Pieces of Eight!

29 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Literary History, Maps, Villains

Tags

Blackbeard, Captain George North, Captain Kidd, coins, Doubloon, Edward Teach, Elizabeth I, Hernan Cortez, Inca, Long John Silver, Mexico, Muppet Treasure Island, N.C. Wyeth, Parrot, Pieces of Eight, Pirates, Privateer, reales, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Newton, San Luis Potosi, Sir Francis Drake, South America, Spain, Treasure Island, Young Folks

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In 1881-1882, a new serial appeared in the British children’s newspaper, Young Folks. Its author was Captain George North and the story was entitled, “Treasure Island or, the Mutiny of the Hispaniola”. In 1883, Cassell and Company published this in book form

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as Treasure Island, and its author’s name was right below the title: Robert Louis Stevenson.

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The story had come about because Stevenson had seen his stepson, Lloyd, drawing a map. Stevenson joined him and that map became the map.

The book became a number of movies over the years, including one by the Muppets (1996),

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but our favorite is that made by the Disney studio in 1950.

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This version has Robert Newton as Long John Silver, the man whose twitches and vocal mannerisms have been passed down now as “the way pirates talk” (including—and especially on—“International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, September 19).

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You’ll notice that parrot (as far as we know, there’s no “International Talk Like a Parrot Day”, unfortunately) on his shoulder. We can trace this back to the original novel and identify him as “Captain Flint”, Silver’s pet. Here he is in a picture from our favorite illustrated version, that of NC Wyeth, from 1911.

(If you’d like your own early edition, with Wyeth’s illustrations—not his only pirate pictures, by the way—here’s a LINK to the 1913 printing.)

Among other parrotings, Captain Flint is given to calling “pieces of eight!” and, when we were little, we wondered “pieces of eight what?” and perhaps you did, too. The story begins much earlier than the novel—about 1500. It starts with this early Spanish silver coin called a “real” (14^th century).

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About 1500, a new coin appeared, worth 8 reales,

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and this is a “piece of eight”.

It shouldn’t be confused with another coin Captain Flint might have exclaimed over, the doubloon.

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The doubloon (from Spanish “doblon”—“double”) was gold, rather than silver, and was probably called “double” because it was worth two of the coins below, an escudo.

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Spanish silver supplies mushroomed after 1519, when a small expedition, led by Hernan Cortez (1485-1547)

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landed on the coast of Mexico. The expedition was armed with European weapons and armor of the period.

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As they marched inland, they found an empire, with a capital set in the middle of a lake, with public buildings made of stone blocks.

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They also found that the local warriors were still living in the Neolithic Era and, though they were fierce, were no match for modern (early 16^th-century) weapons.

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Farther south, other Spanish invaders found the same thing along the west coast of South America,

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and soon, they had enslaved the local populations and turned them to work in the silver mines, like that at San Luis Potosi, in Mexico.

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Their labor then produced vast quantities of precious metal, which was left in bars, or turned into coins—pieces of eight and others. This was loaded on ships and sent back to Spain.

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Such riches didn’t escape the attention of Spain’s enemies, however, and soon such ships had to travel in convoys, with merchant ships being shepherded by warships.

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This didn’t prevent attacks completely, a famous leader of those attacks being Sir Francis Drake, from the days of Elizabeth I.

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Although the Spanish referred to Drake as a “pirate”, while England was at war with Spain (as it was for much of Drake’s later lifetime), to the English he was a “privateer”—a private naval commander holding a kind of license from Elizabeth I, which permitted him to attack enemy shipping at will (and to share the profits with the Queen’s government). Because he wasn’t one of the government’s official officers, this created a kind of grey area, one which many sailors from western nations, as late as the Napoleonic wars, would take advantage of, slipping between government service and something which, even with that license, could look like piracy. Such men included the notorious, like Captain Kidd

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(of whom there is no portrait—we inserted this just for fun)

and Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”.

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(His beard isn’t really on fire, by the way. He wove bits of matchcord—used to fire ships’ guns and touch off handgrenades—into it to give himself a fiendish aspect.)

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Rather than sharing it with governments, both men were said to have taken much of their loot ashore and buried it in now-lost locations—

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which brings us back to the map and Captain Flint squawking, “Pieces of eight!”

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D31MWE Long John Silver. Image shot 1954. Exact date unknown.

Thanks, as always, for reading, and definitely

MTCIDC (matey!)

The most famous of Blackbeard’s ships, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, has been located off the coast of North Carolina, here in the US. Here’s a LINK to the site which talks all about the discovery and the ongoing archaeology.

