• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Edwardian

Speaking Up

19 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Against Idleness and Mischief, Alice in Wonderland, Children, Edwardian, Isaac Watts, Lewis Carroll, Oliphaunt, recitation, Tennyson, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian, William Wordsworth

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

We are always interested in linking JRRT and Middle-earth with things of this earth, from Tolkien’s experience in the Great War to English geography vs that of Middle-earth.  In this posting, we begin with an elephant—or, rather, oliphaunt.  Which is an elephant—sort of, only bigger and menacing.

image1oliphant.jpg

“Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to him, a grey-clad moving hill…his great legs like trees, enormous sail-like ears spread out, long snout upraised like a huge serpent about to strike, his small red eyes raging.  His upturned hornlike tusks were bound with bands of gold and dripped with blood.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

As big as the oliphaunt is, the real subject of our post is actually one small part of what might have been JRRT’s Victorian/Edwardian educational experience and its reflection in the form of Sam Gamgee, who, “stood up, putting his hands behind his back (as he always did when ‘speaking poetry’) and began:

Grey as a mouse

Big as a house

Nose like a snake

I make the earth shake

As I tramp through the grass

Trees crack as I pass

With horns in my mouth

I walk in the South

Flapping big ears

Beyond count of years

I stump round and round

Never lie on the ground

Not even to die

Oliphaunt am I

Biggest of all

Huge, old, and tall

If ever you’d met me

You wouldn’t forget me

If you never do

You won’t think I’m true

But old Oliphaunt am I

And I never lie.”

 

In the 1890s, when JRRT was a little boy, a mainstay of that education was the combination of memorization and repetition through recitation.

image2aaareciting.jpg

Children were expected to commit to memory—and to be able to perform—any number of poetic works whenever called upon.  In what was probably an extreme example, the poet Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-1892)

image2aatennyson.jpg

father is said to have required him to memorize and repeat to him over four mornings all four books of the Roman poet, Horace’s, ( 65-8BC)

image2abhorace.jpg

(This is a “traditional” portrait of the poet, but probably isn’t really he.)

odes—a hefty chore—that’s 103 poems—in Latin.

It’s not surprising, then, that one little Victorian girl, finding herself in a strange and distorted world, would try to provide herself with both comfort and stability by returning to the familiar:  reciting.

image2alice.jpg

“I’ll try and say ‘ How doth the little—'” and she

crossed her hands on her lap as if she were

saying lessons, and began to repeat it…”

This is from Chapter 2, “The Pool of Tears”, of Lewis Carroll’s

image3carroll.jpg

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 (this is an 1866 printing).

image4alicefirsted.jpg

What Alice will try to repeat is a poem called “Against Idleness and Mischief”, by the clergyman Isaac Watts (1674-1748),

image5watts.jpg

from his 1715 collection, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children.

image6divine.jpg

This is what Alice thought that she was going to say:

1    How doth the little busy Bee

2    Improve each shining Hour,

3   And gather Honey all the day

4    From every opening Flower!

 

5    How skilfully she builds her Cell!

6    How neat she spreads the Wax!

7    And labours hard to store it well

8    With the sweet Food she makes.

 

9    In Works of Labour or of Skill

10   I would be busy too:

11   For Satan finds some Mischief still

12    For idle Hands to do.

 

13    In Books, or Work, or healthful Play

14    Let my first Years be past,

15   That I may give for every Day

16    Some good Account at last.

 

What Alice recited, however, was not quite that:

“but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do :

” How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

 

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws.”

 

which was hardly comforting!

Twice, Alice is called upon by others to recite—in Chapter 5, by a hookah-smoking caterpillar,

image7cater.jpg

who demands that she recite “You are old, Father William”—which is, in itself, topsy-turvy, as, instead of the kind of morally-inspiring poem Victorian children were clearly expected to produce, it’s a parody of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850), “Resolution and Independence” (1802, published 1807), a poem about an elderly pauper who makes a living collecting leeches (and who perks up the previously-despondent Wordsworth with his sturdy view of life).

image8ww.jpg

Instead of that sturdy view, here is what Alice begins to recite on the subject of Father William’s behavior:

” You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

”And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

Do you think, at your age, it is right ?”

 

And in Chapter 10, a gryphon

image9gryphon.jpg

orders her to “Stand up and repeat ‘Tis the voice of the sluggard’, another moral poem by Watts.  It should begin:

‘Tis the voice of the sluggard, I heard him complain,

“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides and his shoulders and his heavy head.

Instead, out comes:

”’Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,

‘ You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair!

As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose

Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.””

 

In each case, what was meant to be comforting or at least dutiful, has turned out distorted and disturbing.  As the Caterpillar says—and Alice answers–

” That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar. ”Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice,

timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

” It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the

Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for

some minutes.

