Hartmann von Aue, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From the Gregorius:

My heart has often compelled my tongue to speak much of things that seek worldly reward. My naive years advised it thus. Now this I know to be true indeed: whoever in his youth trusts the scheming of hell's jailer, and, trusting in his youth, sins and says to himself: you are still a young man; there is still plenty of help for all your wrongdoings; you can certainly do penance for them in your old age -- such a person thinks other than he should. These thoughts will easily vanish when the common fate of us all hinders his will to repent, in that bitter death takes vengenace on his earlier way of thinking, cutting short his life with a sudden end. Bereft of grace, he has then chosen the worse course. And even if we were born of Adam, at the time fo Abel, and were to preserve his soul unmarred by sin until Judgment Day, he still would not have done enough to gain eternal life that has no beginning and will also never pass. (pp. 167-168)

Summary: Besides a number of smaller poems that mostly relate crusading and wooing, and the Lament, an apparently early longer work that involves a debate between the body and the heart in matters of love, the works of Hartmann von Aue are Erec, Gregorius, Poor Heinrich, and Iwein. They are all knightly romances. Erec and Iwein are Arthurian romances, and, in fact, are translations and adaptations of earlier Arthurian romances by Chretien de Troyes. Gregorius and Poor Heinrich are non-Arthurian. All four deal with knights who find themselves having to navigate situations far outside the ordinary regions of life.

Erec, the first Arthurian romance to be written in German, follows the adventures of a young knight named Erec, who is humiliated in front of Queen Guinevere by the dwarf of a knight named Iders; Erec attempts to trace down the knight, but as he does so, he spends the night at the house of a nobleman named Coralus, where he meets Coralus's beautiful daughter, Enite. He also learns about an upcoming Sparrowhawk Tournament, in which a sparrowhawk is given as a prize to the knight who successfully proves in battle that his lady is the most beautiful; he learns, moreover, that Iders is participating in the tournament. Borrowing armor from Coralus, he defeats Iders in the tournament, proving Enite the most beautiful lady; they marry and return to Erec's home city, Karnant, where Erec becomes ruler. However, as often happens, the life of ease turns out to be bad for Erec; he spends so much time with his wife that he neglects his duty as a ruler. Erec eventually learns that even Enite thinks he has deteriorated, so he sets out for adventure, taking Enite with him but forbidding her to speak to him. This rule she breaks several times, each time saving his life. They have several adventures, ending with Erec fighting and defeating a powerful knight named Mabonagrin in order to save the widows of eighty knights whom Mabonagrin has killed. Erec defeats the knight and tehrefore is able to return with this honor to the court of King Arthur.

Gregorius tells the story of Gregorius, a knight who discovers that his parents are actually only his by adoption,a dn sets out to learn more about his biological parents, discovering, to his horror, that his parents were brother and sister; that is, Gregorius is the child of incest. He attempts to rise above this by knightly deeds, which lead him to meet the woman who will eventually become his wife. Unfortunately, an accident reveals that she is in fact his mother. This horrifying discovery leads Gregorius to live his life as a holy hermit, living chained living the penitential life on a rock in on an isolated rock in the middle of a large lake. Seventeen years go by, and in Rome, God reveals to some of the clergy that the next Pope will be discovered on a rock in Aquitaine. They find Gregorius there and he becomes Pope.

Der arme Heinrich is about a knight, Heinrich, from Ouwe (Aue), who is a paragon of knightly virtues but is struck by leprosy. He does not take it well, and after consulting every doctor he can, he discovers that there is one and only one cure: the life-blood from the heart of a virgin, freely given. That seems as good as saying that cure is impossible, so Heinrich goes to stay with one of his caretakers, the only person who does not completely shun him for his leprosy. The daughter of the caretaker becomes taken with Heinrich, and when she learns what the cure is, offers her own life so that he might be healed. Being an extremely obstinate and eloquent girl, she manages to convince both Heinrich and her parents that it is useless to try to stop her. They find a doctor, who is for obvious reasons very reluctant to perform this operation; but he too is eventually persuaded. However, Heinrich through a crack in the door sees the girl lying on the table, and is struck by guilt; he prevents the operation, saying that this has made him accept his leprosy. The girl is just as obstinate as she was, and berates him as a coward, but he does not relent. However, as they return to Ouwe, Heinrich's leprosy unexpectedly clears, and Heinrich and the girl marry.

