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Many Woven Cloths

14 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Alexander Mosaic, Ancient Egypt, Assyrians, Battle of Pavia, Battle of the Issus, Bayeux Tapestry, Cloisters, Darius III, Embroidery, Eorl, Hause of the Faun, Hunt of the Unicorn, Middle Ages, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Nubians, Persian, Pompeii, Rameses II, reliefs, Renaissance, story-telling, tapestry, tesserae, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, triptych, Trojan War

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Not long ago, we visited Meduseld for a look at Grima, the fifth-columnist.  Today, we’re back, but, instead of scrutinizing the staff, we’re examining the décor—

“Many woven cloths were hung upon the walls, and over their wide spaces marched figures of ancient legend, some dim with years, some darkling in the shade.  But upon one form the sunlight fell:  a young man upon a white horse.  He was blowing a great horn, and his yellow hair was flying in the wind.  The horse’s head was lifted, and its nostrils were wide and red as it neighed, smelling battle afar.  Foaming water, green and white, rushed and curled about its knees.

‘Behold Eorl the Young!’ said Aragorn.  ‘Thus he rode out of the North to the Battle of the Field of Celebrant!’” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

By “woven cloth”, we presume that JRRT means a tapestry, a decorative wall-hanging, like these—

image1medtapwall.jpg

In the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, even wealthy walls—like those in castles—could simply be stone and such tapestries could act both to decorate and to act as a barrier between cold wall and (potentially) shivering inhabitants.

For those making such things, the possibilities for using them as story-telling spaces inspired such works as the famous “Hunt of the Unicorn” series of tapestries, now housed in the Cloisters, a museum in New York City.

image2hunt.jpg

image3cloisters.jpg

The description of Eorl makes us think of medieval stag hunt illustrations, where hunters may be seen blowing horns—like this one.

image4savernakehorn.jpg

image5dagobert.jpg

But the fact that he was riding to battle also made us think of wall decorations of a military/historical nature through the centuries, starting with ancient Egypt, where Rameses II (1303-1213BC) had himself depicted on walls in various military actions—

image6ramnubians.jpg

image7ramkadesh.jpg

Or the Assyrians, who were not only enthusiastic (gross understatement) about war, but also about depicting themselves engaged in it.

image8assyrians.jpg

As you can see, although these appear on walls, they are not hangings, but reliefs—that is, shallow carvings.  The Egyptian reliefs could be brightly painted, as is that reconstruction of Rameses and the Nubians, the first of the two Rameses illustrations.  It appears that some of the Assyrian reliefs were also colored—here’s a PDF: BMTRB 3 Verri et al, of an interesting article from the Technical Research Bulletin of the British Museum on the subject.

From colored reliefs, we can jump to colored tiles (called tesserae), with the famous Alexander Mosaic.

image9alexandermosaic.jpg

This depicts Alexander the Great nearly confronting the Persian king, Darius III, at the Battle of the Issus (333BC) and what amazes us is that this was originally not on a wall, but on a floor, in the so-called “House of the Faun” in Pompeii.

 

It is believed that this was based upon an early 3rd-century BC painting and, to our eye, it still looks very much like the painting it may have come from (which was, presumably, on a wall, not a floor).

For battle scenes on cloth, we return to the medieval world and something we’ve mentioned before, the so-called “Bayeux Tapestry”.

image11a.jpg

We say so-called because it’s not really a tapestry—which would have been woven on a loom—but, instead, a giant (230ft/70metres) embroidery.  Here’s a detail so that you can see how an embroidery is made up of stitching on a (in this case) plain linen strip.

image11closeup.jpg

 

This is really an astonishing piece of work—so far as we know, nothing else like it has survived from medieval western Europe:  a massive history of the invasion of England in 1066, including events leading up to it, in 50+ scenes.  We see everything from architecture

image12westminster.jpg

 

to ship-building

image13shipbuilding.jpg

 

to feasting

image14bayeux.jpg

 

to battle

image15battle.jpg

at its grainiest

image16deathofharold.jpg

and even includes Halley’s Comet.

image17hscomet.jpg

JRRT certainly knew about the Bayeux piece—he mentions it in his letters—but the richness of his description doesn’t really match the relative spareness (for all its detail) of that embroidery, so we wonder what he might have had in mind?   Late medieval tapestries would have had the lush look—

image18troy.jpg

This is one of a set of 15th-century tapestries illustrating the Trojan War.  You’ll notice that, like the Bayeux Tapestry 3 centuries earlier, there are labels (tituli, they’re called).  In the case of the Eorl tapestry, it’s Aragorn who provides the explanation, suggesting that there is no caption and Aragorn, being Aragorn, simply knows the story.

For an eye-popping battle scene, however, we would point to the set of 7 tapestries of the Battle of Pavia (1525) woven in Brussels between 1528 and 1531 and now in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples.  Here’s just one example—can you imagine the same having been woven for the assaults on Minas Tirith or Helm’s Deep?  (Here’s a LINK, by the way, to a very detailed article on the subject of these wonderful works.)

image19pavia.JPG

But such pieces as these are so elaborate that, for all of their great art, they don’t provide quite the parallel we’re looking for, perhaps because all of the larger ones seem to be filled with people and movement and what JRRT describes is a single figure—almost like a standard, rather than a tapestry—something like this one (although we imagine the original to be facing to the right and the field to be green—oh, and of course he has that horn, but you get the idea).

