November 16, 2003

Elves at Helm's Deep and Gorbag/Shagrat in RotK
Bob Praz

I don't know where, but somewhere I read (or heard, maybe) that there were 150 elves at Helm's Deep, according to Richard Taylor, I believe. Now this number is not necessarily correct (in fact, I don’t think it is), and it could have been an early, vague estimation. Either way, I've been wondering this question for a while and so I did some estimations of my own. I’ve come to the conclusion that there must be up to 500 elves in Haldir’s host. With the 300 rohirrim already there, there would be something like 800 men/elves defending Helm’s Deep.

(If you’re in any way interested in how I came to that conclusion, keep reading; if you’re not, you can skip this paragraph, lol)
I’ve looked at the movie, and the Deeping Wall - or at least the flat part where all the soldiers are standing - appears to be around a hundred metres long (remember, very general estimation here). I tried to count how long the elven ranks are, and there are three lines consisting of probably about eighty warriors each. Which means there must be around 250 elves standing on the Deeping Wall. Then there is the elven host standing behind the wall. This one is composed of four lines that span most of the length of the Deeping Wall, although the elves here have much more space between each other. Thus there could be some 200 to 250 elves behind the wall as well. Which brings my to my initial estimation of nearly five hundred elves in total, maybe a little less.

Ok, recently there have been a lot of pictures from ROTK released (seemingly from the movie-related books that have come out). If you’ve been following TORn, among other sites, you’ve probably seen them. Anyhow, there are images of Gorbag and Shagrat, and I think they raise a few questions. Well, first off, Gorbag appears to be a regular mordor orc while Shagrat is a large uruk-hai (in fact, he looks very much like those of Isengard, which is curious); I always thought they were of equal stature.
Also, it seems that in the movie Gorbag is an orc of Cirith Ungol, whereas in the book he was from Minas Morgul and Shagrat was the captain of Cirith Ungol. The decipher card states him as “lieutenant of Cirith Ungol”, which possibly signifies he is not “captain”. Bear with me. This would mean one of two things: either they’ve switched the names of Shagrat and Gorbag for some reason, or Shagrat is still the captain of Cirith Ungol (being the largest orc, naturally) and Gorbag is now his lieutenant or something. The second option I think makes more sense. Since, in the pictures, Gorbag is the one we see struggle with Sam as well as climbing up the ladder into the chamber where Frodo lies, I can speculate that he will probably betray and kill Shagrat, his larger captain, to get his hands on the mithril coat, and then Sam probably fights him afterwards or even kills him. Whether or not one of the orcs runs away to Barad-Dûr with Frodo’s items could be debated. So if this is true, then it is a minor change from the book which eliminates the party of orcs coming up the pass from Minas Morgul (and I can think of reasons for doing this as well).

So anyways, ALL this just to ask whether any of you have answers or thoughts on this possible change?