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The wide CGI shots are pretty. Get into the sets, and it's all cramped: Númenor has five ships for their grand fleet to the Southlands? The main square can hold sixty people max? There isn't a barracks to train the recruits, we do it on a set of stairs in a side-street where the shopkeepers have stalls set up?
CGI and the New Zealand Tourist Board wet dream vistas can only do so much.
With the disclaimer that I haven't watched RoP at all: isn't "cramped" a pretty good description for medieval Europe? Most commercial activity had to fit within the city/town walls, and the manpower needed to build the walls was proportional to the square root of their area. The old European cities I'm familiar with don't really have "squares" in the modern sense so much as they have random areas where buildings are set back and these became public areas or markets. For example, in old Vienna the only space I can think of is in front and to the sides of the Vienna cathedral, and in the City of London the only green space is around St. Paul's. Presumably these were staging areas for construction when the cathedrals were built, after which they became public spaces.
Ships were very expensive in the middle ages, too, but I think you are right about the number being far too small: well after what we would consider the medieval period, the battle of Trafalgar (1805) only involved 73 vessels, and we think of it as the breaking point of the Spanish fleet. But according to this website, the British navy of 1650 had 74 vessels. Wikipedia says that "In the 11th century, Aethelred II had an especially large fleet built by a national levy." but Aethelred II opted to pay Danegeld following the Battle of Maldon in 991, at which the total strength of the Norse was supposedly 2000-4000 men. That would have been at most 100 longships. And the Norse King Canute the Great is said to have had 1,200 Snekkja (41-man longships) in Norway in 1028.
It didn't feel cramped that way -- full of life and stuff. It didn't actually feel cramped at all, just that it was filmed on a stage (especially Numenor), which is not good for your sense of immersion.
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Even cramped, dirty, pop-history mediaeval Europe managed to find somewhere better to train raw recruits than "go down that alley there and hope a Super Warrior Elf turns up to show you which end of a sword is the pointy bit".
This is meant to be Númenor, the greatest realm of Mortal Men that ever existed, not a village in darkest Berkshire in 1289. Since they're showing Pharazon and Miriel, this is the period in its history in which Ar-Pharazon was able to mount such a huge invasion force that Sauron's armies ran away without even engaging them, just from the terror they inspired upon seeing them.
Instead we get "We're sending out five ships - oh no two burned down - we're sending out three ships to fight a war to liberate the Southlands against an unknown number of Orcs, but Galadriel assures us that hordes of them have infested Middle earth so probably more than fifty".
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Lotr is not medieval Europe. It is mythological Europe and Numenor is Atlantis. And there is grandeur everywhere in Tolkien's world. The white city of Minas Tirith was small outpost of the Numenorean Empire.
Tolkien's world can be viewed a bit like fragment of fragment compared to previous ages. Sauron is but a shadow of Melkor, Godor is but a shadow of Numenor, Elves themselfs are shadows of glory past ...
... And thus am I outed as a non-Tolkie.
But that hit home. The RoK makes Gondor out to be comparable to imperial China in its constructions, and so Numenor was presumably vaster and richer than Rome. For an island nation presumably richer than Rome and presumably with magic to only be able to swing together five ships... yeah, that would break the immersion.
Thank you for the explanation.
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The way I think about it: If Rohan had the state capacity of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Numenor was Rome at its height, or mythological Trojan-War era Greece, complete with a thousand ships.
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