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Sugar Is Sweet, And…

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Narrative Methods

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15th-century hat, 15th-century sallet, Across the Doubtful Sea, Bag End, bevor, Bilbo, British Navy uniforms, Caribbean sugar mill, Christopher Columbus, clone helmet, costuming, Darth Vader, Death Star Gunners, French Navy uniforms, hogsheads, honey, John Mollo, Middle-earth, Samurai, science fiction, Star Wars, sugar, sugar cane, sugar loaf, Taters, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, The Illiad, Tobacco

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

As we continue to explore Bilbo’s entryway, we feel a little like Bilbo himself watching as all of those dwarves gradually pile in until they almost overwhelm their surprised host.

Unlike our earlier postings on barometers and clocks, which are really on the walls, in this posting, we confess to what is called in literary criticism a “creative misread”.  Take a look at the far left of the illustration.

image1bilboshallway.jpg

There is a kind of entryway table, with a mirror and hooks—probably for hats—and those should have tipped us off—but a preconceived notion overwhelmed us, inspired (well, we suppose you could call it that) by how we initially interpreted the object on the right hand corner.

It’s a hat—you can just make out the brim.  It’s a kind of 15th-century hat called a “sugarloaf”, however, because of the crown.

image2sugarloafhat.jpg

(There is a 13th-14th century helmet given that nickname, as well.

image3asugarloafhelm.jpg

In fact, perhaps there’s a certain similarity with the phase 1 clone helmet, if you add a sort of flange to the lower edge—and a ridge piece?

image3b.jpg

If so, it certainly wouldn’t be the only medieval-influenced helmet in Star Wars—just look at the Death Star gunners

image3cdeathstargunner.jpg

and compare it with a 15th-century sallet with its bevor

image3dsalletwbevor.jpg

Although Darth Vader’s helmet is a bit more samurai-ish.

image3edv.jpg

image3fsam.jpeg

All of these came to the screen through the work of uniform historian and costume designer John Mollo,

image3gjohnmollo.jpg

who died on 25 October, 2017, at the age of 86.  His work included not only science fiction costuming

image3himps.png

image3irebs.png

but also the text for works on the history of uniforms.  For our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, he and his illustrator for Uniforms of the American Revolution in Color (1975),

image3juniforms.jpg

provided us with an accurate view of the uniforms of the British and French navies of the period.

image3kbrit.jpg

image3lfrench.jpg

 

But—as we began to say—the crown of that hat bears that nickname because it looks like sugar as it used to be formed, shipped, and sold.

Today, we see sugar in bags

image4sugarbag.jpg

or in little packets in fast food restaurants

image5packet.jpg

or even in cubes.

image6sugarcubes.jpeg

In earlier centuries, sugar came in a very different form:

image7sugarloaf.jpg

and, to use it, you had special tools to snip off or scrape off pieces when you needed them.

image8tongues.jpg

image9sugarwork.jpg

Sugar came like this because of the process by which sugar was extracted from a very tall plant,

image10sugarcanefield.jpg

the sugar being inside the plant.

image11sugarcane.jpg

The first step was to cut the plant down.

image12cutting.jpg

This and some of the following illustrations are drawn from a series of colored engravings published in 1823 and entitled Ten Views in the Island of Antigua.

image13tenviews.jpg

And, as you can see from the subtitle, the collection is devoted to the sugar-production industry, which was an extremely profitable one.  (And it should always be remembered that the great majority of the workers in these images are slaves.)

Cutting, however, is just the first stage in the process.  In the next step, the cane has to be crushed to get the pulp out.

image14crushing.jpg

(We note the mistake in the caption—this isn’t a painting, but a colored engraving.)

The pulp then has to be boiled and sieved until it’s a pure liquid.

image15boiling.jpg

Then—initially—it was dried, forming a coarse brown powder, as you can see on the right hand side of this illustration.

