Peace! Count the Clock!

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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ABC Alphabetical Railway Giude, Agatha Christie, anachronism, Bag End, Bradshaw's Railway Companion, clocks, Egyptian, feudalism, Gros Horloge, hour glases, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Macbeth, Medieval, Normandy, Pope Sylvester II, railways, Rouen, Salisbury Cathedral clock, Shakespeare, sundial, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Wapping tunnel, water clocks, Wells Cathedral

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In our last, we puzzled over something in the entryway to Bag End.

It’s that thing to the left of the door. It looks rather like a clock (which is what we thought before examining it more closely), but it is, in fact, a barometer—and a very puzzling thing for Bilbo to have, as we suggested.

On the right hand wall, however, there is another puzzling object: an actual clock.

In our world, of course, this is no puzzle at all, clocks being so common. In fact, our major way of indicating time in English is to say, “It’s 11 o’clock”, where “o’clock” is a contracted form of “of the clock”. Even if, like many in our world, you get your time from your phone, you’ll still say this, won’t you?

This has been the case since the 16^th century, as we can see in Shakespeare’s plays—including moments when characters who live in times before clocks still talk about them, as in Macbeth, Act II, Scene 4, where Macbeth’s cousin, Ross, says to an Old Man, “By th’clock ‘tis day”, when the historical Macbeth lived in the 11^th century AD, perhaps 200 and more years before clocks began to appear in western Europe.

Although we’ve seen it regularly cited that Pope Sylvester II

invented the first mechanical clock in the 990s AD, we have yet to see anything in the way of concrete evidence that this is so. Rather, we see the first clocks to have appeared in the later 14^th century, including the Salisbury Cathedral clock, which perhaps dates from 1386.

Likewise there is the clock of Wells Cathedral, tentatively dated to about the same time

or the Gros Horloge in Rouen, in Normandy, whose internal workings date from 1389.

And the pendulum clock—which is what is visible on the right hand wall of Bag End—is an even later invention, credited to the Dutch scientist of the mid-17^th century, Christian Huygens.

Long before such devices, people marked time by such things as hour glasses (possibly medieval? Lots of discussion about this, but there is documentation that medieval ships’ captains began to use them)

and water clocks (used in Athenian court rooms to control speeches—when citations of established law were read in court, the order was to “stop the clock”, as reading law as evidence clearly wasn’t considered to be part of a speech)

and even put the sun to work, using its moving shadow to tell the time. (This is the earliest sundial we’ve seen—it’s Egyptian, from the 13^th century BC)

(And just a linguistic footnote on “telling time” as a sort of pun. On the one hand, we read time off a device—and, if asked, aloud—so that we are “telling—that is reciting—the time”. At the same time, an older usage of the verb “to tell” was “to count”. This is preserved in the “teller” in a bank, by someone “telling” a rosary, and by “tolling” a bell. It can also be seen in other Germanic languages, like Danish, which has the verb “taelle”, “to count”, and German, “zaehlen”. So, when you “tell” time, you’re both deciphering the information from a device—possibly aloud—and doing so by counting.)

All of which leads us back to Bilbo’s clock, on a wall in the Shire.

As far as we can tell, at the end of the Third Age, the Shire was primarily a non-feudal medieval agricultural world.

Such worlds are, considering how much the sun is involved in growing things like grain,

governed by daylight, which is, on the whole, easy to mark and measure. (A difficulty for sundials, of course, is that the sun changes position throughout the year and the hours of daylight can vary greatly. Perhaps this is why there is a famous sundial motto: “Horas non numero nisi serenas”—“I count only the fair—that is, sunny—hours”.)

So why is there a pendulum clock on that wall?

A partial answer might be the same as that for the barometer: JRRT is recreating something from his own past, or even from his present—the big dial looks later to us than the 1890s. Just as in the case of that reference to Bilbo shrieking “like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”), it mirrors Tolkien’s own world—a world in which railways in Britain were a major influence on changes in marking time.

Railways had begun to appear in 1830, with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

(And here, by the way, is an engineering marvel of the time—the 1.25-mile long Wapping tunnel, dug to allow the railway’s passage into Liverpool and the first such tunnel to be constructed under a city. Seeing this 1831 illustration, it’s easy to imagine what kind of shriek Bilbo must have made!)

By 1840, building and traffic had increased dramatically and, as the rail lines stretched across England, an awkwardness appeared: there was no uniform time standard. Towns close to each other might share the same time, but those between London and Liverpool, say, had their own methods of marking time and so attempting to produce a dependable schedule for a train’s journey was nearly an impossibility along the 178 miles (287km) between the two cities.