Shire Portrait (3a)

15 Wednesday Feb 2017

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

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Argeleb, Baraduin, Beleriand, Blanco, Bridge of Stonebows, Bronze Age Horse, cable ferry, coins, Dartmoor, Doriath, Dwarves, English South Downs, Fallowhide, Far Downs, Farthings, Fornost Erain, Frodo, Gloucestershire, Government, Great East Road, Green Hill Country, Greenway, Jeremy Brett, Little Delving, Longbottom Leaf, Maps, Marcho, Michel Delving, Middle-earth, Minas Tirith, Misty Mountains, Old Dee Bridge, Oxfordshire, River Baranduin, Roads, Roman Roads, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Paget, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Steven Spielberg, Tharbad, The Hobbit, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Three Farthing Stone, Tobacco, Tolkien, Warwickshire, White Downs, Worcestershire

Welcome, dear readers, to the third installment of our rough portrait of the Shire. We call it a “rough portrait” because, so far, we’ve relied upon only three sources: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. We’ll continue to do so in this installment, but we will add two works of geography, K. W. Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-earth and Barbara Strachey’s Journeys of Frodo (although we may take a hint of two from other works).

So far, we’ve discussed the government of the Shire (Shire Portrait 1) and the economy (Shire Portrait 2). In this, we want to move on to the geography of the Shire. We begin with Fonstad’s map.

Except for Buckland, all of the Shire lies west of the River Baranduin (the “Brandywine”). This river can be broad enough to require a cable ferry

and it is navigable, at least by small boats—after all, it was in such a boat that Frodo’s parents were drowned.

As well, there is the Bridge of Stonebows on the Great East Road. Since it’s wide enough for gates and is reported to have had houses on the far side of it, we might imagine it to look like the Old Dee Bridge, at Chester, in England.

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This bridge dates from Norman times (although there was a bridge there from the days of the Roman occupation—“Chester”, after all, is only a corruption of castra, Latin for “military camp”—founded as Deva Victrix in 79AD), with the present version being more-or-less 14^th-century. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, the Bridge of Stonebows is said to have been “built in the days of the power of the North Kingdom”, making us wonder whether the Dwarves, who had cut the Great East Road long before, had only had a ford at that place.

To the west of the river stretches the Shire, most of it to the north and south of the Great East Road, which acts as a kind of spine, there being subsidiary roads leading off it towards the various villages. Originally built by the Dwarves in the First Age, it led from Doriath in Beleriand eastward beyond the Baraduin towards the Misty Mountains. After the destruction of Beleriand, the remaining section ran only from the Grey Havens eastward. When Marcho and Blanco, the Fallowhide brothers, gained permission to colonize the area in TA1601 from Argeleb II, the only payment required was “that they should keep the Great Bridge in repair, and all other bridges and roads, speed the king’s messengers, and acknowledge his lordship”, which would have included the Great East Road.

In a previous posting, we talked about the North-South Road (later, the “Greenway”, which once ran from Fornost Erain, in the north, to Minas Tirith, in the south. Because of its ancient importance and places like the causeway and bridge at Tharbad, we imagined it to be like a Roman road—carefully laid out by engineers and paved but, no longer maintained, gone to seed.

Because of its great age and one-time importance, we’ve always pictured the Great East Road to be similar, especially when it is clear that the kings of Arnor considered its maintenance to be the equivalent of tribute or taxes from the new Shire. Subsidiary roads which split off from the East Road, however, we might see as the usual rutted country roads.

The Shire, besides being bisected by the Great East Road, is also divided into four parts—hence the name “Farthings”—like the pre-decimal English coin, which was a fourth part of a penny (when a penny obviously was worth a lot more!).

We wonder what these divisions were intended to be used for—perhaps for the election of the Mayor? In our previous posting on the government of the Shire, we quoted JRRT as saying in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, “The Shire at this time had hardly any ‘government’”, so, for the moment, that’s our best guess.

(We should note here the “Three Farthing Stone”, which marks more or less where the North, East, and South Farthings meet. It has been suggested that it has been based upon the actual English “Four Shires Stone”—

which sits at the place where, pre-1931, four shires—Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire — touched. Not only is there a similarity in the names and what the stone may function as, but the Three Farthing Stone is just to the west of Frogmorton, whereas the Four Shire Stone is just east of Moreton-in-Marsh. And is JRRT having a quiet joke in that, after a boundary adjustment in 1931, the Four Shire Stone should really be called the Three Shire Stone?)