 

This was hardly the expected effect, either for Victorians in general or for Alice, in particular, but, if the Caterpillar is censorious and Alice apologetic, Sam’s master has a completely different reaction to the hobbit’s recitation:

“Frodo stood up.  He had laughed in the midst of all his cares when Sam trotted out the old fireside rhyme of Oliphaunt, and the laugh had released him from hesitation.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter Three, “The Black Gate is Closed”)

We wonder what the Caterpillar’s reaction might have been if Alice had recited “Oliphaunt”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Green and Quiet.2

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

21st Lancers, Bataclava, Cavalry, Charge of the Light Brigade, Edwardian, Great War, horses, King Edward, Medieval, Omdurman, Oxford, Pelennor, railways, Rohirrim, Romans, Scots Greys, Tolkien, Victorian, Waterloo

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

The late-Victorian/Edwardian world of JRRT’s childhood and youth was full of stirring stories and illustrations of military adventure, from the 1815 charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo

image1scot.jpg

to the disastrous (but glorious) charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854

image2.jpg

to the near-disastrous (but also glorious) charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman (1898)

image3omdurman.jpg

to the expectation of more glorious attacks in the event of a Great War on the continent.

image4eleventhhus.jpg

Such images may have inspired him to join a volunteer cavalry unit at Oxford, King Edward’s Horse,

image5keh.jpg

and may even lie behind the charge of the Rohirrim at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

image6pel.jpg

To us, however, it also symbolizes something else:  the role of the horse in Tolkien’s world.  Its military role was more than simply carrying the glamorous cavalry, however.

image7hussars.jpg

It also pulled the guns,

image8rha.jpg

the supply wagons,

image9gsw.jpg

the ambulances,

image10ambulance.jpg

as well as carried those in control of it all, from the Kings (after 1901)

image11ed7.jpg

image12geo5.jpg

to the generals,

image13french.jpg

and it was the same for all of Europe and the US, as well.

image14kaiser.png

image15tr.jpg

image16pershing.jpg

All of which simply reflected that, for all that there were railroads

image17railway.jpg

and the West was crisscrossed with railway tracks,

image18rrmaps.jpg

horses still pulled the world,

image19plowing.jpg

as they had from Roman times

image20roman.jpg

through medieval

image21medplow.gif

and still did, even beyond the Great War.

image22london.jpg

In our last posting, we discussed a line from The Hobbit :  “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

We suggested that, with that phrase “long ago” and that imperfect tense verb form, “was”, all was no longer so quiet or green and that goblins/orcs, or their modern equivalent in the Industrial Revolution, were eating up the green of the world, as well as the quiet, but we would like to add to that that a major change in transport, which removed the horse almost entirely from the picture, also contributed greatly.

First, of course, it was those railways which cut through everywhere, steaming and smoking and hooting.

image23rr.png

These greatly reduced the use of horses for carrying things—and people—over distances.

image24wagon.jpg

image25stage.jpg

At the turn of the century, however, a new invention would come to so diminish the employment of horses eventually to the point where they would be thought obsolete.

image26duryea.JPG

At first, they were few and far between, available only to the rich for personal use.

image27richcar.jpg

The massive production needed for the Great War (1914-1918),

image28atruck.jpg

however, encouraged both post-war demand and supply.

image28car.jpg

image29van.jpg

As we’ve discussed in previous postings, the Romans had been masters of the paved road.

image30romanroad

 

After the Romans, however, the secret (and the massive amounts of cash, as well as the numbers of workers) to such roads was lost and roads declined into, at best, wide paths—dust baths in summer, swamps in winter.

image31greatnorth.jpg

At best, a road might be “metalled”—that is, covered in loose stone (from Latin “metallum”—here, meaning “quarry”).

image32metalled.jpg

In the 1820s, the Scots engineer, JL McAdam, created roads with a crushed stone surface over larger inlaid stones.

image33mcadam

 

Each of these was an improvement over a dirt track,

image34track.jpg

but, about 1900, the next process arrived, with the use of bitumen and then various petroleum substances to cover the surface and, along with the use of concrete, these produced the roads we still drive on today.

image35highway.jpg

Unfortunately for green and quiet, this rapidly multiplied the decay of both, as cars and trucks and the roads they needed began to spread across the landscape.  Imagine, for a man who had been born into the greener and quieter and horsier world of 1892, what this 1930s traffic jam would have been like and you can easily see why he would have believed that goblins and orcs could so harm the peaceful world!

image36jam.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

ps

Recently, we happened upon this very interesting story, which we had never seen before, from the online BBC New, 3 July, 2006.  The author mentions “Tolkien’s son” by whom he means JRRT’s second son, Michael.

