Being an assessment of the defence of the Hornburg on the night of 3 March 3019, as recorded by Professor Tolkien in 1954 and by Mr Jackson in 2002, against the Major’s maxim of a rifle, a brew and not moving.
Helm’s Deep scores two out of three and was rescued by a forest. The Wall was twenty feet high and fell to its own drain; the arrows ran out before midnight; the provisions were a short walk away and nobody walked. The Major has passed it, with reservations, and would like the film back in the Library by Friday.
For once both halves are invented, and the paper says so. The battle is fiction by J. R. R. Tolkien and the film an adaptation by Peter Jackson; both are quoted briefly, attributed and analysed as published accounts. What is real: the texts, the author’s letters and drawing, Fonstad’s measurements, the sieges of Rochester and Château Gaillard, Rorke’s Drift and the arithmetic. What is the College’s: the Department, the Major’s marks, Mr Stobbs’s chapter and the grating.
