Are the castles/cities in Lord of the Rings realistic?

ratings I'm shad and welcome to my review of the city's and/or castle like structures in the Lord of the Rings trilogy in this video we will be looking at the movie depictions of a Duras ministereth and the Hornburg of Helm's Deep now I love Lord of the Rings okay it's one of my favorite movie series but I'm not going to let my love to this franchise affect my objectivity in my analysis so without any more delays let us begin the first thing that stands out to me about a dress is the size it is about as big as a small medieval city and that strikes me as odd because a Duras is supposed to be the capital of Rohan and as the capital it is just nowhere near big enough especially when we can try and extrapolate how big of an empire and population Rohan would have to have from the size of its army in total Rohan ends up having a pretty darn big military and to build a military that big you need a pretty darn big population and the size of a Duras does not reflect the size that this nation's capital city should reflect now you might say they owe him here I just spread out more they don't consolidate all their numbers in one big location and yet that could be the case it would be a bit different to what would naturally happen because people are drawn to places of security especially in dangerous you know uncertain times like any medieval based period and cities are convenient they have many necessities and luxuries all contained in a closed area being in an area of a larger population provides greater business opportunities because there's more people to sell goods or services to and they would generally be more secure because they are protected by big walls now we will get to the walls of interest because they're a bit weird but my point is that when you have a nation of a certain population they will naturally have larger cities and a Duras does not reflect this at all the next really big odd thing about interests is that I have no idea how these people feed themselves there there is not a single bit of farmland anywhere there's lots of land that's ready to be farmed but no actual crops at all and these people are supposed to be your horse masters ok where are their fields of horses at the moment it just looks like a dress is a small city just dumped in the middle of nowhere realistically there should be far far more signs of human cultivation ok now to the city itself it looks brilliant this is such a beautiful gorgeous depiction of a medieval fantasy like city clearly taking inspiration from anglo-saxon Norse kind of cultures everything looks very realistic in regards to that design style anglo-saxon Norse up just beautiful ABS pure realism right here absolute immersion just beautiful and then combining the horse theme all throughout their decorations and look at the palace or the Great Hall it is just gorgeous and this is one of the things that I absolutely love about Lord of the Rings there our attention to the fine details it is just amazing but they have fallen short on some of the larger details like the size of the city farmland and now let's look at the walls now the walls have a stone base with a timber palisade like structure built atop it now there's nothing wrong with this actual design in fact it looks pretty done good for what it's trying to represent what doesn't make sense here is that it feels very out of place with the technology level that's been established in the Lord of the Rings world middle-earth we know humans have figured out how to work stone pretty darn well just look at ministereth and we'll get there but they know how to make really really effective walls and so it begs the question why on earth would they have a crappy timber palisade when they could have built such better defenses then the technology exists all right it's in the world what maybe the roham ear just don't have that technology well this is what would happen in real life they would hire people from abroad from Gondor and other places to build the walls for them that's what they would have done especially for the capital I mean my goodness this is where the King lives you see that was actually a fairly common thing in the medieval period when a new kind of architectural you know design or principle was developed and built on a castle and people saw hey that looks really good well guess what they did they hired those architects move them over to where you know they wanted to build their own castles and got them to build the castles for them because they know well those ones over there are a lot better I want one like that because I want to protect myself to the very best technological level that has been achieved in our world and so these walls around a Duras really are out of place they are so primitive compared to the other defensive structures we see in middle-earth beautiful gorgeous just look at this city I mean again attention to detail amazing but my first reactions to ministereth is very much the same as my reactions to a Duras the size of this city does not reflect the population that the nation of Gondor is supposed to have it is the size of a small medieval city maybe a little bit bigger than a small one but it is nowhere near the size of what a capital at medieval city would be there should be another very wide expansive you know wall that circles around what we see here all the way to where Gandalf is at about at the moment and then I would say you know it's about as big as I would be happy with but if they wanted to amp it up because this is epic fantasy they could have