Into the Trees.1

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

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

Tags

A Long-Expected Party, Alan Lee, Angus McBride, Beech, Charles Addams, Cousin It, Eugenia Weinstein, Galadriel, Hildebrandts, Inger Edelfeldt, Lorien, mallorn, Party Field, Party Tree, Samwise Gamgee, Ted Nasmith, The Addams Family, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treebeard, trees

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In the draft of an undated letter from 1958 about a proposed film of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote about the work of the preparer of the draft for the script (whom he calls “Z”):

“I deeply regret this handling of the ‘Treebeard’ chapter, whether necessary or not. I have already suspected Z of not being interested in trees: unfortunate, since the story is so largely concerned with them.” (Letters, 275)

“since the story is so largely concerned with them” puzzled us at first. JRRT himself, of course, had strong feelings for trees, as he says in this letter from three years earlier:

“I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.” (Letters, 220)

“so largely concerned with them”, however, would make them seem almost like characters, or at least major subjects of discussion, within the text.

As far as characters go, there is Treebeard, of course.

(We’re not quite sure about this early version by the Hildebrandts. Here, he appears to be wearing a coat of Spanish moss

and rather reminds us of Cousin It, from the cartoonist, Charles Addams, 1912-1988,

who created a number of mock-sinister characters, including “Cousin It”.

Here it/It is in the 1991 film

or here it/it is in the new animated feature.

image7it

The challenge in illustrating Treebeard is to find a happy balance between human and tree, as we see in this Alan Lee portrayal, on the one hand,

or that of Angus McBride on the other, with much in between–

by Inger Edelfeldt,

by Eugenia Weinstein.)

And there are the Ents, as well, who, like Tolkien, are more than a little upset over the destruction of trees, but, unlike the author, take a very direct approach to stopping it (by Ted Nasmith).

Beyond Treebeard and the Ents, what do we find?

First, there is the so-called “Party Tree”:

“The tents began to go up. There was a specially large pavilion, so big that the tree that grew in the field was right inside it, and stood proudly at one end, at the head of the chief table. Lanterns were hung on all its branches.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

Although its first appearance is understated, it clearly has greater significance, as we see when the hobbits return to the Shire and Sam sees one particular piece of completely unnecessary destruction:

“ ‘They’ve cut it down!’ cried Sam. ‘They’ve cut down the Party Tree!’ He pointed to where the tree had stood under which Bilbo had made his Farewell Speech. It was lying lopped and dead in the field. As if this was the last straw Sam burst into tears.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

And this is not the end. When the Fellowship was leaving Lorien, Galadriel gave each a special gift. To Sam she said:

“ ‘For you little gardener and lover of trees,’ she said to Sam, ‘I have only a small gift.’ She put into this hand a little box of plain grey wood, unadorned save for a single silver rune upon the lid. ‘Here is set G for Galadriel,’ she said; ‘but also it may stand for garden in your tongue. In this box there is earth from my orchard, and such blessing as Galadriel has still to bestow is upon it. It will not keep you on your road, nor defend you against any peril, but if you keep it and see your home again at last, then perhaps it may reward you. Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)

When the hobbits return to the Shire and Sharkey and his henchmen are removed, Sam uses Galadriel’s gift to do exactly as she told him to, to regenerate things. When he opened the box, he found something extra:

“Inside it was filled with a grey dust, soft and fine, in the middle of which was a seed, like a small nut with a silver shale.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

(“Shale” here is an old variation of “shell”.)

Sam chooses a special place for this:

“The little silver nut he planted in the Party Field where the tree had once been; and he wondered what would come of it. All through the winter he remained as patient as he could, and tried to restrain himself from going round constantly to see if anything was happening.”

From this much build, we know that something just this side of miraculous must be about to happen—and it does:

“Spring surpassed his wildest hopes. His trees began to sprout and grow, as if time was in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty. In the Party Field a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. It was indeed a mallorn, and it was the wonder of the neighborhood. In after years, as it grew in grace and beauty, it was known far and wide and people would come long journeys to see it: the only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea; and one of the finest in the world.”

