• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: anachronism

Matchless

15 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anachronism, Hans Christian Andersen, matches, Swan Vestas, The Hobbit, The Little Match Girl, The Lord of the Rings, tinder, tinder box, Tolkien, Vesta, Vilhelm Pedersen

As always, dear readers, welcome.

Recently, we’ve been examining anachronisms in The Hobbit.  These are always such minor things that JRRT, before its initial publication in 1937,

image1hobbit.jpg

doesn’t appear even to have noticed them (see our recent postings for more on them) and only corrected some in succeeding editions.

In our last, it was “guns”, but, in this, our last, at least for the present, it’s this:

“After some time he felt for his pipe…Then he felt for his pouch…Then he felt for matches…”

(The Hobbit, Chapter Five, “Riddles in the Dark”)

Others have noticed this before—Anderson in his invaluable The Annotated Hobbit even has a footnote on it (page 116), adding the detail from Chapter Six that “…Oin and Gloin had lost their tinder-boxes.  (Dwarves have never taken to matches even yet.)”

Why are matches an anachronism?  Tolkien, a life-long pipe smoker,

image2jrrt.jpg

would have used them without thinking—perhaps these, “Swan Vestas”, long sold as “the smoker’s match”.

image3swan.JPG

(The name “Vesta” comes from the Roman goddess of the hearth,

image4vesta.jpg

a fragment of whose temple still stands in the Roman Forum in Rome.

image5temple.jpg

Inside was a hearth—a fire pit—which symbolized all of the hearths in Rome.)

image6temple.jpg

Matches, however, are a nineteenth-century invention, with a complicated history—and, at the beginning, a complicated ignition.  For example, these, from 1828, had a tip of sulphur which burst into flame when dipped into a container of phosphorus.

image7match.JPG

This was hardly a practical way to strike a light and soon matches were made by which friction could be used to light them.  After 1830, the tips of these were coated with white phosphorus, which was rather unstable and could be set off by everything from rubbing against each other to strong sunlight.  They were made by the millions in factories (many employing young women and girls)

image8phos.jpg

image9factory.jpg

and sold on street corners everywhere, commonly by children and the very poor.

image10match.jpg

Considering this made us think of a Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)

image11hca.jpg

story we can’t bear to read.  In English, it’s called “The Little Match Girl” and was first published in 1845.  Here’s an illustration for it by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820-1859), Andersen’s favorite illustrator.

image12match.jpg

(If you would like to read it—we’ve warned you!– here’s the LINK to a very rich site, which has all of Andersen’s fairy tales both in the original Danish and translated into English, along with all of the rest of Andersen’s extensive literary work.)

But, if Bilbo lives in a sort of medieval world, where, presumably, matches wouldn’t be available, then what can he use?  The answer, of course, is what Oin and Gloin have lost (and Sam will have in The Lord of the Rings–see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”):  a tinder box.

image13tinder.jpeg

Such a box would contain three basic items:  a dry material in which to catch a spark (bark, dry moss, linen rags), a piece of steel and a piece of flint to make sparks.

image14tinder.jpg

And here’s how it works—

image15works.jpg

Long before the invention of matches, this was the common way in the western world to strike a light (literally) with “flint and steel”, as it was called—and it’s what the dwarves use in The Hobbit.

It’s also the title of another Hans Christian Andersen story, but a jollier one, called, in English, “The Tinder Box”, first published in 1835—and here’s another Pedersen illustration.

image16tinder.jpg

In this story, a soldier on the way home from war is stopped by an old lady on the side of the road.

image17tinder.jpg

She tells him that there’s treasure below a tree and, if he will climb in, he can take all that he wants and all that she wants in return is a little tinder box to be found there.

image18atinder.jpg

He climbs in and discovers rooms full of riches, as well as three dogs of increasingly enormous size.

image18tinder.jpg

The tinder box is, of course, not a little nothing, but the key to the dogs and to the magic beyond, although the soldier doesn’t know that at the time.  When he climbs out of the tree, and the old woman (a witch, of course), demands the box, however, he grows suspicious and, instead of handing her the box, the soldier hands her her head.

image19tinder.jpg

(We said that this was a jollier story—but clearly not if you’re a witch.)

