• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

doubtfulsea

Tag Archives: contraptions

Contraption

27 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bag End, Barbegal, Birmingham, Caillebotte, contraptions, haymows, Hobbiton, machines, mill, plowing, reaping, Roman bread, Sandyman's Mill, Sarehole, Sarehole Mill, Saruman, sowing, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, water mill, wheels, winnowing

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Although we think we might have another post or two on things in Bilbo’s hall, we thought it would be fun to take a break and look elsewhere in Middle-earth.

In a posting long ago now, we looked at Saruman and his attempt to ruin the Shire.  Cutting down trees was certainly part of his plan, as Farmer Cotton tells the hobbits:  “They cut down trees and let ‘em lie” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8)  There was much worse, however, as he continues:

“Take Sandyman’s mill now.  Pimple knocked it down, almost as soon as he came to Bag End.  Then he brought in a lot o’ dirty-looking men to build a bigger one and fill it full o’ wheels and outlandish contraptions.”

“Wheels” made us think of two things:

  1. Fangorn’s description of Saruman himself: “He has a mind of metal and wheels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)
  2. and, secondly, just what level of technology Middle-earth actually has

JRRT himself wrote of Hobbits, in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.”

As far as authentic depictions, we have one, by Tolkien himself, in this picture of Hobbiton.

image1hobbitonmill.jpg

Presumably, that’s the Sandyman mill in the foreground.  You can see in the left middleground what appear to be hay stacks (also called “haymows”) which rather resemble these from a painting by Caillebotte (whose work appeared in our posting on umbrellas) and are where the material saved from the growing/reaping cycle is stored.

image2haystackscaillebotte.jpg

The whole process for what eventually gets to the mill begins with plowing the land and sowing the seed (and keeping off the birds, if possible).

image3plowing.jpg

Then, when the grain is ripe, it is reaped and stacked.

image4reapingstacking.jpg

At this point, the grain is still on the stalk and needs to be detached.  This is done by flailing it.

image5flailing.jpg

At that point, however, it’s still in its beard

image6wheatinbeard.jpg

and the kernels of wheat need to be shaken free by the process called winnowing.  This can be done by a number of methods, but the easiest includes using the air currents to help remove the hull (the chaff—and, if you know the expression “to separate the wheat from the chaff”, now you also know where it comes from).

image7winnowing.jpg

Now, when you finally have the pure grain, the next step is to grind it to a powder.  The most ancient method (still used for crushing grain in some parts of the world) is this—

image8quernstone.jpg

But the Romans sped this up with a kind of early machine, both slave-driven and animal-propelled—

image9slave.jpg

image10animal.jpg

The flour (pretty coarse and gritty, we understand—which wore down people’s teeth) was then mixed with water and baked

image11bakingprocess.jpg

and sold as this.image12.jpg

(This is real Roman bread—abandoned in an oven when Vesuvius exploded and found many centuries later, still in the oven.)  Some bakers liked to label their bread, as you can see, with a special name stamp.

image13breadstamp.jpg

In time, some clever Roman got the idea that there might be a more efficient method than slaves and animals and harnessed water as a power source and even occasionally harnessed it more than once, as here, at Barbegal, in southern France.

image14multiplemill.jpg

This technology does not appear to have been lost along with so much else of the Roman world and continued to be used in later centuries.

image15irishmill.jpg

As you can see from this illustration, the basic idea is simple:  the water is channeled to pour over the paddles of the wheel, thus turning it.  The turning motion is then conveyed through a series of gears until it spins the upper stone of the two millstones, thus grinding the grain.

image16romanmill.jpg

There are several types of wheel:  overshot, breast, undershot, and pitchback.

image17typesofwheel.jpg

Our research suggests that the overshot is the most powerful—but, as you can see in JRRT’s illustration, the Hobbiton mill is of the undershot variety.

image18hobbiton.jpg

Tolkien’s model for this is assumed to have been the Sarehole Mill, in the village of Sarehole, south of Birmingham, where his mother took him and his brother to live, for about 4 years in the late 1890s, in this house.

image19tolkienhouse.jpg

From its front door, he could look across and see this mill—here’s a 1905 postcard of the mill.

image20sareholemill1905.jpg

After a certain amount of searching, we still can’t tell what kind of wheel Sarehole had in Tolkien’s day, but there are certainly some other strong differences visible between it and the Hobbiton mill.  First, of course, there’s that chimney on Sarehole, which was installed in 1852 as part of the addition of a steam engine to the mill’s older water-driven system.  (Is this one of the “outlandish contraptions” Farmer Cotton complains about?)  But perhaps this suggested the tower on the left of the Hobbiton mill?  Second, and a little stranger, might be those round windows—although we might see these as a quiet joke:  just as an older Hobbit hole, like Bag End, had such windows, so it might be fitting for a Hobbit mill to have them, too?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

Here’s a LINK, by the way, to a 1966 interview with JRRT about his early years in Sarehole.

Advertisements

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • lebedusya1

Categories

  • Artists and Illustrators
  • Economics in Middle-earth
  • Fairy Tales and Myths
  • Films and Music
  • 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
  • Terra Australis
  • The Rohirrim
  • Theatre and Performance
  • Tolkien
  • Uncategorized
  • Villains
  • Writing as Collaborators
Follow doubtfulsea on WordPress.com

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • Boom April 18, 2018
  • Psalters and Psalms April 11, 2018
  • Middle-under-earth April 4, 2018
  • Legionnaire, But No Disease March 28, 2018
  • “Dragons, Other” March 21, 2018
  • Many Woven Cloths March 14, 2018
  • Lent to a Museum (Mathom.2) March 7, 2018
  • I Love a Parade February 28, 2018
  • Wormy February 21, 2018

Blog Statistics

  • 23,675 Views

Posting Archive

  • April 2018 (3)
  • 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)
Advertisements

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel