It just occurred to me, and the Digital Tolkien project confirms, that in all the books Tolkien wrote about war, he never once used the word “martial”. Which makes perfect sense — Mars would be as out of place in Middle-earth as Father Christmas in Narnia. There is one use of the word in an appendix near the back of Unfinished Tales, discussing the Marshals of the Riddermark. But those are drafts, for which I do not hold J.R.R. Tolkien responsible. The word “Marshal” must have exerted a gravitational force, which would surely have been corrected before publication.
Leave a Reply