We refer you to the LINK we mentioned earlier for the rest of the story—SPOILER ALERT:  it does have a happy ending.  As does The Hobbit, except for goblins and wargs, of course.  Oh, and Thorin.

image20thorin.jpg

And then there’s Smaug, whose fire goes out—dare we say it?—like a burnt match.

image21smaug.jpg

Thanks, as always, for reading and, as ever,

MTCIDC

CD

Gun Control?

08 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anachronism, Dettingen, Fireworks, Gandalf, George Frederich Haendel, gunpowder, guns, Helm's Deep, kettle drums, King George II, Millemete Manuscript, petard, Rammas Echor, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The War of Austrian Succession, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always—and with our apology if you googled “gun control” and are a bit puzzled as to what has turned up (this often happens with us, making us wonder how googling images of “Saruman” suddenly produces a picture of sardines).

It’s our last posting which got us into this.  We had spotted another anachronism in The Hobbit (clarinets) and had written about it, but then, as a teaser, had concluded with another, referring to Beorn’s joining the Battle of the Five Armies:  “The roar of his voice was like drums and guns…” (Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”)

“Guns” had, of course, stood out.  Some time ago, we had written about Saruman’s use of some sort of explosive at Helm’s Deep

image1hd.jpg

as well as the destruction by a similar force of portions of the causeway forts of the Rammas Echor, of which no one has seemingly produced an illustration.

image2rammas.gif

Whatever this force was, it only seems to be used in siegework, suggesting things like a petard

image3petard.jpg

an explosive device used to blow holes in gates and doors.

Guns, however, do not appear in any form in Tolkien’s world—except here.  Of course, when one thinks about it, there isn’t much of a step from using a blast to destroy a door to funneling that force to propel a missile—as we first see in the Millemete Manuscript of 1326-1327.

image4millemete.jpg

This doesn’t appear to be portable, but the basic object is simply a tube on a stick, easy to make, easy to carry

image5handgonne

 

and certainly late medieval people had them and employed them,

image6handgonnes.jpg

so, presumably, they might have appeared in Middle-earth (we once wrote a “what-if” posting on the subject).  Why not?  As JRRT introduced explosives, that seems to provide an opening, but we wonder if he had seen all too often and all too clearly the effect of thousands upon thousands of gunpowder weapons on real people in 1916 and, somehow, the idea of lances and swords seemed more appealing—or, at least, more “heroic”.

image7dead.jpg

image8knights.jpg

But the quotation was “like drums and guns”.

As we pointed out in our last, drums certainly appear in The Lord of the Rings—there is that disturbing reference to “drums, drums in the deep” in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”, for example.  But what about “the roar of his voice was like drums and guns”?

When we thought about this, we asked ourselves, what would this actually sound like?  A possible answer appeared from 1749.

In 1749, George II of England

image9george2.jpg

had been one of the winners of what would become known as “The War of the Austrian Succession” (1740-1748).

image10geo2.jpg

He was definitely in a party mood, so he decided to throw a giant fireworks celebration in London.  To provide the soundtrack, he commissioned George Frederick Haendel (say that “HEN-del”, not as people commonly mispronounce it, “HAHN-del”) (1685-1759).

image11gfh.jpg

George was the last English king actually to see battle, at Dettingen, in 1743,

image12dettingen.jpgimage13dettingen.jpg

and wasn’t interested in anything sweet and soft, with lots of violins.

image14violinist.jpg

Instead, he wanted bangs and booms, starting with kettle drums.

image15kettledrums.jpg

Then he hired someone to design a giant framework for the fireworks,

image16frame.jpg

and threw in 101 cannon, just to make sure that it wasn’t too quiet.

image17guns.jpg

And, on the evening of 27 April, 1749, perhaps as many as 12,000 people (London had perhaps between 600,000 and 700,000 people in 1750) stood around the Green Park to watch.

image18fireworks.jpg

Here’s a LINK, if you’d like to hear the music (you’ll have to supply your own cannon and fireworks).