Those in charge of the early railways quickly saw the difficulty and began, as early as 1840, to standardize the measurement of time along their routes. By the late 1850s, standardization had been mainly achieved—although it was only in the 1880s that the government stepped in to complete the progress.

This regularizing of time produced, on the one hand, standard railway timetable books, like Bradshaw’s Railway Companion

(first published in 1839 and often consulted by Watson and Holmes on their extra-London adventures) and The ABC Alphabetical Railway Guide

(first published in 1853 and the basis of Agatha Christie’s 1936 novel, The ABC Murders). On the other hand, it also produced standardized time in general, eventually going global, something which the industrial revolution increasingly demanded as part of its production cycle and now so deeply ingrained that virtually everything we do is influenced by it and we even incorporate it into our bodies, either tying it to our wrists

or wear it as part of our clothing.

Work, school, even fun (movies begin on time schedules, television is one long schedule, as well as certain elements of the internet—although the internet does offer the subversive possibility of doing things “on your own time”), all of it moves to the measured tick of time. In 1937, the year after Agatha Christie’s novel based upon railway timetables was published, JRRT would have felt it, from his lecture schedule to the evening radio broadcasts of the BBC.

Almost as if it were a gathering force of the MODERN WORLD, then, the measurement and standardization of time has crept up, from the later medieval world on. We can see that Shakespeare was influenced by it—in Julius Caesar (1599?), Act II, the jumpy Brutus and Cassius listen to the sound of a clock striking three—in a world where there would be no clocks to strike for almost 1400 years (but providing us with the title of this post). Is it any wonder, then, that clocks could have slipped into Middle-earth? And, besides, they do have a use for Bilbo—how else could he shout to the dwarves as he left them, “If ever you are passing my way…don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four…” (The Hobbit, Chapter Eighteen, “The Return Journey”)?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

About That PS

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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anachronism, Bag End, banjo clock, barometer, clocks, Edwardian, Evangelista Torricelli, Hobbiton, Lucien Vidie, Middle-earth, Oxford, railway, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a PS to our last posting, we showed this illustration

and asked you if you saw something peculiar about it.

In fact, there are two peculiar things about it. Look to the left of the door. What is that? At first, we were inclined to imagine that it was a clock of a style known as a “banjo clock”.

But there was also a clock on the right hand wall, and, unless Bag End was like a stock exchange, with clocks showing various times around the world,

(image the one on the left being “Shire Time”, while the one on the right is “Mordor Time”!)

why would Bilbo have two clocks?

There’s also the technical problem: banjo clocks—maybe all clocks?—which have pendulums need to use gravity to help in their swing. If the object on Bilbo’s wall is a clock, it’s upside down and therefore—

and so, after lots of searching to see if we could match it somehow, we were scratching our collective heads when we realized that it wasn’t a clock at all, but a barometer—and a distinctively Victorian one, which fits in with our suggestion in a recent posting that JRRT was using his memories of his Victorian/Edwardian childhood as the basis of Bag End.

So, what’s a barometer and why might Bilbo have one?

The simplest answer to the first of those is that a barometer measures atmospheric pressure. That measurement, in turn, can tell you about changes in weather: low pressure, it’s more likely to rain, high pressure, not. Here’s a basic chart to explain.

One odd thing about Bilbo’s is that, commonly, barometers are combined with thermometers in patterns of the sort you see on the Bag End wall, whereas this one appears to be by itself.

The really odd thing, however, is that he has one to begin with. The first barometers date from the 1640s, being an offshoot of trying to understand the concept of a vacuum.

It was only in the 1840s that someone (Lucien Vidie) postulated that air pressure changes—measurable by this device– could signal weather changes. For Bilbo to have such a thing in a Middle-earth which appears to be almost entirely devoid both of science as we understand it and of mechanical technology, is a puzzle at best. Who made it? How did he obtain it? And last—and hardest—what did he do with it?

Of course, as we have discussed in past postings, there are whole areas of knowledge about Middle-earth about which we have little or no information and it’s been fun for us to try to reconstruct things using parallels from our own world, combined with the little we do know. That first barometer was, we presume, handmade by Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647).

It appears to have been, basically, a long glass tube, attached to a piece of wood by white metal fittings. The hobbits have glass windows, so the art of glass-blowing exists in their world. The wood and metal could be used in many other settings. Once the concept was understood, it would be easy to see someone taking already available techniques and materials and creating the object.

