Dr. Bret Devereaux

And, you know, this is a sort of common thing.

And the Romans are doing the same thing on their frontier too.

Classic thing that these states do.

The other reason I imagine that Tolkien may be thinking like the Numenoreans are not a cavalry oriented people is certainly the impression we get of Numenor.

It's an island.

It's not very big.

It's probably quite densely peopled.

They probably don't have a lot of horse grazing land there either.

No, no.

And critically, so by way of comparison, like when the Greeks or the Romans are moving an army around, your ship can carry a couple hundred infantrymen or it can carry 30 horses and it cannot carry both.

Yeah.

Like that's the exchange rate you're looking at.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So moving.

Yeah.

And like, this is a thing we get noted whenever these invasion fleets, whether it's the Athenians invading Sicily or the Romans invading North Africa, like our sources will call out the horse transports because you had to specially refit your ships for horses.

You could throw your infantry on any damn warship and they would get where they were going.

But you needed specialized horse transports to move your horses.

And yeah, depending on the size of your ship, 10, 20, 30 horses on a ship.