But fireworks brings us back to Tolkien, doesn’t it?  When Gandalf first appears to Bilbo in the first chapter of The Hobbit,

image19bilgan.jpg

it seems that almost all that Bilbo knows about Gandalf is his fireworks:

“Not the man that used to make such particularly excellent fireworks!  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!”  (Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

And, when Gandalf reappears in the Shire, to celebrate Bilbo and Frodo’s joint birthday, what does he bring?

image20gandalf.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading (and listening).

MTCIDC

CD

Bilbo’s Clarinet

01 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, J.R.R. Tolkien

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anachronism, Antonio Vivaldi, Benny Goodman, clarinet, Disney, Dwarves, Fantasia 2000, George Gershwin, instruments, Johann Cristoph Denner, Juditha Triumphans, medieval musicians, Paul Dukas, Rhapsody in Blue, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Tolkien scholars have long noticed that the 1937 Hobbit has a certain number of anachronisms—as did JRRT himself.

image1firsted.jpg

As have we, too, in past postings, including one on popguns

image2popgun.jpg

[Gandalf speaking to Bilbo:  “It is not like you, Bilbo, to keep friends waiting on the mat, and the open the door like a pop-gun.”  “An Unexpected Party”)]

and tomatoes

image3tomatoes.jpg

[Gandalf:  “And just bring out the cold chicken and tomatoes!”  “An Unexpected Party”]

and steam engines.

image4tunnel.jpg

[“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.”  “An Unexpected Party”]

In the 1966 edition, Tolkien changed “tomatoes” to “pickles” and considered changing that engine whistle to “like the whee of a rocket going up into the sky” (see Douglas A. Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit, 47, note 35) but decided against it.  And the popgun—remained the popgun.

Recently, we fell upon another:

“Kili and Fili rushed for their bags and brought back little fiddles; Dori, Nori, and Ori brought out flutes from somewhere inside their coats; Bombur produced a drum from the hall; Bifur and Bofur went out too, and came back with clarinets that they had left among the walking-sticks.” (“An Unexpected Party”)

image5hild.jpg

Hmm, we thought.  Well, Middle-earth is more or less a medieval world and medieval musicians played stringed instruments and drums and flutes, both transverse (like a modern flute) and recorders, as well as certain other wind instruments, but clarinets?

image6medmus.jpgimage7medmus.jpg

image8medmus

 

When we think of clarinets, the first thing which comes into our minds is the famous 20th-century clarinetist, Benny Goodman (1909-1986)

image9goodman.png

with his Bflat clarinet,

image10bflat.jpg

playing the opening of George Gershwin’s (1898-1937)

image11gg.jpg

Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

 

image12rhap

in a 1942 recording.  (Here’s a LINK so you can hear that recording for yourself.)  Even if you don’t read music, you can see (and hear) that it begins with a clarinet doing a long trill, then playing a glissando, meaning a slide, up several octaves.  We wonder if Bifur and Bofur could play like that!

(We also recommend a very unusual rendition of the piece.  In 2000, Disney Studios released a film called Fantasia 2000,

image13fantasia

 

which was their modern take on the 1940 Fantasia

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

which consisted of a series of piece of classical pieces with Disney animation interpretations.  Here’s a famous moment from Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

image15mick

The 2000 version features a very lively performance of Rhapsody drawn as if it’s taking place during the Great Depression—and even features a cameo appearance by Gershwin himself.

image16gg

Here’s a LINK to the scene so that you can enjoy it for yourself.)

