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Lent to a Museum (Mathom.2)

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Narrative Methods

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Abbotsford, armor, Ashestiel, Cartley Hole, Castle, Craigievar, cuirassier, czapska, Edinburgh, Gothic, Henry Fox Talbot, Horace Walpole, Marquis de Montrose, Mathom-house, Melrose Abbey, Napoleon's Hair, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Rob Roy MacGregor, Scottish, Scottish Baronial, Sir Walter Scott, Strawberry Hill, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Waterloo, Waverly

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a posting from January, 2017, we discussed the idea of a “mathom house” at Michel Delving in the Shire.  We know about this place from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving.  The Mathom-house it was called:  for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom.  Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.”  (Prologue, The Lord of the Rings)

Rereading this passage this time, we were caught by two things:  “some store of weapons” and “Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms” because, put together, they sound like part of the description of the personal Mathom-house of the original inspirer (we would say) of adventure-writing in English, Sir Walter Scott.

image1raeburnscott.jpg

Trained to become a lawyer, Scott had lived for some years in several houses in Edinburgh, for much of his later life at Number 39, North Castle Street–

image2ncastlestreet.jpg

Although he began his rise to literary fame with the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a long poem, in 1805,

image3layfirstedition.jpg

money began to pour in with his first novel, Waverley, published anonymously, in 1814.

image4waverley.jpg

(What a great illustration, by the way—both the first edition and the manuscript.)

Because his legal work required him to have a residence outside Edinburgh, Scott had rented this, at Ashestiel, from 1804-1811.

image5ashestiel.jpg

When the lease was up, he then invested in this rather modest farm house at what was called “Cartley Hole”, which locals called “Clarty Hole”, “clarty” being a Scots word for “mucky”, suggesting that our illustration is prettier than the actual place.

image6cartleyholefarm.jpg

More commercially successful novels and an eventual baronetcy gave Scott grander ideas and he began to rebuild—and rebuild—the house, as well as changing its name to the more dignified “Abbotsford”, as it was near the ruins of the 12th-century Melrose Abbey.

image7melroseabbey.jpg

“Bigger” at this time might have meant something Georgian, like this—

image8nostellpriory.jpg

but Scott, no doubt influenced by the Gothic ideas of people like Horace Walpole

image9hw

 

and his Strawberry Hill

image10strawberryhill.JPG

fixed upon a design which, in time, was not only bigger, but Gothic—and Scottish, in the style called “Scottish Baronial”, like this castle at Craigievar, completed in 1626.

image11craigievar.jpg

In a way, such a choice makes sense:  many of his novels have Scots locations and they made him wealthy enough to build such a place.

image12hftabbotsford.jpg

This is perhaps the first photographic image of Abbotsford.  It dates from 1844 and is by the English inventor, as far as we currently know, of photography, Henry Fox Talbot.

image13talbot.jpg

And here is a modern image.

image14abbotsford.jpg

The outside of Abbotsford is striking enough, but it’s what’s inside which made us think of a Mathom-house.

There is seemingly an endless “store of weapons”.

image15armory.JPG

And then there are all of those other things.  A lock of Napoleon’s hair.

image16nappy.jpg

image17nappy'shair.jpg

The sword of a 17th-century Scottish hero, the Marquis of Montrose.

image18montrose.jpg

image19montrosesword.jpg

The sporran (purse) of that early-18th century Highland legend, Rob Roy MacGregor.

image20sporran.jpg

(Scot also believed he had Rob Roy’s musket.)image21rrsmusket.jpg

And even souvenirs he had picked up from the battlefield of Waterloo, which he had visited only a short time after the battle.

image22waterloo.jpg

image23cuirass.jpg

Note the hole in the breastplate—and also that the  headgear with it (a czapska) belongs not to the man who would have worn the breastplate, a cuirassier,

image24cuirassier.jpg

but to a French/Polish lancer

image25lancer.jpg

With all of these trophies tacked onto every possible surface—including full suits of armor–

image26armor.jpg

we wouldn’t be surprised to see a rather familiar object, ancient, famous, which we are told “was arranged on a stand in the hall (until he lent it to a Museum)”—would you?

image27mithril.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

Abbotsford was opened to visitors within a few months of Scott’s death.  Among those tourists were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

image28avicandalbie.jpeg

They liked the place so much that, when they decided that they needed a little place in the country, Abbotsford would be one of their models.

image28balmoral.JPG

Long after Albert’s death in 1861, the Queen continued to pay a yearly visit to Balmoral.

image29vicatbalmoral.jpg

PPS

If you’d be interested in seeing Abbotsford as an early 20th-century tourist might have seen it, here’s a LINK to Beautiful Britain:  Abbotsford (1912).

