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Green and Quiet.1

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

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

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Birmingham, Charles Dickens, Cottage industry, factories, Goblins, Hard Times, Hilary Tolkien, I Can't Find Brummagem, Industrial Revolution, Isengard, James Dobbs, John Ezard, Mabel Tolkien, Mills, Ornthanc, Sarehole, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien, World War I

As always, dear readers, welcome.

We’ve always loved the lines

“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

which open the paragraph in which Gandalf first appears in The Hobbit and the story actually begins.

For JRRT, green and quiet are the ideal, but things have clearly changed—as this sentence implies, now there is more noise and less quiet.  In our time—and even before Tolkien’s childhood in the late 19th century—the green and quiet were and are going thanks to the Industrial Revolution.  Or so we thought.  Reading Tolkien, however, we begin to believe that it’s goblins:

“Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted.  They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.  They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty.  Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to do the work to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light.  It is not unlikely that they have invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter Four, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

In our last posting, we had linked this passage with the invention of poison gases by German scientists and their use first by German soldiers and then by the Allies in the Great War, but we would like to add to that idea that this may be in reality a larger indictment, of the Industrial Revolution and the effects it had had upon the English countryside.

This revolution had begun in the 18th century, in Britain, when the country was first becoming a major mercantile and colonial power and the demand for British goods—especially British wool and cloth—was growing.  A succession of inventions from the 1760s on had turned a (literal) “cottage industry” of clothing-making—

image1weaver.jpg

into something which produced thread and cloth on a massive scale in early factories.

image2powerlooms.jpg

These factories, often called “mills” because of their original use of waterpower,

image3waterpower.jpg

as was done in the small factories which, all the way back to Roman times, had ground grain into flour,

image4agrainmill.jpg

could also, in time, be run by steam power.

image4steammill.jpg

Mills of this sort soon became prototypes for factories built to mass-produce anything

image5factory.jpg

and soon the air around cities was thick with smoke and industrial waste.

image6pollution.jpg

With no laws to stop them, mill/factory owners bought up land, employed people (many of them ex-cottage workers thrown out of work by the very factories they now sought work in) in near-slave conditions—including children–and polluted water and air with no fear of punishment.  Here is Charles Dickens’ description of a town filled such places, from his 1854 novel, Hard Times:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

Set this next to Gandalf’s description of what had happened to Isengard and you can see what we mean about goblins (here, Saruman and his orcs—but JRRT sometimes uses goblin and orc interchangeably) as what has destroyed the quiet and green:

“I looked on it and saw that, whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges…Over all his works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself about the sides of Orthanc.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Council of Elrond”)

image7aisengard.jpg

In 1895, Tolkien’s mother, Mabel,

image7mabel.png

who had been living in South Africa with her husband, brought her two sons, JRRT and Hilary, to the Birmingham area of England for a visit to relatives.

image8.jpg

Unfortunately, while they were gone, Tolkien’s father died of rheumatic fever.  Mabel decided to stay in England and found a place for her sons and herself at Sarehole, southeast of Birmingham itself.

image9housesarehole.jpg

Birmingham was a booming product of that Industrial Revolution, which we’re sure is why Mabel chose a tiny village several miles away.

image10brum.jpg

Birmingham was also an ancient settlement, (here’s a LINK to a minitour of the medieval town) but had mushroomed, both in factories and population even at the beginning of the 19th century, as this verse from a music hall song from 1828 by James Dobbs depicts:

‘I remember one John Growse,
Who buckles made in Brummagem,
He built himself a country house,
To be out of the smoke of Brummagem
But though John’s country house stands still,
The town itself has walked up hill,
Now he lives beside a smoky mill,
In the middle of the streets of   Brummagem.”

(James Dobbs (1781-1837), “I Can’t Find Brummagem”.  Brummagem is an old local nickname for Birmingham.  Here’s a LINK so that you can see the whole song and its tune, which we know as “Duncan Grey”.  If you go to the link, you’ll notice we’ve made a few editorial additions, which we knew from another version of the song and which help the words to better fit the tune.)

And yet, although Sarehole had an old mill, it was not like those in Birmingham or even in Dickens,

image11mill.jpg

and, in later years, in fact, Tolkien saw the little village beyond it as a kind of paradise, as he said in an interview:

‘It was a kind of lost paradise,’ he said. ‘There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.’

(This is taken from an article by John Ezard in The Guardian for 28 December, 1991—here’s a LINK so that you can read all of it.)

