of sail fleet, and that fleet is going to have a long voyage to get to you.

They are going to arrive with all sorts of wear and tear.

Those ships are going to carry spare spars and sails and wood, and they're going to do what they can, but it would be really convenient if they arrived and you had a whole bunch of that stuff ready to go.

I wonder if Tolkien is thinking about, for instance, you know, in the 1700s and the 1800s, Royal Navy facilities along the Thames, which are absolutely massive.

You know, warehouses storing hundreds of thousands of barrels of ship's biscuits so that ships coming in could just load up and then head out.

Enormous amounts of sails, ropes, spars, spare masts.