#on account of growing up poor as shit in the carta

[elfcollector]

the montilyets have, in fact, been in debt for over a hundred years. - debt or no, you appear to be surviving.

[morwensteelsheen]

@tinacharles replied to your post:

where would the kings of rohan essentially having to hold together the east and west fold fit in do you think? makes it seem even more precarious than gondor which despite the provinces etc feels a bit more centralized?

Yes!!!! I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately (and holy shit I am NOT a military historian so please forgive however many inaccuracies I'm about to include here, BUT…), and one of the things I’ve been wondering about is if this popular vision of Gondor as structured as a Western European feudal state is a little misleading. Insofar as I can see it now, the fanon take on Gondor’s governance is a little bit like England post-Magna Carta, which is to say it looks like this:

You have a King/Steward at the top, who is imbued with some element of divine justification for his rule. The land of the kingdom is his (in essence--and I mean that definitionally, the essence of the land is his), and is rented out to various other actors, namely...

The aristocracy beneath him. Though the land is technically the king’s and leased to them, in practicality the land (and the peasants attached to it!) is theirs, and because of that, they have an immense amount of power. The bigger and the more resource-rich the land, the more important and wealthier the lord who maintains it. The landed aristocrats (because it is possible to have non-landed aristocrats!) have enough power to effectively “check” the King—and a big part of that power comes from their ability to raise armies. As far as raising armies are concerned, they are led by the aristocrats who raise them, and those aristocrats are in turn loyal to the King (but can just as easily not be, hence the somewhat weakened power of the central authority).

Then you have the non-landed aristocrats, so these are mostly perfunctory titles given to make people feel good.

And lastly the soldiers, the peasantry, the urban poor, etc.

I think that that take is wrong for Gondor—if it’s not technically canonically wrong, then it’s certainly less interesting—but right for Rohan. Importantly, that level of inequity engendered between the power of the aristos and the power of the King would explain, for example, why Éomer (as heir to the Lordship of Aldburg, according to the UT) could be leveraged so effectively by Gríma as a threat to Théoden and Théodred’s power, and it would explain why (at least in part) all of Théoden’s family were so hesitant to do anything public with getting Gríma the fuck out: admitting the King had shown any weakness at all could be seriously risky business. Plus, as you point out, it fits in nicely with the Eastfold and Westfold pulling away from one another—different areas, different interests, and less overall allegiance to a central authority (and a weakened “national” narrative to boot) meaning the King himself really needs to have a vise grip on the regions to keep it all together.

The one place where this falls down somewhat is the decentrality of the army (sorry I'm just making up words every five seconds here lol)—we know Rohan’s army is at least somewhat centralised based on, well, every description of it that we get. We can account for it in this model by saying that while the army is centralised, the economics (grain production, taxation, etc.) are not, so the Kings are still fairly beholden to their vassal lords, AND, we can point to Folcwine having substantially reorganised the Éoherë and say that while he split it into roughly three-ish columns of riders, all he actually did was shift around the numbers for the regional lords to muster and institute an unlanded title (the Marshals of the Mark) to take up the task of administering the army, without substantially rebalancing power within the kingdom. So the bulk of the power to raise the Éoreds still rests with the regional lords, meaning keeping them happy and in line is a major part of the work of the king.

So that set-up works for Rohan, but not for Gondor. Gondor, I think, is probably best organised around [byzantine gondor klaxon] the Eastern Roman themata system. After the 600s-ish, the Byzantine Empire began to make more extensive use of a system put in place by Diocletian that is, as far as I can tell, basically a variation on the US Homestead Acts with a military component. It goes something like this:

Land is granted to soldiers (and it’s important here to note that they start as soldiers first, not farmers), to farm. The soldiers’ pay was docked for having the land, but the farming land was typically more valuable anyway, so it was a good deal. As long as the soldiers agreed that their descendants would continue to farm the land AND serve in the military, all was good. And this descendant stuff is important because it means even the people on the lowest rung of the power structure have some sort of emotional tie to the state—they grow up expecting to be part of it in some small way, and so generally feel a greater sense of allegiance to Gondor™ than, for example, in Rohan where they’re tied to the land that’s owned by, say, Lord Erkenbrand of the Deeping Coomb, who is broadly loyal to the Kings but could at any moment flip, leaving the peasantry functionally disconnected from the King and the Riddermark generally.

The theme system is also important because it means you don’t need to do conscription (which is kinda sucky and unpopular) and you have guarantees on both farmers and soldiers, which is an excellent way to occupy your able-bodied population pretty much round the clock, reducing both the likelihood of rebellions and maximising your population’s general efficiency—sounds to me sort of like what Faramir’s on about in Window on the West! It’s also great because it means you can settle conquered lands quickly and easily.

Above these farmer-soldiers in the power schema was something like a regional governor, who was in charge both civilly and militarily. This looks a lot like your classical Western European feudal lord, and is functionally pretty similar, except in that they don’t own ALL of the lands the peasants work, most of that actually belongs to the central authority and is leased directly to the peasantry. This sort of explains how Faramir can credit the expansion/maintenance of Gondor explicitly to the Stewards (“but the Stewards were wiser…” in TTT) instead of having to acknowledge the underling lords—and assuming he’s not just being a blowhard about it—because that leasing of the land would actually be the prerogative of the Steward (in the name of the King) and not the Lords of the Pinnath Gelin or the Prince of Dol Amroth or whoever.

Then there’s an ENORMOUS bureaucracy and administrative wing to the central state. Genuinely enormous, filled with lots of vanity titles (Warden of the Keys, anyone?) and basically helps to keep the administrative state running, reducing the amount of actual clerical work both the central authority and the outlying lords/governors have to do. This makes the bureaucracy quite powerful, but makes the central authority (King/Steward/whoever) even more powerful because he leads it.

Then there’s the interesting pseudo-democratic element inherited from the Roman Empire, which actually goes some of the way to explaining some of the subtext to my initial question about Faramir’s behaviour at the coronation; there's the remnants of the Senate, which technically elected the emperors of the Byzantine Empire (though had waning influence as the centuries wore on). A senate, obviously, is quite different to whatever the fuck it is that Faramir does, but that sort of popular approval for the king is nonetheless interesting and notable, and we can probably assume Tolks knew something of it when he was writing.

Sorry I wrote... way too much here, I am procrastinating v hard from work lol. Anyways yeah I think this is basically where I'm at vis a vis their relative governmental structures. I'm having a bit of a moment as well because Dante Alighieri has this whole take on the Empire and Catholicism, and I think that's actually probably influencing Tolkien somewhere along the line (and is definitely relevant, if nothing else, for how I think about the governments in LOTR), but I haven't had the brain energy to try to incorporate that yet lol