Many years ago I corresponded with Tolkien’s son, a schoolmaster like myself. He said the Dark Riders in his novel were based on a real recurring nightmare from the Forst World War. Tolkien, riding a good cavlary horse, had somehow got lost behind the German lines,and, imagining he was behind his own trenches, rode towards a group of mounted cavalrymen standing in the shade of a coppice.

It was only when he drew nearer he realised his mistake for they German Ulhans, noted for their atrocities and taking no prisoners. When they saw him they set off in pursuit with their lances levelled at him. He swung his horse round and galloped off hotly pursued by the Germans. They had faster steeds but Tolkien’s horse was a big-boned hunter.

They got near enough for him to see their skull and crossbone helmet badges. Fortunately for Tolkien (and us, his readers)he raced towards some old trenches which his horse, used to hunting, took in its stride. The Uhlans’ horses weren’t up to it and they reined in leaving Tolkien to get away to his own side.

He was terrified and the cruel faces of those Uhlans and their badges haunted him in nightmares for a long time afterwards. Years later, when he was writing his novel, the Dark Riders were the result of that terrifying chase.
Revd John Waddington-Feather, Shrewsbury

There are some odd typos, but we think that the basic story might be true except for the details about the German cavalry.  Uhlans are lancers, but lancer cap badges looked like this.

image37czapska.jpg

German hussar busbies, however, could have the famous “death’s head” badge.

image38vonm.jpg

And German hussars also could carry lances as in this picture from 1915.

image39hussars.jpg

German cavalry went to war with covers over their headgear (as in the photo of the hussars), but, if the story is accurate, we might presume that the hussars, for some reason, have shed those covers.

About That PS

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anachronism, Bag End, banjo clock, barometer, clocks, Edwardian, Evangelista Torricelli, Hobbiton, Lucien Vidie, Middle-earth, Oxford, railway, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a PS to our last posting, we showed this illustration

image1bagend.jpg

and asked you if you saw something peculiar about it.

In fact, there are two peculiar things about it.  Look to the left of the door.  What is that?   At first, we were inclined to imagine that it was a clock of a style known as a “banjo clock”.

image2banjoclock.jpg

But there was also a clock on the right hand wall, and, unless Bag End was like a stock exchange, with clocks showing various times around the world,

image3stockclocks.jpg

(image the one on the left being “Shire Time”, while the one on the right is “Mordor Time”!)

why would Bilbo have two clocks?

There’s also the technical problem:  banjo clocks—maybe all clocks?—which have pendulums need to use gravity to help in their swing.  If the object on Bilbo’s wall is a clock, it’s upside down and therefore—

and so, after lots of searching to see if we could match it somehow, we were scratching our collective heads when we realized that it wasn’t a clock at all, but a barometer—and a distinctively Victorian one, which fits in with our suggestion in a recent posting that JRRT was using his memories of his Victorian/Edwardian childhood as the basis of Bag End.

image4vicbar.jpg

So, what’s a barometer and why might Bilbo have one?

The simplest answer to the first of those is that a barometer measures atmospheric pressure.  That measurement, in turn, can tell you about changes in weather:  low pressure, it’s more likely to rain, high pressure, not.  Here’s a basic chart to explain.

image5airpressure.jpg

One odd thing about Bilbo’s is that, commonly, barometers are combined with thermometers in patterns of the sort you see on the Bag End wall, whereas this one appears to be by itself.

image6bar.jpg

The really odd thing, however, is that he has one to begin with.  The first barometers date from the 1640s, being an offshoot of trying to understand the concept of a vacuum.

image7aboutvacuums.png

It was only in the 1840s that someone (Lucien Vidie) postulated that air pressure changes—measurable by this device– could signal weather changes.  For Bilbo to have such a thing in a Middle-earth which appears to be almost entirely devoid both of science as we understand it and of mechanical technology, is a puzzle at best.   Who made it?  How did he obtain it?  And last—and hardest—what did he do with it?

Of course, as we have discussed in past postings, there are whole areas of knowledge about Middle-earth about which we have little or no information and it’s been fun for us to try to reconstruct things using parallels from our own world, combined with the little we do know.  That first barometer was, we presume, handmade by Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647).

image7atorricelli.jpg

 

It appears to have been, basically, a long glass tube, attached to a piece of wood by white metal fittings.  The hobbits have glass windows, so the art of glass-blowing exists in their world.  The wood and metal could be used in many other settings.  Once the concept was understood, it would be easy to see someone taking already available techniques and materials and creating the object.