Iwein is the story of Iwein (Ywain), cousin of Gawain, who sets out to avenge the defeat of another cousin, Kalogrenant, at the hands of the knight Askalon. He does so, killing Askalon, but is trapped in Askalon's castle. He only manages to escape with the help of Lunete, the handmaiden of Askalon's wife, Laudine. Iwein happens to see Laudine, however, and falls in love with her; he wins her hand in marriage with the help of Lunete, who convinces Laudine that there is no one else who can provide better protection. However, Gawain notes that Iwein is not adventuring as he used to; he is turning out, in fact, to be something like Erec, so Iwein heads out to see what might befall, but only after having given Laudine a promise that he would return by a year and a day from the time he left; in a sense the year-and-a-day is the time after which a man is legally dead and someone else can usurp his estate, so if he does not return by then, he will have failed as protector. However, Iwein gets so caught up in the tournaments he is attending that he misses the deadline. Lunete brings Laudine's complaint before the Round Table itself, and Iwein is dishonored. Having lost wife, estate, and knightly honor, Iwein goes mad and becomes a wild man, from which state he is rescued by the Lady of Narison, who happens to have a magic salve made by Morgan le Fay, which heals him. In return, he helps her, but he refuses from that point on either to become ruler or to marry, and among his adventures he ends up rescuing a lion from a dragon. The lion becames a loyal companion, so Iwein becomes known far and wide as the Knight with the Lion. He eventually discovers that Lunete has been sentenced to death, and so he defends her innocence in trial by combat, which he is able to do in part with the help of the lion. Through a further set of adventures, Iwein undertakes to help another woman in trial by combat; she is in a dispute with her sister over inheritance. The sister's champion turns out to be exceptionally good, and their fight goes on and on, until nightfall requires the finish of it to be postponed to the next day. By chance, Iwein discovers that his opponent is actually Gawain; King Arthur comes to the rescue by Solomoning the situation, asking the older sister a question that gives her away and proves the younger sister right. Thus Iwein is allowed back into court, but it takes Lunete to trick Laudine into giving Iwein a chance again, which she does by setting up a situation in which Laudine, who does not know Iwein's new identity, to help the Knight with the Lion in regaining his lady's favor. They renew their marriage and live happily ever after.

All of the stories are concerned with honor, of course, but they are also concerned in great measure with the power of love to face adversity, even the most terrible -- a power that love very much needs, because human nature being as it is, without that power, love could not survive humanity itself. We in our folly and failing guarantee that love will face adversity. But love is not conquered by our folly and failing.

Favorite Passage: From the Iwein:

Looking farther, he saw a beautiful big hall, which he and the girl inspected without finding a soul there. He followed a side path leading to a road that went past the hall. Searching carefully, he noticed some stairs. They took him to a huge park, more beautiful than any he had ever seen. There he saw an old knight lying comfortably on a couch, with which the goddess Juno, in her greatest splendor, would have been pleased. The beautiful flowers, the fresh grass enveloped him in a sweet aroma -- it was a pleasant place for the knight to be lying. He was handsomely mature, and in front of him sat a lady who was doubtless his wife. For all their advanced years the pair could not have been more handsome nor have acted with greater dignity. In front of them, in turn, sat a girl who, so I've been told, could read French very well and was entertaining them by doing so. Often she made them laugh. Because she was their daugther they thought whatever she read was fine. It is right to praise a girl who has good manners, beauty, noble birth, youth, wealth, modesty, kindness, and good sense. She had all this and everything else which one could wish for in a woman -- besides which she could read very well. (pp. 303-304)

Recommendation: Recommended.

*****

Hartmann von Aue, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, Tobin, Vivian, and Lawson, trs., The Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA: 2001).

God Almighty and the Ladies

 Religious principles are also a blemish in any polite composition, when they rise up to superstition, and intrude themselves into every sentiment, however remote from any connection with religion. It is no excuse for the poet, that the customs of his country had burthened life with so many religious ceremonies and observances, that no part of it was exempt from that yoke. It must for ever be ridiculous in Petrarch to compare his mistress, Laura, to Jesus Christ. Nor is it less ridiculous in that agreeable libertine, Boccace, very seriously to give thanks to God Almighty and the ladies, for their assistance in defending him against his enemies.

