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Green and Quiet.2

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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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,

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the supply wagons,

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the ambulances,

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

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to the generals,

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

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

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and the West was crisscrossed with railway tracks,

image18rrmaps.jpg

horses still pulled the world,

image19plowing.jpg

as they had from Roman times

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through medieval

image21medplow.gif

and still did, even beyond the Great War.

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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

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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.

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

image28atruck.jpg

however, encouraged both post-war demand and supply.

image28car.jpg

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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.

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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,

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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.

Peace! Count the Clock!

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

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

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Tags

ABC Alphabetical Railway Giude, Agatha Christie, anachronism, Bag End, Bradshaw's Railway Companion, clocks, Egyptian, feudalism, Gros Horloge, hour glases, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Macbeth, Medieval, Normandy, Pope Sylvester II, railways, Rouen, Salisbury Cathedral clock, Shakespeare, sundial, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Wapping tunnel, water clocks, Wells Cathedral

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In our last, we puzzled over something in the entryway to Bag End.

image1bagend.png

It’s that thing to the left of the door.   It looks rather like a clock (which is what we thought before examining it more closely), but it is, in fact, a barometer—and a very puzzling thing for Bilbo to have, as we suggested.

On the right hand wall, however, there is another puzzling object:  an actual clock.

In our world, of course, this is no puzzle at all, clocks being so common.  In fact, our major way of indicating time in English is to say, “It’s 11 o’clock”, where “o’clock” is a contracted form of “of the clock”.  Even if, like many in our world, you get your time from your phone, you’ll still say this, won’t you?

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This has been the case since the 16th century, as we can see in Shakespeare’s plays—including moments when characters who live in times before clocks still talk about them, as in Macbeth, Act II, Scene 4, where Macbeth’s cousin, Ross, says to an Old Man, “By th’clock ‘tis day”, when the historical Macbeth lived in the 11th century AD, perhaps 200 and more years before clocks began to appear in western Europe.

Although we’ve seen it regularly cited that Pope Sylvester II

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invented the first mechanical clock in the 990s AD, we have yet to see anything in the way of concrete evidence that this is so.  Rather, we see the first clocks to have appeared in the later 14th century, including the Salisbury Cathedral clock, which perhaps dates from 1386.

image4salisbury

Likewise there is the clock of Wells Cathedral, tentatively dated to about the same time

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or the Gros Horloge in Rouen, in Normandy, whose internal workings date from 1389.

 

And the pendulum clock—which is what is visible on the right hand wall of Bag End—is an even later invention, credited to the Dutch scientist of the mid-17th century, Christian Huygens.

image7pendulumimage8huygens

 

 

 

Long before such devices, people marked time by such things as hour glasses (possibly medieval? Lots of discussion about this, but there is documentation that medieval ships’ captains began to use them)

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and water clocks (used in Athenian court rooms to control speeches—when citations of established law were read in court, the order was to “stop the clock”, as reading law as evidence clearly wasn’t considered to be part of a speech)

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and even put the sun to work, using its moving shadow to tell the time.  (This is the earliest sundial we’ve seen—it’s Egyptian, from the 13th century BC)

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(And just a linguistic footnote on “telling time” as a sort of pun.  On the one hand, we read time off a device—and, if asked, aloud—so that we are “telling—that is reciting—the time”.  At the same time, an older usage of the verb “to tell” was “to count”.  This is preserved in the “teller” in a bank, by someone “telling” a rosary, and by “tolling” a bell.  It can also be seen in other Germanic languages, like Danish, which has the verb “taelle”, “to count”, and German, “zaehlen”.  So, when you “tell” time, you’re both deciphering the information from a device—possibly aloud—and doing so by counting.)

All of which leads us back to Bilbo’s clock, on a wall in the Shire.

