ETA: I'm adding this up at the top: I just realized how cranky I am for unrelated reasons, so while I'm not gonna delete this, I am owning my upfront exasperation. I will also note that in this one I'm also actually refraining from going into all the ways that GRRM's portrayal (I don't know the second one so cannot comment much) has so many structural problems that boil down to "okay sure civil wars are bad, brutal and horrifying but also not EXACTLY like that and also your worldbuilding is TERRIBLE and BROKEN and you don't understand ANYTHING" that do in fact affect an attempt to compare his war portrayals to anyone else's for "realistic" effect, because this post is already too long.
Also blame @lireavue as she EXPLICITLY point this post out to me. XP
There seems to be a very sanitized vision of the effects of invasion and the actions of invaders in WWI going on here.
I notice the whole "well we need to stop imagining that the middle ages were just a wall to wall violence and rape fest!" has just gone thrown out the wall, hasn't it?
Y'all have failed to notice the difference between a badly run civil war comprised of conscripts and mercenaries and professionals, and a war of defense on your own territory based on armies drawn from the fucking locals.
These are not small or fussy details, including the last one. So let's start with that one.
Armies are comprised of people. You know. Human beings. People with individual stories and backstories, and everything else, just like you.
One of the biggest factors of soldier misbehaviour in these situations is whether they are at home, or somewhere else. Universally, in The Lord of the Rings, combat for "the Good Guys" happens in two (2) contexts:
FIRST: They are literally defending their home. Their own home. Their personal home. The people they live with, have peacetime social contracts with, in the place they fuckin' live. In Rohan, that's really immediate scale: the context of army they have, everyone but the king's personal warband (his "knights", call it twenty people or so) is, even if they are the elite and the feudal overlords, still dealing with their homes. Or their neighbours. They want to have homes and neighbours when this is over. Any non-knight-type soldiers they call up will again be defending their home and their neighbours and want to have homes to come back to afterwards.
SECOND: They are helping to support a bigger and more powerful ally (and yes, Gondor is bigger and more powerful than Rohan even when it's in the shitter), in an immediate combat situation, when - and I cannot stress this enough - all of the civilians are gone, and all of the civilian homes and farms that used to be on the battlefield have already been destroyed and despoiled.
Subsequent to this, they march again over the homes of a good half of them, which are again empty of people because this area has been evacuated, into enemy territory, where there are no homes or civilians.
Like literally, guys: there isn't, actually, a point where a huge feudal army marches through inhabited fucking countryside in this story except for when they're the army of the dead who are absolutely at Aragorn's command. The only times armies fuckin' march here is either a) through their own personal territory, or b) through EMPTY land.
It's actually heavily implied that historically, when these kinds of limited conditions did not apply (cough cough Numenor, cough cough Sea Kings Gondor, cough cough Arnor's civil war) that this was not, in fact, necessarily the case; that in those cases wars did get QUITE ugly. These are also alluded to in the traditional ways of mediaeval chronicles, which is to say briefly and glancingly.
I also realize that it's really popular to think of the historical elite as Horrific Monsters Who Care Nothing For Human Life and it's not even wrong all the time, but the reality is that especially at the levels described in, say, Rohan, there is a hard limit to how much of a shit you can be to your underlings that is predicated on a) the need for labour in agriculture and pastoral work (you literally can't be so shitty to your peasants that they leave you, because you DON'T have a big labour surplus), and b) the fact that you live there.
As agricultural surplus got bigger, and so did cities and society and so on, bluntly the elite in feudal societies got more and more alienated from the people who actually lived on the land they controlled. That's not how Rohan is set up; and Gondor's model is actually completely different and only recently/peripherally "feudal" - the existence of feudal lords controlling a significant chunk of the army in Gondor is a sign of its decline, not its natural state, and Denethor rules very much as a city-state, which is a very different setup.
("Feudal" actually means things, my guys. It refers to a specific relationship of vassal to liege that is predicated on land grants for military service and is not hugely easy to integrate with cities.)
So. That's ONE of the biggest predictors of soldierly misconduct: whether they've got someone they don't view as Properly a Person to commit misconduct on.
The second one is discipline, and that's going to heavily be a factor of morale and the things that support morale: food, water, rest, lack of deeply punishing casualties, a charismatic leader to believe in and, critically, competent people in the roles we assign the titles of "junior officer" and "NCOs" (which may be whatever the hell you want to call them - at SOME point, people who fulfill these roles will show up).