 

In Shining Armo(u)r

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim, Tolkien

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Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, chain-mail, Crecy, Dark Ages, Embroidery, Howard Pyle, knights of Dol Amroth, Medieval books, medieval manuscript drawings, N.C. Wyeth, Norman knight, Pauline Baynes, Romans, sub-Roman period, Sutton Hoo, The Lord of the Rings, The Rohirrim, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a letter to Miss [Rhona] Beare, of 14 October, 1958, JRRT wrote to answer what was clearly a question about dress in The Lord of the Rings:

“Question 4.  I do not know the detail of clothing.  I visualize with great clarity and detail scenery and ‘natural’ objects, but not artefacts.  Pauline Baynes drew her inspiration for F. Giles largely from medieval MS drawings—except for the knights (who are a bit ‘King-Arthurish’)* the style seems to fit well enough.” (Letters, 280)

To which he adds this footnote:

“*Sc. [= “Know/understand”] belong to our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages which blends unhistorically styles and details ranging over 500 years, and most of which did not of course exist in the Dark Ages of c. 500 A.D.”

In the next paragraph he adds:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’, in our sense.  The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” (Letters, 280-281)

The Bayeux Tapestry (which should really be called the “Bayeux Embroidery”, since it’s actually a long piece of cloth with hundreds of figures and details stitched on to it, rather than woven into it) presents us with a detailed history of the invasion of England in 1066AD.  The soldiers Tolkien is talking about look like this:

image1knights.jpg

You can see what he means by “tennis-nets”—which should really look like this:

image2normans.jpg

That chain-mail, then, looks like this:

image3mailshirt.jpg

And, at the bottom of this next illustration, you can see how it’s made:

image4mailnorman.jpg

We know, then, how JRRT envisaged the Rohirrim in its eoreds, marching towards Minas Tirith, but how did he imagine other soldiers, we’ve asked ourselves, and, in particular, the knights of Dol Amroth—the only soldiers specifically described as such in The Lord of the Rings?

image5map.jpg

JRRT writes of them as they enter Minas Tirith:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses…”(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

“Full harness” means “complete armor”.  When we think of the term, we think of something later than the Normans, who are, after all, just wearing a kind of very long ringed shirt.  Here’s a useful chart to give you of an idea of what we mean.

image6aarmorchart.jpg

So, since “full harness” doesn’t look like the Rohirrim, how might it look?

In Jackson’s films, we don’t believe that we ever see those knights singled out, as we see the Rohirrim.  The best we could find was this picture of Faramir’s men about to mount a cavalry charge against what appears to be Osgiliath.  (We’ve talked about this in a much earlier posting—one of the most unbelievable moments in the whole of Jackson’s work.)

image6knightsmt.jpg

This is a big picture, but the details, unfortunately, aren’t very clear.  There are a few things, however, which we found rather odd:

  1. although there appear to be a few lances with penons among them, most seem to be armed only with swords—a close-up weapon—which is why actual knights also carried lances—heavy cavalry came crashing down on infantry or slamming into enemy mounted men—or intended to—spearing right and left and then drawing swords (or using maces or battle axes)
  2. a minor detail, but everyone seems to be wearing his sword on the right-hand side, which would have made it very hard to draw, unless all were left-handed men!
  3. the helmets and armor seem very standardized, and we would believe that budgetary considerations probably influenced this uniformity—50 identical helmets were probably cheaper to make than 50 different ones—but such sameness reminds us more of Roman imperial troops than of any western medieval army we can think of.

image7romans.jpg

We assume, then, that this is the film’s view of soldiers at least like Imrahil’s men, but when Tolkien wrote “a company of knights in full harness”:  what might he have had in mind?  We think there is a clue in that adjective “King-Arthurish”, which he uses of Pauline Bayne’s illustrations and in his footnote, where he refers to “our ‘mythological Middle-Ages”. What does he mean?