It seems that Tolkien so loved trees that he even invented one here. Mellyrn (the plural of mallorn by the same linguistic process which, in English, turns “foot” into “feet”) appear to be mostly a beech tree of the type called “Fagus sylvatica” or “European beech” (although there are also actual beech trees in Middle-earth).

Some adaptation has taken place: European beeches have spreading branches and can grow to as much as 150 feet, but Tolkien’s tree seems even bigger and has “long leaves”—longer than beech?—

and “golden flowers”, which beech trees don’t have, although the silver bark is similar.

So much of Middle-earth is visibly old, sometimes in layers of antiquity, and JRRT is very careful to present a Shire which lives on top of something older, as the East Road, which runs through its middle and had been built by the dwarves and improved upon by the Numenoreans reminds us. The Party Field, under that name, is almost brand new, however, the party being Bilbo and Frodo’s joint birthday, celebrated at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. The original tree just happens to be in the middle of that field. This replacement, however, is clearly more than just a replacement and we’ll examine its possible significance and more in part 2 of this in our next posting.

In the meantime, thanks, as always for reading and

MTCIDC

Boom

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien

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A Long-Expected Party, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Backarapper, Benwell Fireworks, cracker, Elizabethan entertainment, Fireworks, fountain, Gandalf, Kenilworth Castle, Pain's Imperial Fireworks, Queen Elizabeth, Robert Dudley, Robert Langham, Roman Candles, Shakespeare, Sparkler, squib, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, thunderclap, Tolkien, torch

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

When Gandalf first arrives at Bilbo’s door “in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green”, Bilbo’s memories of him are hardly those of someone aware who Gandalf really is:

“Gandalf, Gandalf! Good gracious me! Not the wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered? Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons? Not the man that used to make such particularly excellent fireworks!” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

And it’s the fireworks in particular which made a strong impression:

“I remember those! Old Took used to have them on Midsummer’s Eve. Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening!”

[Here, by the way are the three flowers he mentions, in case, like us, you live in a climate where such things won’t appear for months yet!]

And, although he alludes to an edgier side of Gandalf (“Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures?”), he concludes as if Gandalf were merely some sort of superior tradesman:

“I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business!”

Gandalf is patient, however, only replying:

“Where else should I be?… All the same I am pleased to find that you remember something about me. You seem to remember my fireworks kindly, at any rate, and that is not without hope…”

Perhaps the idea of linking Gandalf and fireworks is pardonable, however, when we see how, after being associated with them at the beginning of The Hobbit, he appears at the opening of The Lord of the Rings actually bringing fireworks to Hobbiton:

“At the end of the second week in September a cart came in through Bywater from the direction of Brandywine Bridge in broad daylight. An old man was driving it all alone. He wore a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf. He had a long white beard and bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat. Small hobbit-children ran after the cart all through Hobbiton and right up the hill. It had a cargo of fireworks, as they rightly guessed. At Bilbo’s front door the old man began to unload: there were great bundles of fireworks of all sorts and shapes, each labeled with a large red G…and the elf-rune…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party)

(This is from a site called “Llama’s War of the Ring”, which has all sorts of interesting figures and conversions—here’s a LINK.)

Those great bundles turned into spectacular entertainment at the joint birthday party:

“The fireworks were by Gandalf: they were not only brought by him, but designed and made by him; and the special effects, set pieces, and flights of rockets were let off by him. But there was also a generous distribution of squibs, crackers, backarappers, sparklers, torches, dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers and thunderclaps. They were all superb. The art of Gandalf improved with age.”

We ourselves enjoy fireworks, and, for the sake of our readers who might not be familiar with some of the types mentioned, we add here a few images—although some, like “dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers” no longer seem to be available.

A squib is a small firecracker, like these.

Crackers seem to come in sets.