[David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste", par. 36.]

This is an interesting passage, because the association of the erotic/romantic and the religious is very close to being universal; and perhaps more immediately to the point, a Petrarch who wouldn't associate Laura with religious tones would not have written the poetry he did, and likewise with Boccaccio and his stories, and that would not have been an obvious improvement in the field of 'polite composition'. Nor, if you actually look at either Petrarch or Boccaccio, do the religious elements seem particularly intrusive. It's worth quoting an example of what Hume is complaining about, from Boccaccio's Decameron (in "Conclusion of the Author"):

Most noble damsels, for whose solace I have addressed myself to so long a labour, I have now, methinketh, with the aid of the Divine favour, (vouchsafed me, as I deem, for your pious prayers and not for my proper merits,) throughly accomplished that which I engaged, at the beginning of this present work, to do; wherefore, returning thanks first to God and after to you, it behoveth to give rest to my pen and to my tired hand.

How ridiculous this very mild expression of an author who is responding to criticisms of his work as being immoral or impious may be, is perhaps more controvertible than Hume suggests; at the very least, the association of God Almighty and the ladies is not itself ridiculous. One is inclined to suggest that Hume's Scottish Presbyterian background is showing through here. It seems a touch of bigotry to deny a poet the right to appeal to God Almighty and the ladies; particularly as it is a right that poets have had in possession from time immemorial, and God Almighty and the ladies are the only consistent patrons of poetry through the ages.

Small, Mysterious Threads

 I was looking up something in Nehemiah this morning, and grabbed a Bible that I don't normally use, which I've had for a very long time; it is a 1929 American Standard Version published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, and has the written inscription, 

Presented to Mr. & Mrs. White 
by Harrisburg Christian Church 
December 1, 1949

I don't know these people, although the Harrisburg Christian Church was perhaps a church in Harrisburg, SD, for reasons that become obvious below (I could find no church of that name currently in Harrisburg, SD). In any case, the reason I record this information is that as I was looking up the passage, a little tiny clipping of an obituary fell out. The obituary:

Zipporah Huntley was born in New Lyme, Ashtabula Co., Ohio, Jnne, 3rd, 1825. She was married to F. W. Rice, Jan. 17th, 1850; this union was blessed with three children--two sons and one daughter. She was for many years a devoted member of the Congregational church. She fell asleep in Jesus Oct 22nd, 1912, leaving one son, one daughter and eight grandchildren. Her husband preceded her in death by four years. In the Father's house she awaits the home coming of her loved ones.

(The 'Jnne' for June is in the original.) There is no indication of what newspaper is the source of the clipping.* I don't know either Zipporah Huntley or F. W. Rice, either.  

I cannot remember how the Bible came to me; I would have said that it was probably from my grandparents' library, and thus either from my grandmother or grandfather, but for all I can be sure, I may have picked it up in some free book bin or at a used book sale somewhere. Do I have any familial connection at all with Mr. & Mrs. White, or were they friends of family, or are they simply strangers? I do not know. What connection did they have with Zipporah Huntley or F. W. Rice? I do not know. It's entirely a mystery. And yet here I was this morning somehow connected, in some unknown way, with Zipporah Huntley who died in 1912.

Online, there is some limited information about Zipporah Huntley, although none that I could find about her husband; she has an Ancestry.com entry, which has very limited, tentative information, saying that she was born June 1826 in Ohio or Connecticut and died in Lake Preston, South Dakota on October 22, 1912. It gives her parents as Selden Huntley and Louisa Peck, and gives her children's names as Flora Estella Rice and Sherman E. Rice. The South Dakota place of death is one possible reason to suspect that I just picked up the Bible somewhere; I have a few books that were picked up that way in South Dakota. 

