Thomas Jefferson, in his instructions to Lewis and Clark, asked them to keep on the lookout for woolly mammoths during their expedition, not knowing that they were long extinct.
Considering he was originally inspired by “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” which, in turn, is suspected of being inspired by the historic Roland, probably a very conscious decision
I always interpreted oliphaunts as being pretty much what a medieval Englishman might imagine an elephant to be (like @Stratocaster), complete with all the nonsense and mythical garbage that such a remote creature would be associated with. Something huge, gray, with a trunk and tusks, but not much else factual about it would be known. I mean, do we think had a regular elephant showed up with the Haradrim, that Sam and Frodo would have been saying “Well that’s just an elephant, not a proper Oliphaunt”?
Yeah, I wasn’t sure about the inspiration for Childe Roland, so it seemed like a natural question.
I’d always assumed them to be just normal elephants, but the Tolkien Gateway article says, citing the third book:
Killing a mûmak was almost impossible - its rough, leathery hide made arrows relatively harmless… The only known way to kill an oliphaunt was to shoot it in the eye…
So even without a direct comparison in the literature, they were definitely (dephaunatly?) tougher than modern elephants, which could definitely be taken down by sustained archer fire. I don’t know if we have any direct evidence to support them also being larger than modern elephants, but it would be thematically appropriate (Chronos mentions how our elephants would be ‘diminished,’ as with everything else since the time of Middle Earth).
In letter #64 that the Good Professor wrote his son Christopher, he mentions a “large elephant of pre-historic size”.1 This and other clues is why I believe them to be the size of a large mammoth and not the epically large creatures of the Movies or merely elephant size.
BTW: This letter also included Sam’s poem about the Oliphaunts quoted above.
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1 page 77 of my copy.
Yeah, from the point of view of a quasi-European peasant farmer, they’re just “much bigger than any animal I’ve ever seen or heard of”, and hence any pachyderm would have been equally incomprehensible and hence equally impressive. But then we have direct word from the author, in his role as omniscient narrator, that these beasts are in fact larger than modern elephants. One reasonable interpretation of this is that they were similar to some of the extinct elephants we know of.
I think Peter Jackson’s motivation was to make them as different from modern elephants as he could, while still keeping them recognizable and consistent with the source material. We modern audiences are jaded: Unlike Frodo or Sam, we would look at a modern elephant and just say “Oh, that’s just an elephant”. So to convey the same sense of wonder that the characters felt, he made them much bigger, and gave them extra tusks, and so on. He had to make them clearly something that we haven’t ever seen in a zoo, but which we could still recognize as being kin to the creatures we’ve seen in the zoo.
One of the things about Tolkein’s Middle Earth is that he seems to have been inspired by images of prehistoric life, incorporating them into his world of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. So “Lake Town” – the village built on pilings over the lake in The Hobbit , appears to have been inspired by what was then (in the 1920s-30s) believed about prehistoric dwellings on Swiss lakes. (Today the houses are not believed to have been built over water, but over marshes – see Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps - Wikipedia ) The flying steeds of the Nazgul , from their descriptions in the Lord of the Rings, appear to have been pterosaurs (even though the Peter Jackson movies make them into something quite different. Even the Brothers Hildebrandt depicted them as not quite the same as pterosaurs). And the description Tolkein gives of the mumakil seem consistent with mammoths. I’ve always figured them as mammoths, which is consistent with Tolkein’s prehistoric views.
I’m not getting the distinction you seem to be making here. A marsh is a wetland, and so is at least some of the time, under water.
The marshlands where they were built weren’t always wet, and when they were, weren’t strictly water. It’s not like the houses were built over standing open water.
Some have claimed that the structures weren’t even built over marshland, but that the “stilts” were misinterpreted fenceposts. I don’t know if that has been changed.
To put it in terms I’ve dealt with recently, the Wonderland amusement park was built on pilings with a Boardwalk between buildings – not because the land wasn’t necessarily dry, but because it could easily flood. By putting the buildings 2-3 feet above the ground, they made it less likely that the buildings would flood, unless the water rose over 2-3 feet.
This decides it for me. I think limiting ourselves to just the text of the trilogy, an argument could be made for either a garden variety elephant (Sam’s poem, for example, could describe one) or some kind of mega-pachyderm.
But Tolkien suggests something perhaps more like Jackson’s creature, though not quite as super-sized. And I also agree with the comment made earlier that Jackson had to amaze us, not just the hobbits. A parade of elephants wouldn’t have done the trick.
I think Jackson was jealous of the Imperial Walkers.
In fact, modern elephants can be taken down with a single arrow, even one shot from a simple wooden bow. Heavy equipment is mandatory, use of poison optional.
Here’s a picture with an assortment of mammoths:
From left to right those are woolly, Channel Islands*, Columbian (aka imperial), steppe, and southern mammoths.
And here’s Stegotetrabelodon syrticus, from late Miocene Africa…
* the ones in California, not the ones in the English Channel
They’re missing the mimmoth in that diagram.
More like sauropod size, if you ask me.
A gut shot deffo doesn’t do it, at least in any semblance to ethical action. Heart/lung and brain shots are the options to choose from, when archery hunting oliph…elephant.
That diagram seems to indicate that proboscideans hover three feet above the ground.