This strong contrast between green and quiet and its opposites, as seen in Sarehole versus Birmingham, early in Tolkien’s life, and the two stages of Isengard, will appear again in the Shire as Saruman/Sharkey has planned.  The green and quiet is literally uprooted and even Sandyman’s old mill is a victim of the goblinesque work as Farmer Cotton says:

image12mill.jpg

“But since Sharkey came they don’t grind no more corn at all.  They’re always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and stench, and there’s no peace even at night in Hobbiton.  And they pour out filth a purpose; they’ve fouled all the lower Water, and it’s getting down into Brandywine.”

(The Return of the King,  Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

image14shire.jpg

Those who work for Sharkey are men, but, as you can see, under his influence, they act very much like those destructive goblins with which we began.   For all that he rode in automobiles and trains and used telephones and typewriters, JRRT was never quite happy in the modern world and, considering that the goblins seemed always poised to ruin more green and produce more noise at the command of a modern-day Saruman, it’s perhaps not surprising.  It’s also not surprising, we would add, that his favorite creatures, trees, are the ones who destroy Saruman’s handiwork at Isengard and return it to a leafy park.

image15isen.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

In our next, we want to talk about another aspect of quiet which had changed from Tolkien’s childhood and may be a reason why there are Rohirrim and why JRRT himself enlisted in the volunteer cavalry…

image16yeomanry.jpg

Contraption

27 Wednesday Dec 2017

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

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Tags

Bag End, Barbegal, Birmingham, Caillebotte, contraptions, haymows, Hobbiton, machines, mill, plowing, reaping, Roman bread, Sandyman's Mill, Sarehole, Sarehole Mill, Saruman, sowing, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, water mill, wheels, winnowing

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Although we think we might have another post or two on things in Bilbo’s hall, we thought it would be fun to take a break and look elsewhere in Middle-earth.

In a posting long ago now, we looked at Saruman and his attempt to ruin the Shire.  Cutting down trees was certainly part of his plan, as Farmer Cotton tells the hobbits:  “They cut down trees and let ‘em lie” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8)  There was much worse, however, as he continues:

“Take Sandyman’s mill now.  Pimple knocked it down, almost as soon as he came to Bag End.  Then he brought in a lot o’ dirty-looking men to build a bigger one and fill it full o’ wheels and outlandish contraptions.”

“Wheels” made us think of two things:

  1. Fangorn’s description of Saruman himself: “He has a mind of metal and wheels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)
  2. and, secondly, just what level of technology Middle-earth actually has

JRRT himself wrote of Hobbits, in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.”

As far as authentic depictions, we have one, by Tolkien himself, in this picture of Hobbiton.

image1hobbitonmill.jpg

Presumably, that’s the Sandyman mill in the foreground.  You can see in the left middleground what appear to be hay stacks (also called “haymows”) which rather resemble these from a painting by Caillebotte (whose work appeared in our posting on umbrellas) and are where the material saved from the growing/reaping cycle is stored.

image2haystackscaillebotte.jpg

The whole process for what eventually gets to the mill begins with plowing the land and sowing the seed (and keeping off the birds, if possible).

image3plowing.jpg

Then, when the grain is ripe, it is reaped and stacked.

image4reapingstacking.jpg

At this point, the grain is still on the stalk and needs to be detached.  This is done by flailing it.

image5flailing.jpg

At that point, however, it’s still in its beard

image6wheatinbeard.jpg

and the kernels of wheat need to be shaken free by the process called winnowing.  This can be done by a number of methods, but the easiest includes using the air currents to help remove the hull (the chaff—and, if you know the expression “to separate the wheat from the chaff”, now you also know where it comes from).

image7winnowing.jpg

Now, when you finally have the pure grain, the next step is to grind it to a powder.  The most ancient method (still used for crushing grain in some parts of the world) is this—

image8quernstone.jpg

But the Romans sped this up with a kind of early machine, both slave-driven and animal-propelled—

image9slave.jpg

image10animal.jpg

The flour (pretty coarse and gritty, we understand—which wore down people’s teeth) was then mixed with water and baked

image11bakingprocess.jpg

and sold as this.image12.jpg

(This is real Roman bread—abandoned in an oven when Vesuvius exploded and found many centuries later, still in the oven.)  Some bakers liked to label their bread, as you can see, with a special name stamp.