So for all I know the Bible may be in my hands due entirely to the chance event of my rescuing a Bible from a free book bin. But Zipporah Huntley lived and had a family and friends and died in 1912; a church gifted a Bible to a couple in 1949; and at some point, someone put the tiny clipping of the 1912 obituary into that 1949 Bible; and somehow or another that Bible happened to come into my hands. The Bible was an important enough gift to be formally inscribed; the obituary was important enough to somebody to keep in a Bible and carefully preserve, even to the point of ending up in a Bible that did not exist when the obituary was written. And whoever Zipporah Huntley was, someone at least somewhere found her in their family tree in order to put up a brief record about her on the internet. Of such things are most human connections made. And so I put up this record of an obituary clipping found in a Bible, partly to have it in case I ever discover more about it; partly because that obituary clipping will eventually completely disappear, however important it might have been, and it seems a sort of respect, for someone having considered it so important, to reduce the chances of that happening any time soon; and partly so that the information will be available online if anyone, hunting down some genealogical connection, tries to find information about Zipporah Huntley in the future. And also it serves as a reminder that we are connected to other people in many ways. These ways are mostly tenuous, but they are very many, and make up the greater part of what binds the human race together.

----

* Since it could be relevant at some future date to determining the source of the obituary, I will note that the reverse of the clipping looks like it is a bit about 'Poor Nobles of Italy' and mentions some medieval castle in a hill town in Central Italy that was sold to an Englishman for $195.

Links of Note

 * Joel K. Jensen, Extraterrestrial Epistemology, or the Limits of Archives, at "Extinct"

* Katarzyna Ogrodnik-Fujcik, St Jadwiga of Anjou, the King of Poland, at "The Freelance History Writer"

* Seamus O'Neill, Angels and Henads: How Aquinas' Angelology Draws Upon Proclus' Henadology (PDF)

* Vanessa A. Seifert, The many laws in the periodic table (PDF)

* Rachel M. Cohen, Why I changed my mind about volunteering, at "Vox"

* Jacob Riyeff, So, a Chatbot Did Your Homework, at "Plough"

* Nicholas Colgrove, Deadly Language Games: Theological Reflections on Emerging Reproductive Technologies (PDF)

* Jonathan Fine, Of Pots and Plato's Aesthetics (PDF)

* Molly Parker, The Government Spends Millions to Open Grocery Stores in Food Deserts. The Real Test Is Their Survival., at "The Daily Yonder"

* Samuel J. Abrams, The Dangerous Evolution of Cancel Culture, at "Minding the Campus"

* Daniel W. McShea & Gunnar Babcock, Four false dichotomies in the study of teleology (PDF)

* Melissa Merritt, The Ancient Background of Kant's Conception of Virtue (PDF)

* Barbara Castle, Medieval Hillbilly Kings, Priests, Pagans, and Poets: Beowulf, Johnny Cash, and Trent Reznor, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Felipe d'Avillez, Crocodile tears: How East Timor Became a Catholic Stronghold, at "The Pillar"

* Nicholas Zaks, Does Aristotle's differentia presuppose the genus it differentiates? (PDF)

* James Kreines, Hegel: The Reality and Priority of Immanent Teleology (PDF)

* Uncovering Merlin's Scottish Legacy: New Archaeological Findings at Drumelzier, at "Medievalists.net"

Delicacy of Taste

 When you present a poem or a picture to a man possessed of this talent, the delicacy of his feeling makes him be sensibly touched with every part of it; nor are the masterly strokes perceived with more exquisite relish and satisfaction, than the negligences or absurdities with disgust and uneasiness. A polite and judicious conversation affords him the highest entertainment; rudeness or impertinence is as great a punishment to him. In short, delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion: It enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind.

I believe, however, every one will agree with me, that, notwithstanding this resemblance, delicacy of taste is as much to be desired and cultivated as delicacy of passion is to be lamented, and to be remedied, if possible. The good or ill accidents of life are very little at our disposal; but we are pretty much masters what books we shall read, what diversions we shall partake of, and what company we shall keep.

[David Hume, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion", par. 2-3.]

In the Beautiful Days of September

September
by Mary Howitt 

There are twelve months throughout the year,
 From January to December,
 And the primest month of the twelve
 Is the merry month of September!
 Then apples so red
Hang over-head,
And nuts ripe brown
 Come showering down
 In the beautiful days of September. 