But we were wondering about those clarinets, so we did a little research and found this, the ancestor of the clarinet, the chalumeau.

image17chal

About 1700, it is thought, this man, Johann Christoph Denner, (1655-1707)

image18denner

a famous wind instrument maker, extended the range of the chalumeau and thus made it a more flexible instrument.

image19clar

The (presently) first known use of clarinets in an orchestra is in Antonio Vivaldi’s (1678-1741)

image20vivaldi

1716 oratorio, Juditha Triumphans.

image21juditha

And, with that, we thought:  “Hmm.  Yep.  Another anachronism” and were about to move on when our eye was caught by this about Beorn at the Battle of the Five Armies:

“The roar of his voice was like drums and guns…” (Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”)

Drums—well, of course.  Bombur had one.  And, in The Lord of the Rings, there’s that mention of “drums, drums in the deep”, but…guns?

Thanks, as ever, for reading and—as you can see—

MTCIDC

CD

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.

image1popgun.jpg

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,

image2helmsdeep.jpg

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

image3handgonne.jpg

image4handgonne.jpg

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.

image5daisy.jpg

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

image6conandoyle.jpg

“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.)

image7ms.jpg

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

image8reichenbach.jpeg

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

image9moriarityholmes.jpg

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

image10hound.jpg

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.

image11moranbroughtdown.jpg

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.)

image12airgun.JPG

Air guns had first begun to appear in the 16th century, but, by the later 19th 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.

image13martinihenry.jpg

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 21st 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

image14popgun.jpg

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

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Ps

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

Peace! Count the Clock!

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

image1bagend.png

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?

image2cell.png

This has been the case since the 16th 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 11th 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

image3sylvester2.jpg

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 14th century, including the Salisbury Cathedral clock, which perhaps dates from 1386.

image4salisbury

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

image5wells.jpg

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-17th century, Christian Huygens.

image7pendulumimage8huygens

 

 

 

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)

image9hourglass.jpg

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)

image10clepsydra.jpg

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 13th century BC)

image11egyptsundial.jpg

(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.

image12medievalplowing.gif

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

image13medreaping.jpg

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”.)

image14sundial.jpg

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.

image15earliestrr.jpg

(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!)

image16wappingtunnel.jpg

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.

image17railwaymap.jpg

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

image18abradshaw.jpg

 

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

image18rrguide1924.jpg

 

(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

image19earlywatch.jpg

or wear it as part of our clothing.

image20cellinpocket.jpg

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

CD

About That PS

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

image1bagend.jpg

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”.

image2banjoclock.jpg

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,

image3stockclocks.jpg

(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.

image4vicbar.jpg

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.

image5airpressure.jpg

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.

image6bar.jpg

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.

image7aboutvacuums.png

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).

image7atorricelli.jpg

 

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.

image8grandpointstation.JPG

(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

CD

Bilbo’s Shopping List

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ale, An Unexpected Party, anachronism, apple-tart, barley fields, biscuit, cheese, coffee, cold chicken, eggs, food, hop garden, Isengard, Longbottom Leaf, mince-pies, pickles, pork-pie, porter, raspberry jam, red wine, salad, scones, seed cake, Tea, The Green Dragon, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, Tomatoes, vineyard, Wensleydale, wheat fields

Dear Readers, welcome as always.

We were having tea the other day when an earlier—and much more elaborate—tea came to mind and we began to consider the economics (as you’ve seen us do in earlier postings on other elements of Middle-earth) of Bilbo’s larder, about which Bilbo remarks that Gandalf, “Seems to know as much about the inside…as I do myself!” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”—and a footnote here. “Party”, in older British and American English, can also mean “person”, so JRRT is having fun with party = “event” and party = “person”—or, to Bilbo’s astonishment and dismay, “persons”–both meanings unexpected. We might add that that title may have yet another meaning for the future in that Bilbo, because of that party/event, becomes, in time, a party/person who he would never expect himself to be.)

