Midnight
In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional lands of Middle-earth, a mûmak (plural mûmakil) is a pachyderm of the southern land of Harad, similar to but much larger than today's elephant, and said to be its ancestor.
The terms mûmak and mûmakil were used by the Men of Gondor. Hobbit folklore called these creatures oliphaunts.
Contents
Description
The oliphaunt is described in The Two Towers, Book IV, Chapter 3. Samwise Gamgee expresses a desire to see one and tells of Hobbit-lore of them being "big as a house" (see poem below). Later, in Chapter 4, the creature is first called "Mûmak" by Damrod, one of Faramir's Ithilien rangers. Sam then sees one as big as a "moving hill." Tolkien relates that Sam's "fear and wonder" may have enlarged the animal in his eyes.
Employed as a beast of burden by the natives of Harad, the Haradrim, the mûmakil were also used in battle during the wars of the Third Age. In the War of the Ring, they were used by troops in Ithilien and in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, much like war elephants of the real world. In battle, they carried tower-like structures (corresponding to the real world's howdahs) on their backs.
These beasts had skin so thick, it was almost impenetrable—making them almost invulnerable to arrows. The only known way to kill one was to shoot it in the eye, doubtless a very difficult task to perform. Also, as with real elephants, horses unfamiliar to them refused to go near them, making them effective against enemy cavalry. Tolkien implies that the creatures became extinct and that its "kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and majesty."
Word origin
The word oliphaunt is a variant spelling of the archaic word oliphant meaning "elephant", "ivory", "elephant-tusk", "musical horn made of an elephant tusk", or "a musical instrument resembling such a horn". It appears in Middle English as olifant or olifaunt, and was borrowed from Medieval French olifanz. The French word owes something to both Old High German olbenta "camel", and to Latin elephantus "elephant", a word of Greek origin. OHG olbenta is a word of old Germanic origin; cf. Gothic ulbandus also meaning "camel". But the form of the OHG and Gothic words suggests it is also a borrowing, perhaps indeed directly or indirectly from Greek elephas (ελεφας) literally "ivory", though apparently with some confusion as to the animal the word referred to. The word survives as the surname "Oliphant" found throughout the English speaking world (used by people such as the political cartoonist Pat Oliphant).
The most famous use of the oliphant is in The Song of Roland "The oliphant is set to Roland's Lips;" Roland fails to call for help at the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 until it is too late for him and his comrades. The oliphant is echoed in The Lord of the Rings by Boromir's horn and counterposed by Helm's horn and the horns of Buckland.
Tolkien was born in South Africa, though he was taken to England at the age of 3; in Afrikaans, just as in the Dutch language, the word for elephant happens to be olifant.
Poem
Oliphaunt is also the title of a short comic poem about the beast quoted by the hobbit Samwise Gamgee, based on traditional bestiary lore.
- Grey as a mouse,
- Big as a house,
- Nose like a snake,
- I make the earth shake,
- As I tramp through the grass;
- Trees crack as I pass.
- With horns in my mouth
- I walk in the South,
- Flapping big ears.
- Beyond count of years
- I stump round and round,
- Never lie on the ground,
- Not even to die.
- Oliphaunt am I,
- Biggest of all,
- Huge, old, and tall.
- If ever you'd met me
- You wouldn't forget me.
- If you never do,
- You won't think I'm true;
- But old Oliphaunt am I,
- And I never lie.
In adaptations
Mûmakil first appear in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where Faramir and his men ambush not one, but two of them along with the Haradrim.
In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, they play a key role in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where the Rohirrim lose many men due to a direct charge against them (quite counter to real-life tactics, as noted above). However, they are ultimately defeated by the Army of the Dead. Legolas also kills one beast all by himself, climbing up it and shooting it in the head piercing the brain stem, in fashion similar to the way he had previously dispatched a cave-troll in the tomb of Balin in the mines of Moria.
Here they are interpreted as being much, much larger (50-100 feet or 15-30 meters tall) than today's elephants with two sets of large tusks, one set in the upper jaw with a further set of smaller tusks, and another in the lower (like in the extinct Deinotherium) . The giant tusks hang close to ground level, and carry either spiked sleeves for hitting enemies, or house a broad barbed wire suspended between them, used for simply grinding anything in front of the animal down. Also, their skin is cut by blades and pierced by arrows relatively easily, though their hides are so tough they seem to shrug off any pain. Legolas uses embedded arrows as handholds and footholds to climb up to one animal's back. Éowyn cuts one down with a sword in both hands by cutting the hamstring of its back legs, doing the same to another with a thrown spear before she is dismounted, and her brother Éomer incapacitates two by killing a leader of the Haradrim riding on top with a well-aimed spear throw. The man topples down with the spear still embedded in him, and the apparatus used to steer the Mûmak by pulling the ears is disrupted, causing it to turn to the side and knocking over the other.
Peter Jackson mentions in the DVD commentary for the Extended Edition of The Return of the King that the scenes with the Mûmakil are deliberately less violent and shorter than the original cut (i.e. Oliphaunts were originally going to be required to be shot in the eyes to be killed, but this was cut), because test audiences may have been reminded of the infamous abuse of circus elephants and given the creatures unintended sympathy. He also says that they specifically chose not to make the mûmakil trumpet with their trunks, as elephants are commonly imagined to, but to bellow a slowed-down and distorted lion's roar. This is, once again, to keep the audience from thinking of them as sympathetic creatures rather than evil monsters.
Noting their huge proportions and role in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields as shock troops, some have compared them to the Imperial AT-AT walkers of Star Wars, as MAD magazine has done by juxtaposing one of the latter with them in a parody.
In popular culture
- In the game, Rome: Total War, typing in the word 'oliphaunt' into the console will create larger elephant units.
See also
Bibliography
- Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. 1952, Unwin
- Tolkien, J. R. R. Oliphaunt. 1989, Contemporary Books/Calico, illus. Hank Hinton
- The Song of Roland (Oxford text, 1972. Translated by Douglas David and Roy Owen. George Allen and Unwin, ISBN 0048410039)
- Oxford English Dictionary OUP
References
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es:Olifante (Tierra Media) fr:Mûmak hu:Olifánt it:Olifante (Tolkien) nl:Mûmakil pl:Mumakile pt:Olifante sv:Mûmakil