Backarappers—we don’t have an image, but here’s a definition (and it sounds like the previous image):

“A firework made from multiple firecrackers folded together so that they will explode one after another”. (from G.F. Northall’s Warwickshire Word-book, 1896)

Sparklers are metal rods or bamboo sticks whose upper part has what is called “pyrotechnic composition”—which means something which shoots out sparks when it’s lit.

Torches may be these—which, when lighted, change color as they burn down (or so the manufacturer’s description says).

Although there are no “dwarf-candles”, there are Roman Candles. These are built in stages and, as the fire burns down, they shoot out star-patterns—as you can see.

There are no “elf-fountains”, either, but there are fountains and they look like this—

Finally, we can date a “thunderclap”, made by Benwell, back to this advertisement from about 1950,

but we wouldn’t be surprised if Pain’s (not the best name for fireworks, we would say!) carried them, as they have something called “Laburnum Blossoms” in this 1903 listing

Gandalf’s productions were clearly quite spectacular—which was undoubtedly why Bilbo remembers them:

“There were rockets like a flight of scintillating birds singing with sweet voices. There were green trees with trunks of dark smoke: their leaves opened like a whole spring unfolding in a moment, and their shining branches dropped glowing flowers down upon the astonished hobbits, disappearing with a sweet scene just before they touched their upturned faces. There were fountains of butterflies that flew glittering into the trees; there were pillars of coloured fires that rose and turned into eagles, or sailing ships, or a phalanx of flying swans; there was a red thunderstorm and a shower of yellow rain; there was a forest of silver spears that sprang suddenly into the air with a yell like an embattled army, and came down again into the Water with a hiss like a hundred hot snakes.”

And then there was the finale. Pain’s, in that 1903 listing, could make claims to baskets of elaborate pyrotechnics, but this?

“And there was also one last surprise, in honour of Bilbo, and it startled the hobbits exceedingly, as Gandalf intended. The lights went out. A great smoke went up. It shaped itself like a mountain seen in the distance, and began to glow at the summit. It spouted green and scarlet flames. Out flew a red-golden dragon—not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his eyes glared down; there was a roar and he whizzed three times over the heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over Bywater with a deafening explosion.”

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy king, Oberon, says to his spirit-servant, Puck, these rather mysterious lines:

“My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest

Since once I sat upon a promontory

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

To hear the mermaid’s music?”

(Act 2, Scene 1)

In 1575, Queen Elizabeth I

visited Kenilworth Castle,

the home of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester,

and a close friend (and maybe more). To entertain her, Dudley spent thousands of pounds.

(This is actually a gold sovereign—worth 20 shillings—that is, a pound, but there were no actual pound coins till after 1583.)

Among the entertainments was a big fireworks display (as well as at least one mermaid—see the LINK here for Robert Langham/Laneham’s contemporary “letter” in which he describes these entertainments in detail) and some scholars have theorized that those falling stars mentioned by Oberon are, in fact, Shakespeare’s boyhood memory of having seen the fireworks display (and the mermaid). Kenilworth is only 14 miles from Stratford and Shakespeare was 11 and living at home—we presume—at that time, so we can imagine that this is possibility. We know that JRRT had seen fireworks shows as a boy—as he tells us in a letter to Donald Swann, 29 February, 1968 (Letters, 390)—but we wonder: did he ever, in those early years, see Goblin-barkers, or a red-golden dragon?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

We almost forgot–in case you’d like to make your own fireworks (definitely not recommended–and definitely illegal in some places!), here’s an 1878 manual on the subject.

Shire Portrait (5a): Hostile Takeover

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

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Tags

A Long-Expected Party, auction, Bag End, Baggins, Barliman Butterbur, Galadriel, Government, Isengard, Longbottom Leaf, Luke Skywalker, Merry and Pippin, Mirror of Galadriel, Pipeweed, Sackville-Bagginses, Sam Gamgee, Saruman, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, The Scouring of the Shire, The Shire, Tolkien, Yoda

As always, dear readers, welcome!