Here’s the list of what Gandalf and the Dwarves demand of Bilbo:

Drinks:

tea,

yunnan-tea-brick.jpg

coffee,

coffee

ale,

english-style-dark-mildale

porter,

porter

and red wine

red wine

Food:

seed cake,

Caraway_seed_cake

scones,

recipe_irish_scone_1

raspberry jam,

raspberryjam

apple-tart,

appletart

mince-pies,

mince-pie_2739967b

cheese, (Wallace and Gromit’s favorite, Wensleydale)

544494-eat-wensleydale-cheese-on-its-own

pork-pie,

Pork-Pie

salad,

early-spring-salad-beets-celeriac-fennel-21

eggs,

hardboiledegg

chicken,

coldroastchicken

[tomatoes—more about these in a moment],

red-tomato-meteorite

pickles,

iStock_000013582794Large_cucumber_pickles

[biscuit—i.e., cookie, in the US—which Bilbo nibbles, while looking on]

hobnob

We know there are farms in the Shire—think of Farmer Cotton (who, in contrast to the completely anachronistic corn in P. Jackson’s film, actually grows turnips—see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 4, “A Short Cut to Mushrooms”), but Bilbo certainly doesn’t farm, although he appears to have a vegetable garden (something “old Holman”, then Hamfast (“Gaffer”) Gamgee, looks after—see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”). He might grow raspberry bushes, the makings of a salad (although, since it’s April, there won’t be such an extensive set of possibilities for the ingredients as later in the spring and early summer), and cucumber for pickles there, but there are a number of items which would require both wide fields and animal husbandry.

For example, the cake of seed cake, as well as scones, the tart, the pie of mince-pie and the pie of pork-pie (not to mention what mostly makes a biscuit/cookie) would all require flour—which would mean having wheat fields.

Wheat-field-at-the-sunset

There is a mill for grinding corn (UK for the US “wheat”)—Tolkien depicts it, as well as mentioning it. (If you look closely at the land in front of The Hill, you can also see what are clearly both plowed fields and, a little closer to the mill, haystacks.)

millfieldsbehind

The apple of apple-tart would, of course, require apples—which require apple trees, something Bilbo doesn’t seem to have. He also has no chickens for meat or eggs, goats/sheep/cows for cheese, or pigs for pork-pie. Add to this no hop garden

hop

or barley fields

barleyfield

to provide the materials for ale or porter, not to mention a vineyard for that red wine which Gandalf has asked for.

Vineyard_BBS_1515_768px

That being the case, we are left to wonder where such things come from. Initially, they come from the storerooms (“larders”), of which Bilbo appears to have several. Certain things could be stored for lengths of time there: dry tea and coffee beans, ale, porter, and wine, in bottles or barrels (both exist in Middle-earth). Flour could be kept in containers and things like raspberry jam and pickles could be preserved in jars. Meats could be dried or salted, but Gandalf says, “Bring out the cold chicken and pickles,” meaning that the chicken has been freshly killed and cooked.

Beyond storage in Bag End, we must assume that anything more complex than raspberries or pickles (or taters, we’re reminded by Sam) has been bought and brought from somewhere else—the same places, we imagine, which supply The Ivy Bush and The Green Dragon, for example. Someone, for instance, makes, barrels, sells, and ships the beer Merry and Pippin consume in the ruins of Isengard and someone grows, dries, sells, and ships the Longbottom Leaf which they smoke.

merryandpippinisengard

All such commerce is complicated, requiring not only growers, but makers of containers, and shippers. Who are these hobbits? And add to this, are there markets? Shops of any sort? And where are they? Bilbo loses buttons escaping from the goblins under the Misty Mountains. Who made them? Where? How did Bilbo get them? (And, for an even bigger—and maybe really more obvious–question: who makes the parchment and ink for Bilbo to keep diaries? Who binds the eventual books?)

As we come to the end of this posting, we want to turn back to something we mentioned much earlier. In the 1937 The Hobbit, Gandalf asked for cold chicken—and tomatoes. In the 1966 Ballentine edition, these tomatoes have been replaced with pickles. We presume that Tolkien, keeping to his idea of The Shire—and Middle-earth in general—being medieval-ish, the New World tomato was out of place. It is interesting, however, to see that Bilbo serves the dwarves both tea and coffee. If by “tea”, Chinese tea is meant, we are left with another anachronism, as we are with coffee, tea have been introduced to Britain in the mid-17th century and coffee at more or less the same time.