This was then packed into huge barrels, called “hogsheads”,

image16packing.jpg

and shipped.

image17shipping.jpg

When it reached its final destination, it was turned back into a liquid and further refined until poured into molds, which is how it was commonly sold, even into the 20th century, apparently.

image18mold.jpg

It is estimated that the average person consumes 53 pounds (24kg) of sugar a year, partly because sugar is mixed in with a huge variety of products where you would have to read the label before you realized that it was even an ingredient.

But what about Bilbo?  So far, as there is no concordance to the complete works of JRRT, as there is for something like the Iliad.

image19concordance.jpg

(A concordance is a complete collection of all the words, in their various forms, in a work, listed alphabetically, with reference to where they may be found.)

Our research, then, is completely casual—we paged through The Hobbit and, although we found no mention of the word “sugar” per se, we did find, particularly in Chapter One, a number of references to baked goods (“cake”, “seed cake”, and “tarts”).  We might suppose that, as in our medieval times, Bilbo employed honey in his recipes,

image20honeycomb.jpg

but, for the sake of our sugar loaf misread, we’re going to imagine that sugar is the ingredient.  (After all, there are “taters” and tobacco/pipeweed and, in the first edition of The Hobbit, even tomatoes mentioned, so why not?)

The next question, of course, is where this sugar came from.  Sugar is native to Southeast Asia, growing in tropical regions.  As far as we understand it, the Shire appears to be rather like southern England for climate, which means grains and things like hops, for beer, and perhaps even tobacco (in the United States, tobacco is grown as far north as Massachusetts), but nothing which requires a warmer, moister climate.

image21tobacco.jpg

Europe first began to receive its sugar (after tiny and very expensive exotic imports) in the 16th century from plants descended from cuttings from the Canary Islands and planted in the Caribbean by the agents of Christopher Columbus.  (The Portuguese did something similar in Brazil.)

Looking south on the map of Middle-earth, where would the climate allow for the growth of such plants?

image22map.jpg

Our best guess is to look as far south as we can—which is why, in our next posting, we want visit Harad and chat with those Corsairs of Umbar…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Smoke (No Mirrors)

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

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Algonquian, Aragorn, Bag End, Baggins, Daemonologie, domestic, Gandalf, Gimli, Hernandez de Boncalo, hogsheads, Isengard, James I, Jamestown, John Rolfe, Longbottom Leaf, Matoaka, Merry and Pippin, Native Americans, Nictotiana, Philip II of Spain, pipe, plantations, Pocahontas, Popeye the Sailor, Saruman, Scouring of the Shire, Sharkey, Sherlock Holmes, Shire, smoking, Southfarthing, The First Part of Ayres of the Musicall Humours, The Hobbit, The Illiad, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Tobacco, Tobias Hume, Tolkien

As always, welcome, dear readers.

This posting takes us away from the Shire and back to it, all in a couple of pages, as well as linking itself with a recent one on Sharkey and his attempt at revenge on the Hobbits who have helped in his downfall.

We begin just after Helm’s Deep, at the moment when Gandalf and all of the major characters involved have followed the invasion route back to Isengard, only to find it in ruins and:

“And now they turned their eyes towards the archway and the ruined gates. There they saw close beside them a great rubble-heap; and suddenly they were aware of two small figures lying on it at their ease…One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head, leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long whisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”

image1ruins.jpg

For Gimli, himself a smoker, that latter sight is not a surprising. For Theoden, however, not only are the Hobbits a surprise, but: “I had not heard that they spouted smoke from their mouths.”

Merry’s reply then leads us into today’s posting.

“That is not surprising…for it is an art which we have not practised for more than a few generations. It was Tobold Hornblower, of Longbottom in the Southfarthing, who first grew the true pipe-weed in his gardens, about the year 1070 according to our reckoning. How old Toby came by the plant…”

Gandalf interrupts Merry here, concluding with “Some other time would be more fitting for the history of smoking.”