But who made it?  When it came to ingenuity in craft, JRRT suggests the dwarves—with the men of Dale as fellow-workers or perhaps as middlemen.  As Thorin says of the past:

“Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days…the toy market of Dale was the wonder of the North.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

How did Bilbo acquire it?  He had come to be known in Hobbiton as unlike other hobbits—his mother, after all, was the famous Belladonna Took (for her history—or, rather, her mystery–see The Hobbit, Chapter 1) and, after his travels, “he took to writing poetry and visiting elves”.  Perhaps the barometer came from one of his trips?  Or had it been sent to him?

If we take the preparations for the famous joint-birthday-party at the opening of The Lord of the Rings as a clue, there must have been at least a small degree of commerce between the Shire and the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and the rebuilt town of Dale:

“On this occasion the presents were unusually good…There were toys the like of which they had never seen before, all beautiful and some obviously magical.  Many of them had indeed been ordered a year before, and had come all the way from the Mountain and from Dale, and were of real dwarf-make.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party).

But then there is that third question:  what did he do with it?  As far as we can currently determine from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, neither Bilbo nor Frodo nor even Gandalf ever mentions a barometric reading, or is concerned that the pressure is dropping.

So what are we to make of this?

For all that JRRT was increasingly careful about this, there a few anachronisms in his work.  In The Hobbit, there is the well-known one of Bilbo’s reaction to Thorin’s explanation of the dangers of future burglary:

“At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

Although JRRT himself considered changing this for the 1966 revision, Douglas Anderson, in The Annotated Hobbit, 47-48, argues that this doesn’t have to be an anachronism at all:

“…for Tolkien as narrator was telling this story to his children in the early 1930s, and they lived in a world where railway trains were a very important feature of life.”

In fact, built in 1844, the first railway station in Oxford was almost a century old when The Hobbit was published in 1937.

image8grandpointstation.JPG

(And we can’t resist this quotation from Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 15 June, 1844, which describes the arrival of the first train as “one of those rampageous, dragonnading fire-devils”.  Clearly, dragons and railroads have a long history together!)

So, is this just a slip on JRRT’s part?  Perhaps he had a barometer in his past, next to a door, and, in his urge to fill up the wall space of Bag End, he simply filled in what he already knew?  We can only shrug—and, in our next, wonder about that clock on the wall to the right:  what’s it doing in Middle-earth?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Are You Sitting Down?.2 (Some Thrones, but No Games)

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Game of Thrones, Bag End, basins, Bree, British monarchs, Buckland, canopy, cart, Cirith Ungol, Coronation Chair, Coronation Throne, Crick Hollow, Edoras, Edward I, Edward VII, Edward VIII, Edwardian, Elizabeth II, Elrond's house, Furniture, George V, George VI, Gondor, high table, Iron Throne of Westros, Lia Fail, Lothlorien, Medieval, Middle-earth, Minas Tirith, monopodium, Moot Hill, parlor, pubs, Rivendell, Rohan, Shire, Stone of Scone, Tara Ireland, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Prancing Pony, the Stone of Destiny, throne, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, UK pubs, Victorian Bedroom, Victorians, washstand

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last, we were talking about furniture in Middle-earth—in that post our subject was The Hobbit.  We continue with The Lord of the Rings and conclude with one specialized piece of furniture.

We begin where we began last time, with Bag End.

image1bagend.jpg

With all of its rooms and the stuff in them, we suggested then that what JRRT was really doing was depicting the kind of overcrowded place later Victorians and Edwardians—the people with whom he, born 1893, would have grown up around—would have preferred.

image2vicparlor.jpg

[Note, by the way, the table in the middle of the entryway in Tolkien’s picture of Bag end, and compare it with this “monopodium” table with claw feet, which could be seen in such a parlor.]

image3monopodium.png

Once the three Hobbits leave Bag End for their journey to Crick Hollow,

image4shiremap.jpg

having sent “two covered carts…to Buckland, conveying the goods and furniture…” (and the next day sending off another) (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 3, “Three is Company), they will spend a great deal of time walking (and paddling and riding), but will enter few buildings.  Here, by the way, is a cart—we imagine “covered” simply means that a blanket of some tough coarse fabric, like canvas, (called a “tilt”) would have been pulled over the load.

image5cart.jpg

Our chances of getting much furniture detail are not high, then, but let’s see what we find.

Beyond Buckland, the first indoors for the hobbits is Tom Bombadil’s house.  As the hobbits enter, they are in:

“…a long low room, filled with the light of lamps swinging from the beams in the roof; and on the table of dark polished wood stood many candles, tall and yellow, burning brightly.