And then there’s the problem of taters…

As always, thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • Ollamh

Categories

  • Artists and Illustrators
  • Economics in Middle-earth
  • Fairy Tales and Myths
  • Films and Music
  • Games
  • Heroes
  • Imaginary History
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Language
  • Literary History
  • Maps
  • Medieval Russia
  • Military History
  • Military History of Middle-earth
  • Narnia
  • Narrative Methods
  • Poetry
  • Research
  • Star Wars
  • Terra Australis
  • The Rohirrim
  • Theatre and Performance
  • Tolkien
  • Uncategorized
  • Villains
  • Writing as Collaborators
Follow doubtfulsea on WordPress.com

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • Horning In (2) February 1, 2023
  • Horning In (1) January 25, 2023
  •  Things You/They Know That Ain’t January 18, 2023
  • Sympathy for a Devil? January 11, 2023
  • Trumpeting January 4, 2023
  • Seating December 28, 2022
  • Yule? December 21, 2022
  • Sequels and Prequel December 14, 2022
  • Rascals December 7, 2022

Blog Statistics

  • 69,219 Views

Posting Archive

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (4)
  • December 2022 (4)
  • November 2022 (5)
  • October 2022 (4)
  • September 2022 (4)
  • August 2022 (5)
  • July 2022 (4)
  • June 2022 (5)
  • May 2022 (4)
  • April 2022 (4)
  • March 2022 (5)
  • February 2022 (4)
  • January 2022 (4)
  • December 2021 (5)
  • November 2021 (4)
  • October 2021 (4)
  • September 2021 (5)
  • August 2021 (4)
  • July 2021 (4)
  • June 2021 (5)
  • May 2021 (4)
  • April 2021 (4)
  • March 2021 (5)
  • February 2021 (4)
  • January 2021 (4)
  • December 2020 (5)
  • November 2020 (4)
  • October 2020 (4)
  • September 2020 (5)
  • August 2020 (4)
  • July 2020 (5)
  • June 2020 (4)
  • May 2020 (4)
  • April 2020 (5)
  • March 2020 (4)
  • February 2020 (4)
  • January 2020 (6)
  • December 2019 (4)
  • November 2019 (4)
  • October 2019 (5)
  • September 2019 (4)
  • August 2019 (4)
  • July 2019 (5)
  • June 2019 (4)
  • May 2019 (5)
  • April 2019 (4)
  • March 2019 (4)
  • February 2019 (4)
  • January 2019 (5)
  • December 2018 (4)
  • November 2018 (4)
  • October 2018 (5)
  • September 2018 (4)
  • August 2018 (5)
  • July 2018 (4)
  • June 2018 (4)
  • May 2018 (5)
  • April 2018 (4)
  • March 2018 (4)
  • February 2018 (4)
  • January 2018 (5)
  • December 2017 (4)
  • November 2017 (4)
  • October 2017 (4)
  • September 2017 (4)
  • August 2017 (5)
  • July 2017 (4)
  • June 2017 (4)
  • May 2017 (5)
  • April 2017 (4)
  • March 2017 (5)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (4)
  • December 2016 (4)
  • November 2016 (5)
  • October 2016 (6)
  • September 2016 (5)
  • August 2016 (5)
  • July 2016 (5)
  • June 2016 (5)
  • May 2016 (4)
  • April 2016 (4)
  • March 2016 (5)
  • February 2016 (4)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (5)
  • November 2015 (5)
  • October 2015 (4)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (4)
  • July 2015 (5)
  • June 2015 (5)
  • May 2015 (4)
  • April 2015 (3)
  • March 2015 (4)
  • February 2015 (4)
  • January 2015 (4)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (4)
  • October 2014 (6)
  • September 2014 (1)

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • doubtfulsea
    • Join 68 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • doubtfulsea
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...