Contraption

27 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

Tags

Bag End, Barbegal, Birmingham, Caillebotte, contraptions, haymows, Hobbiton, machines, mill, plowing, reaping, Roman bread, Sandyman's Mill, Sarehole, Sarehole Mill, Saruman, sowing, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, water mill, wheels, winnowing

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Although we think we might have another post or two on things in Bilbo’s hall, we thought it would be fun to take a break and look elsewhere in Middle-earth.

In a posting long ago now, we looked at Saruman and his attempt to ruin the Shire. Cutting down trees was certainly part of his plan, as Farmer Cotton tells the hobbits: “They cut down trees and let ‘em lie” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8) There was much worse, however, as he continues:

“Take Sandyman’s mill now. Pimple knocked it down, almost as soon as he came to Bag End. Then he brought in a lot o’ dirty-looking men to build a bigger one and fill it full o’ wheels and outlandish contraptions.”

“Wheels” made us think of two things:

Fangorn’s description of Saruman himself: “He has a mind of metal and wheels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)
and, secondly, just what level of technology Middle-earth actually has

JRRT himself wrote of Hobbits, in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.”

As far as authentic depictions, we have one, by Tolkien himself, in this picture of Hobbiton.

Presumably, that’s the Sandyman mill in the foreground. You can see in the left middleground what appear to be hay stacks (also called “haymows”) which rather resemble these from a painting by Caillebotte (whose work appeared in our posting on umbrellas) and are where the material saved from the growing/reaping cycle is stored.

The whole process for what eventually gets to the mill begins with plowing the land and sowing the seed (and keeping off the birds, if possible).

Then, when the grain is ripe, it is reaped and stacked.

At this point, the grain is still on the stalk and needs to be detached. This is done by flailing it.

At that point, however, it’s still in its beard

and the kernels of wheat need to be shaken free by the process called winnowing. This can be done by a number of methods, but the easiest includes using the air currents to help remove the hull (the chaff—and, if you know the expression “to separate the wheat from the chaff”, now you also know where it comes from).

Now, when you finally have the pure grain, the next step is to grind it to a powder. The most ancient method (still used for crushing grain in some parts of the world) is this—

But the Romans sped this up with a kind of early machine, both slave-driven and animal-propelled—

The flour (pretty coarse and gritty, we understand—which wore down people’s teeth) was then mixed with water and baked

and sold as this.

(This is real Roman bread—abandoned in an oven when Vesuvius exploded and found many centuries later, still in the oven.) Some bakers liked to label their bread, as you can see, with a special name stamp.

In time, some clever Roman got the idea that there might be a more efficient method than slaves and animals and harnessed water as a power source and even occasionally harnessed it more than once, as here, at Barbegal, in southern France.

This technology does not appear to have been lost along with so much else of the Roman world and continued to be used in later centuries.

As you can see from this illustration, the basic idea is simple: the water is channeled to pour over the paddles of the wheel, thus turning it. The turning motion is then conveyed through a series of gears until it spins the upper stone of the two millstones, thus grinding the grain.

There are several types of wheel: overshot, breast, undershot, and pitchback.

Our research suggests that the overshot is the most powerful—but, as you can see in JRRT’s illustration, the Hobbiton mill is of the undershot variety.

Tolkien’s model for this is assumed to have been the Sarehole Mill, in the village of Sarehole, south of Birmingham, where his mother took him and his brother to live, for about 4 years in the late 1890s, in this house.

From its front door, he could look across and see this mill—here’s a 1905 postcard of the mill.

After a certain amount of searching, we still can’t tell what kind of wheel Sarehole had in Tolkien’s day, but there are certainly some other strong differences visible between it and the Hobbiton mill. First, of course, there’s that chimney on Sarehole, which was installed in 1852 as part of the addition of a steam engine to the mill’s older water-driven system. (Is this one of the “outlandish contraptions” Farmer Cotton complains about?) But perhaps this suggested the tower on the left of the Hobbiton mill? Second, and a little stranger, might be those round windows—although we might see these as a quiet joke: just as an older Hobbit hole, like Bag End, had such windows, so it might be fitting for a Hobbit mill to have them, too?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Here’s a LINK, by the way, to a 1966 interview with JRRT about his early years in Sarehole.

Throwing Shade

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Day: Paris In the Rain, Adelard Took, Assyrians, Bag End, Bilbo Baggins, bowler hat, ceramic chariot, China, city gent, CS Lewis, elephant, Emperor Ch'in Shihuang, Greeks, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean Marius, John Howe, Jonas Hanway, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, Mary Poppins, Monty Python, Palais Galleria, Persians, Romans, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ministry of Silly Walks, Tolkien, umbrella, umbrella stand, Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie, van Dyck

Welcome, dear readers, as always and, if you’re in the US, we hope you’ve had a happy and not over-stuffed Thanksgiving.