But who made it? When it came to ingenuity in craft, JRRT suggests the dwarves—with the men of Dale as fellow-workers or perhaps as middlemen. As Thorin says of the past:

“Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days…the toy market of Dale was the wonder of the North.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

How did Bilbo acquire it? He had come to be known in Hobbiton as unlike other hobbits—his mother, after all, was the famous Belladonna Took (for her history—or, rather, her mystery–see The Hobbit, Chapter 1) and, after his travels, “he took to writing poetry and visiting elves”. Perhaps the barometer came from one of his trips? Or had it been sent to him?

If we take the preparations for the famous joint-birthday-party at the opening of The Lord of the Rings as a clue, there must have been at least a small degree of commerce between the Shire and the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and the rebuilt town of Dale:

“On this occasion the presents were unusually good…There were toys the like of which they had never seen before, all beautiful and some obviously magical. Many of them had indeed been ordered a year before, and had come all the way from the Mountain and from Dale, and were of real dwarf-make.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party).

But then there is that third question: what did he do with it? As far as we can currently determine from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, neither Bilbo nor Frodo nor even Gandalf ever mentions a barometric reading, or is concerned that the pressure is dropping.

So what are we to make of this?

For all that JRRT was increasingly careful about this, there a few anachronisms in his work. In The Hobbit, there is the well-known one of Bilbo’s reaction to Thorin’s explanation of the dangers of future burglary:

“At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

Although JRRT himself considered changing this for the 1966 revision, Douglas Anderson, in The Annotated Hobbit, 47-48, argues that this doesn’t have to be an anachronism at all:

“…for Tolkien as narrator was telling this story to his children in the early 1930s, and they lived in a world where railway trains were a very important feature of life.”

In fact, built in 1844, the first railway station in Oxford was almost a century old when The Hobbit was published in 1937.

(And we can’t resist this quotation from Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 15 June, 1844, which describes the arrival of the first train as “one of those rampageous, dragonnading fire-devils”. Clearly, dragons and railroads have a long history together!)

So, is this just a slip on JRRT’s part? Perhaps he had a barometer in his past, next to a door, and, in his urge to fill up the wall space of Bag End, he simply filled in what he already knew? We can only shrug—and, in our next, wonder about that clock on the wall to the right: what’s it doing in Middle-earth?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Are You Sitting Down?.2 (Some Thrones, but No Games)

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A Game of Thrones, Bag End, basins, Bree, British monarchs, Buckland, canopy, cart, Cirith Ungol, Coronation Chair, Coronation Throne, Crick Hollow, Edoras, Edward I, Edward VII, Edward VIII, Edwardian, Elizabeth II, Elrond's house, Furniture, George V, George VI, Gondor, high table, Iron Throne of Westros, Lia Fail, Lothlorien, Medieval, Middle-earth, Minas Tirith, monopodium, Moot Hill, parlor, pubs, Rivendell, Rohan, Shire, Stone of Scone, Tara Ireland, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Prancing Pony, the Stone of Destiny, throne, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, UK pubs, Victorian Bedroom, Victorians, washstand

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last, we were talking about furniture in Middle-earth—in that post our subject was The Hobbit. We continue with The Lord of the Rings and conclude with one specialized piece of furniture.

We begin where we began last time, with Bag End.

With all of its rooms and the stuff in them, we suggested then that what JRRT was really doing was depicting the kind of overcrowded place later Victorians and Edwardians—the people with whom he, born 1893, would have grown up around—would have preferred.

[Note, by the way, the table in the middle of the entryway in Tolkien’s picture of Bag end, and compare it with this “monopodium” table with claw feet, which could be seen in such a parlor.]

Once the three Hobbits leave Bag End for their journey to Crick Hollow,

having sent “two covered carts…to Buckland, conveying the goods and furniture…” (and the next day sending off another) (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 3, “Three is Company), they will spend a great deal of time walking (and paddling and riding), but will enter few buildings. Here, by the way, is a cart—we imagine “covered” simply means that a blanket of some tough coarse fabric, like canvas, (called a “tilt”) would have been pulled over the load.

Our chances of getting much furniture detail are not high, then, but let’s see what we find.

Beyond Buckland, the first indoors for the hobbits is Tom Bombadil’s house. As the hobbits enter, they are in:

“…a long low room, filled with the light of lamps swinging from the beams in the roof; and on the table of dark polished wood stood many candles, tall and yellow, burning brightly.

In a chair, at the far side of the room facing the outer door, sat a woman…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”)

The hobbits are given “low rush-seated chairs”.

