Thirty Days Hath…

06 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by lebedusya1 in Literary History, Research

Tags

Calendar, consuls, decimalized time, French Revolution, Gregorian Calendar, Julian Calendar, Julius Caesar, leap year, Napoleon, New Republican Calendar, Numa Pompilius, Pontifex Maximus, Pope Gregory XIII, Remus, Revolutionary calendar, Romans, Rome, Romulus, Sir Percy Blackeney, Tarquinius Superbus

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Our last posting, which involved, among other things, the French Revolution, made us think of calendars.

The traditional Western calendar has been with us a long time, beginning with the Romans.

They believed that the calendar had originally been devised by the founder of Rome, Romulus.

(Romulus is the one on the right. If you don’t know Roman mythology, this is part of the legend of Romulus and his twin, Remus, who were, at one time, raised by a she wolf. Romulus eventually clashed with Remus and killed him.)

Romulus produced a yearly calendar divided into 10 months and it was his successor, Numa Pompilius, who revised it by adding two months. Romulus and the rulers who followed him were traditionally believed to be seven in number (like the seven hills Rome was built on—or maybe just because 7 has been thought of as a magic number—to read more—maybe too much!—on this, see this LINK).

(If you’d like to improve your knowledge of early Rome—at least as the Romans believed it–here’s a neat way to remember these mythological kings in order.)

When the last of these kings, Tarquinius Superbus (“Tarquinius the Arrogant”) was overthrown in 509BC (as always, according to Roman tradition), he was replaced by two consuls, who were elected annually.

Because of the annual nature of their election, the consuls in time became the marker for each year—the year being designated in documents by their names. In Latin, this was written as, for example, “L. Sulpicio et M. Canonico consulibus”—“Lucius Sulpicius and Marcus Canonicus being the consuls”—that is, “in the year during which LS and MC were the consuls”.

In time, two events complicated this time-keeping to the point where it was a mess.

First, this calendar was based upon the lunar year of 355 days. Set against the 365 ¼ days of the solar year, there was always a gap and so the months and the seasons could begin to separate. To close this gap, an intercalary month of 27 or 28 days was sometimes inserted, but, seemingly, without the strict regularity the marking of time really needed. Second, the chief priest of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus, with his assistants, the College of Pontiffs, had the legal (and religious) right to change the calendar and, if you think about this in political terms (and the Romans did), you can see what a less-than-neutral Pontifex could do: add days to the term of consuls he favored and subtract days from those he didn’t, potentially making the synchronization of lunar, solar, and consular years fall apart completely.

When Julius Caesar (100-44BC)

came to power, he ordered the reformation of the calendar, but retained the old lunar calendar of 355 days, dividing the year into 8 months of 29 days and 4 of 31, plus adding an intercalary month of 27 or 28 days every two years. This meant that, every 4 years, the total number of days, divided by 4, would come to 366 ¼–which meant more regularity, but trouble to come, in time (literally), especially because the College of Pontiffs was still in charge of maintaining things, which it doesn’t seem to have done with the necessary diligence.

In fact, the story is more complicated yet than this, but this at least gives us the so-called “Julian Calendar”, which was in use in the West from Caesar’s time until the Renaissance. In 1582, by the direction of Pope Gregory XIII,

to correct the seasonal drift which had gradually occurred over the centuries, the Julian calendar was reformatted, adding a full day to the month of February (February 29^th) every fourth year. The first year with such an addition to February was the next year, 1583, but, to help the calendar and actual year rejoin, Gregory ordered the addition of 11 days to October of 1582, so that October 4^th became October 15^th. We hope that all of this is clear?

For people who grew up with all of this adding here, changing there, it’s left us with a sort-of rhyme to remember what months now have how many days:

“Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November.

All the rest have thirty-one—”

And then the thing breaks down into something like “Except February, which has twenty-eight, except every fourth year, when it has twenty-nine.”

So, why did the French Revolution remind us of calendars?

One of the main bases of the French Revolution, the thinkers of the Revolution would say, was the idea of REASON. In fact, for a short time, some revolutionaries attempted to replace Christianity with the worship of a goddess by that name.

Reason brought about the initial attempt to convert France by law to the metric system in 1795. Even before that, however, there had been a program to decimalize everything possible, including the currency and the time of day—here’s a watch from 1795 with both kinds of time marked on it.

Of course, the calendar would be a target and, between 1793 and 1805, France would mark its years by it in 12 months of 30 days each, each month divided into 3 decades. To keep the balance between months and seasons, five or six extra days were added to the end of the year. To remove any trace of the old royal (and religious) past, the new months were renamed—here’s the calendar. As you can see, the renaming was meant to reflect seasonal weather.

The committee (one major feature of the Revolution was that seemingly everything was created by a committee) even came up with the names for every day, the names being something ordinary to which the day was devoted.

If you look at the column marked “Nivose”, you can see that the first four days are “neige/glace/miel/cire”—“snow/ice/honey/wax” (although those first two make perfect sense in a month called “Snowy”, we’re a little unclear about “honey” and “wax”).

Napoleon participated in a coup which ended revolutionary government in 1799 (18 Brumaire, Year VIII-9 November, 1799).

He tolerated the revolutionary calendar for the next 5 years, but, after he made himself emperor, 11 Frimaire, Year XIII–2 December, 1804,

a decree was issued that, beginning 1 January, 1806, the old Gregorian calendar would be reinstated.

During the days of the Terror

and the Scarlet Pimpernel, however,

when Sir Percy Blakeney put down a rescue date on his calendar in Paris, he would have written January 1, 1794 as “day 2 of the second decade of Snowy, year II, “ a day devoted to “Argile”—“Clay”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Green and Quiet.2

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It also pulled the guns,

the supply wagons,

the ambulances,

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

to the generals,

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

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

and the West was crisscrossed with railway tracks,

horses still pulled the world,

as they had from Roman times

through medieval

and still did, even beyond the Great War.

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.

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

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.