Believe it or not, there have in fact been times when local support for large and even feudal armies was quite high in a warfare context! These times share very consistent features: they were almost always local armies defending against external incursion; they were almost always well-supported and themselves felt a sense of investment and protection for the area and people they were deployed in; and finally, they appear to have been well-run by effective commanders and subcommanders in whom the soldiers had a lot of faith.
(Do incidents of specific, individual misconduct still happen? Sure, the same as crimes get committed by your neighbour. When you have people around each other in large groups, you eventually get Crimes, at least if any given person thinks they can get away with it. But in terms of systemic widespread misconduct as a facet of people existing in the space, not so much.)
So what are the things that fuck this up?
Mercenaries, professionals not drawn from the local area/not trained to feel attachment to the local area, and conscript troops pulled from places far away.
Mercenaries are there to get paid. Some can be quite professional, but most people who want to get paid for killing other people Just Because are gonna be really close to that edge of the human psyche that finds ways to justify anything it wants. That means they're going to have to have immediately compelling reasons not to mistreat the local population who are, after all, strangers and to whom they have no attachment.
(Want to have some fun, there's some interesting stuff we're piecing together through a lot of archeology and study about the transition of some of the larger vikingr armies that then deliberately made the transition to local landowners. Some of them were horrifying; some of them appear to have picked it up well and transitioned pretty easily; but it's still a TRANSITION, because now instead of stealing what they want and leaving, they have an opportunity for significant wealth and prestige . . . . but it requires. staying here. and having the farmers not try to run away, or poison their food. It requires making social alliances and integrating, because they don't have ENOUGH people to just come in, colonize, and wipe out the natives.)
Professional soldiers disconnected from the populace.
A professional army isn't doomed to be an abusive mess, but if you don't make sure that the soldiers still feel a part of the local landscape, society and population, don't feel integrated and ownership of it, you're taking a much bigger risk.
Conscripts dragged from a long distance.
There are of course varying degrees of conscription, and not ALL of them produce intense and hateful alienation towards anyone except the people that directly protect you/etc, but an awful lot of them do, especially if something like a civil war has been going on a long time.
That kind of conscript is already hurting and traumatized and scared out of their mind; they don't want to be here, and they don't want to do this, and they are highly likely to decide Fuck This I'm Out For Myself and just go with whatever follows that creed.
However, all of these still need, you know, the presence of a civilian population for the soldiers to do anything to a civilian population.
Which is lacking from anywhere armies went in the armies part of LotR.
Now! You know what kind of WAR highly predisposes soldierly misconduct on all sides*? That's right! Civil war!
Civil war here is slightly broad as well: I absolutely am counting, for instance, the 100 Years War in France as that, because that war is honestly a war between formerly-French nobility and French nobility for continental territory. That war forged concepts of Frenchness and Englishness that were very opposed to one another on a large scale, over the ensuing centuries, but that's what we call a retcon.
(*take it as read that "invasion" encourages misconduct on the invading side.)
Civil war is particularly ugly because of the sense of betrayal. And the longer it goes on, the more ugly and complex and strung out loyalties can get, and the more vengeful retaliation for perceived betrayals can get.
Another thing civil war tends to do is fuck up the economics of the country, by which I mean the ability for everyone to get their basic needs met. That's when you get a hard line competition between civilians and soldiers for food and water and so on, which is another thing likely to lead to soldierly misconduct.
These conditions apply heavily to what GRRM is trying to invoke in ASoIaF. All of these wars are civil wars, and they're civil wars happening less than a full lifetime since the last civil war, and they're happening when the country can't afford a civil war and when, in theory, the nobility do have a choice about the matter.
He also specifically chose a "time period" (that is, model of aristocracy etc) to copy, very imperfectly, when a huge number of OTHER social factors (including a change in agriculture, in real history) had increasingly led to the alienation of the wealthy from the land they actually owned, even at an immediate level - a period where it was deeply possible you'd never even SEEN your overlord in your life, as opposed to him living in that castle up the hill there. This alienation works both ways: it makes the powerful more willing to spend lives, and it makes the powerless less willing to give any real loyalty, which leads to the powerless acting in their own interests more, which leads to the powerful trusting them less, which leads to the powerful being more coercive . . . .and we get readily down to soldierly misconduct because nobody's bothering to stop it.