This is, we think, the last in our Shire Portrait series (although a 2-parter)—at least for the moment. In it, we intend to consider just how the Shire fell into the hands of “Sharkey” and his “boys”.

The Ring destroyed and the King returned, Gandalf, the Hobbits, and a party of Elves are traveling back toward Rivendell and beyond when they come upon Saruman and Grima, now no more than Saruman’s slave.

It is not a happy meeting, as can be imagined. When offered help, Saruman replies:

“All my hopes are ruined, but I would not share yours. If you have any…You have doomed yourselves, and you know it. And it will afford me some comfort as I wander to think that you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine.” The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”

In such a mood, it can be imagined how he treats the Hobbits—even when Merry offers him pipe-weed, which he does while commenting, less than tactfully, on its origin:

“ ‘You are welcome to it; it came from the flotsam of Isengard.’

‘Mine, mine, yes and dearly bought!’ cried Saruman, clutching at the pouch. ‘This is only a repayment in token; for you took more, I’ll be bound. Still, a beggar must be grateful, if a thief returns him even a morsel of his own. Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. Long may your land be short of leaf!’”

Saruman’s remark—a curse, really—resonates especially with Sam.

“’Ah!’ said Sam. ‘And bought he said. How, I wonder? And I didn’t like the sound of what he said about the Southfarthing. It’s time we got back.’” The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”

This is a natural reaction on Sam’s part because of what he had seen in Galadriel’s mirror, we presume.

“’Hi!’ cried Sam in an outraged voice. ‘There’s that Ted Sandyman a-cutting down trees as he shouldn’t. They didn’t ought to be felled: it’s that avenue beyond the Mill that shades the road to Bywater…

But now Sam noticed that the Old Mill had vanished, and a large red-brick building was being put up where it stood. Lots of folk were busily at work. There was a tall red chimney nearby. Black smoke seemed to cloud the surface of the Mirror…

‘I can’t stay here,’ he said wildly. ‘I must go home. They’ve dug up Bagshot Row, and there’s the poor old Gaffer going down the Hill with his bits of things on a barrow…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VII, “The Mirror of Galadriel”

At the time, Galadriel had told him

“’You cannot go home alone,’ said the Lady. ‘You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror, and yet you knew that evil things might well be happening in the Shire. Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them. The Mirror is dangerous as a guide to deeds.” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VII, “The Mirror of Galadriel”

[A footnote: suddenly, we are reminded of that scene on Dagobah in Star Wars V, when Luke has had a vision and immediately wants to rush off to Bespin.

“Luke: I saw—I saw a city in the clouds.

Yoda: [nods] Friends you have there.

Luke: They were in pain…

Yoda: It is the future you see.

Luke: The future?

[pause]

Luke: Will they die?

Yoda: [closes his eyes for a moment] Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

Luke: I’ve got to go to them.

Yoda: Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.” The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

As—using various websites—we provide links here—we can see that an imitation of the opening of the Hobbit—Bilbo and Gandalf meeting—appears in an early script of Star Wars IV, I think that the scene at Galadriel’s Mirror was somewhere back in G. Lucas’ wonderfully fertile brain—and, yes, we are big fans.]

“Secrets of the ‘Star Wars’ Drafts”

Was George Lucas Inspired by Tolkien?

Star Wars Origins: The Lord of the Rings

At this point, we know from two sources that Saruman has had commercial dealings with the Southfarthing.

First, of course, we’ve just seen it confirmed by Saruman’s response to Merry. Second is that scene at Isengard, where Gandalf, Theoden, Eomer, and Aragorn, travel with an escort and find there Merry and Pippin, who tell them of their discovery of two small casks:

“ ‘My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf! There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain. How it came here, I can’t imagine.” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”

Knowing, however, of Saruman’s increasing interest in the Shire, we can imagine that one of his agents, active in the Southfarthing, had acquired it for him. As the Appendix B, “The Tale of Years” tells us, under TA2953:

[Saruman] notes his [Gandalf’s] interest in the Shire. He soon begins to keep agents in Bree and the Southfarthing.” (page 1089 in Appendix B)

Spying was clearly only the beginning for Saruman, however. The actual evidence for his eventual take-over is scattered throughout The Lord of the Rings, but we believe that it can be pieced together to provide a picture of how it must have been done. It was a two-step process.