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

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

however, encouraged both post-war demand and supply.

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.

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

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,

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.

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!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

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.

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

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

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.

Small Talk

02 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Tags

Assyrians, Charles Goodyear, cyclops, David and Goliath, Death Star, Egypt, Ewoks, Greeks, Hetep Senworset, Hobbits, Jack and the Beanstalk, Kelandry of Mindelan, Lachish, Medieval, Odysseus, Polyphemus, Protector of the Small, Romans, Sling, slingers, Slingshot, Smaug, Star Wars, Tamora Pierce, thrush, Tortall, Vulcanized, Woses, Yoda

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Sometimes, ideas for posts come from something we’ve seen in a movie theatre or something we’re reading or even from something we’re teaching or studying. Sometimes we employ the Sortes Tolkienses. And sometimes things just seem to fall into our hands. And that’s where this post comes from.

We were moving a bookshelf and something literally dropped into our hands, a boxed set of books by one of our favorite YA authors, Tamora Pierce.

As you can see from our image, the series is called “Protector of the Small” and is about the life of Keladry of Mindelan, who lives in Pierce’s imaginary Tortall, where it is possible—just possible—for a girl to become a knight. Through the four volumes, Kel gradually works her way from pre-page to knighthood and, is always the case with TP’s books, there are both surprises and interesting and not always predictable difficulties along the way, as well as an ultimate humanity which makes her books such satisfying reading.

It wasn’t the actual books, however, which got us to thinking, but the word “small” in the series title. How often, in our favorite adventure stories, it’s a case of small versus big

and, very often, the big thinks that that’s all which counts—think of the fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” for example.

For all that the giant is huge and menacing in the story, he’s vulnerable as he climbs down the beanstalk and Jack’s quick thought–to cut down the stalk even as the giant descends–makes quick work of the oversized (but perhaps overconfident—and underbrained?) creature.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have the Biblical story of David and Goliath.

Goliath is not only huge, but armored, and David is a boy who has only his shepherd’s staff, a sling, and five stones from a river bed, but it’s all he needs.

A sling is an ancient weapon

This is from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom town of Hetep Senwosret, c. 1895BC. The Assyrians were still using the weapon more than a thousand years later, as this scene from one of the Lachish reliefs (c.700BC) shows.

The Greeks had slingers

as did the Romans

as did medieval westerners.

Slings shouldn’t be confused with slingshots, by the way. (Or “catapult” if you’re one of our British friends.)

This is the weapon of choice of the cartoon character, Dennis the Menace.

These are a modern invention which requires a large rubber band (an “elastic”) to propel the missile and such rubber bands can only come from the 1840s and beyond, when the process of heat-hardening rubber (“vulcanization”) was patented by Charles Goodyear.

For us, then, the image of Ori in P Jackson’s film armed with a slingshot

goes into our catalogue of anachronisms, like the steam engine whistle, the popgun, and the tomatoes in The Hobbit.

But, as we were saying, small David has no fear of big Goliath, as one of those stones from the riverbed stuns the giant warrior, allowing David to use Goliath’s own sword to cut off his head.

In ancient Greek tradition, Polyphemus the Cyclops obviously thinks his size will allow him to consume all of Odysseus’ men—and then Odysseus, too, saving him for last as a “guest gift”.

Big body, however, doesn’t necessarily mean big brain as Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk and then blinds him with his own staff.

Then, he uses the Cyclops’ own sheep as escape vehicles for himself and his men.

Small versus big is a major theme in Star Wars, from the fact that the gigantic Death Star has a single ventilator duct which makes it vulnerable

to attack by a single fighter,

to the ferocious Ewoks,

and, of course, Yoda, with his famous question.

And then there are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where the world of the small and tough seems to be everywhere, from the hobbits

to the dwarves

and even to the Woses.

Their opponents are suitably large—trolls,

dragons

wizards

to the biggest evil in Middle-earth (although it’s not clear, really, how big he is, physically).

But there’s someone even smaller in The Hobbit who, because of that size, perhaps, is left behind, but is crucial to the story: the elderly thrush

who informs Bard the Bowman just where to fire that black arrow which never fails him—and doesn’t this time, thanks to the bird.

We were sorry that his part was completely removed from The Battle of the Five Armies, but perhaps this was, in fact, one of the few times when the small hero lost to the big–studio.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Here’s a LINK to an amazing demonstration of just how accurate the sling can be.

Wains, Carts, and… (2)

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien

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Boudica, Carts, Cassius Dio, Celts, chariots, Conestoga, Farmer Maggot, Gandalf, gur, Hobbiton, Iceni, Iron Age, Medieval, Mongols, Oregon Trail, Roman History, Romans, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, vikings, Wagons, Wainriders, Wains

Welcome, as always, to our blog, dear readers.

In our last, we began discussing wheeled transport in The Lord of the Rings. We began with Gandalf’s cart, mentioned in Chapter 1.

The posting took us from the first traces of wheeled vehicles in western Europe, circa 3600BC (literally traces—just a pair of tracks in the clay)

through chariots

to Roman carts

to their descendants, medieval carts,

which led us back to Gandalf.

Continuing our discussion, we move from carts (2 wheels) to wagons (4 wheels) with the wagon Farmer Maggot uses to carry the hobbits to Bucklebury Ferry:

“I was going to say: after a bit of supper, I’ll get out a small wagon, and I’ll drive you all to the Ferry.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 4, “A Short Cut to Mushrooms”)

There is no description beyond that, really, but wagons are pretty generic things. We have a few examples of early (600-500BC) Iron Age wagons—very fancy ones, too—from burials,

as well as this later Viking wagon.

And, in between, we have Roman wagons

and their medieval descendants.

Farmer Maggott’s wagon, would probably have looked something like this (without the arms).

Of course, those Roman wagons were meant for paved Roman roads.

Although some Roman roads remained on the surface and continued to be used, most medieval roads were merely dirt and stones—as JRRT illustrates in that picture of the Hill

and as we see in this picture.