image13breadstamp.jpg

In time, some clever Roman got the idea that there might be a more efficient method than slaves and animals and harnessed water as a power source and even occasionally harnessed it more than once, as here, at Barbegal, in southern France.

image14multiplemill.jpg

This technology does not appear to have been lost along with so much else of the Roman world and continued to be used in later centuries.

image15irishmill.jpg

As you can see from this illustration, the basic idea is simple:  the water is channeled to pour over the paddles of the wheel, thus turning it.  The turning motion is then conveyed through a series of gears until it spins the upper stone of the two millstones, thus grinding the grain.

image16romanmill.jpg

There are several types of wheel:  overshot, breast, undershot, and pitchback.

image17typesofwheel.jpg

Our research suggests that the overshot is the most powerful—but, as you can see in JRRT’s illustration, the Hobbiton mill is of the undershot variety.

image18hobbiton.jpg

Tolkien’s model for this is assumed to have been the Sarehole Mill, in the village of Sarehole, south of Birmingham, where his mother took him and his brother to live, for about 4 years in the late 1890s, in this house.

image19tolkienhouse.jpg

From its front door, he could look across and see this mill—here’s a 1905 postcard of the mill.

image20sareholemill1905.jpg

After a certain amount of searching, we still can’t tell what kind of wheel Sarehole had in Tolkien’s day, but there are certainly some other strong differences visible between it and the Hobbiton mill.  First, of course, there’s that chimney on Sarehole, which was installed in 1852 as part of the addition of a steam engine to the mill’s older water-driven system.  (Is this one of the “outlandish contraptions” Farmer Cotton complains about?)  But perhaps this suggested the tower on the left of the Hobbiton mill?  Second, and a little stranger, might be those round windows—although we might see these as a quiet joke:  just as an older Hobbit hole, like Bag End, had such windows, so it might be fitting for a Hobbit mill to have them, too?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

Here’s a LINK, by the way, to a 1966 interview with JRRT about his early years in Sarehole.

Shire Portrait (3b)

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

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

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24Hr Trench, Andrew Robertshaw, architecture, Birmingham, Brandywine, crop rotation, Diamond Jubilee, dugouts, Dunedain, feudal system, German lawn chairs, Hornblotton, Inns, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lavenham, manor, Marish, Medieval, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Sarehole, Sarehole's mill, Somerset, Suffolk, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, village, Western Front, WWI Trenches

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In this post, we’re continuing our series on the Shire. So far, we’ve looked at its government and organization (1), its economy (2), and its geography (3a). Now we want to look at Shire architecture.

Our initial inspiration for this was from a line in a letter from JRRT to Allen & Unwin, 12/12/55. Speaking of the Shire, he says: “It is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village about the period of the Diamond Jubilee… (Letters, 230)

The “Diamond Jubilee” was the 60th anniversary of the reign of Queen Victoria (she came to the throne in 1837–Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Diamond Jubilee just five years ago).

1vic.jpg

The Jubilee was a huge celebration, bringing in people from all over Britain’s empire, who converged on London in the summer of 1897.

2adiam2bdiam2cdiam

JRRT was born in 1892 and had been brought to England in 1895, for a visit which became permanent when his father died back in South Africa. He and his brother

3atolkandbro.jpg

lived with their mother for a time in the village of Sarehole, just south of the huge industrial city of Birmingham. Sarehole’s mill

3sareholemill.jpg

still stands. It has been said that this mill is the model for the one by The Water in The Hobbit, as drawn by JRRT.

4hob.jpg

Thus, when we think about Shire architecture, we can have a double picture:

  1. bits of description in JRRT’s works
  2. actual late Victorian rural villages of the sort in which Tolkien spent part of his childhood

If we begin with historical villages, there isn’t anything to see in the actual Sarehole, except for the mill, which, though built upon the site of a mill which can be dated to 1542, is a building from 1771, just before the industrial revolution, an event with which Tolkien certainly had problems. If we look at other such villages, however, we can get a general picture. Basing our image upon a schematic medieval village plan, we find a double line of houses strung out along a single road.

5medvil.JPG

Spreading back from the houses are the fields, as villages in this world were self-sustaining. You can see these in JRRT’s illustration of the mill and the Hill. You’ll notice that these are in strips. In the feudal world, they illustrated both the use of crop rotation (different plants in different fields, with some fields allowed to rest), plus fields of the lord of the manor, which the tenants were obliged to tend. In Tolkien’s Shire, as there is no feudal system, we presume the stripping is for rotation.