Just when we think we’ve exhausted a topic, we return and, well, here we are.

Just to the left of the door and below what we now see as a barometer, there’s a tall tube-like structure, something once common—we wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in every house in which JRRT ever lived: an umbrella stand.

As a child, one of us was fascinated by having once seen an umbrella stand made out of an elephant’s lower leg and foot—or at least the skin.

The couple we’ve seen are all identified as “Victorian”, so, as we are very fond of pachyderms, we hope that such a use is now long in the past!

Umbrellas, at least as sunshades, appear to have been around since at least before 200BC in China, as this ceramic chariot—with large umbrella—from part of the tomb complex of the Emperor Ch’in Shihuang demonstrates.

The Assyrians had them.

The Persians had them.

The Greeks had them.

As did the Romans.

And so on for centuries, although it seems that the first modern references to them in England date from the early 17^th century and appear, by the latter part of the century and into the 18^th as part of “ladies’ apparel”, used as much for sun as rain as this 1623 portrait by van Dyck of the Marchesa Elena Grimaldi shows us.

A center for the manufacture of umbrellas was Paris, and the inventor of the modern collapsible model may have been Jean Marius, who received a 5-year monopoly on his invention in 1710. Here is a later (1772) advertisement for his business

and here is a model, identified by the Palais Galleria in Paris as post-1715 because it has no Marius markings.

If there was a prejudice against men carrying them, being a combination of the association with “feminine things” and perhaps also a long-standing prejudice against the French, how did that so change that, by the 20^th century, the umbrella, along with the bowler hat, became the marks of the “city gent” in London,

caricatured in the 20^th century by Monty Python in skits like “The Ministry of Silly Walks”?

This change is said to stem from the behavior of one rather eccentric man, Jonas Hanway

who, sometime in the 1750s, began to appear on London streets carrying an open umbrella.

As you, sharp-eyed reader, can tell from our verbs and constructions like “seems”, “appears” and “is said to”, this, like other items of fashion and its changes, hasn’t the firmest of scholarly foundations, but, considering how many illustrations (often mocking cartoons) begin to appear by the 1770s, something happened to alter men’s behavior. Just look at these three, from 1772, 1782, and 1790.

All of this is very interesting, you may ask, but what does it have to do with Bilbo, or with JRRT? There are, in fact, a couple of references in The Lord of the Rings to umbrellas. First, there is one of Bilbo’s mocking gifts:

“For Adelard Took, for his very own, from Bilbo; on an umbrella. Adelard had carried off many unlabeled ones”. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Then there are two to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. The first is suggestive of her suspicious behavior at the near-auction of Bilbo’s property at the end of The Hobbit (you’ll remember that some spoons never reappeared):

“He [Bilbo] escorted her [Lobelia] firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

The second reference is actually rather pathetic. Once “Sharkey” and his thugs take over the Shire, they evict Lobelia from Bag End and, because she resists, they drag her off to the Lockholes, as young Tom Cotton tells Merry and the others:

“She comes down the lane with her old umbrella…”

When told that “Sharkey” gave the order for her eviction (and the building of sheds at Bag End):

“ ‘I’ll give you Sharkey, you dirty thieving ruffians!’ says she, and ups with her umbrella and goes for the leader, near twice her size.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Here’s a little illustration of a defiant Lobelia by John Howe.

By the later 19^th century, men with umbrellas seem quite common—even to the point of providing material for social commentary in the public press—

But, in the 20^th century, we who love children’s literature see them in a completely different way, either as a mode of transportation

or as part of the origin of a favorite story, when CS Lewis, at 16, had a recurring image of “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” (from It All Began with/as a Picture). (We’ve seen the title cited both ways.)

But we want to end this posting not with literature, but with pure art. There are lots of paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries with umbrellas, but here is what may be our favorite, by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Although he is grouped with the Impressionists, this painting in particular shows the artist’s interest in the hard-edged world of early photography (“Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie”—“A Day: Paris In the Rain”)

Stay dry, dear readers, and thanks, as ever for reading!

MTCIDC

Pop!

13 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anachronism, Bag End, gun, gunpowder, hand gonne, Helm's Deep, pop-gun, Professor Moriarity, Reichenbach Falls, Rosenbach Library, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Empty House, The Hobbit, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Trev's Air Gun Scrapbook

Welcome, as always, dear reader.

The anachronisms in the 1937 Hobbit are well known: “cold chicken and tomatoes”, “like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel”, etc. We ourselves have contributed to the commentary in several past postings and here we are again.

This time, we were caught by something Gandalf says to Bilbo in Chapter 1:

“It is not like you, Bilbo, to keep friends waiting on the mat, and then open the door like a pop-gun” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

So, “pop-gun”?