In which case, medieval people relied upon pack horses to transport many of their goods.

(Think of Bill the pony as a modest example.)

An old word for wagon is wain and we would like to end this brief exploration with something about wains and Wainriders. In Appendix A, we find this:

“The third evil was the invasion of the Wainriders, which sapped the waning strength of Gondor in wars that lasted for almost a hundred years. The Wainriders were a people, or a confederacy of many peoples, that came from the east; but they were stronger and better armed than any that had appeared before. They journeyed in great wains, and their chieftains fought in chariots.”

We’ve been puzzled by that combination of “great wains” and “their chieftains fought in chariots”. The only immediate reference we could think of was to the Iceni, a tribe of ancient Britain, who, led by a female chieftain named Boudica, revolted against Roman occupation in 60-61AD. At the final battle, where they were defeated by Roman troops, they had parked wagons in a crescent formation to their rear, then advanced with their chariots and infantry against the Romans. (See Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXII.12 for a description of this battle—here’s an easy LINK to that portion of his extensive writing.)

There is a problem here, however. The Britons were not migratory and their wagons were probably no more than farm wagons and carts, hardly the great wains of JRRT’s description. If we removed the chariots, another candidate for the Wainriders might be the Mongols, however, who were migratory and traveled in something even more splendid than a wagon—a gur—like this one—

The Mongols certainly came from the east and, in a short time, swallowed up territory from China all the way to eastern Europe.

It is more likely, however, that JRRT combined things–it wouldn’t be the first time he synthesized—so much of his so-called legendarium is a mixture of this and that in brilliant profusion. So, in the same spirit, we asked ourselves what we thought wains might look like and immediately saw the big wagon which was instrumental in colonizing the western part of the US, the Conestoga.

Great, long lines of these and other wagons, packed with people and supplies, crossed the plains from the 1840s on.

Could we then remove the 19^th-century settlers and add Celts and their chariots, say?

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Wains and Carts and… (Part I)

07 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History

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Bronze Age, Byzantines, Carts, chariots, delivery carts, Flintbek, Gandalf, Great War, Greece, Iliad, Late-Victorian, Medieval, military, Mycenaean, Neolithic, Roman Roads, Romans, Schleswig-Holstein, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Trundholm Sun Chariot, Wagons, wattle and daub

Welcome, dear readers, once more to our blog.
We’ve just been watching the extended version opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, in which Gandalf appears, driving a cart.

(Sorry—we couldn’t resist! We love Legos and the older Playmobil—Vikings, pirates, Roman warship, too. Not to forget the Egyptian pyramid! )
Unlike ordinary medieval carts,

it is quite elaborate.

You can see from our second illustration that both the medieval example and Gandalf’s have wattled sides—that is, the upright spindles below the railing top have pliable sticks (perhaps willow or hazel?) woven between them to make the sides of the cart.
This is also a common method for producing traditional house walls: you just add daub, which is clay plus fibre, as a kind of plaster to fill in around the sticks.

Many buildings, from the Neolithic on, were constructed using the technique,

as well as, without the daub, miles and miles of useful fencing.

What caught our attention, however, was the general look of the cart and the detailing of the wooden railing,

which very much reminded us of this—

a Celtic chariot of the sort one sees both in chariot burials

and in stirring reconstructions.

But that’s not the direction we wanted to take in this post. Rather, we were, as so often, thinking about the medieval world and Middle-earth and, in this case, wheeled vehicles.
The earliest evidence in Europe currently known for such vehicles is not the remains of a vehicle itself, but rather its tracks, found under a burial mound at Flintbek, in Schleswig-Holstein, in northwest Germany.

These have been dated to about 3600BC, during the late Neolithic Era. A bit later, we see this odd thing, the so-called “Trundholm Sun Chariot”, from about 1400BC

which actually appears to be some sort of wagon, or at least its frame.

Perhaps 50 years later, there are Bronze Age Mycenaean chariots

but, at least as far as illustrations go, European domestic vehicle depictions are scarce, especially in contrast to those of military—or sport—vehicles. Here’s a 5th-century BC depiction of a wagon being used for a wedding,

but we could then show you heaps of illustrations of chariots, used in very early Greece for warfare. You see them all over the Iliad, for example,

but chariots in the later Greek world were abandoned for warfare, although retained for racing, which was true for the Romans and for their successors, the Byzantines.

We have lots more depictions of domestic vehicles from the Roman world, both carts

and wagons.

This shouldn’t be surprising, we suppose, given that the Romans built more than 50,000 miles of roads.
image19romrd
Judging by these depictions, it appears that the medieval world simply continued using Roman vehicle patterns, just as, where available, they continued to use Roman roads.

For us, then Gandalf’s cart—which is not really described:
“At the end of the second week in September a cart came in through Bywater from the direction of Brandywine Bridge in broad daylight. An old man was driving it all alone…It had a cargo of fireworks…”
(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)
would follow what we see in manuscript illustrations.
Tolkien might have been thinking of such illustrations, of course, but there is another possibility. In the late-Victorian world into which JRRT was born, horses still powered vehicles and delivery carts like this one

would have been a common site—even after the Great War. Perhaps he was thinking of something he might still have seen outside his window when he was young?
We’ll stop here for now, but will continue in Part II, where we’ll consider Farmer Maggot’s wagon and wains…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD

In Shining Armo(u)r

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim, Tolkien

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Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, chain-mail, Crecy, Dark Ages, Embroidery, Howard Pyle, knights of Dol Amroth, Medieval books, medieval manuscript drawings, N.C. Wyeth, Norman knight, Pauline Baynes, Romans, sub-Roman period, Sutton Hoo, The Lord of the Rings, The Rohirrim, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a letter to Miss [Rhona] Beare, of 14 October, 1958, JRRT wrote to answer what was clearly a question about dress in The Lord of the Rings:

“Question 4. I do not know the detail of clothing. I visualize with great clarity and detail scenery and ‘natural’ objects, but not artefacts. Pauline Baynes drew her inspiration for F. Giles largely from medieval MS drawings—except for the knights (who are a bit ‘King-Arthurish’)* the style seems to fit well enough.” (Letters, 280)

To which he adds this footnote:

“*Sc. [= “Know/understand”] belong to our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages which blends unhistorically styles and details ranging over 500 years, and most of which did not of course exist in the Dark Ages of c. 500 A.D.”