 

And we do have this example.  It comes from a site called “Elvenesse”.

image21eorl.jpg

It looks more like a religious triptych than a tapestry to us,

image22triptych.jpg

but it certainly is going in the right direction.  What do you think, dear readers?

And thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

Ugluk Was Here

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History, Military History

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Tags

Alan Lee, Alfred Waud, American Civil War, Angus McBride, Argonath, Belgium, Black Speech, cemeteries, Confederate, Egyptian monuments, First Virginia Cavalry, graffiti, Great War, Greek mercenaries, Greeks, Hildebrandt, John Howe, Journey to the Cross-roads, Kilroy, Kilroy was here, Literacy, Napoleon I, Orcs, Pompeii, quarry at Naours, Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Union, Virginia, World War I, World War II

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

One of our reasons for holding Tolkien’s work in such high esteem is that it’s so rich: practicing Sortes Tolkienses (see our earlier posting on this), we find innumerable subjects to write about.

In this posting, our eye was caught by this:

“The brief glow feel upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.” (The Two Towers, Book 4, Chapter 7, “Journey to the Cross-roads”)

crossroads.jpg

We had the feeling that we’d seen a statue something like this before—and we were curious whether JRRT had, too, and with a little mental rooting-around, we found this:

abusimbelengraving.jpg

It’s Egyptian (13th century BC), and has a head, but, not only is it monumental, and seated, but it has lots of “idle scrawls” on the bases and lower parts of its legs.

abusimbelgraffiti.jpg

What’s particularly interesting to us is that one piece of the graffiti is actually from some Greek mercenaries c. 600bc

hoplite1.jpg

main-qimg-9eddef3641e25892afa016888b808aa5-c.jpeg

As long as there has been a certain level of literacy, of course, there has been graffiti. The walls of ancient Pompeii (sealed in by the eruption of 79AD) are loaded with everything from election posters to the admiration of gladiators to personal insults.

gladiatorialstats.JPG

There’s so much, in fact, that this is our favorite:

antigraffiti.jpg

A translation of this might be: “I wonder/am in awe, wall, that, you, who are holding up so much boring writing, haven’t fallen down!”

Soldiers, in particular, seem prone to leaving messages behind—beginning with those 7th-c Greeks, but continuing throughout the centuries. When Napoleon I led an expedition to Egypt in 1798,

napegypt.jpg

his soldiers left their mark in more ways than one upon the landscape.

frenchinegyptgraf2.jpg

Recently discovered in a house in Virginia was a large collection of inscriptions from the soldiers, Union and Confederate, of the American Civil War.

Graffiti-House.jpg Graffiti House Wall and Chair.jpg unionsoldier.jpgAlfred R. Waudfirstva.jpg

(An irresistible footnote: the picture you see of the Confederate cavalry—actually the 1st Virginia—was made by one of the greatest Civil War artists, Alfred Waud (pronounced “woad”). He had been briefly detained by this unit and took the opportunity to sketch them from life. His sketch—with his notes—then went to his publisher in New York, who had a group of engravers ready to turn his sketch into a finished—and publishable—picture.1st-virginia-cavalry-halted-based-on-sketch-by-waud-harpers-sept-27-1862.jpg

For more on the process by which a sketch becomes a magazine illustration, see this link.)

Another recent discovery was a mass of inscriptions (something like 2000 of them) in an abandoned quarry at Naours, in northern France.

quarrynaours.jpg

6XYh68h5xHSK2-3026250-In_this_image_made_on_Feb_20_2015_showing_names_engraved_on_the_-a-32_1428320205858.jpg

These date from the Great War (World War I) and, in a sad way, parallel the epitaphs on the seemingly-endless graves in the seemingly endless military cemeteries in the same region and in southern Belgium.

greatwargraves1.jpg

Tyne Cot 3.jpg

And World War II brought us Kilroy, of the famous (and ubiquitous) “Kilroy was here”.

Engraving-of-Kilroy-on-the-WWII-Memorial-in-Washington-DC.jpg

American prankster soldiers doodled this everywhere they went.

kilroy-was-here-photo.jpg

We have written previously about literacy in Middle-earth: not uncommon among hobbits, it would seem, but much less so among the other peoples. As for orcs, be they Hildebrandt

captured_by_orcs.jpg

Mcbride,

mcba_orc.jpg

Howe

John Howe - Merry et Pippin prisonniers des orcs.jpg

Or Lee,

Alan Lee - Orcs (1).jpg

although the Black Speech was created for them and Sauron’s other creatures, we have no evidence (except for the Ring inscription) of any use of it as a writing tool by any of them.

Which leaves us free to imagine just what those “idle scrawls” might read like. How about:

LUGDUSH SMELLS LIKE MAN FLESH!

LAGDUF + MUZGASH = CLUELESS AND SHIRTLESS!

GORBAG LOVES SHELOB

SHAGRAT IS A SNAGA!

And, of course:

UGLUK WAS HERE

Thanks for reading! (And why not submit your own graffiti? We’d be glad to add them to our list!)

MTCIDC

CD

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