Dr. Bret Devereaux

That said, this sort of the way to kill these heavily armored men is to mob them down and get them on the ground.

That certainly tracks.

We see this, for instance, at a battle like Agincourt, where the solution for the English men at arms, particularly to the initial attack by French cavalry, is to pull these guys off of their horses, get them on the ground.

And then at a point, they're having their skulls caved in through their helmets with the fletching mallets.

that English archers carry.

You know, your little wooden mallet for carving out your arrows.

And so, you know, for a man that's really in full armor, especially plate armor, that kind of late medieval warfare, and again, Tolkien's playing with his time periods here.

Because by the Lord of the Rings, at least, no one's got plate armor.

Everybody's got mail.

But if you can get somebody on the ground, the ability to penetrate armor becomes a lot more possible.

And so this idea that they're just, right, they're mobbing one guy down and then the next guy.

And they're just accepting losses in the process of doing that.

You know, certainly...

I think the accepting, the casualty ratio is heroic and fantastical, but the idea that these guys are so heavily armored that the way to defeat them is you've got to wrestle them to the ground.

Yeah, that is how fighting against heavily armored opponents can work.

can work, you know, I think, but I think especially this idea of, right, and he's made it a 200 man company rather than a 300 man force, though, the historian in me needs to note that while everybody talks about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, there were like several thousand other Greeks also there were being like, just off of camera, right.

because it makes a better story.

Even when the Spartans hold for their sort of final doomed last stand, they're not the only guys there.

But it was useful for Herodotus and sort of thinking was basically pro-Greek propaganda to pretend they are.

And so he just kind of lets everybody else fade out in soft focus.