Just south of the Great East Road is the Green Hill Country, which appears to be heavily forested.

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This is mirrored by a smaller wood north of the road, Bindbole.

Other than these (and, of course, the Old Forest in Buckland), the land seems to be open. To the north are the North Moors. These are windy uplands, mostly grass, with little in the way of trees.

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Dartmoor (which is the image above), in southwest England, seems so bare (although it has the fallen remains of earlier cultures on it), that it can seem a little spooky—the perfect setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (first published in book form in 1902).

(We love the original Sidney Paget illustrations in The Strand Magazine, but our favorite film version is the one starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. For pure fun, by the way, we recommend Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes—not for the purist, we hasten to add.)

To the west are two lines of downs, the White and the Far (or Fox) Downs. When we think of downs, we think of the chalky rolling hills southeast of the Thames in England. Here’s what the English South Downs look like

and it’s easy to imagine that the Shire version would look very similar and the chalk would easily be cut into to make Michel Delving (“Big Dig”) and Little Delving (“Little Dig”). The chalk just below the surface is exposed on the south English coast

making that name “the White Downs” clear. And we can’t resist adding another chalk artifact. In Oxfordshire (but once Berkshire), on the edge of the Berkshire Downs, is a Late Bronze Age horse, cut into the chalk. We wonder why there isn’t one in Rohan…

Last of all, there’s the South Farthing, stretching south of The Green Hill Country. As it is a tobacco-growing area, but in a temperate climate (at least, we understand that the Shire is in a temperate zone—they appear to have—or to have had—snowy winters), we visualize it as looking like the Connecticut Valley, which runs south down from Vermont, through western Massachusetts and through central Connecticut, in the US.

In the central part of the valley are tobacco plantations.

These always include drying barns for the tobacco—which would become the Longbottom Leaf Merry and Pippin discover two casks of in Saruman’s pantry.

The one farthing we haven’t studied directly is the East Farthing, but, as it contains a continuation of the Green Hill Country, abuts the Brandywine, and has the already-mentioned bridge of Stone Bows, and thus has no main features we haven’t mentioned, we’ll conclude here for the moment. In our next, we want to examine Shire architecture, from hobbit holes to mills.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (2)

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

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

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Tags

An Unexpected Party, Bad End, Baggins, ceramics, clay bank, coal, coins, cork, crafts, cutlery, Dwarves, Esther Forbes, Gondorian money, Hobbits, Isengard, Johnny Tremain, lead, Lloyd Alexander, Longbottom Leaf, Mayor, Michel Delving, mines, Postal Service, pottery, realien, Renaissance, Robert II of Scotland, Saruman, Shirriffs, silica, Silver, Taran Wanderer, Thain, The Green Dragon, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last post, we began a series responding to the question: what makes the Shire the Shire?

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We began with the government, which turned out to be very rudimentary: a Thain (hereditary), a Mayor (elected), a postal service (not known how chosen), Shirriffs (a kind of border patrol—volunteer). Since the Thain and Mayor were principally honorary positions, there was perhaps no salary attached. As for the postal service (called “Messengers”) and the Shirriffs, we presume that there must have been some sort of payment, although we are not told so. Since, in our world, we pay for the police and the post office through taxes, we wondered how the same services in the Shire were paid. This led us to the question of the Shire economy in general.

In a letter of 25 September, 1954, JRRT wrote to Naomi Mitchison:

“I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archaeology and realien [“physical facts/things of real life”] than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like…I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the ‘mortals’ go, Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out…” (Letters, 196)

The Shire would appear to be an agriculturally-based economy:

“The Shire is placed in a water and mountain situation and a distance from the sea and a latitude that would give it a natural fertility, quite apart from the stated fact that it was a well-tended region when they [hobbits] took it over.” (Letters, 196)

He adds to this that, when the hobbits took control of the Shire, that included “a good deal of older arts and crafts”, suggesting that the solution to the problem of the production of “clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery”—all the Realien, as he calls them, is assumed. How and from whom such things were taken over is not explained and such production, in any community, is not a small matter: “things of real life” are many and complicated.

Consider, for example, just one moment at Bag End. The Baggins appear to have been well-to-do, even without the treasure Bilbo brought back from his trip. His house is extremely well-furnished and the Baggins certainly don’t want for provisions, as we know from descriptions both in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as Realien, as the Dwarves’ clean-up song reminds us:

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!

Blunt the knives and bend the forks!

That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates—

Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

(The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

If we take this line by line, we come up with the following: glasses, plates, knives, forks, bottles, corks.