 There are flowers enough in the summer-time,
 More flowers than I can remember;
 But none with the purple, gold and red,
 That dyes the flowers of September!
 The gorgeous flowers of September!
 And the sun looks through
 A clearer blue,
 And the moon at night
 Sheds a clearer light
 On the beautiful flowers of September.

Rings of Power and How Monarchies Work

 I have watched the first three episodes of the second season of Rings of Power; Darwin has some comments with which I pretty much agree. I plan to talk more about the general problems that are still seen in these episodes, particularly with how the series has so far handled what is often called polyphonic narrative, after I've seen a few more episodes. (Short version now: while polyphonic narrative, with its interwoven storylines, is a tried and true method of epic storytelling, the series doesn't correctly handle the structural problems that have to be solved to do such narrative well, in part because it doesn't handle correctly some more basic structural problems of plotting.) But I want to talk a little bit about its mishandling of the (sometimes important) politics in the story.

In this season, we have

(1) Sauron trying to be ruler over the Orcs sometime after the defeat of Morgoth, and failing.

(2) Various elven lords and kings interacting with Gil-Galad as High King of the Noldor.

(3) The development of a succession crisis in Numenor, as Tar-Palantir dies.

(4) There is rising complication between King Durin III and his son Durin IV in Khazad-Dum.

Of these, none of these are handled very plausibly, although (3) manages to have something like the right general structure and (4) manages to have some sort actual logic to its events.

Let's take a very simple three-tier model of monarchy, one that nonetheless covers a lot of political behavior in various kinds of monarchy. Suppose we have a king with a bunch of middle-rulers, like nobles or warlords, ruling a people. The basic form of monarchy is easy to develop; you just need a bunch of people in power and then chose a principal ruler from among them. It is also not highly centralized -- that requires very specific kinds of resource-intensive features that most traditional monarchies don't have, or at least don't have reason to use for centralization. In principle this model should fit fairly well all four of the above, with (1), as a brutal tyranny with actually magical means of centralization, being the most deviant; in Tolkien's actual work, all four exhibit the three-tier model fairly well, because they are all modeled on pre-feudal and feudal political structures that the model already fit. In Rings of Power, the model fits none of them.

In this season we see Sauron attempting to sway the Orcs to his rule. He does this by soapboxing and having Adar, one of the Orc-fathers, crown him in front of a small group of Orcs. This doesn't make much sense, and would certainly not be how someone like Sauron would have handled the matter. Sauron is not some random person; he was one of Morgoth's most trusted and feared lieutenants, so the Orcs should already have a reason not to cross him. And trying to persuade a bunch of random Orcs by speeches doesn't make any sense. What Sauron actually needs to do is focus on people like Adar -- the Orcs who are already respected and have a following, and thus who are essentially functioning like nobles or warlords in Orc society -- and obtain their support by bribery and display of power, which would first have to be done on an individual level. If he does this, he has no need to convince anyone else. He does not have to be made king by anyone; he can just set himself up as king. There will likely be servants of Morgoth who will flock to him based on reputation alone, or who can be easily overawed. And power flows to the powerful; he can just draw power, based on his already existing reputation and resources, by manipulating the middle tier, the 'nobles', and then playing them off each other. The kind of situation that requires a monarch to appeal directly to the people is when there is a dispute between king and nobles; reasonably intelligent kings with popular support can virtually always outmaneuver the political scheming of the middle tier. But building a kingdom just requires middle-tier support; co-opt by any means people like Adar, however reluctant they may be, then use the squabbles and contentions among such people to solidify power, then deal ruthlessly with dissenters. It makes no sense for Sauron to be crowned by Adar -- such ceremonies are required for regular succession or symbolic deference to a higher power, neither of which is relevant here, and even if Sauron had such a ceremony he would, like Napoleon, not want it to be structured as if his crown depended on anything other than his own power.

