As always, dear readers, welcome.
This posting began with a question from my friend Erik, who was currently reading Dracula and had come upon this:
“Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls. Lucy was really tired, and we intended to creep off to bed as soon as we could. The young curate came in, however, and Mrs. Westenra asked him to stay for supper. Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the dusty miller; I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic. I think that some day the bishops must get together and see about breeding up a new class of curates, who don’t take supper, no matter how they may be pressed to, and who will know when girls are tired.” (Dracula, Chapter VIII)
“What’s a ‘dusty miller?’ he wrote, knowing that I’d taught the novel a number of times. (And, if you haven’t read it, here it is in its original 1897 American first edition: https://gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm )
He then went on to mention a plant by that name, of which there are a number of varieties, like this one (senecio bicolor cineraria)
but that hardly fit the context of Dracula—unless it were related to garlic.
I replied that I’d always assumed that said Miller was a close relative of the Sandman.
(No image unless you want to see Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman or Neil Gaiman himself. For a much earlier and very creepy Sandman story, see E.T.A. Hoffmann’s (1776-1822) 1817 Der Sandmann, in the collection Night Pieces—Nachtstuecke—
which you can read in translation here: https://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~rlbeebe/sandman.pdf )
And so Lucy and Mina, after their long day out along the coast, were struggling to stay awake.
Millers were dusty, of course, because they worked all day with flour, which could easily cover them as in this very atmospheric painting by Paula McHugh.
Ms McHugh has a very interesting approach: she bases her paintings on the titles of folksongs and you can see more of her work–and her at work–(and hear her banjo) at: https://www.paulamchugh.com/
The song by which she must have been inspired is this:
Hey, the dusty Miller,
And his dusty coat,
He will win a shilling,
Or he spend a groat:
Dusty was the coat,
Dusty was the colour,
Dusty was the kiss
That I gat frae the Miller.
Hey, the dusty Miller,
And his dusty sack;
Leeze me on the calling
Fills the dusty peck:
Fills the dusty peck,
Brings the dusty siller;
I wad gie my coatie
For the dusty Miller.
(Robert Burns, 1759-1796)
(Burns was a competent poet in the standard English of his time, but a brilliant poet in Lallans, his own Scots–“win” here means “to gain” and “leeze me” is a corruption of “lief is me”—“dear is to me” See: https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/lief for more–this is from The Scottish National Dictionary at: https://dsl.ac.uk/ )
The miller in this song (you can hear a lively version sung by Rod Paterson here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB1wZ6Oi6YA ) appears somewhat flirtatious, but, in another mill song we see—
“The maid gaed to the mill by nicht,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
The maid gaed to the mill by nicht,
Hey, sae wanton she!
She swore by a’ the stars sae bricht
That she should hae her corn ground,
She should hae her corn ground
Mill and multure free
Then oot and cam’ the miller’s man,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Oot and cam’ the miller’s man,
Hey, sae wanton he!
He swore he’d do the best he can
For to get her corn ground,
For to get her corn ground
Mill and multure free
He put his hand about her neck,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
He put his hand about her neck,
Hey, sae wanton he!
He threw her doon upon a sack
And there she got her corn ground,
There she got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.
When other maids gaed oot to play,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Other maids gaed oot to play,
Hey, sae wantonly!
She sighed and sobbed and wouldna stay
Because she’d got her corn ground,
Because she’d got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.
When forty weeks were past and gane,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
When forty weeks were past and gane,
Hey, sae wantonly!
This lassie had a braw lad bairn
Because she got her corn ground,
Because she got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.
Her mither bid her cast it oot,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Her mither bid her cast it oot,
Hey, sae wantonly!
It was the miller’s dusty clout
For getting’ a’ her corn ground,
Gettin’ a’ her corn ground
Mill and multure free.
Her faither bade her keep it in,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Her faither bade her keep it in,
Hey, sae wantonly!
It was the chief o’ a’ her kin
Because she’d got her corn ground,
Because she’d got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.”
(Here’s one version of the tune used—this by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7SZbzz7o1s “multure” is a fee paid to the miller for grinding the grain)
We can see millers having a bad reputation in English literature all the way back to Chaucer’s (c.1340-1400) Canterbury Tales, in that called “The Reeve’s Tale”,
(from the early 15th-century Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer—a reeve was, in Chaucer’s time, a kind of estate manager)
in which Symkyn the miller is shown to be a cheat—and it’s easy to see how suspicion of millers arose just by looking at the structure of the mill.
Someone would bring bags of grain to the mill to deliver to the miller. He—or an assistant—would pour the grain in at the top, it would be ground in the mechanism, and come out as flour at the bottom.
But suppose the miller didn’t dump in all of the grain—how would you know? And how could you be sure that the flour which the miller kept was indeed the proper multure (1/16 of the total was a common measure) when the whole business was overseen by the miller?
As for the licentious side of millers, my guess is that:
a. unlike most men, who worked outside all day, millers worked within the closed structure of a building, meaning that they had a kind of daytime privacy others didn’t
b. should a girl or woman come to a mill with a sack of grain—well, the songs above—and there are more—suggest that there could be all sorts of goings-on
Whether the cheating or other things were true, we can imagine that rumors spread, as rumors will and Chaucer’s story has a parallel in Boccacio’s Decamerone IX, 6, among other sources, suggesting that England—and Scotland, whence the songs above come—were not the only places where millers were suspect.
And this brings me to a suspect miller in the Shire, Ted Sandyman,
whom we meet in the very first chapter of The Lord of the Rings, where, replying to the Gaffer’s story about the tragic death of Frodo’s parents in a boating accident on the Brandywine, says: “And I heard she pushed him in, and he pulled her in after him.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)
Already he’s an unsavory character, with this cynical remark.
I had always assumed that Tolkien had taken against Sandyman because of his own experience with the millers of Sarehole, just south of Birmingham, where he had spent part of his childhood.
As Humphrey Carpenter tells it:
“There were two millers, father and son. The old man had a black beard, but it was the son who frightened the boys with his white dusty clothes and his sharp-eyed face. Ronald named him ‘the White Ogre’ .” (Carpenter, Tolkien, 22)
But perhaps there’s another influence here. In 1931, JRRT presented a paper to the Philological Society in Oxford on dialects in “The Reeve’s Tale” (published 1934—Carpenter, 154) and, in 1939, he had impersonated Chaucer,
(a second illustration from the Ellesmere Manuscript—there are no actual portraits of Chaucer)
reciting an edited version of “The Reeves’ Tale” at the Oxford “Summer Diversions”. (Carpenter, 242)
(This is from the ever-helpful Tolkien Gateway)
Could Tolkien not only be imitating Chaucer himself, telling the Reeves’ story, but perhaps imitating an attitude which Chaucer repeats in that story about dusty millers and what they’re up to?
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Stay well,
If you’ve got grain, consider investing in a quern (your multure will then always be free),
And remember that there’s always
MTCIDC
O
doubtfulsea 