War was never like that. At Cannae thousands of years ago, fought with blades and shields, thousands of men were slaughtered in mere hours. Agincourt is famous for the ruination of the French knighthood by archers- who were not nobility but quite skilled in their own right. Artillery predates the warplane by quite a bit and is often ignored in media because it simply and terrifyingly dominates the battlefield (they don't call it the Queen of Battle for nothing- a chess reference). Even Tolkien knew this and, while his heroes are very skilled at arms, it is the motion of armies and placement of defenses that make the difference; Helm's Deep needed Eomer's men to break the siege, not just Eomer.
Now, I think your concept of Knighthood is better seen as an expression of something deeper. I think it is tied to the sense of an ability to directly influence outcomes of a situation writ (often very) large.
Hey! Thanks for reading. I probably dressed my point up in a bit too much hyperbole, but that is essentually whar I am trying to get to, yes. When I say that soldiers used to be able to parry blades and block arrows, I am not trying to claim that they're life expectancy on the field was "good" by an objective metric, but that it was something they had direct influence on in a way you just can't when it's now possible for an entire squad to be decimated from remote by, say, an artillery strike. Even archers, as far as they could be from their target, were still at least in sight range, which meant they were a targetable entity themselves.
To refer to Cannae, thousands of men in a few hours is horrifyingly deadly... but if you gathered that many men in the same way in a battle today, technology means that same damage can happen *in minutes*. That's why we don't and why since (at least) the Great War most foot combat is—to put it cheekily—a game of peekaboo. You don't even want to be *seen* on the battlefield now, or you're already that much closer to dying.
In a way, my point is paradoxical. And to be sure I'm missing a good deal of rigor. But I think there's something to the sheer extreme it has come to, and that's what I was focused on (if that makes sense).
War was never like that. At Cannae thousands of years ago, fought with blades and shields, thousands of men were slaughtered in mere hours. Agincourt is famous for the ruination of the French knighthood by archers- who were not nobility but quite skilled in their own right. Artillery predates the warplane by quite a bit and is often ignored in media because it simply and terrifyingly dominates the battlefield (they don't call it the Queen of Battle for nothing- a chess reference). Even Tolkien knew this and, while his heroes are very skilled at arms, it is the motion of armies and placement of defenses that make the difference; Helm's Deep needed Eomer's men to break the siege, not just Eomer.
Now, I think your concept of Knighthood is better seen as an expression of something deeper. I think it is tied to the sense of an ability to directly influence outcomes of a situation writ (often very) large.
Hey! Thanks for reading. I probably dressed my point up in a bit too much hyperbole, but that is essentually whar I am trying to get to, yes. When I say that soldiers used to be able to parry blades and block arrows, I am not trying to claim that they're life expectancy on the field was "good" by an objective metric, but that it was something they had direct influence on in a way you just can't when it's now possible for an entire squad to be decimated from remote by, say, an artillery strike. Even archers, as far as they could be from their target, were still at least in sight range, which meant they were a targetable entity themselves.
To refer to Cannae, thousands of men in a few hours is horrifyingly deadly... but if you gathered that many men in the same way in a battle today, technology means that same damage can happen *in minutes*. That's why we don't and why since (at least) the Great War most foot combat is—to put it cheekily—a game of peekaboo. You don't even want to be *seen* on the battlefield now, or you're already that much closer to dying.
In a way, my point is paradoxical. And to be sure I'm missing a good deal of rigor. But I think there's something to the sheer extreme it has come to, and that's what I was focused on (if that makes sense).