In the next paragraph he adds:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’, in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” (Letters, 280-281)

The Bayeux Tapestry (which should really be called the “Bayeux Embroidery”, since it’s actually a long piece of cloth with hundreds of figures and details stitched on to it, rather than woven into it) presents us with a detailed history of the invasion of England in 1066AD. The soldiers Tolkien is talking about look like this:

You can see what he means by “tennis-nets”—which should really look like this:

That chain-mail, then, looks like this:

And, at the bottom of this next illustration, you can see how it’s made:

We know, then, how JRRT envisaged the Rohirrim in its eoreds, marching towards Minas Tirith, but how did he imagine other soldiers, we’ve asked ourselves, and, in particular, the knights of Dol Amroth—the only soldiers specifically described as such in The Lord of the Rings?

JRRT writes of them as they enter Minas Tirith:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses…”(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

“Full harness” means “complete armor”. When we think of the term, we think of something later than the Normans, who are, after all, just wearing a kind of very long ringed shirt. Here’s a useful chart to give you of an idea of what we mean.

So, since “full harness” doesn’t look like the Rohirrim, how might it look?

In Jackson’s films, we don’t believe that we ever see those knights singled out, as we see the Rohirrim. The best we could find was this picture of Faramir’s men about to mount a cavalry charge against what appears to be Osgiliath. (We’ve talked about this in a much earlier posting—one of the most unbelievable moments in the whole of Jackson’s work.)

This is a big picture, but the details, unfortunately, aren’t very clear. There are a few things, however, which we found rather odd:

although there appear to be a few lances with penons among them, most seem to be armed only with swords—a close-up weapon—which is why actual knights also carried lances—heavy cavalry came crashing down on infantry or slamming into enemy mounted men—or intended to—spearing right and left and then drawing swords (or using maces or battle axes)
a minor detail, but everyone seems to be wearing his sword on the right-hand side, which would have made it very hard to draw, unless all were left-handed men!
the helmets and armor seem very standardized, and we would believe that budgetary considerations probably influenced this uniformity—50 identical helmets were probably cheaper to make than 50 different ones—but such sameness reminds us more of Roman imperial troops than of any western medieval army we can think of.

We assume, then, that this is the film’s view of soldiers at least like Imrahil’s men, but when Tolkien wrote “a company of knights in full harness”: what might he have had in mind? We think there is a clue in that adjective “King-Arthurish”, which he uses of Pauline Bayne’s illustrations and in his footnote, where he refers to “our ‘mythological Middle-Ages”. What does he mean?

JRRT would have been about ten when Howard Pyle published his The Story of King Arthur and His Knights in 1903.

Here is how Pyle saw Arthur’s knights.

image9aknight image10asknights

Could this have inspired Tolkien’s view of Imrahil’s men? (Judge for yourself by following this LINK.)

Tolkien would have been nearly 30 when The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, was published in 1922,

but, if this were in among his children’s books, perhaps these illustrations might have given him ideas. (And here’s a LINK to your own copy, from the Internet Archive.)

These are two well-known sets of illustrations of Arthurian figures, both available in Tolkien’s early lifetime. If Arthur was real, of course, he would have lived, as JRRT was well aware, in what is called the “sub-Roman period”, c.500AD—at the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages”– and he and his men would actually have looked like this:

But this is where “our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages” comes in—little would have been known, when JRRT was writing The Lord of the Rings, of what such warriors would have looked like, although the spectacular Sutton Hoo find of 1939, with its splendid helmet, would have given an inkling, once restored.

Because such knowledge was lacking, however, the historical Arthur (if there was one) had been moved to the Middle-Ages and re-equipped as a military figure of a much later era, and we believe that, when Tolkien wrote “Arthurish” and “knights”, this is what he meant—and how we’ve always seen Arthur, not only from books (and lots of films) but also from the armor galleries in a number of museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

to the Higgins Armory in Massachusetts

to the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts

to the Tower of London.

And, as we’ve discussed before, Prince Valiant, has been an influence from childhood (talk about ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages!).

And so, in turn, we imagine—and we think that JRRT did, too–the “company of knights in full harness” to have been individuals, brightly clothed in heraldic colors, their armor that, perhaps, of Crecy, in 1346—

or Agincourt, in 1415.

And you, dear readers, what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Mirror Image

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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ancient mirrors, Bag End, chiaroscuro, Claude Debussy, Egyptians, Etruscans, Georges de la Tour, Greeks, hall stand, Headington, Magic mirror, Maurice Ravel, Medieval, Miroirs, mirror, North Oxford, Parmigianino, Portrait of the Money-Lender and His Wife, Quentin Matsys, Reflections in the Water, Reflets dans L'eau, Renaissance, Romans, Snow White, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

In English, we have the expression “upon reflection”, meaning something like “I’ve looked back at something and have considered (or reconsidered)”. When we look at the word “reflection”, we see its Latin origin, re “back/again” and flection, from the verb flecto, flectere, flexi, flexum “to bend/turn/bow” (we show all four of what are called the “principal parts” of the verb so that you can see where words like “flexible”—and, together with that re—“reflex” come from) and can imagine that, originally, it was almost a physical act—as if a person were believed literally to have turned back to a thought, event, action, to think about it again.

But that made us wonder about a reflection in a different sense—when an image is repeated, in water, say.

(And here we provide a YouTube LINK for a beautiful piece of music “Reflets dans L’eau”—“Reflections in the Water” by Claude Debussy—1862-1918, from the set entitled, Images, Book One—1905.)