In a chair, at the far side of the room facing the outer door, sat a woman…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”)

image6agoldberry.jpg

The hobbits are given “low rush-seated chairs”.

image6rushseatchair.jpg

And, shortly, are shown their bedroom:

“They came to a low room with a sloping roof…There were four deep mattresses…laid on the floor along one side.  Against the opposite wall was a long bench laden with wide earthenware basins, and beside it stood brown ewers filled with water…”

Not much to go on here.  We’ll presume that the bench is wooden and plain, and the basins and ewers (a big pitcher—ultimately from Latin aquarius, “having to do with water”) are of the kind one would have seen in a Victorian bedroom, when indoor bathrooms were still only a wish—or were only in the homes of the extremely wealthy.

image7ewer.jpg

[Victorians, by the way, could have specialized places for such pitcher/basin combinations.  They’re called “washstands” and here’s a simple but functional one.]

image8awashstand.jpg

Next on their journey (we won’t count the barrow—although the Wight does mention a “stony bed”) is the Prancing Pony.

image8prancingponey.jpg

Again—what we have is functional.  The hobbits are initially led to what the landlord, Barliman Butterbur, calls “a nice little parlour” where “There was a bit of bright fire burning on the hearth, and in front of it were some low and comfortable chairs” and “a round table, already spread with a white cloth”. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)

This sounds like a small, private room, found in some UK pubs, and called a “snug” (etymology unclear—but used to mean “comfy” as early as the 1620s).  Here’s one, in fact, from an Irish pub.  (We don’t advertise—this was simply the image which fit best with both our impression and the book.  And “fit best” does a double duty here, as “snug” can also mean “fitting tightly”.)

image9snug.jpg

The same will be true of the bedroom the hobbits don’t use—and just as well!—plain and nondescript.

So when, if ever, are we given something with more detail?  If not in Bree, perhaps in Rivendell?

image10rivendell.jpg

Frodo comes to in a generic bed, but the “hall of Elrond’s house” is a bit more promising:

“Elrond, as was his custom, sat in a great chair at the end of a long table upon a dais…In the middle of the table there was a chair under a canopy…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 1, “Many Meetings”)

A “dais” is a raised platform.  If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll remember it at “High Table” (as it’s called in English schools), where the students of the four different colleges meet to dine and the faculty sit on such a platform.

image11hightable.jpg

This is a left-over medieval custom, when royalty/nobles sat on a kind of stage, above the lesser folk, for formal meals.

image12feast.jpg

(Oh—and don’t ask about the horse—but it wasn’t required.  Horse and rider do appear at a banquet, of course, in the 14th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—which JRRT once edited.)

image13agawaingreen.jpg

And that “chair under a canopy” reminds us of thrones with canopies, like this at the Palace of St. James, in London.

image13thronecanopy.jpg

Which brings us to the subject of thrones, in general.  After Rivendell, indoors will consist of Lothlorien

image14lorien.jpg

for the fellowship, then nothing for Sam and Frodo till Faramir’s cave hide-out and, beyond, the Tower of Cirith Ungol

image15towercirithungol.jpg

Hardly places to find any furniture beyond the functional!

For the others, we have Edoras

image16edoras.jpg

and Minas Tirith.

image17minastirith.jpg

And here we want to conclude by discussing a similar piece of furnishing in each—those thrones.

These days, when we say or write “thrones”, well, what comes immediately?  A Game of Thrones and the Iron Throne of Westeros.

image18ironthrone.jpg

The thrones of Rohan and Gondor are a bit less complicated.

Theoden’s is described simply as “a great gilded chair” on a “dais with three steps”.  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”).

Here’s Allen Lee’s interpretation

image19alee.jpeg

and here is the Hildebrandts’.

image19bhild.jpg

The throne of Gondor is just a tiny bit more elaborate:

“At the far end upon a dais of many steps was set a high throne under a canopy of marble shaped like a crowned helm…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

Here’s an image from the film.

image19cthroneroom.jpg

But wait—there’s no one on it.  Let’s look lower:

“At the foot of the dais, upon the lowest step which was broad and deep, there was a stone chair, black and unadorned, and on it sat an old man gazing at his lap.”image19ddenethor.jpg

During his lifetime, JRRT would have seen the coronation of five British monarchs:

Edward VII

image19ed7.jpeg

George V

image20geo5.jpg

Edward VIII

image21ed8.jpg

George VI

image22ageo6.jpg

and the current monarch, Elizabeth II.

image22liz2.jpg

You’ll notice that, in every case, the throne is the same.

image23throne.jpg

This is the so-called “Coronation Chair”, built between 1297 and 1300 and used since for crowning English monarchs.  It was especially commissioned so that it could hold the “Stone of Scone” (pronounced “skoon”—not like the pastry).  This was an ancient piece of Scottish royal history which Edward I,

image24ed1.jpg

in an effort to control Scotland, had stolen from its place on Moot Hill, near the Abbey of Scone.

image25sconeabbey.jpg

Supposedly, it was a stone used in the crowning of Scottish kings back to the time of the first one, or that it was even older, having been lugged from Tara, in Ireland, where, under the name “Lia Fail”, “the Stone of Destiny” it was used in coronation ceremonies there.  Its purpose was confirmation:  tradition had it that, when the true king bestrode it (a great old verb form), it gave a great shout.

image26liafail.jpg

As far as we know, no shouting has been reported, over the centuries—perhaps because it’s being used for English kings and therefore the stone is holding its tongue till it’s taken back to wear it belongs?

