Battering Ram

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and its hideous head, founded of black steel, was shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it...
—The Return Of The King

When you want to enter a structure, you politely knock on the door. When the door does not open after that, you knock harder.

A common element in sieges is people carrying a large blunt object, like a cut down tree, and ramming it against the gate of a castle in order to break it down.

This is very common in fiction. After all, it's dramatic, looks cool, and has plenty of basis in Real Life. The Theory of Narrative Causality, however, means that it's only effective half the time.

Sometimes, a person has to be substituted as the battering ram, mostly through his head.

Examples of Battering Ram include:

Card Games

Comic Books

  • Used twice in the Polish comic Kajko I Kokosz. On one occasion Clumsy suggests that the brigands simply break down the town's gate (as opposed to coming up with scheme of the week) They agree to the plan but forget to bring the ram and end up using Clumsy's head instead. On the other occasion the one shot villains, the Falcon Band, break down the gate with a ram, only to realize that the heroes had covered it with glue the night before.

Film - Animation

Film - Live Action

  • There's a bit in Braveheart where this gets an added Incendiary Exponent - if the door doesn't fall down it can burn down.
  • In the 1923 and 1939 versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo drops a long piece of wood onto the rabble attacking Notre Dame and the rabble use it as an improvised battering ram.
  • Some policemen attempt to use one to break into an apartment in The Man With Two Brains.
  • In Hairspray, at one point they use a hairspray battering ram
  • In The Pirate Movie, the pirates use a battering ram to... ring the doorbell. On their second charge, the butler opens the door and they charge through.
  • At the end of the western comedy The Great Bank Robbery, after numerous unsuccessful assaults, the Mexican bandits smash their way into the fortress-like bank using a giant tree trunk as a ram, only to learn the bank's already been robbed by someone else.
  • Hot Fuzz: two huge chains of shopping carts were used as this.
  • In The Two Towers, the Uruk-hai use a battering ram against Helm's Deep's gates.
    • Likewise the orc army in Return of the King (see Literature, below). Their standard battering ram has absolutely no effect on Minas Tirith's gate, so they bring up Grond.

Literature

  • As quoted above, in Lord of the Rings, the army attacking Minas Tirith uses a battering ram called Grond against its gates.
  • In the Masters of Rome series of novels, Caesar is fond of using "battering ram" as an Unusual Euphemism for his... you know what.
  • In The Mouse That Roared, the solders of Grand Fenwick need to get past a locked door at the New York Institute of Physics. So they chop down a tree and cover one end with a chainmail shirt. They then batter down the door. Cut to later on as an almost crying historian examines the chainmail shirt and laments over the destruction of a perfect replica of ancient chainmail.
  • Jake's rhinoceros morph and occasionally Rachel's elephant morph were the substitutes several times in Animorphs.

Live Action TV

  • The Red Dwarf crew once needed a battering ram to get through a series of doors. "All we need is something, say, I dunno, six foot long, fairly sturdy, with a flat top." {{[[[Why Are You Looking At Me Like That?]] Everyone looks at Kryten}}.] "Fifty-three doors!? You can't be serious!" Fifty-three doors later...

Lister: Kryten, are you okay?
Kryten: I'm fine, thank you Susan!

Newspaper Comics

Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons & Dragons has both the traditional version (check the Dungeon Master's Guide) and smaller man-portable rams similar to the type used by police in Real Life.

Theater

  • Occurs in Lysistrata when Greece's women have barricaded themselves in the Acropolis and vowed to withhold sex from their husbands until they call off the Peloponnesian War. So we get a scene where the much-deprived men of Athens grab a big trunk of wood and ram it against the doors of the Acropolis again and again, desperately trying to force their way inside...

Video Games

  • Battering rams are one of the units that you can create in Age of Empires II.
  • The Norse get light man-portable rams in Age of Mythology. The Egyptians and Greeks opt to use siege towers with rams in the base.
  • In the first Age of Wonders rams are the most basic way to get past enemy walls. Even small villages can build them. However, their slowness makes them difficult to use.
  • In the early ages of Empire Earth, the very first siege weapon available is the Samson, an infantry unit carrying a huge log he repeatedly bashes against whatever building he's pointed at. Due to Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors, he's unable to attack anything but buildings.
  • Near the end of Bastion, the player character receives one as a weapon... which he carries himself. He can use to smash down doors and clear the room of obstacles and enemies in a single move. However, it slows him down to a crawl, turning him into a Mighty Glacier.
  • A reliable way to smash through city or castle gates in many Total War games, assuming enemy archers don't get lucky and set it alight with flaming arrows... or it's not late enough in the game for the enemy settlement to have cannon towers that smash the ram to splinters in one shot. Unlike many video game examples, these rams aren't constructed normally, but built by your armies in the field once they besiege a settlement.
  • Similarly in Stronghold, engineers build rams on the field and must man them to be usable.
  • Kingdoms of Camelot has battering rams as a weapon. They're a higher-level weapon, not unlocked until the player has a level 9 Barracks and several high level researches completed. They also tend to require a lot of food upkeep, so they aren't trained quite as often as foot or horse troops. They are great for attacking other players' cities, though you have to watch out for defensive trebuchets, which specifically target siege weaponry.

Western Animation

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