Or in a mirror.

(This haunting painting is by Georges de la Tour, 1593-1652—known for his chiaroscuro—shadow-versus-light effects—style.)

Fancifully, we might ask: does a “reflection” in this sense suggest that the image in the mirror was turning back to look at the viewer? More realistically, we might say that the image is bent/turned back upon the viewer—but we also wonder if the Latin word from which our word mirror comes might give a certain flavor of the uncanny about it. Miror, mirari, miratus sum in Latin means “to wonder/be amazed at something” (Put the Latin preposition ad– on the front of this and you’re looking at English “admire”—originally “to wonder at something”—our modern sense of this has lost something of the wide-eyed nature implied in the original, but that’s how language works—sharp things, like knives, become dull with use. In Spanish, for example, mirar comes to mean “to look at/watch/observe”.)

Certainly, folktales and folk customs once preserved something eerie about mirrors. Think of the wicked queen’s magic mirror in Snow White.

If you know the Disney version of Snow White, you probably expected us to show this image.

But this so creeped us out as children that it was not our first choice!

In various western European countries, looking into a mirror on New Year’s Eve (lots of extra things to do: while combing hair, eating an apple, taking a bath first so that the mirror is steamy) will show you the image of your intended spouse. And breaking a mirror can mean seven years of bad luck.

For Egyptians,

Greeks,

Etruscans,

Romans,

and western Medieval people, as well,

mirrors were not very breakable, however, being commonly made of a piece of polished bronze (although there were attempts, apparently, from late classical times on to do something with glass and a metal backing). Artists in the classical world, rarely missing a chance to do something more, used the backs of mirrors as surfaces for decoration, as well. Here’s a very interesting Etruscan mirror back, including an inscription (it’s the story of Icarus and Daedalus).

Mirrors with a silvered back and glass cover, the direct ancestors of modern mirrors, appeared during the Renaissance.

This is a little joke—a self-portrait of the painter—which has been included in Quentin Matsys’ (1466-1530) painting “Portrait of the Money-Lender and His Wife” (1514).

(And, speaking of Renaissance paintings with mirrors, we couldn’t resist including this famous little painting by Parmigianino (1503-1540), a self-portrait painted on a mirror-shaped convex panel.)

If silver-backed, glass-covered mirrors only appeared in the Renaissance, however, what can we say about this object on the left house wall in this picture?

We can tell it’s meant to be a mirror as, looking closely, you can just make out the reflection of a tree which is outside to the right of the open door on its surface. And is that another mirror, on the piece of furniture in the foreground on the left? If so, it fits the kind of thing called a “hall stand” which one might see in a later-Victorian house—like this piece from the 1870s.

This makes us wonder once again: how much of this entryway depicts a Middle-earth based not upon the Middle Ages, but upon the memory of houses JRRT grew up in or perhaps furnishings from his own homes in North Oxford or Headington as an adult?

But we’ll save what appears to be a Gothic Revival chair there on the right for another day…

In the meantime, thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

We would like to take a moment and turn to the west to thank the Valar for the full recovery of our dear friend and fellow Tolkien enthusiast, EMH, from a serious operation. Get even well-er soon!

Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Woman_before_the_Rising_Sun_(Woman_before_the_Setting_Sun)_-_WGA08253.jpg

PPS

If you enjoyed the Debussy in the link above, perhaps you might also enjoy Maurice Ravel’s (1875-1937) Miroirs (1906)—here’s a LINK.

Throwing Shade

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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A Day: Paris In the Rain, Adelard Took, Assyrians, Bag End, Bilbo Baggins, bowler hat, ceramic chariot, China, city gent, CS Lewis, elephant, Emperor Ch'in Shihuang, Greeks, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean Marius, John Howe, Jonas Hanway, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, Mary Poppins, Monty Python, Palais Galleria, Persians, Romans, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ministry of Silly Walks, Tolkien, umbrella, umbrella stand, Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie, van Dyck

Welcome, dear readers, as always and, if you’re in the US, we hope you’ve had a happy and not over-stuffed Thanksgiving.

Just when we think we’ve exhausted a topic, we return and, well, here we are.

Just to the left of the door and below what we now see as a barometer, there’s a tall tube-like structure, something once common—we wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in every house in which JRRT ever lived: an umbrella stand.

As a child, one of us was fascinated by having once seen an umbrella stand made out of an elephant’s lower leg and foot—or at least the skin.

The couple we’ve seen are all identified as “Victorian”, so, as we are very fond of pachyderms, we hope that such a use is now long in the past!

Umbrellas, at least as sunshades, appear to have been around since at least before 200BC in China, as this ceramic chariot—with large umbrella—from part of the tomb complex of the Emperor Ch’in Shihuang demonstrates.

The Assyrians had them.

The Persians had them.

The Greeks had them.

As did the Romans.

And so on for centuries, although it seems that the first modern references to them in England date from the early 17^th century and appear, by the latter part of the century and into the 18^th as part of “ladies’ apparel”, used as much for sun as rain as this 1623 portrait by van Dyck of the Marchesa Elena Grimaldi shows us.

A center for the manufacture of umbrellas was Paris, and the inventor of the modern collapsible model may have been Jean Marius, who received a 5-year monopoly on his invention in 1710. Here is a later (1772) advertisement for his business

and here is a model, identified by the Palais Galleria in Paris as post-1715 because it has no Marius markings.

If there was a prejudice against men carrying them, being a combination of the association with “feminine things” and perhaps also a long-standing prejudice against the French, how did that so change that, by the 20^th century, the umbrella, along with the bowler hat, became the marks of the “city gent” in London,

caricatured in the 20^th century by Monty Python in skits like “The Ministry of Silly Walks”?

This change is said to stem from the behavior of one rather eccentric man, Jonas Hanway

who, sometime in the 1750s, began to appear on London streets carrying an open umbrella.