And, shortly, are shown their bedroom:

“They came to a low room with a sloping roof…There were four deep mattresses…laid on the floor along one side. Against the opposite wall was a long bench laden with wide earthenware basins, and beside it stood brown ewers filled with water…”

Not much to go on here. We’ll presume that the bench is wooden and plain, and the basins and ewers (a big pitcher—ultimately from Latin aquarius, “having to do with water”) are of the kind one would have seen in a Victorian bedroom, when indoor bathrooms were still only a wish—or were only in the homes of the extremely wealthy.

[Victorians, by the way, could have specialized places for such pitcher/basin combinations. They’re called “washstands” and here’s a simple but functional one.]

Next on their journey (we won’t count the barrow—although the Wight does mention a “stony bed”) is the Prancing Pony.

Again—what we have is functional. The hobbits are initially led to what the landlord, Barliman Butterbur, calls “a nice little parlour” where “There was a bit of bright fire burning on the hearth, and in front of it were some low and comfortable chairs” and “a round table, already spread with a white cloth”. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)

This sounds like a small, private room, found in some UK pubs, and called a “snug” (etymology unclear—but used to mean “comfy” as early as the 1620s). Here’s one, in fact, from an Irish pub. (We don’t advertise—this was simply the image which fit best with both our impression and the book. And “fit best” does a double duty here, as “snug” can also mean “fitting tightly”.)

The same will be true of the bedroom the hobbits don’t use—and just as well!—plain and nondescript.

So when, if ever, are we given something with more detail? If not in Bree, perhaps in Rivendell?

Frodo comes to in a generic bed, but the “hall of Elrond’s house” is a bit more promising:

“Elrond, as was his custom, sat in a great chair at the end of a long table upon a dais…In the middle of the table there was a chair under a canopy…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 1, “Many Meetings”)

A “dais” is a raised platform. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll remember it at “High Table” (as it’s called in English schools), where the students of the four different colleges meet to dine and the faculty sit on such a platform.

This is a left-over medieval custom, when royalty/nobles sat on a kind of stage, above the lesser folk, for formal meals.

(Oh—and don’t ask about the horse—but it wasn’t required. Horse and rider do appear at a banquet, of course, in the 14^th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—which JRRT once edited.)

And that “chair under a canopy” reminds us of thrones with canopies, like this at the Palace of St. James, in London.

Which brings us to the subject of thrones, in general. After Rivendell, indoors will consist of Lothlorien

for the fellowship, then nothing for Sam and Frodo till Faramir’s cave hide-out and, beyond, the Tower of Cirith Ungol

Hardly places to find any furniture beyond the functional!

For the others, we have Edoras

and Minas Tirith.

And here we want to conclude by discussing a similar piece of furnishing in each—those thrones.

These days, when we say or write “thrones”, well, what comes immediately? A Game of Thrones and the Iron Throne of Westeros.

The thrones of Rohan and Gondor are a bit less complicated.

Theoden’s is described simply as “a great gilded chair” on a “dais with three steps”. (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”).

Here’s Allen Lee’s interpretation

and here is the Hildebrandts’.

The throne of Gondor is just a tiny bit more elaborate:

“At the far end upon a dais of many steps was set a high throne under a canopy of marble shaped like a crowned helm…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

Here’s an image from the film.

But wait—there’s no one on it. Let’s look lower:

“At the foot of the dais, upon the lowest step which was broad and deep, there was a stone chair, black and unadorned, and on it sat an old man gazing at his lap.”

During his lifetime, JRRT would have seen the coronation of five British monarchs:

Edward VII

George V

Edward VIII

George VI

and the current monarch, Elizabeth II.

You’ll notice that, in every case, the throne is the same.

This is the so-called “Coronation Chair”, built between 1297 and 1300 and used since for crowning English monarchs. It was especially commissioned so that it could hold the “Stone of Scone” (pronounced “skoon”—not like the pastry). This was an ancient piece of Scottish royal history which Edward I,

in an effort to control Scotland, had stolen from its place on Moot Hill, near the Abbey of Scone.

Supposedly, it was a stone used in the crowning of Scottish kings back to the time of the first one, or that it was even older, having been lugged from Tara, in Ireland, where, under the name “Lia Fail”, “the Stone of Destiny” it was used in coronation ceremonies there. Its purpose was confirmation: tradition had it that, when the true king bestrode it (a great old verb form), it gave a great shout.

As far as we know, no shouting has been reported, over the centuries—perhaps because it’s being used for English kings and therefore the stone is holding its tongue till it’s taken back to wear it belongs?

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

And did you notice something(s) out of place in JRRT’s drawing of Bag End? We’ll talk about it in our next…

image1bagend

Are You Sitting Down.1?

