One of the cool parts of The Return of the King is when Gandalf and Pippin light the beacons of Minas Tirith. Cool visuals. Majestic music. Neat suff!
Thing is, a bunch of folks probably thought “What a cool idea Tolkien (or maybe Jackson) had here.” But the idea wasn’t original.
Beacons (fires set on hilltops or other high places as a means of communication) were used in antiquity. The Greeks and Romans had beacons linked in relay that were used to rapidly transmit information across long distances. Homer mentions them in The Illiad (which is what that Troy movie is loosely based on). They served as a low-tech form of Internet, though with severe limitations about what kind of information could be sent.
To get around the problem of only being able to send a limited number of messages, the ancients would also use flags, smoke signals, and other means that could transmit a more data-rich message.
As cool as the beacons of Minas Tirith sequence is in The Return of the King, I do have one criticism of it: Peter Jackson shows the beacons taking way too much time. The sequence shows them being lit for part of a day, all of a night, and part of another day in order to get the “Help!” message from Gondor to Rohan, which the film tells us are only a few days’ ride apart. That’s too much time.
The Roman beacon system was much faster, speed being the whole point of the beacon network. As soon as the guys at one beacon see another catch fire, they start lighting their own, and so the message is communicated from beacon station to beacon station much faster than a horse could carry a rider. A basic message could be sent across Europe by the real-world system in less time than it took the message to travel in the film.
If you’re any kind of a history buff–or if you’ve watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos–you know about the famed