made it huge and of course the other absolute bizarre thing is again where on earth is the farmland how are these people feeding themselves these fields should look like a patchwork quilt of cultivated farmland now looking at the city's architecture it is epic in scope in how it rises with the sight of the mountain and honestly I think that could be achievable with medieval level technology it would be a heck of a lot of work but we see some just astounding feats of architecture in the medieval period and even a bit before it I mean look at the Coliseum and sorry if a people really wanted to build a city like this I you know think they could it is profoundly impractical okay and why well how difficult would it be to rise up to each new level or just be an absolute pain in the buttock can you imagine if you lived on the second top level or even the third top level honey I'm gonna go see Baba rally but you gotta walk half a mile of stairs just to get to him oh yeah you're right not ever mind I'll just have a beer I feel sorry for the king who lives at the very top you would either never leave there because any time you would ever want to go anywhere in the city he would have to trudge through so many steps but is the king you'll probably just get people to carry him but still do you get what I'm saying it's profoundly impractical especially when you have to move Goods and supplies and stuff like that it would just be a nightmare now there is a kind of you know closest comparison in the real world there's no in here as extreme that's kind of what I mean this is a bit too extreme but the close comparison is Mont saint-michel the difference here is that it's not as tall as ministereth and if there's not as many levels also Mont saint-michel was never considered a city it's an island commune which is roughly equivalent to a civil Township still there are a lot of comparisons you can make with Mont saint-michel & ministereth but if we were to compare them side-by-side in my opinion as I kind of look at it the top of Mont saint-michel would reach about the very 2nd or 1st level up from the ground level of Minas Tirith ministereth is way taller so tall that in my mind it's impractical would I change it you know probably not because this is fantasy and it just looks awesome and epic and I'll probably make more sense if there was a larger ground level where the regular commoner peasant folk would live and then the rich who can pay for people to take them up and down and have things lugged up and down well they can get people to do that for them so the upper levels could be reserved for the noble elite and wealthy where they can look down on those beneath them socially and literally now having said all that about the upper levels of ministereth there is a very very significant advantage that could actually make it more plausible to actually have it on a city and that is in defence having to climb long narrow stairs to get to each successive level would make it such an absolute turd in trying to conquer the city you see there's no real walls to breach on this next level because the side of the mountain is the wall you just have to go up to get to the next level of the city and the access ways would be small narrow stairs which would be very easily defended you would bottleneck any enemy that's trying to get up them their levels are just way too high for a sieves tality even you know come close to reaching without the use of magic and other incredible things that you know could exist in a fantasy world with standard medieval technology I don't see any way how you could actually assault those upper levels now there is duplicity the standard Trojan horse kind of tactics sneaking people in and other things like I'm talking about in a standard assault it would basically be impossible and the only thing that you could do is to resort to a drawn-out siege where you would try and starve out the city so in this sense there is actually a bit of practicality to these upper levels it would make daily living an absolute pain in the butt but maybe the citizens are willing to go through the discomfort for the security now looking at the outer walls of ministereth I just love it do you see all those matriculation 's they look so awesome and they're absolutely authentic these are very legitimate defensive parts of the walls looking at the city's entrance there isn't necessarily a gate house here per se but the design of where this entrance is actually provides almost as much benefit as what a gatehouse would what you'll notice the entrance the door is actually recessed okay from the main outer line of where the wall is and so the wall is traveling around when it reaches the part of where the door is the walls move backwards a bit creating kind of an alcove that you would have to walk through before you reach the door this is a very solid tactical design it means anyone who tries to assault this wall is just going to get absolutely belted by those on the walls that are standing on either side and that's exactly what we see in the goblins and orcs first attempt in trying to take down this door they get absolutely demolished so yes having the main gate of the city recessed a bit into the wall so they can be two side walls for anyone who's approaching it is a very solid bit of defensive architecture but it really should have had a gatehouse there you see proper medieval defences rely upon redundancies if the first line of defense fails we want something a backup that would then enable us to try and fight them off and the gatehouse is a classic example of that