As you, sharp-eyed reader, can tell from our verbs and constructions like “seems”, “appears” and “is said to”, this, like other items of fashion and its changes, hasn’t the firmest of scholarly foundations, but, considering how many illustrations (often mocking cartoons) begin to appear by the 1770s, something happened to alter men’s behavior. Just look at these three, from 1772, 1782, and 1790.

All of this is very interesting, you may ask, but what does it have to do with Bilbo, or with JRRT? There are, in fact, a couple of references in The Lord of the Rings to umbrellas. First, there is one of Bilbo’s mocking gifts:

“For Adelard Took, for his very own, from Bilbo; on an umbrella. Adelard had carried off many unlabeled ones”. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Then there are two to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. The first is suggestive of her suspicious behavior at the near-auction of Bilbo’s property at the end of The Hobbit (you’ll remember that some spoons never reappeared):

“He [Bilbo] escorted her [Lobelia] firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

The second reference is actually rather pathetic. Once “Sharkey” and his thugs take over the Shire, they evict Lobelia from Bag End and, because she resists, they drag her off to the Lockholes, as young Tom Cotton tells Merry and the others:

“She comes down the lane with her old umbrella…”

When told that “Sharkey” gave the order for her eviction (and the building of sheds at Bag End):

“ ‘I’ll give you Sharkey, you dirty thieving ruffians!’ says she, and ups with her umbrella and goes for the leader, near twice her size.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Here’s a little illustration of a defiant Lobelia by John Howe.

By the later 19^th century, men with umbrellas seem quite common—even to the point of providing material for social commentary in the public press—

But, in the 20^th century, we who love children’s literature see them in a completely different way, either as a mode of transportation

or as part of the origin of a favorite story, when CS Lewis, at 16, had a recurring image of “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” (from It All Began with/as a Picture). (We’ve seen the title cited both ways.)

But we want to end this posting not with literature, but with pure art. There are lots of paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries with umbrellas, but here is what may be our favorite, by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Although he is grouped with the Impressionists, this painting in particular shows the artist’s interest in the hard-edged world of early photography (“Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie”—“A Day: Paris In the Rain”)

Stay dry, dear readers, and thanks, as ever for reading!

MTCIDC

Crowning Achievement

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Alexander the Great, Alice in Wonderland, Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Bayeux Tapestry, Brunhilde, Charlemagne, Cheshire Cat, circlet, Cleopatra VII, diadem, Egypt, Egyptian crowns, Elightenment France, Eowyn, French Revolution, Gondor, Gondorian crown, Greek, Greek coins, Hildebrandts, Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, Julius Caesar, Lupercalia, Marcus Antonius, Medieval, Napoleon I, Nazgul, Octavian Augustus, Pharoahs, Philip II, Pontifex Maximus, Ptolemy I, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Richard Wagner, Rohan, Romans, Tenniel, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, William Shakespeare, Witch-King of Angmar, wreaths

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Recently, one of us was lecturing on ancient Egypt, a country of two lands, in fact, Upper and Lower, and each could be represented in the crown worn by the pharaoh.

Within in blink, we began to think about JRRT’s illustration of the traditional crown of Gondor,

of which Tolkien says:

“I think that the crown of Gondor (the S. Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle.

The N. Kingdom had only a diadem (III 323). Cf. the difference between the N. and S. kingdoms of Egypt.”

(Letters, letter to Rhona Beare, 10/14/58, 281)

For us, the first crown we believe we ever saw as children was either one in an illustrated fairy tale (here’s a Tenniel illustration from Alice)

or the actual one of Queen Elizabeth II, and that hardly fits JRRT’s idea about the southern crown—or the northern one

or that of her ancestor, Queen Victoria

or that of their distant ancestor, Elizabeth I.

When we think of a “diadem”, however, we are reminded of the earliest western European crowns, which, in contrast to Elizabeth’s, is barely there at all.

Here is the first type of crown we know of being depicted—it’s that “diadem” in a Greek form, being on a coin of Philip II, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great (the reverse—the back side—the front side is called the “obverse”—shows Philip’s Olympic victory horse and Philip’s name in the genitive—possessive—case, “of Philip”—showing not only possession of the horse, but of the victory, of the coin, and, by implication, the right to issue coins).

This became a regular pattern, both of coin and of crown for those who followed Philip, and, thinking about Philip’s victory, we can imagine that the original of the crown was based upon the wreath athletic game victors wore.

And coins like Philip’s set the pattern for classical coins—and crowns—for centuries. Here’s the crown pattern on the head of Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s generals.

At Alexander’s death, Ptolemy seized Egypt, making it a family possession for the next nearly three hundred years, all the way down to his greatgreatgreat etc granddaughter Cleopatra VII.

The pattern was not confined to Greece or Egypt, however—Julius Caesar wore something similar—

although, unlike Ptolemy and other such rulers, Caesar might have hoped to muddy people’s perceptions of what such a thing symbolized and what position (dictator for life) he’d forced the Senate to give him. Rome had hated monarchs, after all, since they’d kicked out their last king 450 years before.

(And see Act I, Sc.2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which, at the festival of the Lupercalia, Marcus Antonius publically offers him a crown and Caesar rejects it, much to the loud delight of the mob.)

In the Greco-Roman world, wreaths had many purposes: besides Greek kings and winners at games, people at parties and weddings and other festive occasions wore them, as well as celebrants at religious rites.

Perhaps Caesar hoped that, appearing in one, he might appear less like a Hellenistic king and more like anything from an Olympic victor or party-goer to a priest (he was Pontifex Maximus, head of religion in Rome, so there was a certain credibility to the latter).

Malicious people in Rome also suggested another reason for the wreath: Caesar was sensitive about his thinning hair.

Caesar’s grandnephew and successor, Octavian/Augustus, continued the tradition,

as did following emperors for several centuries—and even Charlemagne, hundreds of years after the last western emperor, revived it.

At some point, just after Charlemagne’s time or thereabout (c1000ad), a new pattern appeared, which you can see in the famous “Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire”.