But not for us.

For us, smoking, in the The Lord of the Rings, as in The Hobbit, belongs to a whole category of what we call the “domestication of the heroic”, a distinctive and important feature of JRRT’s narrative style. Earlier epics, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, certainly have their moments where combat and travel and dealing with monsters and enchantresses are not the only features of the stories. People sometimes pause to eat and drink and even sleep. JRRT goes beyond this, however, to provide what he himself might call the “homely” in his texts. By this term, we mean the ordinary and familiar, including such things as a brief inventory of the contents of Bag End, food more detailed than the “endless meat and sweet dark wine” of Homer–such as the mushrooms and bacon which Farmer Maggot offers–and Bilbo reading his letters and forgetting his pocket handkerchief. Such seemingly-trivial things give the stories—and certain of the characters within them—an extra depth and thus a deeper believability, as well as anchoring the story in something more ordinary than kings and wizards.

In fact, the center of this domestication are the Hobbits: think of Sam wanting a bit of rope or explaining taters to Gollum or that heart-breaking moment when Sam discards his pots and pans and “The clatter of his precious pans as they fell down into the dark was like a death-knell to his heart.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”) And, along with things like rope and conies, there is what once was called “the pleasures of the pipe”.

We live in a different world from JRRT. When he took up the pipe, in the early 20th century, no one knew the dangers of smoking.

image2jrrt.jpg

It was simply something men, in particular, did. After all, there was Sherlock Holmes, with his famous “three-pipe problem” (“The Red-Headed League”, The Strand Magazine, August, 1891) as a perfect model.

image3holmessmoking.jpg

Thus, smoking was acceptable and, potentially, domestic: after all, although the ancient comic book and cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor (1929-1957), may hold a pipe in his mouth while battling,

image3apopeye.jpg

it is generally something done in quiet and contemplation. Perhaps, then, for the times in which JRRT was writing, a perfect symbol of the domestic. (Hence the old expression for household comfort that someone—typically his wife–brings the owner “his pipe and slippers” when he comes home from work?)

And it appears very early in our experience of Hobbits. After all, the first time we see Bilbo, he is “standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes”. (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

image4bilbo.jpg

In time, we’ll see Gandalf smoking

image5gandalfsmoking.jpg

and Strider/Aragorn, too.

image6strider.jpg

In fact, we wonder if it isn’t a kind of unconscious sign that someone is a positive character—after all, as we said, Gimli smokes, too.

image7gimli.jpg

There is one exception, of course—and we’ll come back to that!

It should be no surprise, then, that one more positive character, Merry, is a smoker. Knowing, from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, that he is also the author of Herblore of the Shire, among other works, it is also not surprising that he appears to be the main authority on “pipe-weed”, claiming that the Hobbits were the inventors of its consumption:   “Hobbits first put it into pipes. Not even the Wizards first thought of that before we did.”

This, of course, made us think about who invented tobacco-smoking in our world—or, at least, in the English-speaking Western Hemisphere. (Although we are glad to point out that, as early as 1559, Philip II of Spain ordered Hernandez de Boncalo to bring back tobacco seeds from the New World to plant in Spain.)

Merry says of the plant (which he correctly identifies with our genus Nicotiana):

“…observations that I have made on my own many journeys south have convinced me that the weed itself is not native to our parts of the world, but came northward from the lower Anduin, whither it was, I suspect, originally brought over Sea by the Men of Westernesse. It grows abundantly in Gondor, and there is richer and larger than in the North, where it is never found wild, and flourishes only in warm sheltered places like Longbottom.”