First, he appears to have gained knowledge of internal dissatisfaction within the Shire. Because there is really nothing political in the Shire–as readers will know from the first posting in this series, there is virtually no government—this unrest was domestic—as is said in the Prologue, “Families for the most part managed their own affairs.”

In the case of Bilbo and Frodo, the dissatisfied were the Sackville-Bagginses. We first met them in the last chapter of The Hobbit, where they were described as “Bilbo’s cousins” and were shown as being actively involved in the auction of the “effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire”—as well as in the disappearance of some merchandise not auctioned off:

“Many of his silver spoons mysteriously disappeared and were never accounted for. Personally he suspected the Sackville-Bagginses. On their side they never admitted that the returned Baggins was genuine and they were not on friendly terms with Bilbo ever after.” The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”

It was one more blow to the Sackville-Bagginses when Bilbo rescued the now-orphaned Frodo from “those queer Bucklanders” and brought him to live at Bag End, as Gaffer Gamgee related in The Ivy Bush:

“ ‘But I reckon it was a nasty knock for those Sackville-Bagginses. They thought they were going to get Bag End, that time he went off and was thought to be dead. And then he comes back and orders them off; and he goes on living and living, and never looking a day older, bless him! And suddenly he produces an heir, and has all the papers made out proper. The Sackville-Bagginses won’t never see the inside of Bag End now, or it is to be hoped not.’ “ The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

Bad blood, then, on several counts—and, for Saruman, looking for a way in, a great opportunity.

Bilbo might have suspected them of spoon-pilfering, but his was a more generous nature, however, and he even invited them to his and Frodo’s joint birthday party.

“The Sackville-Bagginses were not forgotten. Otho and his wife Lobelia were present. They disliked Bilbo and detested Frodo, but so magnificent was the invitation card, written in golden ink, that they had felt it impossible to refuse…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

On the other hand, Bilbo does not please them when he announces that Frodo is coming into “his inheritance”—

“The Sackville-Bagginses scowled, and wondered what was meant by ‘coming into his inheritance’ “ and, when Bilbo makes his startling disappearance, they “departed in wrath”. (quotations from Chapter One).

And yet they didn’t quite depart. It seems they have only stepped away from the party, only to return to cause trouble, demanding to see Bilbo’s will.

“Otho would have been Bilbo’s heir, but for the adoption of Frodo. He read the will carefully and snorted. It was, unfortunately, very clear and correct…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

Otho “snapped his fingers under Frodo’s nose and stumped off”, but Lobelia, his wife, remained, and Frodo later found her “still about the place, investigating nooks and corners, and tapping the floors. He escorted her firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” And she leaves with a kind of threat and what she believes is an insult:

“ ‘You’ll live to regret it, young fellow! Why didn’t you go too? You don’t belong here; you’re no Baggins—you—you’re a Brandybuck!’ ”

It’s never said why there is such an animus held by the Sackville-Bagginses against the Bagginses, but there is clearly something wrong with the S-Bs, from their covetousness to Lobelia’s open theft, and whatever is wrong is just what Saruman will find and exploit. Our next mention of them is oblique and it has to do with that pipe-weed. Merry and Pippin have been explaining how they had come to discover it at Isengard and all seems clear—

“ ‘All except one thing,’ said Aragorn: ‘leaf from the Southfarthing in Isengard. The more I consider it, the more curious I find it. I have never been in Isengard, but I have journeyed in this land, and I know well the empty countries that lie between Rohan and the Shire. Neither goods nor folk have passed that way for many a long year, not openly. Saruman had secret dealings with someone in the Shire, I guess. Wormtongues may be found in other houses than King Theoden’s…” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam

With that faint foreboding, we hear no more until Gandalf and the Hobbits are once more leaving Bree and Butterbur says, almost in passing:

“ ‘I should have warned you before that all’s not well in the Shire neither, if what we hear is true. Funny goings on, they say.’ “ The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

With Butterbur’s words in their ears, the Hobbits ride out and conversation begins:

“ ‘I wonder what old Barliman was hinting at,’ said Frodo.