As far as we can tell, at the end of the Third Age, the Shire was primarily a non-feudal medieval agricultural world.

image12medievalplowing.gif

Such worlds are, considering how much the sun is involved in growing things like grain,

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governed by daylight, which is, on the whole, easy to mark and measure.  (A difficulty for sundials, of course, is that the sun changes position throughout the year and the hours of daylight can vary greatly.  Perhaps this is why there is a famous sundial motto:  “Horas non numero nisi serenas”—“I count only the fair—that is, sunny—hours”.)

image14sundial.jpg

So why is there a pendulum clock on that wall?

A partial answer might be the same as that for the barometer:  JRRT is recreating something from his own past, or even from his present—the big dial looks later to us than the 1890s.  Just as in the case of that reference to Bilbo shrieking “like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”), it mirrors Tolkien’s own world—a world in which railways in Britain were a major influence on changes in marking time.

Railways had begun to appear in 1830, with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

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(And here, by the way, is an engineering marvel of the time—the 1.25-mile long Wapping tunnel, dug to allow the railway’s passage into Liverpool and the first such tunnel to be constructed under a city.  Seeing this 1831 illustration, it’s easy to imagine what kind of shriek Bilbo must have made!)

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By 1840, building and traffic had increased dramatically and, as the rail lines stretched across England, an awkwardness appeared:  there was no uniform time standard.  Towns close to each other might share the same time, but those between London and Liverpool, say, had their own methods of marking time and so attempting to produce a dependable schedule for a train’s journey was nearly an impossibility along the 178 miles (287km) between the two cities.

image17railwaymap.jpg

Those in charge of the early railways quickly saw the difficulty and began, as early as 1840, to standardize the measurement of time along their routes.  By the late 1850s, standardization had been mainly achieved—although it was only in the 1880s that the government stepped in to complete the progress.

This regularizing of time produced, on the one hand, standard railway timetable books, like Bradshaw’s Railway Companion

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(first published in 1839 and often consulted by Watson and Holmes on their extra-London adventures) and The ABC Alphabetical Railway Guide

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(first published in 1853 and the basis of Agatha Christie’s 1936 novel, The ABC Murders).  On the other hand, it also produced standardized time in general, eventually going global, something which the industrial revolution increasingly demanded as part of its production cycle and now so deeply ingrained that virtually everything we do is influenced by it and we even incorporate it into our bodies, either tying it to our wrists

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or wear it as part of our clothing.

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Work, school, even fun (movies begin on time schedules, television is one long schedule, as well as certain elements of the internet—although the internet does offer the subversive possibility of doing things “on your own time”), all of it moves to the measured tick of time.   In 1937, the year after Agatha Christie’s novel based upon railway timetables was published, JRRT would have felt it, from his lecture schedule to the evening radio broadcasts of the BBC.

Almost as if it were a gathering force of the MODERN WORLD, then, the measurement and standardization of time has crept up, from the later medieval world on.  We can see that Shakespeare was influenced by it—in Julius Caesar (1599?), Act II, the jumpy Brutus and Cassius listen to the sound of a clock striking three—in a world where there would be no clocks to strike for almost 1400 years (but providing us with the title of this post).  Is it any wonder, then, that clocks could have slipped into Middle-earth?  And, besides, they do have a use for Bilbo—how else could he shout to the dwarves as he left them, “If ever you are passing my way…don’t wait to knock!  Tea is at four…” (The Hobbit, Chapter Eighteen, “The Return Journey”)?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Circuses (But No Bread)

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Theatre and Performance

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Tags

A.J. Bailey, American Civil War, Amphitheatre, Barnum & Bailey, Ben Hur, bread and circuses, Charles Dickens, Circus, Circus Maximus, Claude Debussy, closing, clowns, Colosseum, Elephants, equestrian, gladiators, Hard Times, Jimbo's Lullaby, John Bill Ricketts, Jumbo, Juvenal, London Zoo, macadamized roadways, Museum, P.T. Barnum, panem et circenses, parade, Philip Astley, racing, railways, Ringling Bros, Rome, tents, travel, Valley Pike

Welcome, dear readers, as ever, to our latest posting.