In our world—that is, in the Americas– Native Americans first cultivated tobacco—as can be seen in this engraved version of John White’s 1580s drawing of the Algonquian village of Secoton by Theodor de Bry for the 1590 second edition of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

image8secoton.jpg

At the top, center, is a tobacco field, with stylized plants, which, up close, might look like this:

image9tobacco.jpg

Native Americans appear to have used tobacco—and its smoke—primarily for religious and political ceremonies, rather than for recreation.

image10pipeceremony.jpg

This soon changed, however, when a member of the newly-established (1607) colony of Jamestown, John Rolfe, in what would become the US state of Virginia,

image11jamestown.jpg

saw the commercial possibilities and began to cultivate tobacco for export.

image12growingtobacco.jpg

Although John Rolfe is known to those interested in early English colonization, his wife is much more famous. She was Matoaka, called Pocahontas as a nickname (it means something like “playful/lively”), the 400th anniversary of whose funeral is the day of this writing, 21 March (although it will be posted tomorrow, the 22nd).

image13pocahontas.jpg

Tobacco was already known in England,

image14drinker.jpg

had become a sort of craze,

image15tobaccosmoking.gif

and even inspired at least one pop song, Tobias Hume’s “Tobacco”, from his The First Part of Ayres of the Musicall Humours (1605). Hume was a big fan of the lyra viol (a member of the string bass family).

image16lyraviol

(We include here a link so that you can hear the song sung and accompanied by his favorite instrument.  Oh—and it’s sung in the pronunciation of the early 17th century, so be prepared for some differences in sound.)

Thus, Rolfe’s exploitation was a good business investment, even though tobacco quickly ran afoul of the British government, in the form of the new king, James I,

image17james1

who had already published an attack on smoking in 1604.

image18counterblast

James I had opinions on numerous subjects, including witches, about whom he had published a book, Daemonologie, in 1597.

M0014280 James I: Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogue. Title page.

His attack on tobacco—although more sensible than believing in witches—didn’t stop it from becoming the major Virginia crop, however—as this roadside sign points out.

image20sign.jpg

Virginia farmers planted huge fields of tobacco,

image21tobaccofield.jpg

cultivated it (a major use of slave labor, like the sugar plantations of the Caribbean),

image22cultivation.jpg

cut and dried it,

image23drying.jpg

packed it into huge barrels, called hogsheads,

image24hogsheadpacking.jpg

dragged those hogsheads to a port,

image25dragging.jpg

and shipped those hogsheads to England

image26shipping.jpg

where smokers enjoyed it.

image27smoking.jpg

We don’t know the methods used in the Southfarthing, but, looking at tobacco around the world in our world, the main difference seems to be in the curing (drying) technique used. We can imagine, then, that, when Merry talks about “pipe-weed” and its cultivation, if we visited the southern part of the Shire, we would see familiar sights—except, perhaps, for those hogheads. The stuff which Merry is smoking came from “two small barrels, washed up out of some cellar or store-house…When we opened them, we found they were filled with this: as fine a pipe-weed as you could wish for, and quite unspoilt.” (The Two Towers, Chapter Nine, “Flotsam and Jetsam”)

Gimli admires the quality and Merry says, “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.”

This brings us back to the final smoker and one exception to our fanciful rule that, in Tolkien, if you smoke, you’re a positive character: Saruman.

image28saruman.jpg

It’s hard to think of Saruman as indulging in the domestic. As Treebeard says of him: “He has a mind of metal and wheels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”). And yet, although he has lost his position as head of the White Council, and has lost Isengard, as well, as Gandalf says of him, “I fancy he could do some mischief still in a small mean way.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”). Thus, what better small, mean way than to attack that very domesticity which is embodied in the Hobbits and their Shire? As Sharkey, he does so, destroying the Shire by cutting down trees, knocking or burning down houses, replacing water mills with steam, and turning a nearly a-political place into a little fascist state. And, perhaps, as a last straw, he attacks one last small comfort, saying to Merry, as he keeps his tobacco pouch:

“Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. Long may your land be short of leaf!” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”)

If so, perhaps there is a certain horrible irony, then, that, when Saruman is murdered, he is last seen as “a grey mist…rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire”. (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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