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After a battle, what do you do with the dead? Burn them? Leave them? Say Valter's army in Kinstrife; after the battle are they buried in a mass grave? Any precedence for this sort of thing in history?

Whenever I run a mass battle I just leave the clean up off screen.

In the books it's usually pile them up and bury them, sometimes burn them if there are too many to easily bury. For the ones on your side you will usually use their spears or other weapons as a makeshift monument. Or you can go the Viking funeral route as they did with Boromir. Dwarves will always try to bury their own kind in stone tombs. The battle at the gates of Moria was notable in part because they had to burn their dead their rather than put them in tombs, because there were too many.

There's plenty of precedence for burying the dead in mass graves in both historical times and during pre-history. Although no mass grave has yet been found for Hastings/Senlac Hill the archaeologists just can't find one and they are still looking. There's a few mediaeval battles where the dead are buried in mass graves. Visby (AD 1361) which is still being excavated, Various battles in the English Wars of the Roses have mass graves. There's one recently been discovered near Durham Cathedral in the UK. A Viking mass grave was recently found in Dorset UK and is believed to be a group of raiders caught and killed by locals, with another possibility being the St Brice's Day massacre ordered by Aethelred II of all Viking men living in England at the time (13 November 1002 AD).

These things quickly pass into folk memory when there is no written record, are distorted by oral tradition and when finally put into writing are usually riddled with factual errors and fanciful ideas.

That leads me to a question about Elven burial rites. Do we know anything about them? Buried in the forest? Probably not tombs. Burning also feels wrong. I've not really looked into it, but when two elves died on this week's session I really didn't know how to handle it.

I believe that I've seen a reference to Avar tombs in the northern part of Mirkwood not far from Caras Amarth. Now this might be a misprint for Avari Tombs or it might be my knowledge of Sindarin isn't up to much and the contraction is linguistically correct. I don't think the reference is from ICE/MERP but it could be and despite the rules their Tolkien knowledge was always pretty good.

I think the only reason to deal with the dead is if it is part of the story. For example, my group carried Odo and Merevech back to Beorn, but burned the goblin bodies (they had been ambushed by the same goblins that did in Odo and Merevech). After the battle at the Old Ford, I dealt with the bandits who had died off-screen, but gave a listing of all the NPCs who died. Due to circumstances, the PCs ended up fighting a defensive action against the bandits on the western shore before the big battle the next day. Every time a random archer/spearman killed a bandit (or got killed) they got a name; it made a nice litany of consequences after the main battle.

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https://www.planet-tolkien.com/board/3/ ... -cremation

Burial, tomb, mound. I would expect burial under normal circumstances (quite natural + hroa (the body) was quite likely not that important for the elves) and tomb or something similar in case of events of great importance.