Instead of a wreath, this was a built-up circlet, with lots of “bits and bobs” on top.

This newer look persisted in various more or less complicated forms in the west for centuries

and seems to underlie the crowns seen in more recent times (often with what appears to be a red velvet balloon in the middle).

There is a throwback, however: Napoleon I. He had grown up in Enlightenment France, in a world which idealized classical learning and art, and so, when he made himself emperor in 1804, his model wasn’t medieval and Germanic, but Augustine.

This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t aware of that other model and he would have used it—the so-called “crown of Charlemagne”–at his self-coronation

had it not suffered the fate of many medieval treasures and been destroyed during the French Revolution (the famous Bayeux Tapestry was almost converted to wagon covers by revolutionaries). In fact, a “crown of Charlemagne” did turn up for the ceremony—“recreated” by a clever Paris jeweler.

[A footnote about the coronation. In the painter David’s sketches for it, he shows the pope (Pius VII) with his hands in his lap.

Napoleon saw the drawing and said to David that the pope should be blessing the occasion—after all, that’s why Napoleon had dragged him all the way from Rome. David redid his sketch, of course!]

Beyond the Crowns of Gondor, most of the crowns seen in The Lord of the Rings are described as “circlets”—

Sam, Merry, and Pippin, laid out in the barrow:

“About them lay many treasures of gold maybe, though in that light they looked cold and unlovely. On their heads were circlets, gold chains were about their waists, and on their fingers were many rings.”(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”)

Theoden:

“Upon it sat a man so bent with age that he seemed almost a dwarf; but his white hair was long and thick and fell in great braids from beneath a thin golden circlet set upon his brow.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

But there is one which, well, looking at the various illustrations of its wearer, reminds us of Alice’s comment upon the Cheshire Cat:

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin…but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6, “Pig and Pepper”)

On the Fields of the Pelennor, a “great shadow descended like a falling cloud. And behold! It was a winged creature.”

This might be bad enough, but:

“Upon it sat a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening. A crown of steel he bore, but between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes: the Lord of the Nazgul.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

We are aware of at least half-a-dozen professional renderings of this scene (and we plan to discuss them all in a future post), but it seems to us that those eyes, seeming to float in space, make it extremely difficult to illustrate it, no matter what crown—simply described as “steel”—he’s wearing. And that brings us back to our original crown. As JRRT described it:

“It was shaped like the helms of the Guards of the Citadel, save that it was loftier, and it was all white, and the wings at either side were wrought of pearl and silver in the likeness of the wings of a sea-bird, for it was the emblem of kings who came over the Sea; and seven gems of adamant were set in the circlet, and upon its summit was set a single jewel the light of which went up like a flame.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 5, “The Steward and the King”)

If his drawing (seen at the beginning of this post) is what he had in mind, then the only professional illustration we’ve seen of it, by the Hildebrandts, is only an approximation.

And, in fact, reminds us all-too-easily of Brunhilde, the Walkuere, from Wagner’s operas.

If illustrators as good as the Hildebrandts struggle, this must be a tough one. The designers of the P. Jackson films are even farther away from the original, as so often.

Here, however, we have some sympathy! Somehow the medieval world of Middle-earth can not easily assimilate an Egyptian artifact. And so, we suspect that they thought “circlet” and “wings” and left it there. What do you think, readers? How do you imagine the crown?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Spare Change?

19 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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1909 penny, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander the Great, Aragorn, Asia Minor, Augustus, bartering, Bilbo's birthday, British Royal Government, Brutus, Charlemagne, Classical Greek coins, Cleopatra VII, Coinage, daggers, Denethor, Domitian, Egypt, federal law, Frankish king, freedman, George Washington, Gondor, Greek Kings, Hanoverian kings, Hellenistic Greeks, Holy Roman Emperor, Ides of March, Julio-Claudian dynasty, Julius Caesar, libertus, Lucius Plaetorius Cestianus, Lydia, manumission, Middle-earth, Pennies, pilleum, Plebeians, portrait, Prince Charles, Ptolemy I, Queen Elizabeth II, Roman Empire, Romans, Seleucus, Senatus Consulto, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

We are veering a little to the left in this posting inspired by a comment on “Shire Portrait (2)” from our good friend, EMH. It was about currency and coins in Middle-earth and we were a little vague, but E pointed out:

Bilbo giving “a few pennies away” before the party
the price of Bill, the pony: “twelve silver pennies”
Gandalf praising Barliman and saying his news was “worth a gold piece at the least.”

With E in mind, we decided to do another posting on M-e money. Long ago, we did a posting on imagined currency in Middle-earth, but, since then, we’ve thought a bit more about the subject, and, right now, dear readers, we ask you to produce a coin, any coin. As we live in the US, here’s a US coin, a fourth of a dollar, hence, a “quarter”.

This is the front, or “obverse” in coin speech, and we’re going to focus on that and not on the back (the “reverse”). We use coins all day long every day, so we probably don’t look at them more than to note value when we pay for something or receive change, but let’s look at this one a bit more closely.

It seems pretty simple:

at the top a single word, “Liberty”
then a low relief (that is, cut very shallowly) portrait of the first president, General George Washington
then, to the left, a slogan, “In God We Trust”
at the bottom, the date, 1993

Let’s start with that date—1993. In 1993, the president was Bill Clinton.

Federal law, however, prevents coins—with very special and rare exceptions—to bear the portraits of living people. The first president on a coin was Abraham Lincoln, on a penny first minted to commemorate his 100^th birthday, in 1909.

The previous coin, up to 1909, had the idealized head of a Native American,

the pattern for which was first introduced in 1859.

The first coin in western European history is from the late 8^th century BC, and comes from Lydia, in Asia Minor.

Classical Greek coins seem to model themselves on Lydian coins like this, having badges–city emblems and religious tokens, like the famous Athenian owl, rather than portraits of humans, like that quarter with George Washington on it.

