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Tag Archives: Edinburgh

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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Tags

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).

 

A Long Stretch

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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Tags

Agincourt, Archery, arrow bag, arrows, Bard the Bowman, Battle of Poitiers, Casula Mellita, Crecy, Edinburgh, English Longbowmen, Esgaroth, Greco-Roman, gunpowder, harpoon, Hundred Years War, Laketown, longbows, Medieval-Renaissance, Napoleonic Wars, Naval Warfare, Pinkie Cleugh, Roman, sailing, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Mary Rose, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In the past, we had a posting on Bard the bowman

image1jeffchanbard.jpg

who rescued Esgaroth (Laketown)

image2esgaroth.jpg

from the attack by Smaug.

image3smaug.jpg

(We especially like this Jeff Chan Bard not only because Bard is depicted as he is in the book, as an archer, but also because it includes the thrush who tells him where he is to strike.)

In that previous posting, we suggested that JRRT pictured Bard as looking and acting like one of the English longbowmen of the Hundred Years War

image4longbowman.jpg

rather than as a harpooner, as in the film.

image5bard.jpg

image6aharpoongun.jpg

Since that posting, we did a second which included bowmen, just a few weeks ago, about Mogul-knife and arrow wound, and now we would like to add a third.

As we’ve mentioned before, one of us is preparing a new university course to be taught in the autumn on the history of warfare.  As you can imagine, this is a big subject, but, in the process of shaping it, we want to include a week on developments in naval warfare over the centuries.  So far, we’ve divided it into several parts:

a. Greco-Roman

image6agrknavbat.jpg

image6romannavbat.jpg

b. medieval-renaissance

image7sluys.jpg

image8lepanto.jpg

c. the age of sail

image9glorious.jpg

d. ironclads

image10monitor.jpg

e. dreadnoughts

image11tsushima.jpg

While working on the Medieval/Renaissance section, we were reminded of what might be the most famous Renaissance shipwreck:  the sinking of The Mary Rose, 19 July, 1545.

image12mrsinks.jpg

Medieval naval battles had been primarily infantry battles transferred to the sea, as had been Roman practice.  That practice was a story in itself—the traditional Roman explanation was that they were land-fighters and so had invented a device, called a “corvus”–that’s “crow” in English—probably because the point at the enemy’s end was a bit like a pecking beak.  This was a kind of gangplank which, dropped onto the enemy’s ship, stuck in place and allowed Roman marines to rush across and deal with their opposite numbers.

image13corvus.jpg

image14medbat.jpg

Things began to change with the invention of cannon in western Europe.  (The history of gunpowder in the Far East is its own subject—and one we urge those interested to have a look at.  Here’s a LINK to get you started.)  Used first on land perhaps by the 13th century, the first recorded use of cannon on a ship dates from 1338 (and here’s a LINK to naval artillery, in case you want to know more).

With cannon, you could stand off from an enemy ship and—your choice—cripple it by destroying its sails and rigging—or sink it with holes below the waterline.

image15renbat.jpg

Boarding, as the Romans had, was still a possibility, of course, and provided the extra benefit, if the boarding was successful, of allowing for the acquisition of an extra ship.  This could be added to your fleet or sold and the profits shared among the sailors—or, actually, if we go by Napoleonic British standards, the profits went to everybody at the top, including admirals who weren’t even present at the capture, with a teeny amount remaining for the seamen who’d actually taken the prize.

image16renbat1.jpg

To do that boarding, Romans—and medievals—had loaded their ships with soldiers, and the Mary Rose was no exception, its surviving records suggesting that there were about 200 soldiers in a crew of approximately 400-450.

As a number of longbows have been recovered from the wreck,

image17mrlongbows.jpg

this would suggest that many of those soldiers were archers.

These, along with the artillery (and perhaps a small number of arquebuses?  To our current knowledge, none has been recovered from the ship, but, certainly, by 1545, they were in common use—at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, east of Edinburgh, in 1547, the English army had several hundred German mercenary arquebusiers),

image18grmarq.jpg

would have supplied the missile weapons of the ship.

image19mrbowman.jpg

Not only were large numbers of artifacts discovered in the Mary Rose, but the skeletons of perhaps half its crew and about 90 of those were intact enough to warrant further study.  For our purpose, one, in particular is very interesting.

image20mrarcher.jpg

Discovered in the hold, he was a large man for his time, about 6 feet (about 183cm).  As well as revealing that he would have had a powerful build, his skeleton displayed repetitive stress injuries to his upper body.  There is discussion as to the pull-weight (how much muscle power it takes) of the longbow of the medieval/Renaissance period, estimates ranging from 90 to about 150 pounds (we’re sorry that we can’t readily convert this, as it isn’t pounds of weight, but pounds of force—the general idea is that it would have taken huge muscle power in either case), but, for a bow as tall as a bowman, this would have demanded great muscular strength—which would then have, over time, put huge stress upon an archer’s body.  This has then led archaeologists to suggest that he was a bowman.

And this brings us back to Bard, the actual archer, and a suggestion as to what he might have looked like.

JRRT only says:

“But there was still a company of archers that held their ground among the burning houses.  Their captain was Bard, grim-voiced and grim-faced…Now he shot with a great yew bow, till all his arrows but one were spent.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

“a great yew bow” makes us think of the English bowmen we’ve mentioned before, and those we believe were in Tolkien’s mind, the victors at the battles of Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415).

image21agincourt.jpg

To produce archers who could pull such powerful bows (and fire up to 10 arrows a minute, as we’ve mentioned in a previous posting), English archers began training as boys and continued throughout the years—as athletes of the bow, they had to keep in shape.  Such training and exercise would then have produced men like that discovered on the Mary Rose—big-shouldered, strong-armed—and given to the subsequent damage inflicted on the body by archery wear-and-tear.

So, might we then see Bard as not only “grim-voiced and grim-faced”, but “broad-shouldered and imposing”?  To which we can add this from The Hobbit:

“In the very midst of their talk, a tall figure stepped from the shadows.  He was drenched with water, his black hair hung wet over his face and shoulders, and a fierce light was in his eyes.”  (Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

All of which gives us:  “tall, black-haired, fierce, grim-voiced and grim-faced”—and, at our suggestion, “broad-shouldered and imposing”—a worthy portrait of Bard the Dragon-slayer.

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

PS

It’s not known what our Mary Rose archer was doing in the hold at the time the ship went down, but perhaps he was seeking to transfer extra ammunition to the main deck?  That ammunition would probably have been in the form of coarse linen bags carrying 24 arrows each—here’s a modern reconstruction

image22arrowbag.jpg

and here’s the LINK to the site from which it comes.  This belongs to an amazing woman whose website is full of her life on the edge of the Great Plains, in Kansas, USA—home of Dorothy of the OZ books, of course– as well as her photos of things like the reconstructed bag in the photo above.  Below is a picture of the Kansas tall grass prairie.

image23kansas.jpg

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