‘I can guess some of it,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘What I saw in the Mirror: trees cut down and all, and my old gaffer turned out of the Row. I ought to have hurried back quicker.’

‘And something’s wrong with the Southfarthing evidently,’ said Merry. ‘There’s a general shortage of pipe-weed.’

‘Whatever it is,’ said Pippin, ‘Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.’”

Here again, after Aragorn’s remark long before, we see that pipe-weed turn up—and associated somehow with a Sackville-Baggins. Butterbur has already replied to Gandalf’s request for it that “That’s the one thing that we’re short of, seeing how we’ve only got what we grow ourselves, and that’s not enough. There’s none to be had from the Shire these days.”

It’s never explained why Pippin makes the connection with Lotho at this point—was the bad blood between the Bagginses and the Sackville-Bagginses part of a darker picture of the S-Bs? This seems more than possible when Gandalf adds to Pippin’s remark:

“ ‘Deep in, but not at the bottom,’ said Gandalf. ‘You have forgotten Saruman. He began to take an interest in the Shire before Mordor did.’”

And now we begin to see a potential bigger pattern: Saruman-an S-B-Shire and, with it, the second step in the take-over of the Shire, that from outside. But that’s for Shire Portrait 5b: “Hostile Take-Over.2”, next time.

Until then, thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

His Letters

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

≈ 1 Comment

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1930s England, A Long-Expected Party, Bellerophon, Governor of the King's Posts, Henry VIII, London, mail coach, Orality, Penny Black, pillar box, Pony Express, Postal Service, Postmen, Rowland Hill, Royal Mail, semata lugra, Shire, Shirriffs, Sir Brian Tuke, stamps, The Illiad, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

(For Aunt Cathy—she knows why.)

“Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters—meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.” Gaffer Gamgee, The Fellowship of the Ring, Ch.1, A Long-Expected Party

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

We’ve written a little before about aspects of literacy in Middle-earth and we will probably do so again, since the idea of reading and writing in what is, basically, an heroic world interests us very much.

Ordinarily—with a few exceptions (South Slavic pjesme, “songs” sometimes have examples)—we don’t think of writing as being an important feature of heroic stories, but our interest in such things began some years ago with an odd little reference in The Iliad. In all of the story (or in Homer in general for that matter), this is the only mention of what appears to be writing. We say “appears” because the actual writing is called semata lugra, not, in fact, a clear reference to writing, but often translated as something like “baneful signs”. We won’t get into the long, complex controversy over orality and literacy in Homer (although we have strong opinions on the subject) here, but rather point to what these semata were supposed to do. They were inscribed on tablets.

The tablets were sealed and given to a carrier—in this case, the hero Bellerophon—

to take with him to the person who would open the tablets, read them, and then—have him killed! That certainly makes those semata lugra. The fact that the tablets were closed suggests that, whatever those “signs” were, the sender thought that the carrier would be able to read them, too, giving us a wider picture of the use of such signs, whatever they might actually be.

But now we come to the Shire, and to a world which is domestic, long before some of its inhabitants become heroic.

At the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo is enjoying a pipe in the morning air when a very disturbing figure appears.