Gil-Galad is High King; in Tolkien, he receives this position after the fall of Gondolin and the death of Turgon, being the last male member of the House of Finarfin. As High King he is foremost king among a bunch of other kings; he is actually directly the Lord of Lindon. Other kings are lords of other places; some of them (like Celebrimbor) hold power over those places by Gil-Galad's gift, as his control over territory, and thus his ability to give land to others under particular conditions, expands, but others (like Cirdan) have held power longer than Gil-Galad. As such, most of his authority is diffuse and entirely indirect; he receives a certain amount of deference due to the eminence of the House of Finarfin, he is personally respected as an excellent leader, and as High King he is the war-leader of all the Elves, able to call up military support from other Elven kings as needed. But this is all. None of the other kings are directly under his authority unless they have put themselves directly under his authority. Galadriel, for instance, is not Gil-Galad's subordinate; she is a queen in her own right, with occasional obligations to the High King arising from custom and agreement. Likewise, Celebrimbor, as Lord of Eregion, also from a royal house, is ruler of Eregion; he has received the right to rule the land from Gil-Galad, and thus has specific obligations to the High King based on that gift, but he is the one who rules it.

So things are in Tolkien, and it all makes sense -- Gil-Galad is High King among all the kings of the Noldor in somewhat like the way King Arthur is High King among all the kings of Britain. The other kings are his allies, and in general allies with special obligations of military deference to him, but not his direct subordinates.  None of this is visible in Rings of Power, which seems to take 'High King' to mean that Gil-Galad is sole ruler of all the Elves. Galadriel's title is given as 'Commander of the Northern Armies'; it is a purely military title, and Gil-Galad treats her as a subordinate under his command, who can be directly ordered as Gil-Galad pleases. This seems to be the case with Celebrimbor, as well. At one point in this season, Celebrimbor sends a deceptive message to Gil-Galad to prevent him from interfering with Celebrimbor's work. Tolkien's Gil-Galad, of course, would have had no authority directly to interfere with Celebrimbor's own work in Celebrimbor's own city in the land Celebrimbor himself rules. What is more, he would likely have had no ability to do it -- Celebrimbor's city of Ost-in-Edhil in Eregion is a major economic power, governed for centuries by what is effectively a guild of some of the most talented smiths in the world, controlling the trade with the great Dwarven city of Khazad-Dum and its nearly equally talented smiths. Rivers of wealth are running through Celebrimbor's hands, and he is politically well-entrenched, so he cannot be simply ordered around. The show's condensation of time, however, weakens him considerably, since his stronghold seems to be relatively recent and the show shows very few economic connections between major powers at all, so that trade with relatively close Khazad-Dum (also absurdly new) seems to be little more than an occasional sputter. And Celebrimbor himself, again, both is treated as a subordinate by Gil-Galad and treats himself as such. In reality, a king like Gil-Galad cannot directly rule territory as large or people as diverse as he does; most of his authority arises from the fact that he is the monarch, among a number of other monarchs, who has the responsibility for guaranteeing unified defense, and some from particular feudal-ish land grants. His direct rule is over Lindon. This is why Tolkien's Gil-Galad is only able to keep Annatar out of Lindon, and not out of other Elven kingdoms, even an Elven kingdom like Eregion that is effectively a vassal state. The show has to build up elaborate (and generally unconvincing) explanations for something like this, when in reality it should just follow from the political structure. \

Numenor is at first appearance the most promising monarchy in the show. We have seen glimpses, brief but clear, of all three tiers of Numenorean society. We don't see a lot of details about how it works, but it is very clear that the monarchs of Numenor rule through the nobles, and have to maneuver around that fact. The increasing political problems of Numenor, while portrayed in a manner that is oddly both very stylized and very clumsy, are at least the general kind of political problems that one could expect of a monarchy like we've seen. In particular, Numenor displays one notoriously dangerous pathology of the simple three-tier model, the situation in which the king, instead of policing the nobles and keeping the nobles' treatment of the people within boundaries, loses touch with the concerns of the people, thus giving the nobles the opportunity to unite with the people against the king.  This is indeed a circumstance known to breed either civil war or coup, depending on how strong the perpetrators are. We have seen Pharazon both rabble-rouse among the people and conspire among the nobles; nothing that we've seen him do has been very impressive, but these kinds of actions are indeed how you lay the groundwork for a successful coup when the king's role as advocate or defender of the people against the middle tier has decayed, as is Pharazon's maneuvering to make sure that Miriel is away on military expedition when her father dies, thus giving him an opportunity to begin manipulating the situation. (Although I suspect the latter, unlike the former, is entirely accidental on the part of the writers.)