Just previously, Bilbo was described as pulling open “the door with a jerk” (and in tumble 4 dwarves), which suggests what the pop-gun sounds like, as well as how sudden the motion.

How is that sound made? Here’s an example of such a gun.

As you can see, it’s just a tube. Inside is a kind of plunger—a rod with a flattened end which faces towards the muzzle (the opening at the left). You pull back the rod and it draws air into the barrel. If you stick a cork in the muzzle, so that it makes a seal, when the rod is pushed up the barrel, the flattened rod end pushes the air in front of it, compressing it. The compressed air then forces out the cork, which shoots out with a POP!

For all that it uses air to propel the cork, this is, as its name implies, a kind of gun. Although there may be gunpowder in Middle-earth (see our earlier posting on the use of explosives at Helm’s Deep and the gate area of the Rammas Echor), it seems to be employed as the equivalent of dynamite,

and never as the propulsive force in what medieval people in our world called a “hand gonne”.

And thus it falls into that category of anachronisms. The idea of air guns, however, makes us think of the Daisy Air Rifle one of us had as a child.

The air was pulled in when the lever underneath the trigger was pulled down and then pushed back, to make it ready to fire. The illustration fires bbs, but ours was more peaceful, firing cork balls.

But a very unpeaceful version appears in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s

“The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). Here’s the first page of the manuscript, housed at the Rosenbach Library, in Philadelphia. (And here’s a LINK to their excellent on-line magazine.)

Sherlock Holmes had disappeared after his combat with Professor Moriarity at the Reichenbach Falls

in Switzerland in 1891 (although the story in which this happens was published in The Strand Magazine in December, 1893).

For financial reasons, Conan Doyle brought Holmes back—first in the novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901,

but this story was supposed to have taken place in 1889, two years before Holmes’ disappearance. It was only with “The Adventure of the Empty House” that Holmes reappeared in contemporary London. Here, it was revealed that Holmes had not fallen to his death with Moriarity, but had survived and had lived in disguise for some years, traveling the world and avoiding the vengeance of Moriarity’s men and, in particular, his chief lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who had actually seen Holmes escape the clutches (literally) of Moriarity and had tried unsuccessfully to kill him with a fall of rock.

Back in London, Holmes appears to Watson and enlists his aid in trapping Moran, which Holmes does by placing a wax bust of himself in outline in the window of 221B Baker Street as a lure. Holmes and Watson then wait across the street in an empty house (hence the title of the story), Holmes thinking that Moran will try to assassinate him from the street. Instead, Moran climbs to the very room where the two are concealed and, opening a window, uses an air rifle to attempt to kill Holmes—before he’s tackled by the pair and subdued, with the aid of several policemen summoned from hiding nearby.

Moran, Holmes explains, was thought to be the best shot in India, where he had been stationed for some years, so it’s not surprising that he would attempt the long-distance murder of Holmes, but why an air gun? (This is from the Granada television series of the 1980s, with the brilliant Jeremy Brett as Holmes.)

Air guns had first begun to appear in the 16^th century, but, by the later 19^th century could be either a toy, or a useful weapon for snipers, mainly because of its propulsion method. Until the 1890s, the main propellant was gunpowder which, when fired, produced a loud bang and a cloud of white smoke.

Imagine, instead, a weapon which made much less noise—or a noise very unlike a gun’s BANG! (Conan Doyle has Watson describe the sound as “a strange loud whiz”)– and no smoke at all. Perfect for a nighttime assassination, as Colonel Moran has planned it, never realizing that Holmes is well aware of his plan and foils it neatly (as Holmes almost always does).

In the 21^st century, smokeless powder is the norm and air guns are now used for target shooting (including an Olympic event), and pop-guns? Still for sale—just google “toy pop guns” at Amazon.com

or E-Bay and see what you find—something Bilbo never could!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

If you’d like to know more about air guns, here’s a LINK for a great source, “Trev’s Air Gun Scrapbook”.

Floored

06 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bag End, Baggins, carpet, classical altars, Cosmati, English Ham House, Erasmus, Felicity Irons, floors, Gamgee, John Howe, Lady Chapel, paneling, parquetry, rush door mat, Shire, social levels, stone block, swags, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, tile, Tolkien, Took, Typha, Versailles, Westminster Abbey

Welcome, dear readers, once more to our blog. In this installment, we are returning to our inspection of Bilbo’s entryway.

So far, we’ve examined the barometer, the clock, the umbrella stand, and that hat in the left foreground—intentionally misread as a sugar loaf. Now we want to examine the floor, which looks to be a pretty complicated place, asking ourselves, as we always do, where does this come from and how much of the medieval—so often the foundation of Middle-earth—does it contain?