His mocking words are soon too much for the Hobbit, who “Then…took out his morning letters, and began to read, pretending to take no more notice of the old man.” (The Hobbit, Ch.1, An Unexpected Party)

As we were once intrigued by the semata lugra, we are now interested in these letters. Douglas Anderson, in his note (15) to this sentence in The Annotated Hobbit supplies the information that “In England in the 1930s there were at least two mail deliveries per day—hence the distinction of morning letters.” (39) If the Shire is like 1930s England, which it sometimes appears to be, even as Tolkien denies that “There is no special reference to England in the ‘Shire’—except of course that of an Englishman brought up in an ‘almost rural’ village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham…” (draft of a letter to Michael Straight, “probably January or February 1956”, Letters, 235), then Bilbo is in the enviable position of one who is in the care of The Royal Mail—or, in this case, its Shire equivalent. Or is he?

The Royal Mail as a branch of government took off in the time of Henry VIII, with the appointment of Sir Brian Tuke (respell that and where in the Shire might you find him?) as Master of the Posts (1512), then Governor of the King’s Posts (1517).

Much, if not most of the correspondence of that period was literally royal—the government’s business, not private correspondence, but, over time, this gradually changed until, by the late 18^th century, postmen had an official uniform

and there were places were letters were received and sorted.

There were problems of corruption in the system, as well as a basic difficulty: the sender didn’t pay for the letter—the receiver did. Thus, there was no assurance that the service would be paid for, beyond whatever government subsidies were allowed to it. All of this began to change in 1837, however, with this privately-printed and circulated pamphlet

by the education (and, in time more general) reformer, Rowland Hill.

He proposed to reverse the process: the sender would pay and there would be strict regulation of the charge (and, for ordinary letters a very low charge at that). Initially, the idea was to use an already franked (that is, with a mark showing that it had been paid for) form on which one might write a message, fold it, and send it.

This was not a new idea and had been used since the 17^th century, at least.

Hill quickly followed this with the idea of a stamp which could be readily attached to a letter—commonly a sheet which, once written upon, could then be folded into its own container.

This could also be attached as we do, to a pre-made envelope, into which the folded letter might be placed. This was the first modern stamp, the so-called “Penny Black”.

After 1853, there were even special public mail boxes into which you might place your letters for collection.

Delivery in big cities like London would, by the late 19^th-century, begin at 7:30 in the morning and go to 7:30 in the evening, so that you could write a note to a friend across the city, drop it into a pillar box (mailbox to people in the US) at 7:30 am

and expect a reply sometime during the same day.

Behind all of this was an increasingly-complex government backed by a well-established bicameral legislature, with an increasingly-large tax base. But what of the Shire?

The government of the Shire seems to be sketchy, at best. Tolkien gives us the total picture on in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings.

“The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving (or of the Shire), who was elected every seven years…As mayor almost his only duty was to preside at banquets…But the offices of Postmaster and First Shirriff were attached to the mayoralty, so that he managed both the Messenger Service and the Watch. These were the only Shire-services, and the Messengers were the most numerous, and much the busier of the two. By no means were all Hobbits lettered, but those who were wrote constantly to all their friends (and a selection of their relations) who lived further off than an afternoon’s walk.

The Shirriffs was the name that the Hobbits gave to their police…There were in the Shire only twelve of them, three in each Farthing, for Inside Work.”

So, in contrast to the elaborate workings of the Royal Mail, we are left with a series of questions: if there is a Postmaster—and clearly there is a post—how does it work? Is it all on foot? Is there the equivalent of the Pony Express? Nob, at the Prancing Pony, is called a “slow-coach”—were there once mail coaches, as in England?

(Is this the only mention of such carriages in all The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? There are certainly wagons—there was even an invasion of “the Wainriders” once upon a time—see Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings.)

How were letters collected? Distributed? Is there a central post office, perhaps in Michel Delving, the closest thing to a capital in the Shire? And, of course, how was it all paid for? In an earlier posting, we talked a little about coinage in Middle-earth and we tried to imagine what Gondorian currency might have looked like—can we imagine Shire postage stamps?

When you read the following, think of your own postal service and join us in wondering about all of the above:

“Before long the invitations began pouring out, and the Hobbiton post-office was blocked, and the Bywater post-office was snowed under, and voluntary assistant postmen were called for…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Ch.1, A Long-Expected Party

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: A Long-Expected Party

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