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

And did you notice something(s) out of place in JRRT’s drawing of Bag End?  We’ll talk about it in our next…

image1bagend

 

Are You Sitting Down.1?

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

19th Century, An Introduction to Old Norse, Bag End, Beorn, Charles Dodgson, E.V. Gordon, Edwardian, Elvenking, Furniture, Goblins, Hildebrandts, House, Iron Age Farmhouse, Lewis Carroll, Listen with Mother, Master of Laketown, Monty Python, Norse house, Sackville-Bagginses, The Hobbit, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Victorians

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Several times, Monty Python skits included the pattern, “Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin.”

image1a.jpg

It was clear, when we first heard it, that, like so much of Python material, it was one of those references which an audience in Britain in the early 1970s would have understood immediately and chuckled at, but it was only with the advent of the all-knowing Wikipedia that the reference came clear to us.  (Here’s a LINK, so that, if you don’t know it already, you, too, can be suitably enlightened.)

But it made us think—not everything does, we promise!—of Tolkien and what must sound like a very odd subject—furniture.

Furniture?

Consider Bilbo’s Bag End:

“The Door opened on to a tube-shape hall like a tunnel:  a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another.  No going upstairs for the hobbit:  bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage…” (The Annotated Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

Here is JRRT’s version of the entryway–with Bilbo—or is that JRRT himself?  There appears to be a strong resemblance…

image2a.jpg

image2bilbo.jpg

As the narrator tells us, “This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit…”, but, at the same time, we could easily see this description (ignoring the fact that it’s about a hole, albeit “not a nasty, dirty, wet hole…nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole…it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort”) applied to the kinds of late-Victorian/Edwardian interiors with which Tolkien was familiar.

image3hall.jpg

People of this world—middle-class England—seem to have loved to live among piles of possessions—heavy furniture, thick carpets, heavy drapes, and knickknacks galore.

image4.jpg

(Oh–and swords, apparently.)

To us, this has a slightly claustrophobic effect—and we imagine that it may be why Alice in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) attempts to escape it–

image5lookingglasshere.jpg

only to find herself in a distorted version of the same room on the other side of the mirror.

image6lookingglassthere.jpg

[Here’s the actual mirror, from the childhood home of the real Alice, which is said to have inspired Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll to write a sequel to the first Alice book.]

image7alicemirror.jpg

What about other Middle-earth interiors, beginning in The Hobbit?

Surprisingly, there is really nothing before the Dwarves and Co. reach Beorn’s house.  There is no description of any inside in Rivendell and, beyond that, the only “indoors” we see before Beorn is the main cave of the goblins and the only “furniture” is this:

“There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a tremendous goblin…”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 4. “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

image8goblinstone.jpg

Beorn’s house, as we see in Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (170-171), appears to be based upon an illustration to be found in E.V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse (1927) (with an older history yet—see Anderson, 171).

image9beornshall.jpg

The Hildebrandts saw Beorn’s house as rather like a giant log cabin,

image10aabeornshouse.jpg

but we imagine the outside of Beorn’s house to look rather more like this view of an Iron Age farmhouse

image10bb.jpg

And here’s a reconstruction of a Norse house interior which is a little more “lived-in”, to give you the idea of what Beorn’s house might look like day-to-day (without the magic animals, unfortunately).

image10bvikinghall.jpg

As Tolkien’s illustration shows, however, this is hardly based upon a Victorian parlor!  As the narrator describes it (with magic animals as the kitchen staff):

“Quickly they got out boards and trestles from the side walls and set them up near the fire…Beside them a pony pushed two low-seated benches with wide rush-bottoms and little short thick legs for Gandalf and Thorin, while at the far end he put Beorn’s big black chair of the same sort…These were all the chairs he had in his hall…What did the rest sit on?…The other ponies came in rolling round drum-shaped sections of logs, smoothed and polished, and low enough even for Bilbo…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 7, “Queer Lodgings”)

