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Tag Archives: Bellerophon

The Nazgul Brothers?

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

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

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Tags

aircraft, anti-aircraft gun, Aviation, Bellerophon, bombers, British Army, dogfights, Dragons, early airships, flight, flying machines, Great War, harpies, Hermes, machine gun, manoeuvres, military intelligence, Nazgul, Paris, Pegasus, Schlieffen Plan of 1914, Sir Douglas Haig, Sir James Grierson, The Blitz, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, trench fever, trenches, Wraiths, Wright Brothers, WWI Trenches

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Imagine a world where there were no airports, no contrails, no roar of engines, no small silver objects crossing the skies, the sound of their flight trailed behind them.  The only flying things would be birds and those in different seasons, some permanent, some migratory (or used to be—where we live in North America the Canada Geese, whose great chevrons across our skies used to be powerful signs of winter to come or spring soon to appear, now squat here year round).

image1geese.jpg

This would have been England in 1892, the year JRRT was born.  There were early airships—basically big balloons of various sorts, but they were primarily stationary and used for (limited) military intelligence.

image2intrepid.jpeg

Then came the Wright brothers

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who, in December, 1903, produced the first engine-propelled, manned flight in their enlarged kite.

image4kittyhawk.jpg

Thereafter, flight would, literally, take off, but the Wrights, who were idealistically inclined, believed that such an invention would actually end war by making it too terrible.

The British army thought differently, however, and there were soon aerial observation units attached to military formations.  In fact, Sir James Grierson

image5grierson.jpg

tactically outfoxed his rival, Sir Douglas Haig,

image6haig.jpg

not only by his skillful use of aircraft for observation, but also by his keen understanding of how to conceal his own movements from Haig’s aircraft

image7airship.jpg

in the army manoeuvres of 1912.

image8manoeuvres.jpg

 

The Great War, when it came, two years later, would then be the proving ground for all sorts of aerial experimentation.

First, it was just observation.

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A British aviator, flying north of the army, first spotted the massive German columns which were designed to outflank the British and French armies and capture Paris in the Schlieffen Plan of 1914.

image10schlieffenplan.gif

Because observation was their task, the earliest aircraft were unarmed, but this changed and soon there was aerial combat, the so-called “dog fights”, the popular images being “knights of the sky” who jousted with manoeuvres and machine guns, rather than with lances, maces, and swords.

image11joust.jpeg

image12dogfight.jpg

Next came the use of aircraft to disrupt enemy formations and their movements, bombing and strafing, sometimes as part of major attacks, the whole idea being to dominate the sky over the enemy’s trenches, while protecting your own.

image13dogfightingovertrenches.jpg

And this is where we imagine 2nd Lieutenant JRR Tolkien

image14jrrt.jpg

in the summer of 1916, standing in such a trench,

image15atrench.jpg

looking up, and thinking…

We can also imagine him imagining—not seeing flying machines, but something much earlier.  After all, with his education, background, and interests, it would have been difficult not to think of classical harpies

image15harpies.jpg

or Hermes

image16hermes.jpg

or Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus.

image17bellerophon.jpg

And, with his Norse passion, there would also, of course, be dragons…

image18smaug.jpg

And, perhaps a combination:  a Bellerophon mounted on a miniature dragon?

image19nazgul.jpg

In the world of the trenches, there were two defences against aircraft:  friendly aircraft in the air

image20dogfight.jpg

and anti-aircraft guns on the ground.

image21aagun.jpg

But the war ended fairly quickly for the scholarly lieutenant, laid low by a more primitive enemy than Industrial Age Germans with bombs:  lice.

image22lice.jpg

JRRT became sick with what was then called “trench fever”, an illness conveyed, like typhus, by the bite of the tiny insects who colonized the clothing and bodies of soldiers in every dugout in Europe.  Wracked with recurring fevers, headaches, and complete exhaustion, among other complaints, men ill with trench fever were brought to base hospitals and, if sick enough, were sent home, as there was no cure, to recover as best they could.  Tolkien spent the rest of the war in the hospital or in garrison in England and thus escaped the last and perhaps worst years of the war in the trenches.

At home, he became Professor Tolkien, taught his classes, fathered four children, and then a second war came, one in which the primitive air war of the first war was intensified by more sophisticated aircraft, more powerful explosives, and plans to bomb Britain into ruin and submission in what was called “The Blitz”.

image23blitz.jpg

 

JRRT went back into service, this time as an air raid warden, even as two of his sons were more directly involved in the war.

image24airraidwarden.jpg

Night after night, the bombers came,

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to be met with the same weapons as the previous war:  aircraft,

image26spit.jpg

anti-aircraft guns

image27aagun.jpg

and, because the enemy began to attack at night,

searchlights.

image28searchlight.jpg

And this brings us back to our imaginings.  Working on The Lord of the Rings, staring into the night sky, listening for enemy bombers, would Tolkien have thought of danger to Middle-earth in the form of flying things, not machines but terrible figures mounted on even more loathsome creatures—and what could be done about them?  Magic, perhaps?

image29gandalf.jpg

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

His Letters

25 Wednesday May 2016

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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.

writingtablets1.jpgwritingtablets2.JPG

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

NAMA_Epinetron_Bellérophon.jpg

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.

gandalfvisitsbilbo.jpg

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).

Holbein,_Hans_-_Sir_Brian_Tuke.jpgmasterkingspost1512.jpg

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 18th century, postmen had an official uniform

bellman2.JPG

and there were places were letters were received and sorted.

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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

Post118_1837_1.jpg

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

Rowland_Hill_photo_crop.jpg

 

 

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.

mulready1.jpg

 

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

WallensteinBriefSiegel.jpg

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.

historicalletter-01.jpg

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”.

Penny_black.jpg

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

letterbox.jpg

Delivery in big cities like London would, by the late 19th-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

pillarbox_line1.jpg

 

 

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?

The-Cambridge-Telegraph-a-mail-coach-about-to-depart-English.jpg

 

(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

ingeredelfeldt.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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