By the time there's a clear external enemy the landscape is completely different and also the writers are off the edge of the map for the show.
Finally: y'all have some oddly rose-coloured glasses about WWI. It was really, really not just a war of trenches and soldiers.
The German occupation of Northern France and that general area was brutal and horrific, and there is zero reason to expect that this would have been restricted to that area; it was in fact a war of invasion between Germany and France, and while a certain thread of history likes to act like everyone bumbled into the war and All Are Guilty, nah, actually, Germany was the one that invaded, and invaded with the intent to occupy.
They also repeatedly committed mass civilian killings during the initial invasion. There was a turn against the overuse of this as propaganda, which took what was already bad enough and turned it into cartoonish absurdity (babies on bayonets, that kind of thing) but they still killed Belgian and French civilians in mass executions for essentially the temerity of resisting the invasion. And the Eastern Front was such a horror show of mutual atrocities that you can't even pin it down to one side or the other, because it actually moved across territories, back and forth, so that everyone was at some point invading someone else, at least briefly.
For Tolkien this was not history; this was current affairs, as was his active resistance of the pro-patria-mori ethos of the time. When he did finally get sent to the front he didn't want to be there.
The subtext of Lord of the Rings isn't that war is sometimes good - it is that sometimes your choice is war or annihilation. The closest you get to "sometimes war is moral and good" comes from the Rohirrim and from Boromir - and in both cases it is explicitly represented as a way in which they are morally immature, culturally immature, a way in which Boromir is actually a lesser man than his younger brother, and a way in which the culture of the Rohirrim is more "primitive"* than that of Gondor or potentially even that of the Shire.
(*now you can sure as heck query the hell out of some aspects of that attitude in the text! But it's still what's there.)
But the text also engages in the context and reality which is that cultures that are continually faced with war or danger or threat that requires response of arms? Those cultures will start valuing and valourizing the ability to make war, and perceive that ability as the profoundest part of strength. That stories of great battles and struggles and strife and so on are stirring and uplifting and even while that is the case it does not mean you actually want a war, that anything about this is actually fun or okay. (But it might help you get through the one you have no choice about. Which is still not necessarily the greatest thing but here we are in Arda Marred, the Fallen World, and we do what we can.)
People often skip "The Scouring of the Shire" because it can feel very pasted on yaye. But there is a fundamental core argument that happens in it between Frodo and Meriadoc: Frodo is absolutely, emphatically insistent that he does not want anyone killed. He doesn't want even any of the invading "ruffians" killed and he is absolutely emphatically sure that the worst fucking thing that could ever, ever happen would be a hobbit killing a hobbit, even if that hobbit is aligned to the ruffians. But also he doesn't even want to kill the ruffians. That doing this will stain the Shire, will cross a line that is a kind of horror.
And Meriadoc points out that acting shocked and sad will not in fact get rid of the ruffians. Sure, fine, we'll try to scare them off if possible but the likelihood is that we're going to hit a point where they turn and fight and then our option is going to be kill or let them win.
And the war ends - really ends - with a murder and an execution on his doorstep, things he tried desperately in both cases to stop, and is it a surprise that Frodo can't actually stay there anymore?
Also here let's have a quote:
Frodo had been in the battle, but he had not drawn sword and his chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons.
That is: Frodo's task in the Battle of Bywater was to prevent his neighbours - hobbits, the peaceloving agrarian hippy children - from committing war crimes on unarmed prisoners.
It's almost like Tolkien knew exactly what happens, even to "good guys", when shit gets bad.
It is true that Tolkien and the later writers are writing about different kinds of war. But that different "kind" is actually literally what caused the war and thus what the wars circumstances were, rather than merely an ethos towards war. GRRM also explicitly chose a civil war context, and he also chose a specific time-period model (as he understood it, which is not well) to imitate - and he chose it not because it was "accurate" but because he wanted to tell a certain kind of Dark Story. Fair play to him; but that doesn't make his portrayal of war across the board accurate, nor does it mean all contexts of war and armies and their interactions are the same.
It is also true, as always seems to be, that people often mistake their memory of what they felt when they read The Lord of the Rings for what is actually on the page.
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