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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19th Century, An Introduction to Old Norse, Bag End, Beorn, Charles Dodgson, E.V. Gordon, Edwardian, Elvenking, Furniture, Goblins, Hildebrandts, House, Iron Age Farmhouse, Lewis Carroll, Listen with Mother, Master of Laketown, Monty Python, Norse house, Sackville-Bagginses, The Hobbit, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Victorians

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Several times, Monty Python skits included the pattern, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

It was clear, when we first heard it, that, like so much of Python material, it was one of those references which an audience in Britain in the early 1970s would have understood immediately and chuckled at, but it was only with the advent of the all-knowing Wikipedia that the reference came clear to us. (Here’s a LINK, so that, if you don’t know it already, you, too, can be suitably enlightened.)

But it made us think—not everything does, we promise!—of Tolkien and what must sound like a very odd subject—furniture.

Furniture?

Consider Bilbo’s Bag End:

“The Door opened on to a tube-shape hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage…” (The Annotated Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

Here is JRRT’s version of the entryway–with Bilbo—or is that JRRT himself? There appears to be a strong resemblance…

As the narrator tells us, “This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit…”, but, at the same time, we could easily see this description (ignoring the fact that it’s about a hole, albeit “not a nasty, dirty, wet hole…nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole…it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort”) applied to the kinds of late-Victorian/Edwardian interiors with which Tolkien was familiar.

People of this world—middle-class England—seem to have loved to live among piles of possessions—heavy furniture, thick carpets, heavy drapes, and knickknacks galore.

(Oh–and swords, apparently.)

To us, this has a slightly claustrophobic effect—and we imagine that it may be why Alice in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) attempts to escape it–

only to find herself in a distorted version of the same room on the other side of the mirror.

[Here’s the actual mirror, from the childhood home of the real Alice, which is said to have inspired Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll to write a sequel to the first Alice book.]

What about other Middle-earth interiors, beginning in The Hobbit?

Surprisingly, there is really nothing before the Dwarves and Co. reach Beorn’s house. There is no description of any inside in Rivendell and, beyond that, the only “indoors” we see before Beorn is the main cave of the goblins and the only “furniture” is this:

“There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a tremendous goblin…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 4. “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

Beorn’s house, as we see in Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (170-171), appears to be based upon an illustration to be found in E.V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse (1927) (with an older history yet—see Anderson, 171).

The Hildebrandts saw Beorn’s house as rather like a giant log cabin,

but we imagine the outside of Beorn’s house to look rather more like this view of an Iron Age farmhouse

And here’s a reconstruction of a Norse house interior which is a little more “lived-in”, to give you the idea of what Beorn’s house might look like day-to-day (without the magic animals, unfortunately).

As Tolkien’s illustration shows, however, this is hardly based upon a Victorian parlor! As the narrator describes it (with magic animals as the kitchen staff):

“Quickly they got out boards and trestles from the side walls and set them up near the fire…Beside them a pony pushed two low-seated benches with wide rush-bottoms and little short thick legs for Gandalf and Thorin, while at the far end he put Beorn’s big black chair of the same sort…These were all the chairs he had in his hall…What did the rest sit on?…The other ponies came in rolling round drum-shaped sections of logs, smoothed and polished, and low enough even for Bilbo…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 7, “Queer Lodgings”)

Beyond Beorn’s house, there is mention that the Elvenking sat “on a chair of carven wood” (The Hobbit, Chapter 9, “Barrels Out of Bond”) and the Master of Laketown has a “great chair” (The Hobbit, Chapter 10, “A Warm Welcome”), but we have come deeper into the Middle-earth/medieval world, it seems, where furniture (at least in the narrator’s view) is sparse and we will only begin to see more abundance, at least in a general way, when we return to the Shire and the unwelcome event of the auction of Bilbo’s possessions on June 22^nd:

“The legal bother, indeed, lasted for years…and in the end to save time Bilbo had to buy back quite a lot of his own furniture.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

“Furniture” is, unfortunately, a vague word, mentioned just previously in relation to the Sackville-Bagginses who were “busy measuring his [Bilbo’s] rooms to see if their own furniture would fit.” We’ll have to make do here with our original idea of Bilbo the Middle-earth Victorian’s house,

but, in our next, we’ll have a look at households (and palaces) in The Lord of the Rings, to see what we may find (and we have a hunch the inventory will include a quantity of thrones…)

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

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Monthly Archives: October 2017

Peace! Count the Clock!

About That PS

Are You Sitting Down?.2 (Some Thrones, but No Games)

Are You Sitting Down.1?