Beyond Beorn’s house, there is mention that the Elvenking sat “on a chair of carven wood” (The Hobbit, Chapter 9, “Barrels Out of Bond”) and the Master of Laketown has a “great chair” (The Hobbit, Chapter 10, “A Warm Welcome”), but we have come deeper into the Middle-earth/medieval world, it seems, where furniture (at least in the narrator’s view) is sparse and we will only begin to see more abundance, at least in a general way, when we return to the Shire and the unwelcome event of the auction of Bilbo’s possessions on June 22nd:

“The legal bother, indeed, lasted for years…and in the end to save time Bilbo had to buy back quite a lot of his own furniture.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

“Furniture” is, unfortunately, a vague word, mentioned just previously in relation to the Sackville-Bagginses who were “busy measuring his [Bilbo’s] rooms to see if their own furniture would fit.”  We’ll have to make do here with our original idea of Bilbo the Middle-earth Victorian’s house,

image10vicparlor.jpg

but, in our next, we’ll have a look at households (and palaces) in The Lord of the Rings, to see what we may find (and we have a hunch the inventory will include a quantity of thrones…)

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

And Then the Dragon Came

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A.A. Milne, Apollonius, Arthur Rackham, Beowulf, Chrysophylax, Cressida Cowell, Dragons, Drawn From Life, Drawn From Memory, Dream Days, E.H. Shepard, Edwardian, Farmer Giles of Ham, How to Train Your Dragon, Kenneth Grahame, Maxfield Parrish, Nine Dragons, Now We Are Six, Octavian, Prince Valiant, Renaissance, Sir Gawain, Smaug, St. George and the Dragon, The Argonautica, The Hobbit, The House at Pooh Corners, The Reluctant Dragon, The Wind in the Willows, Tolkien, Victorian, Walt Disney, Western Medieval, When We Were Very Young, Winnie the Pooh

Welcome, dear readers, as always.
One of us is in the midst of creating a course for the fall term. It’s called “Handling Monsters: A Handbook” and several of those monsters are dragons—the “Sleepless Serpent/Dragon” of the ancient Greek literary epic by Apollonius, The Argonautica,
image1sleepless.jpg
the dragon which Beowulf fights,
image2beowulf.jpg
(when small, we always imagined this as looking like the one which Sir Gawain, Prince Valiant’s master, fights)
image3sirgawaine.jpg
Smaug,
image4smaug.jpg
and Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon (by Cressida Cowell—there’s also a movie by that name, which is fun—great flying scenes–but it’s so different from the book that it really should have another title!)
image5hiccup.jpg
We must confess that we’ve never been big saurian fans, either dinosaurs or dragons, but, as monsters go, they have their uses. Saying that, however, we do have to add that we’ve always loved the “Nine Dragons” scroll, a 13th-century Chinese painting…
image6nine.png
[And here’s a LINK to a site at the Center for the Art of East Asia which you can see the whole scroll—well worth the visit—and revisit, if you’re like us and love Chinese painting.]
While putting together this course, we’ve been spending some time gathering dragon images. Sometimes, they seem pretty fantastic—painters with wild imaginations—
image7meddragon.jpg
And sometimes they look like someone once saw a crocodile.
image8stg.jpg
[Perhaps on an old coin? For example, Octavian—the Emperor Augustus-to-be—after the defeat of Antonius and Cleopatra, issued this coin, which reads “Egypt Taken”,

image9aegypta.jpg
suggesting that, when a Roman thought of Egypt, it wasn’t the pyramids which came to mind, but a scaly, many-toothed amphibian!]
And the image before the coin reminds us that, in Western medieval/early Renaissance art, a major source of dragon pictures is religious, being depictions of St. George and his dragon-slaying.
image10stg1.jpg

image11stgeo2.jpg
We’ve mentioned JRRT and Smaug, but that it only his first dragon story. There is another, Farmer Giles of Ham, written in 1937 and published in 1949.
image12farmergiles.jpg
If you haven’t read it, we recommend it as a look at JRRT at play, more Hobbit than Lord of the Rings. The story is about a very practical, but hardly adventurous farmer, Giles, who, after chasing off a giant from his village, is given the job of dealing with an invading dragon, Chrysophylax (maybe something like “Watchman of the Gold”).
image13xryso.jpg
Although the dragon is tricksy, Giles eventually overcomes him with a combination of shrewdness and a famous sword, Caudimordax (“Tailbiter”). In the process, he becomes not only wealthy, but also founds his own kingdom-within-a-kingdom. As well, though JRRT, more than once in his letters, lets us know that he is not an enthusiast for democracy, he provides a very critical view of monarchy and its pretensions. (This may also explain why, although those in the Shire may refer to “the king” and “the rules”, which presumably came with that monarch, their own local form of government is more familial than bureaucratic.)
Chrysophylax is chatty, rather like Smaug, but there is a much lighter touch here, and Chrysophylax reminds us of our favorite dragon after Tolkien’s, the unnamed dragon in Kenneth Grahame’s
image14kgrahame.jpg
short story, “The Reluctant Dragon”, from his 1898 collection, Dream Days.
image15dreamdays.jpg
If you recognize Grahame’s name, you probably know it from his 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, with its well-known characters, Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger—not to mention the wicked weasels!–
image16wiw1sted.jpg
image17wiwcharacters.jpg
first illustrated by E.H. Shepard
image18ehshepard.jpg
whom you may also know as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corners, When We Were Very Young, and Now We are Six.
image19wthepfirst.jpg
[Shepard also wrote two volumes of autobiography—which he illustrated, of course—Drawn from Memory (1957) and Drawn from Life (1961)
image19drawnfrommem.JPG