not all gate houses had this but many had double doors once you burst through the first door and portcullis that was covering it guess what you had to enter this building which is like a tunnel where at the end of it to leave the gatehouse is another door and another portcullis trapping the people inside and they would then have to deal with murder holes or arrow slits on either side where they'll just get slaughtered it would be a death trap again layers of Defense but we don't see this in the movie as soon as the bad guys break through the first door there's nothing else there they are in the city now and it's Red's chaos in the streets where if they were employing proper principles of medieval defense there would have been a gatehouse behind this first primary door that would have trapped the attackers in once they broke through it's the last thing that I find interesting are the tributes that are assembled along the walls of the city now I've never actually seen any historical cases of tribution catapults or other siege like equipment being set up on top of medieval walls and you know I've done a fair bit of research and again not once has that ever been a topic of conversation or something that has been pointed out the main reason why well I don't think there was any room on the ramparts of a wall to fit trebuchet x' or other seeds like equipment and even on the towers it's rare that you would find at our large enough to be out of fit attribution on it but okay what if there was what if you could there was enough room or even you built enough room to set up a trebuchet would that be practical or useful no because if they ever really did want to set up a trebuchet to fire back at an attacking enemy that's assaulting your castle you would set it up behind the wall lots of advantages in doing that one you're being protected by the wall itself which would make it much much harder for the enemy siege equipment to take out your trebuchet also depending on the size of the trebuchet putting it behind your wall might actually shield it from to the enemy making it much harder for the enemy to use their own large rock throwing devices to launch boulders at your trebuchet and destroy it so yeah it probably would have been a better idea in Lord of the Rings for them to have set up their trebuchet is behind the outer wall so there you go those are my thoughts on ministereth often misidentified as helms deep the Hornburg which is located within the valley of Helm's Deep looks to be a fairly solid looking fortress now is it a castle well it kind of depends on how you define the word castle I've done a whole video on that subject because the Hornburg is a fortress that uses medieval style battlements you can rightly call this a castle though generally most castles would have served as a place of governance and also a residence for at the family that owned it and because of that I actually think it's more accurate to call this structure a fortress instead of a castle the Hornburg was built to defend the entrance to the glittering caves I don't know much about the glittering caves but they must be strategically important hence the need of the fortress itself the small valley itself that sits in front of the entrance to the glittering caves and to the side of the main fortress part of the Hornburg is called the deep and the wall that blocks off access to the deep and the glittering caves is the Deeping wall now the wall has a barrier to prevent people from falling off and there looks to be kind of arrow slits at intermediate intervals kind of making criminals and therefore the crenellations that are classically found on castles the problem is that barrier only comes up to about chest height and doesn't offer nearly as much protection as it should the Merlin's in credence which is the tooth part that sticks up needs to be head height to provide full cover for the defenders on the wall that's their whole point and purpose and so because of that this wall actually doesn't have any proper embattlement at all it's just a wall and that's it and we can see this when people on the wall get shot by the ORAC high down below adds a big fail in the defensive design of this wall and fortress so if you ever see a castle or anything with crenellations on them and they are only coming up to waist or chest height their aesthetic battlements they're not realistic or functional at all the other thing about this wall is that there are intermediate towers or parts on it that extend a bit outwards by having areas on walls that extend a bit outwards and that can be kind of an extension of the wall itself or a tower it provides a platform for arches and defenders to shoot sideways down at attackers who are assailing the walls without any extensions like this the defenders can only really attack those people that are directly in front and below them and then angles to their sides but nowhere near at 90-degree angles and that is a defensive limitation the main fortress part of the Hornburg is built into the side of the cliff itself that can be both good and bad depending on the nature of the cliff it means that the fortress only has to defend one main side so I can't be attacked from behind but it also means that things can fall on it from the cliff above and if people can get access to the top part of the cliff and were to engineer some type of landslide or something like that well the fortress will be pretty screwed if this region gets snow all right and even if the fortress part of the Hornburg doesn't get snow but the tops of the mountains do and they're not too