Yet in many ways, this just highlights ways in which Numenor's political workings don't make sense. Nothing about Numenor does -- its wealth, its isolationist foreign policy, its anti-Elvish bigotry -- but when we look at the details of how the politics seems to work, the details are often lacking at crucial points. No nation with a succession as fragile as the Numenor we have seen in the show should be as unified as Numenor is. Tar-Palantir was essentially removed from power by the nobles in his own reign; as his daughter, Miriel was then apparently appointed by the nobles as Queen Regent. But we are also told that Pharazon, who is her cousin, was also considered, meaning that they had, at least in theory, the ability to decide whom they wanted. This means that this version of Numenor should really be governed by a council of nobles -- which we never see, and which, if it even exists, played no direct role in Miriel's recent major military decision -- and seems also to mean that succession by direct line is at most a custom that is not regarded as strictly mandatory. But the monarch of Numenor seems even weaker than this; treasonous conspiracies against the Crown operate freely in public places and the Queen Regent can even be publicly assaulted without repercussions. The coronation of Miriel, which should be a closely and carefully managed affair in which nobles affirm their allegiance to their Queen, is a complete mess in which random people are allowed to speak, policy issues are debated in a free-for-all argument, and the crowd is allowed to chant their support for another potential claimant to the throne. That the monarchs of Numenor have provable divine sanction is given a very loose, vague nod in the form of the visit of the Eagle of Manwe, although (presumably because of the limits of their licensing) this is never explained beyond being a 'good omen'; but we see nothing of the religious power of the kings, and the coronation unexpectedly turns out not to have any features that would identify it as a religious ceremony, which formal coronations usually are. (It's also usually the case that monarchs do not require a coronation in order to rule -- that's the whole point of the famous phrase, "The king is dead, long live the king." The purpose of the coronation is not usually to become king but rather to have one's kingship acclaimed, and in particular to force the middle tier to obligate themselves to the king in public. This is not absolutely universal, but, again, states in which it isn't true tend to be states with elected kings and/or serious succession problems, neither of which exist here.)

Thus Numenor has something of the abstract shape of a monarchy, but it does not recognizably function as its shape would suggest; its apparent structure does not fit the actual functioning that we see. In Tolkien, of course, it is very different. Tolkien's Numenor is based loosely on ancient empires (it was originally conceived as literally the ancestor of the political systems of Ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and the like, which were degenerate imitations of the Numenorean splendor); the Numenorean monarchs are priest-kings of a vast economic, and eventually military, empire; the middle tier is kept firmly middle tier, having power insofar as they are necessary for the organization of the kingdom but definitely subordinate to the king; to take the throne, Pharazon has to compel Tar-Miriel to marry him (with Tolkien wavering over time about whether this was by manipulative persuasion or by force) because she is recognized as the legitimate ruler regardless of how much support he has.

What we see of the monarchy of Khazad-Dum is mostly family drama of the Royal House. Beyond some councillors, we see very little of a middle tier. Durin III's decisions do not seem to require much in the way of consultation or consent from nobles. He arbitrarily and without any further process strips the younger Durin of his status of Prince. It's not entirely unheard of for a king to be able to do that, but it's notably unusual. When Durin IV is stripped of his rank, he turns out to have no noble supporters -- which would again be unusual -- he's basically cast down to the lowest rung of society, not even having a recognizable ci-devant status. Thus what we see of the Dwarven kingdom makes it look like the Dwarven king is an absolute monarch of a kingdom with no significant middle tier such as a mighty kingdom would certainly require. This gives him a weirdly paradoxical flavor as both an unbelievably powerful ruler and nothing but the Mayor of Dwarf Town.