image20drawnfromlife.JPG
and, for a picture of a growing up in the later Victorian world, beautifully written and illustrated, we very much recommend both.]
[And a second footnote here: Arthur Rackham—one of our favorite late-19th-early-20th-century illustrators– also illustrated The Wind in the Willows,
image22rackham.jpg

image23wiwrack.jpg
his last project before his death in 1939. It was published a year later, in 1940.]
The title gives away a great deal of the plot of Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon”. Instead of being a murderous hoarder, like Beowulf’s dragon, or Smaug, this is dragon-as-pacifist, (as depicted by his original illustrator, Maxfield Parrish):
image24fearless.jpg
not in the least interested in plundering and burning, but rather in viewing sunsets and living a peaceful existence—until St. George appears. As to what happens next, we’re not going to issue a spoiler alert here, but rather provide links to three works by Grahame: two collections of stories and essays, The Golden Age (1895), Dream Days (1898), and The Wind in the Willows (1908), inviting you to read for yourself and to enjoy Grahame’s elegant Edwardian prose and gentle approach.
With thanks, dear readers, for…reading.
MTCIDC
CD

PS
Walt Disney studios made cartoons of “The Reluctant Dragon” (1941) and “The Wind in the Willows” (1949), which are currently available in Disney collections. They both stray rather far from the original stories, but are fun in themselves (and Eric Blore’s voice is perfect for “the handsome and popular Toad”).
PPS
One of us has written what we might immodestly call a very good short story based upon Arthur Rackham’s last days and his determination to finish his illustrations to The Wind in the Willows before his death and we plan to publish it here next week as a kind of “Summer Holidays Extra”. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

 

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • Ollamh

Categories

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

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • Horning In (2) February 1, 2023
  • Horning In (1) January 25, 2023
  •  Things You/They Know That Ain’t January 18, 2023
  • Sympathy for a Devil? January 11, 2023
  • Trumpeting January 4, 2023
  • Seating December 28, 2022
  • Yule? December 21, 2022
  • Sequels and Prequel December 14, 2022
  • Rascals December 7, 2022

Blog Statistics

  • 69,165 Views

Posting Archive

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (4)
  • December 2022 (4)
  • November 2022 (5)
  • October 2022 (4)
  • September 2022 (4)
  • August 2022 (5)
  • July 2022 (4)
  • June 2022 (5)
  • May 2022 (4)
  • April 2022 (4)
  • March 2022 (5)
  • February 2022 (4)
  • January 2022 (4)
  • December 2021 (5)
  • November 2021 (4)
  • October 2021 (4)
  • September 2021 (5)
  • August 2021 (4)
  • July 2021 (4)
  • June 2021 (5)
  • May 2021 (4)
  • April 2021 (4)
  • March 2021 (5)
  • February 2021 (4)
  • January 2021 (4)
  • December 2020 (5)
  • November 2020 (4)
  • October 2020 (4)
  • September 2020 (5)
  • August 2020 (4)
  • July 2020 (5)
  • June 2020 (4)
  • May 2020 (4)
  • April 2020 (5)
  • March 2020 (4)
  • February 2020 (4)
  • January 2020 (6)
  • December 2019 (4)
  • November 2019 (4)
  • October 2019 (5)
  • September 2019 (4)
  • August 2019 (4)
  • July 2019 (5)
  • June 2019 (4)
  • May 2019 (5)
  • April 2019 (4)
  • March 2019 (4)
  • February 2019 (4)
  • January 2019 (5)
  • December 2018 (4)
  • November 2018 (4)
  • October 2018 (5)
  • September 2018 (4)
  • August 2018 (5)
  • July 2018 (4)
  • June 2018 (4)
  • May 2018 (5)
  • April 2018 (4)
  • 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)

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • doubtfulsea
    • Join 68 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • doubtfulsea
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...