far away well then the risk of avalanche also exists all right now let's look at the gate the entrance to the Hornburg is raised up higher than ground level that is a very proper and defensive feature but then they do not have a drawbridge separating the gate from the ramp that people have to walk up to reach it that is just ludicrous when it comes to medieval style defenses and renders the advantage of having that raised entrance completely pointless yes they have to traverse a narrow ramp which kind of bottlenecks them and that's a good thing but again this is the perfect setup to have a drawbridge and it's not there at all which just seems to defy reason for me the next odd thing about the gatehouse is that there's no secondary door either once they break through the first door they're in there should be a secondary door at the back end of the gatehouse to trap people inside and then you have the fun joy using murder holes and arrow slits to destroy the enemy once they're in there when looking at the Hornburg there's a very big missed opportunity here a river runs all the way in and down under the wall which means they have free running water to it and they could have dug out the area in front of the Deeping wall and made a really effective moat one that ran along the entire length of the Deeping wall and in front of the Hornburg main fortress and keep but it's not there another massively big missed opportunity okay so the Hornburg unfortunately isn't really coming up to scratch at the moment there's been a lot of issues with it there is one thing okay that I absolutely love but and there is a but but I'll get there but first let me tell you why it's awesome this is one of the most effective and awesome kind of designs you can have on a fortress and that is having two main entrances that are off-center to one another look at what the enemy will have to do they ever get through the first gate then second gate isn't directly in front of them and you need a battering ram or something to knock down the front door and battering rams are usually long but once you get through the first door you need to make a hard left turn 90-degree left turn angle and if the battering ram is too long it won't be able to fit around that corner and then you'd go around in a loop to another door or another entrance and this is a narrow corridor that would be an absolute death trap for anyone trying to traverse it because there are two walls on either side where the enemy should be able to just rain death a debt down upon the attackers and in this situation what which would really happen on the first main outer wall is that there should be battlements on either side at the front side facing out and also on the inside because they're going to be shooting down at the enemies along that narrow corridor but again on the Hornburg there's no battlements on the inside face of this wall and then when the enemy reaches the second entrance this is where I come to the but okay there should be another door here and better yet there should be another whole gatehouse and with a door another gatehouse here there would not be enough room for the battering rear to turn and face the door because it's too narrow and so breaking through the second door would be an absolute turd but there's a major fail here there's no door it's just an archway what what is what is going on here this is a huge fail in this fortresses design it's almost a massive win okay one of the biggest wins and because you see this on historical castles the two off-centered entry points I'm referring to when I say you see this on historical castles this is the exact defensive style or design that you see on bow Marus castle the main outer gatehouse sometimes called the Barbican sits off-center to the second gatehouse and so after they get through the first gatehouse they have to make a hard right 90-degree turn to try and get in front of the second gatehouse but then there's a wall right behind them preventing them from lining up a battering ram and that would make trying to break down the door of the second gatehouse the biggest turn it would be impossible and about Marus castle isn't the only castle that does this there are other ones as well but it's a great example to show and so that's my analysis of the Hornburg and it's interesting because from a you know distant kind of you know perspective or look just a cursory you know over you it looks pretty strong and defensible but when you go in close and you know analyze every single little thing well unfortunately the Hornburg is a terribly designed fortress and we are done this has been my analysis of the cities and/or castle like structures in the Lord of the Rings trilogy specifically a Duras ministereth and the Hornburg of Helm's Deep thank you very much for watching if you are interested in learning more about castles please do go check out my other videos that are about castles and until next time farewell if you'd like to support shadow versity or express appreciation for a video that you particularly enjoyed please become a patron through patreon your $1 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Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 1,881,477

Keywords: the lord of the rings, trilogy, lotr, fellowship of the ring, the two towers, return of the king, edoras, minas tirith, helm, helm's deep, hornburg, the hornburg, gondor, rohan, medieval, castle, castles, fantasy, fantasies, city, cities, review, real, realistic, analysis, shad, shadmbrooks

Id: GYaoKHGP0dc

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2016