Dr. Bret Devereaux

The weight of the pull and the power stroke, that is the distance across which the arrow is being accelerated.

And for crossbows, this is much shorter.

So the pullback of crossbows is way, way high, but the power stroke is smaller.

They can absolutely punch really hard, but it isn't as hard as you might think.

But you do get crossbows with metal bows.

And then, of course, you need like a pulley and windlass system to actually crank that sucker back because human beings are not going to produce, you know, 400 pounds of weight.

And obviously you would not be using a 45-inch long anything on a crossbow.

And these are clearly, like the implication here is these are recurved bows, not crossbows.

So I think the hollow steel bows is a kind of a sort of a neat embellishment of the sort that Tolkien particularly likes to do for the Numenoreans.

I mean, depending on...

Where and what unfinished material you read, they also occasionally have like flying ships and businesses.

Tolkien seems to have never fully decided whether the Numenoreans were ancient and heroic in character or almost modern and industrial or kind of steampunk-y.

Um, and one wonders if he had to publish which way he would have gone, because sometimes it seems like the Numenoreans have advanced technology and sometimes it seems like they are more ancient and heroic and sometimes they're a mix.

This, this seems to me to, to strike into that space.

What I do find interesting is this sort of, like, the Numenoreans are ever so briefly famous for their archers, which is just kind of an interesting Tolkien kind of varying the way he thinks about them.

Because sometimes the Numenoreans feel like Romans.

And certainly, right, like, when we get to Gondor in The Lord of the Rings…

We're told their archers are kind of like, of such they have, right?

Their archers are not impressive.

They're an infantry force, a contact infantry force, which feels very Roman.