We’re taking a slight detour from our usual work on adventure and fantasy because we’ve just read something on the BBC website. It was announced there (as on other news websites) that the famous Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey Circus will close for good in May of this year.

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If you are clownophobic (and it seems that many people are), this may be a relief to you.

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If you love elephants (we do), you may be glad to see them freed from their slavery to humans (here—but not yet so in the rest of the world, perhaps).

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If you, like us, love popular entertainments and their traditions, you may feel more ambivalent—or even ambivalent about feeling ambivalent—as we do.

After all, the word “circus” brings back a very ancient past—Rome and the Circus Maximus: the center for the Roman passion for chariot racing.

Imperial Rome: Circus Maximus (pen & ink and pencil on paper)

6circusmaxtoday.jpg

If you know the 1959 movie Ben Hur, you’ll know the amazing chariot race scene (set in Antioch, rather than Rome), which gives you an idea why this was the favorite Roman competitive spectator sport.

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It’s also the basis of the remark by the Roman satirist, Juvenal (c.100AD), that the formerly independent people of Rome had gradually given up their rights and now anxiously awaited only two things: panem et circenses, “bread and circuses”, meaning a free grain dole and free public entertainment.

It’s a bit of climb from there to modern circuses, of course. There were animal shows in Roman arenas (places used for blood-sport spectacles, mostly), like the Colosseum in Rome.

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(You’ll notice, by the way that we’ll show gladiators, but not beast-fights.)

But, afterwards, with the exception of private menageries kept by monarchs and nobles over the centuries, there was nothing like the modern circus until 1768, in London, where an ex-cavalry sergeant, named Philip Astley,

9pastley.jpg

gave a demonstration of equestrian skill which soon brought him both fame and fortune. A competitor came up with the name “circus”, but it was Astley and his “Amphitheatre” who started it off.

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And also inspired Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

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to portray a comic (and not so comic) traveling version in his 1854 novel, Hard Times.

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The first American circus, founded by the English equestrian, John Bill Ricketts, appeared in 1792, in Philadelphia.

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By the early 19th century, these had become traveling tent shows, which brought a little something exotic to rural communities in the US before the Civil War.

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But then enter P.T. Barnum (1810-1891).

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(He’s the taller one on the left.)

Beginning in the 1830s, Barnum had a very long career in show business, including all sorts of hoaxes, a number of them displayed at his famous New York City museum—

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After two disastrous fires, Barnum moved on, in 1870 founding his own circus, with a typically bombastic name: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome”.

17barnumposter.jpg

Never one to stand still, Bailey was an early user of the railways to move his circus.

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In a world made up almost entirely of dirt roads for wheeled traffic, this was a very good idea. The most advanced roads were “macadamized”—meaning that they had layers of crushed stone, like the Valley Pike in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

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Otherwise, travel on anything other than a dry day could look like this—

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In 1881, Barnum took on a partner, A.J. Bailey—

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and, in 1882, he bought, from the London Zoo, an elephant, Jumbo.

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From Jumbo, we get “jumbo-sized” and, of course, Claude Debussy’s (1862-1918),

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“Jimbo’s Lullabye”, from his “Children’s Corner Suite”.

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Meanwhile, the Ringling Brothers, of Baraboo, Wisconsin (now home of an impressive circus museum), put their own show on the road.

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Early in the 20th century, the Ringlings bought Barnum and Bailey and, after a short time running two separate circuses, they joined them to become Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, which is now about to fold its tents forever.

24aposter.jpeg

We have never been big circus-goers, but one of our grandmothers used to tell the most haunting story. When she was a little girl, she sat on the front porch of her house and watched the circus—probably in fact Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey—all its wagons pulled entirely by horses—parade down her street and, when she told the story, she returned to that porch and took us with her. So, as a small tribute to an old tradition, we close with a few images of those circus parades of the now far past.

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24flotoscircusparade.png

25bandbparade.jpg

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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