JRRT would have been about ten when Howard Pyle published his The Story of King Arthur and His Knights in 1903.

image8pyle.png

Here is how Pyle saw Arthur’s knights.

image9aknightimage10asknights

Could this have inspired Tolkien’s view of Imrahil’s men?  (Judge for yourself by following this LINK.)

Tolkien would have been nearly 30 when The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, was published in 1922,

Image result for the boy's king arthur

but, if this were in among his children’s books, perhaps these illustrations might have given him ideas.  (And here’s a LINK to your own copy, from the Internet Archive.)

image12wyeth.jpgimage13wyeth.jpgimage14wyeth.jpg

These are two well-known sets of illustrations of Arthurian figures, both available in Tolkien’s early lifetime.  If Arthur was real, of course, he would have lived, as JRRT was well aware, in what is called the “sub-Roman period”, c.500AD—at the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages”– and he and his men would actually have looked like this:

image15arthur.jpg

But this is where “our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages” comes in—little would have been known, when JRRT was writing The Lord of the Rings, of what such warriors would have looked like, although the spectacular Sutton Hoo find of 1939, with its splendid helmet, would have given an inkling, once restored.

image16suttonhoo.jpg

image17suttonhoohelmet.jpg

image18mcbhelm.jpg

Because such knowledge was lacking, however, the historical Arthur (if there was one) had been moved to the Middle-Ages and re-equipped as a military figure of a much later era, and we believe that, when Tolkien wrote “Arthurish” and “knights”, this is what he meant—and how we’ve always seen Arthur, not only from books (and lots of films) but also from the armor galleries in a number of museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

image24.jpg

to the Higgins Armory in Massachusetts

image25.jpg

to the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts

image26.jpg

to the Tower of London.

image27tower.jpg

And, as we’ve discussed before, Prince Valiant, has been an influence from childhood (talk about ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages!).

image28val.jpg

And so, in turn, we imagine—and we think that JRRT did, too–the “company of knights in full harness” to have been individuals, brightly clothed in heraldic colors, their armor that, perhaps, of Crecy, in 1346—

image29crecy.jpg

or Agincourt, in 1415.

image30agincourt.jpg

And you, dear readers, what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

Feudal Array 2

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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14th century, 15th century, Adventure, Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, feudalism, Fyrd, Gerry Embleton, Huscarl, Luttrell Psalter, Middle-earth, N.C. Wyeth, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to conclude what has turned out to be a kind of mini-series on Feudalism in Middle Earth. Two postings ago, we used the 14th-century Luttrell Psalter to illustrate what working the plowland behind the Rammas Echor might have looked like. In our last, we used the Bayeux Tapestry to offer another possible visual influence on Tolkien’s depiction of the Rohirrim: the conquering Normans. In this final posting, we will look at the forces of Rohan’s ally, Gondor and will use a number of sources, both medieval and modern.

In the Jackson movies, there is a kind of regularity, from Osgiliath to Minas Tirith in what we are shown.

gondorians.jpg

This is not surprising if the cue for costuming has come primarily from one description:

“The Guards of the gate were robed in black, and their helms were of strange shape, high-crowned, with long cheek-guards close-fitting to the face, and above the cheek-guards were set the white wings of sea-birds; but the helms gleamed with a flame of silver, for they were indeed wrought of mithril, heirlooms from the glory of old days. Upon the black surcoats were embroidered in white a tree blossoming like snow beneath a silver crown and many-pointed stars. This was the livery of the heirs of Elendil, and none wore it now in all Gondor, save the Guards of the Citadel before the Court of the Fountain where the White Tree once had grown.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

We have no wish to criticize—in this respect, at least—the creators of the films for taking what might appear to be an easy out: uniformity being cheaper than individuality, since it’s clear that, when it came to dramatic effects in the films in general, the old theatrical advertising line, “No Expense Was Spared To…” is really true. Instead, we want employ our former method of consulting medieval manuscripts, as well as another passage from the same chapter, to offer another possible view, one which might have influenced the author in his depiction of the defenders of Gondor.