The Shire clearly has social levels. Bilbo, Frodo, and Merry and Pippin (contrary to P Jackson—who violated JRRT’s wishes on the subject of the latter two), for example, all speak (in translation, of course) what is called “Received Standard English”. In contrast, Sam, the Gaffer, and the Cottons speak what would appear to be a rural dialect and Sam even thinks of Frodo as “Mister Frodo” and even “Master”. We do not know where these class distinctions came from, but we know of Bilbo that:

he is called “a very well-to-do hobbit “ at the very beginning of The Hobbit (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
he has distinguished forebears in the Tooks—his mother was “the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
he lives in an extensive, rambling burrow: “a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill…bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

And the entryway certainly shows some elements of a wealthier lifestyle, with its paneled (US spelling) walls—but we intend to devote a later posting to the walls and support structure of Bag End, so let’s turn to what is said next: “floors tiled and carpeted”. Looking at JRRT’s drawing, we can see both—and more.

Before we had gone back to this passage, we were a little puzzled as to the basic floor. As you can see in Tolkien’s illustration, it’s in a checkered pattern and, at first, we wondered if this might be an example of what’s called “parquetry”. In this method of flooring, different strips or blocks of wood are laid into designs of all sorts. Here are a couple of fancy examples from the 17^th-century English Ham House.

Parquetry appears to have been developed in France, as an alternative to marble floors (much less weight to support by the floor beams and equally pretty, we’d guess). Here’s an example from Louis XIV’s Versailles.

But the description in The Hobbit says “floors tiled”– here’s an exterior tile pattern from Ham house.

and an indoor one.

So, although Bilbo appears well enough off to afford parquetry, there is no mention of it in JRRT’s description and it is a decorative detail from the 17^th century and beyond, which rather goes against our usual “Middle-earth is (more or less) medieval” idea. The text of The Hobbit clinches the fact that it’s tile, of course, but the tile we then see in JRRT’s illustration strikes us as even plainer than the late-19^th, early 20^th century hallway tile we’ve seen, as in this restoration picture, and with which Tolkien would have been familiar on a daily basis.

Medieval tiles, in fact, can be even more elaborate, first appearing in England in the 13^th century, mainly in ecclesiastical buildings. Here’s one from the Lady Chapel (completed in 1373) in York Minster.

Much medieval tiling has disappeared over the centuries and here’s a useful link which explains why. And to see an amazing example of such work, here’s a link to the restored Cosmati paving in Westminster Abbey.

Over this tile, Tolkien has laid a carpet (as his description has said, the floors are “carpeted”).

It’s faint, but what one can make out appears to be a solid-colored center with what appear to be wreaths and what are called “swags”—long chains made to imitate garlands of ribbons, fruit, and flowers used to decorate classical altars.

So far, we haven’t located anything which closely resembles the carpet at Bag End, but here’s an 18^th-century French example to provide a kind of general idea.

There are two more items on the floor, both just below the door.

The first looks to be perhaps a stone block, used as a sill. (Our illustration is actually of a mistake—the central block here has fallen out of position, but it gives you the idea of such a block in use.)

The other item appears to us to be a rush door mat (dog—“Bo”–optional).

Rushes (genus Typha) grow all over the world and can be used, it seems, for almost anything. Here’s the English rush weaver, Felicity Irons, busy harvesting.

Rushes, however, bring us back to the subject of English medieval flooring. Our research suggests that the houses of farmers and lower-level townspeople would have been of natural substances, like clay pressed to make a hard surface. Richer people would have had wooden or even, in a few cases, tile floors (more such floors after the commercial business took off in the 15^th/16^th centuries). Carpets appear to be much later (most weaving was hung on walls, to keep down drafts, it seems). Our sources for what people laid on top of their floors are very sketchy and some modern writers have depended upon a quotation from the Dutch scholar, Erasmus (1469-1536),

who visited England and spent some years there around 1500. He tells us that the English covered their floors with rushes, but that they only added more to the top, without cleaning out the lower levels, which became full of refuse and caused bad smells (which to a person of Erasmus’ time represented the danger of “miasma”—bad air which could cause disease—something believed as scientifically true even throughout the first half of the 19^th century). Some modern commentators have questioned this, proposing the difficulty of moving about on a weedy floor in a long gown, as women and, in time, men, wore during the later Middle Ages. At least one of those questioners even suggests that rushes meant rush mats—see above.

Bilbo’s hall has only one of these, meant, from its position, to be used as a modern would, as a doormat.

Taken altogether, we would suggest that Bilbo’s floor, just like his clock and barometer and umbrella stand, would appear to belong not to the medieval world which lies underneath Middle-earth, but rather to the late 19^th-20^th century world of the author. And we’re not alone in our opinion. Here’s John Howe’s version of that hallway—compare it with JRRT’s and see what’s been erased.

And here’s the film version–

There are more differences, too–for fun, see how many you can find.

And thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Monthly Archives: December 2017

Contraption

Throwing Shade

Pop!