Glasses and bottles (as well as the window panes at Bag End) require a glassblower and perhaps a glazier.

Plates require a potter.

Knives and forks were once made by cutlers (and forks are very advanced for a Middle-earth which is mostly medieval—although classical people used them in food preparation, it was only during the Renaissance that they began to appear as an eating utensil—western Medieval people ate with knives, spoons, and fingers).

(And next is a Renaissance fork, found in the foundations of the Rose Theatre)

Corks come from vintners and brewers (in our world, vintners only began using cork as a sealant in the 17^th century, we have read).

Take those objects a step farther back and you find:

glasswear, bottles, and window panes require silica and something to make it more stable, like lime (from limestone) or lead, which leads us to the question of where the ingredients come from. Silica is sand and can be found in many places—perhaps it might come from the west coast of Middle-earth? If all of the Shire is like the White Downs, where Michel Delving is located, it may be situated upon a vast deposit of chalk (more about Shire geography in our next posting). Lime would then have to be imported. As we have no record of mines in the Shire, the same would be true for lead.

ceramics, like plates, are made of clay and all sorts of clay are used to make pottery, but all need to be dug out, usually from beds found near streams, rivers, or places like canyons or ravines. The Shire seems fairly well-watered, so we presume that the clay used to make Bilbo’s dishes was local.

knives and forks would be made of iron, early steel, or silver (with silver, plus an alloy to make them stronger)—here, again, we would need mines, for the iron ore and silver

cork in our world is actually tree bark from the cork trees which grow in hot, dry southwest Europe (Spain/Portugal) and northwest Africa

1, 2, 4 (and possibly 3) require raw materials of which no mention is made in the Shire and 1, 2, and 3 all need especially hot fires to make them, possibly using charcoal (made locally?) or coal (again, no mines discussed). And this is just, basically, four items.

So many import possibilities: what about export? We have solid evidence for one, which Merry and Pippin have discovered at Isengard:

“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. For Saruman’s private use, I fancy. I never knew that it went so far abroad.” (The Two Towers, Book 3, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”)

It should always be remembered that these are works of fantasy, of course, and, unless there is some novelistic purpose which employs a potter as a character (in Taran Wanderer,

by Lloyd Alexander, book 4 of The Chronicles of Prydain, for example, the hero, Taran, spends a little time as an apprentice potter, among other trades) or the making of silverware (something one might read about in Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain,

where Johnny is an apprentice to a silversmith), it would seem completely unnecessary to spend narrative time discussing raw materials, imports, exports, or the manufacture of day-to-day items. We have taken the time, however, because, where, sometimes, we write about the parallels between Middle-earth and something here in our world, here the complexity of ordinary things in our world is completely forgotten in Middle-earth, or simply taken for granted, as JRRT implies in the letter cited above. If we are to examine Shire economics, however, we must, at least, consider them. As well, although we may keep saying, “No evidence for”, we think that, even if there is no potter or tin mine in the text, prompting readers to remember that, in the real world, there would have been one is a useful exercise and, for us, at least, makes the story that much more real.

But now we come to the subject of paying for Realien, or for anything else in the Shire, be it for the Shirriffs or for a pint at The Green Dragon.

In a totally rural economy many things might be obtained through barter: in return, for payment, please take 10 chickens, or a sack of grain. (And perhaps we see something like this in “The Scouring of the Shire”, when Hob Hayward tells Merry that, “We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘gatherers’ and ‘sharers’, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage.”—this looks like taxes, “paid in kind”). Such might work for, say, trading a hen for a bowl, but would certainly not do for that pint—or for the bill at The Prancing Pony. Coins and their values are not mentioned in Tolkien, but their effect is felt, all the same: when Frodo buys a house in Crickhollow, we doubt he does it with cows!

(We discussed Middle-earth money in an earlier posting and it seems to us that it would be fun to create, say, Gondorian money—here’s one possibility

It’s actually a coin of Robert II of Scotland—1316-1390—but, changing the crown, could you imagine this as something issued earlier in the Third Age, say?)

This has been perhaps a rather long-winded and prosy posting (perhaps not for nothing did Thomas Carlyle, in 1849, call economics “the dismal science”?), for which we ask our readers’ pardon, but, if it helps to flesh out our portrait of the Shire, it was worth it, we feel. Our next, we hope will be a bit lighter, being on the physical “look” of the Shire, from its geography to its geology to its architecture.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: coins

Pieces of Eight!

Shire Portrait (3a)

Shire Portrait (2)