4hob

Missing, however, from Hobbiton, would be two features you can see in the medieval illustration: a manor house and a church.

In the feudalism mentioned above, this ideal village is part of the social/governmental system in which it is attached to the smallest unit of that system, the manor.

8feudal.jpg

As the chart explains, in the early medieval world, land was power and kings used their claim to control their lands (supposedly given to them by God) as a way to control the state in general.   They deeded certain sections of land to their nobles, in return for taxes and military service. Those nobles, in turn, deeded out land to lesser nobles, all the way down to individual knights, who might hold no more than one parcel, or manor, with its house, church, and village of freemen (literally, free men, who could own land but paid taxes to the lord for it), peasants (who were also free, but held no land), and serfs (who were landless as well as being the property of the local lord).

Although Tolkien once described the Shire as “granted as a fief” (Letters, 158) and “half republic half aristocracy” (Letters, 241), it is not a feudal property and therefore lacks those marks of that system, those manor houses.

As well, it is also missing churches, or, for that matter, any form of religious shrine. A real English medieval village, depending on its size and wealth, could have had a very modest building, such as this at Hornblotton, in Somerset.

9hornblotton.jpg

Or, if your village had become a prosperous town, like Lavenham, in Suffolk, you could even have a mini-cathedral. (Lavenham’s money had come from the international trade in woolen cloth.)

110lavenham.jpg

Although Tolkien insisted that there was a monotheistic underlay to Middle-earth in the Third Age, he also says of the folk of the Shire: “I do not think Hobbits practiced any form of worship or prayer (unless through exceptional contact with Elves).” (Letters, 193)

Without manors and churches, the Shire consists of private dwellings and inns. Inns seem to be like their parallels in our medieval world.

11medinn.jpg

And, of course, there are the inns of the Shire and the Prancing Pony in Bree.

12prancingpony.jpg

Private houses, including farms, however, fall into two categories: traditional hobbit (that is, built into hillsides) and what we might call outside-influence houses. As Tolkien says in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“All Hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground, or so they believed…Actually in the Shire of Bilbo’s days it was, as a rule, only the richest and the poorest Hobbits that maintained the old custom. The poorest went on living in burrows of the most primitive kind…while the well-to-do still constructed more luxurious versions of the simple diggings of old…in the hilly regions and the older villages, such as Hobbiton and Tuckborough, or in the chief township of the Shire, Michel Delving on the White Downs, there were now many houses of wood, brick, or stone…Hobbits had long accustomed to build sheds and workshops…

The habit of building farmhouses and barns was said to have begun among the inhabitants of the Marish down by the Brandywine.

It is probable that the craft of building, as many other crafts beside, was derived from the Dunedain. But the Hobbits may have learned it direct from the Elves… “

Our Tolkien illustration of The Hill

12hob.jpg

shows us both styles. In the background, burrows; in the foreground, outside-influence houses. The traditional style reminds us of something from US western history: the use of “dugouts” as (at least temporary) dwellings as settlers moved west across the plains.

13sodhouse.jpg

As fans of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books will remember, her family lived in one of these along the banks of Plum Creek in the 1870s.

14sod.jpg

15littlehouse.jpg

On a more sinister note, we’ve always wondered whether JRRT’s inspiration for hobbit holes may have come from his time on the Western Front, where, from late 1914, soldiers had burrowed into the earth to protect themselves from enemy attack and from the increasingly inclement weather. The shelters could be simply cutouts in the earth

15dugout.jpg

or very elaborate cottages. The Germans were especially admired for their creativity in building the more elaborate ones.

16gmandugout.jpg

We can’t mention the Great War and trenches without also mentioning the brilliant Andrew Robertshaw, the English military historian, who actually reconstructed sixty feet of a trench line in his backyard.

17androb.jpg

He shares his experience in doing this in his book, 24Hr Trench.

511PnAeovzL._SX342_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Continuing our medieval parallel, we imagine the outside-influence houses to look something like these:

medhouse1medhouse2

19medhousea.jpg

And, for outbuildings, there are a few surviving medieval barns, like this one:

19medbarn.jpg

whose roofs are often held up by the most beautiful woodwork, always reminding us of cathedrals, on the one hand, and sailing ships on the other.

20medbarn.JPG

Imagine that this is what Farmer Cotton’s farm might have looked like.

And, with this image, we conclude this posting. In our next, we’re going to move to the edge of the Shire, to discuss marches—geographical ones, that is.

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

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