During the Hellenistic Period (post about 300bc and on), however, the Greek kings, from Greece to Asia Minor to Egypt, all began to issue coins with portraits of themselves. These were, initially, the generals of Alexander the Great, who, at Alexander’s death, had grabbed portions of his empire for themselves. We think of Seleucus, who controlled much of Asia Minor

Or of Ptolemy I,

the founder of a dynasty which ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years until their final descendant, Cleopatra VII, was defeated by the Romans.

Those Romans, we imagine inspired by the Hellenistic Greeks, produced coins by the bushel .(this is an obsolete dry measurement, based upon what you can put into a basket like this:

which was, in fact, made up of four pecks

which could also be divided into two kennings of two pecks apiece.)

Considering that Rome produced coins from the late 4^th century bc to late in the 5^th century ad, it’s not surprising that there would be so many—and considering the size of the Roman empire, as well.

Earlier Roman coins had been unlike Hellenistic coins, however, in not depicting living people—that is, until Julius Caesar gained power.

This opened the floodgates and it’s easy to see why.

Coins are short-hand wealth, originally standing in for earlier barter items, like flocks and herds.

As Romans spread out beyond farms and local markets, the wealth in animals and agricultural produce, as well as raw materials, was simply not portable enough, as this cartoon shows.

By making tokens which were accepted as a stand- in for that wealth, the agency which did so was asserting its claim to have a strong hand in, if not control of, the economy.

Julius Caesar, who had already forced the Senate to make him “Dictator for Life” (that “S…C” on both sides of his profile stands for “Senatus Consulto”—“by a decree of the Senate”), by putting his face on the currency is implying that he now is the state—and therefore possesses a power which extends to regulating the money economy by which people live and survive or prosper. (There may be a quiet joke here, as well. “SC” was stamped on bronze coins to guarantee their worth—on the back side—to have those letters surrounding Caesar on the front side, the obverse, may suggest a double meaning: he is dictator by Senatorial decree, but his worth is also being guaranteed by that decree.)

It is no surprise, then, that Brutus, one of those who murdered Caesar, would, in turn, issue his own coins—and these are even more heavily symbolic.

On the obverse, there is Brutus, his name above, to our right his title “imp[erator]”—a title given to a general by his soldiers with the implication “You rule!” To our left is an abbreviated form of the name of the moneyer, the man who directed the mint, L[ucius] Plaet[orius] Cest[ianus]. Although we said that we would only examine obverses, we can’t resist the reverse here. At the bottom is the inscription, “eid mar”, standing for “eides Martis”, the “Ides of March”, the 15^th of March, the day Caesar was murdered. Above that is a “pilleum”, the kind of cap worn by a slave during the ceremony called “manumission”, in which a he was turned into a “libertus”, or “freedman”.

To both sides of the cap are daggers.

Put all of this together and we see Brutus’ claim: on the 15^th of March, we murdered Caesar and, as a consequence, we freed Rome from its slavery.

Coins like Caesar’s and Brutus’ are simple in their claims. Later emperors were less so. Look at this coin of Domitian (81-96ad).

On the rim of the obverse is a pile of information:

Imp[erator] Caes[ar] Domit[ianus] Aug[ustus] Germ[anicus] P[ontifex] M[aximus] Tr[ibunicia P[otestas] VIII

“Emperor Caesar Domitianus Augustus Germanicus, Chief Priest of Rome, Holding the Power of the Representative of the People 8 Times”

In fact, Domitian was sailing under false colors—Caesar, Augustus, and Germanicus all belong to the earlier Julio-Claudian dynasty, of which his family was not a part. As for “Holding the Power of the Representative of the People”, this was an ancient elective office, which allowed a member of the lower class, the Plebeians, special powers in the legislative process. As emperor and son of an emperor most of a century after elections had been abolished, this looked like an honor, but was just an empty title. “Chief Priest” had once been an extremely important position in the state, but, from the time of the first emperor, Augustus, it had simply become another title emperors claimed.

Later European rulers, eager to suggest that they were as powerful as the ancient Romans, used Roman coins as a model. Here’s one from Charlemagne, Frankish king and first Holy Roman Emperor (768-814).

Returning to our George Washington quarter,

let’s look at the comparatively meager inscriptional material. If the coin of Domitian had so much to tell us about how important he was, the inscription on the quarter has a very different message, its focus being upon cultural values: 1.freedom; 2. religion. In our culture, probably everyone would agree with 1, but our ancestor/founders were very adamant on the subject of keeping church and state completely apart, with no influence of either upon the either, so that that 2, “In God We Trust”, shows that there is some confusion about those values. In any case, the plainness might remind us of Caesar’s coin more than Domitian’s, but, in both cases, the point of the artwork and labeling is to put the government’s stamp, whether republic or empire, upon the everyday life of everyone who buys and sells.

There is another message to be read here, as well. The George Washington quarter was first issued on Washington’s 200^th birthday, in 1932, and is still on the obverse of the quarter, suggesting the continuity of what he stood for. In the case of monarchs, however, each new emperor/king/queen demands the issuing of new coinage, with the new ruler’s portrait, suggesting not only royal government continuity, but also, in some cases royal family continuity. Here are the first four Hanoverian kings of England, for example, all sons or grandsons, from 1714 to 1830.

So, When Prince Charles succeeds his mother, Elizabeth II,

new coins will have to be minted.

And this brings us back to Middle-earth and to a puzzle about Gondor. There are certainly coins, as our good friend has thoughtfully pointed out. There has been no king on the throne of Gondor for many centuries, however. If Denethor’s behavior is anything to go by, the Stewards have become kings in everything but title, even though Denethor avoids the royal throne. If everyone from the Hellenistic kings to Elizabeth II has his/her portrait on the coinage, are the Stewards on Gondor’s? And what happens when Aragorn becomes King Aragorn II Elessar?

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

Tag Archives: Romans

Thirty Days Hath…

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Wains and Carts and… (Part I)

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