Plate armour is a type of armor made of plates, usually metal, mostly Bronze, iron or steel, more rarely even wood or hardened leather.The elves seemingly knew certain types of corselet, cuirass, harness and breastplate and some Warriors of Arnor apparently wore a type of panoply.
Plate armor also was known in some other cultures of the Men of Darkness in Rhûn and Harad and may have been known to the Númenóreans as well as their ancestors who had been clad in elven-armour by their Noldorin liege-lords.
Notes[]
The existence of plate armor within the legendarium has always been an issue of dispute. While the length of time and technologically advance to develope plate armor would certainly have been given throughout the ages of Arda, full plate never seems to have been explicitly mentioned in any texts while arguably at least some sorts of scale, splinter and lamellar, perhaps even ring or segmented armor might have been alluded to in the writings, mail armor seems to have been the military standard for millenia.The question however gets tougher through the fact that JRRT often used the term mail to refer to any type of archaic body armor, not always necessarily chain, as would have been the proper historic use.A few times he uses the term corselet, cuirass, harness and once even panoply to describe types of armor, however these terms all are ambiguous and their context debateable. Also the elvish terms for body armour, "Ambasse" or " Ammos" are contradictingly translated variously as breastplate, cuirass, byrne or hauberk, the latter unquestionably hinting towards chain.
The elves, especially high-elves however already knew and used other types than mail, which was an invention of the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains, long before and as such other, earlier types of body armor, especially the type known as fishmail.Corslets are also mentioned in combination with chain armour, which makes a kind of plate, scale or lammelar armor rather likely.
See:
- coat of plates
- Elven Armor
- half-plate
- plated mail