We’ll begin with the passage:

“Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men that Pippin had yet seen in Gondor…

And so the companies came…The men of Ringlo Vale…from the uplands of Morthond…five hundred bowmen…From the Anfalas…a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen…Fisher-folk of the Ethir…Hirluin the Fair…with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. Imrahil…with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.”

There is actually not a lot of detail here, but there are a few hints. First off, there are those “great battle-axes”.   Here are two images from the Bayeux Tapestry of the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold’s, bodyguards, his huscarl, armed with their characteristic long-handled axes.

axemen_bayeux.jpg

And here is a modern reconstruction.

huscarl4.jpg

Next, we have those five hundred bowmen from Morthond. The Tapestry can provide a useful image of those,

archers2.jpg

but perhaps what JRRT really was thinking of were the famous longbowmen of Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt, whose skill and courage knocked down whole waves of equally brave French knights. Here are a pair of modern images by the brilliant historical illustrator, Gerry Embleton, himself a medieval reenactor.

EnglishLongbowman1330-15151
longbowman2

Besides the huscarl, King Harold’s army was made up of the fyrd, a kind of militia drawn from the freemen of the countryside, who had to provide their own weapons and equipment and were only required to serve for limited periods—they would have been farmers, most of them, after all, and couldn’t be off the farm for too long without threatening their own livelihoods. Perhaps these could suggest that “long line of men of many sorts”. Here’s an image from the Tapestry of what appears to be the fyrd fending off a mounted Norman attack. You’ll notice the lack of defensive armor.

fyrd3.jpg

“gallant, green-clad men” is rather vague, but, suddenly, all we could see is Robin Hood and his Merry Men. And so we can’t resist including some of our favorite N.C. Wyeth illustrations.

rhood1rhood2

And these could easily provide the model for the rangers in South Ithilien, couldn’t they?

faramir.jpg

Last, there is that “company of knights in full harness”. This presents a real problem. Knights from which period? The armor available at the time of the Bayeux Tapestry in the mid-11th century

fyrd3.jpg

and which, we suggested in our last, might be good for the Rohirrim, was very different from that of later times. Here’s the armor of the days of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell,

Sir_Geoffrey_from_LPsalter.jpg

in the early 14th century—

early14thcarmor.jpg

and here’s what the English archers would have faced as worn by their valiant French opponents at Agincourt, in 1415.

early15thcarmor.jpg

This handy chart can give you a diachronic (through-time) view of changes in medieval armor.

02e1c306489f565ee38b56e417ba5ff0.jpg

If we look at something produced through the workshop of William Morris, that strong influence upon JRRT, we find this group of knights from a set of tapestries produced in the 1890s.

Holy_Grail_Tapestry_-The_Arming_and_Departure_of_the_Kniights.jpg

The armor is pretty vague (the systematic study of the history of armor was still in its childhood then—if you’re interested in the early days, google Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick to learn about its first great scholar), but one of the helmets—the one to the far left in the background, looks like a visored sallet, which could date what we see in the tapestry to the later 15th century.

Sallet_helmet,_Southern_Germany,_1480-1490_-_Higgins_Armory_Museum_-_DSC05461.JPG

(Sharp-eyed readers who are Star Wars fans—we are—will recognize this general pattern from the technical people on the Death Star—

deathstarcrewmen.png

We might add that Morris and his friends were strongly influenced by pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance painters, so perhaps this picture, one of a set of 3 by Paolo Uccello from the middle of the 15th century, might also provide a possible model (and we’re glad to show you the whole set because we think that they’re just magical).

Öèôðîâàÿ ðåïðîäóêöèÿ íàõîäèòñÿ â èíòåðíåò-ìóçåå Gallerix.ru

Uccello_Battle_of_San_Romano_Uffizi

 

Taken all together, these produce a very different image from the films, don’t they? Much more individual, often much less well-equipped, more actual medieval, as we would imagine the author had had in mind. So—contrast this

 

with this:

ArmiesOfAgincourt.jpg

Which do you prefer, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

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