We do not get a lot of the inner workings of Dwarven society in Tolkien -- the Dwarves sometimes seem actively hostile to anyone nosing about their affairs -- but we still get a more balanced picture. One of the serious deviations of the show from the books is the absurdity of having a father-son relationship between two Dwarves named Durin. The Dwarves of Khazad-Dum have an odd system in which occasionally -- we don't know what triggers it -- a prince is taken to be the reincarnation of Durin I. The name Durin is reserved for Durin. For obvious reasons, the show's Durin IV cannot possibly be the reincarnation of Durin III. Thus, despite not knowing the details, it would make sense for Tolkien's Durin III to wield at least a lot of soft power, because he is the third incarnation of Durin, and thus what we would normally think of as a religious figure, whereas the Durins of the show seem just to be named after the first Durin. There are different kings, although the king of Khazad-Dum seems to have a special eminence due to the connection to Durin. Again, despite not knowing much about the details, we see clear signs of a strong middle tier in Dwarvish society; the Dwarves are very clannish, and this seems to be the foundation of their version of the middle tier -- most of the Dwarves who journey with Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit seem to be the equivalent of down-on-their-luck Dwarven nobility. The relationship between Thorin and Dain, as well as between Dain and Balin when Balin becomes Lord of Moria, while not expounded upon seems to suggest that they have a system of allegiances at least loosely like that of the Elves. We get nothing like any of this in the show.

It's not surprising that Tolkien's monarchies are more plausible than those of Rings of Power, anymore than it's surprising that Tolkien's descriptions of how ancient kingdoms and militaries work are more plausible than Peter Jackson's depictions of them in the movies. But that's an interesting comparison, because while Jackson sacrifices a lot of historical and legendary plausibility to bring the War of the Ring to the screen, the vast majority of his choices make sense in movie-context. There is a coherence to them, in terms of visual spectacle, mood, and theme; you can question some of the judgments made, but you never have doubt that there was a genuine attempt to think them through. Even egregiously implausible examples, like the Elves showing up at Helm's Deep or Gandalf's beat-down of Denethor or Theoden's inexplicable inability to handle convoy operations properly or some of the truly awful decisions in how the Battle of the Five Armies is handled in the Hobbit movies, are very carefully prepared and have explanations, however weak. You don't ever get this sense with Rings of Power, which consistently seems slapdash and arbitrary. It is all very shoddy. Figures who are immensely powerful in one scene seem weirdly powerless in another, political decisions come out of nowhere, power relations seem contradictory, and far from it being justifiable in cinematic terms, the visuals and cinematic mood almost never do so, and someteimes even cut against what we are supposedly seeing. Thus we get scenes like the famously powerful and cunning Sauron reaching his complete nadir as a Dark Lord, murdered without much fanfare in a dark cave after impotently begging a bunch of Orcs to recognize him as king. 

Even bad judgment calls can get a sort of aesthetic nobility from showing signs of serious thinking-through; on the screen, looking like it could work is just as good as actually being able to work; consistency can make even absurdities seem plausible. But we have none of this deliberation, care for appearances, or consistency here, despite the fact that the story they are telling is one that is filled with politics that needs it. I almost at one point considered saying that the societies we see are less like societies and more like their depiction in role-playing and video games, and this is in some sense true -- as far as the politics go, what we are getting here is often more like D&D or Dragon Age than Tolkien. But it's also not true, because no Dungeon Master or video game developer would be so careless with politics in a story that is entirely about power.

Judging of Things and Judging of Men

 ...One thing is it to judge of things and another of human beings. For in judging of things, we judge without considering good or bad on the part of the thing which we judge, since nothing harms it whatever way we judge of it, but considering the one judging, there is good if he judges truly, or bad if falsely; because true is the good of intellect, but false is the bad of it, as is said in VI Ethic. And thus everyone ought to strive to judge of things in accordance with the way they are. But in judging in which we judge of human beings, good and bad are considered on the part of what is judged, for he has worthiness of honor as judged good and worthiness of contempt as judged bad. And because of this, we ought in this judgment to aim at judging a human being good unless there appears to be manifest reason to the contrary. But for the one judging, the false judgment by which he judges well of another is not relevant to what is bad for his intellect, just as it is not relevant to its completion to be aware of the truth of contingent singulars according to themselves, but instead it is relevant to good disposition.

[Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2-2.60.4 ad 2, my rough translation; the Dominican Fathers translation is here. The point in context is that if it is not a matter of their violating the rights of another, and if we do not have an obvious reason to the contrary, we should judge people in the best light in order to avoid violating their right to be honored and not despised for good, even knowing that we will often be wrong. Thus we should give people credit for the good they might have, and not worry about the fact that they might not actually have it, as long as we can do so while upholding our responsibilities to protect others from injustice.]