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Sugar and Oliphaunts

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Africa, Bag End, Bodleian Library, Boromir, Chanson de Roland, creative misreading, Elephants, Greenway, Harad, horn, Mumakil, Oliphaunt, Oliphaunts, Savanna, sugar cane, sugar loaf, Sunlands, Swanfleet, Swertings, Tharbad, Tolkien, tropical, Umbar, war-horn

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last posting, through a piece of “creative misreading” we saw a hat on Bilbo’s hallway table as a sugar loaf

image2sugarloaf

and, before you knew it, we were thinking about where the sugar behind the cakes, seed cakes, and tarts in his pantry came from.

Sugar cane is a tropical plant

image3sugarcanefield

so, logically, we began to consider where, on the Middle-earth maps we have, tropical might be.

image4memap

In our world, that would be south, of course, and, looking as far south as we can go, we reach Harad, a name which actually means “south” in Sindarin.  It consists of two big regions, Near Harad and Far Harad.

As far as we can find, JRRT has left us no detailed geographic information about this region.  On page 413 of The War of the Ring, we are given the clue that, when the Corsairs of Umbar are driven back,

“all the enemy that were not slain or drowned were gone flying over the [?borders] into the desert that lies north of Harad.”

This would suggest that at least Near (as in “near to Gondor”, as we presume that our cartographers were Gondorians) Harad might be imagined as being like our world’s North Africa—

image5northafrica

with some fertile coastline, backed by the Sahara.  And we can’t resist including this view of the Sahara from space here.

image6saharafromspace

And, just as in our world, the whole south can’t be desert, since people from Harad are associated with elephants—or “oliphaunts”, as Sam says:

“But I’ve heard tales of the big folk down away in the Sunlands.  Swertings we call ‘em in our tales; and they ride on oliphaunts backs and all, and the oliphaunts throw rocks and trees at one another.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed”)

The Mûmak of Harad, by Ted Nasmith

This would suggest more fertile land south of the northern desert, a savanna, or region of great, grassy plains.  Such an area forms one of two habitats for elephants in our Africa.

image8savanna

South of the African savanna lies the rain forest—the other African elephant habitat.

image9rainforestelephants

Sugar cane, a little research tells us, can grow in savanna lands

image10caneinsavanna

as well as in rain forest (which, in our world, is being destroyed to provide more space for growing it—here’s a LINK about that).  Thus, we imagine that this must be the point of origin for Bilbo’s sugar.  From its growing and processing point (for something about those things in our world, please see the previous posting), it might then be shipped to the city of Umbar and from there to Gondor.

As to how it reaches Bilbo, well, we know that there must have been some trade up and down the old North-South Road/Greenway, as Saruman has a supply of pipe-weed from the South Farthing, with “the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”), which takes us as far as Isengard.  From Gondor to Isengard?  Packhorse up the Greenway to Bree?  Butterbur tells Frodo & Co that “”There’s a party that came up the Greenway from down South last night” (Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)—though he then says that “that was strange enough to begin with”.

As we said in our last, this is all based upon a “creative misreading”, so we admit that there are some gaps here and there–just as there is a gap in the North-South Road at the Swanfleet, where the great bridge at Tharbad is down, but that’s what we get with such a “creative misreading” of a hat!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

But another thought—not based upon a “misreading”, but rather upon The Lord of the Rings, so, at the posting’s end we can have at least something a little less speculative.

There is another medieval spelling of “oliphaunt”—“Olifant/oliphant”, with its own specific meaning:  a horn made from an elephant’s tusk, like this one, which is just over a thousand years old and is in the treasury of York Minster.

KIPPA MATTHEWS - COPYRIGHT NOTICE

image12york

 

This is a drinking horn, but such horns could also be used for signaling, the most famous being that of Roland, the hero of the later-11th-century Old French epic poem, the Chanson de Roland. Here is a page from the oldest known ms, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

image13chanson

(Here are links to two translations in English, one in prose, one in verse.)  If you don’t know the poem, its main action is a rear guard defense of a pass by a group of Carolingian soldiers commanded by Roland.  He has an olifant and can use it to call for help, but refuses to do so until the last moment because, in his view, asking for reinforcements would be cowardly.  As a consequence, the Carolingians, including Roland, do not survive the battle, as Roland blows the horn only at the last moment (and blows it so hard that he bursts his brains in the process—there would be those who might argue that someone who sacrifices his troops on a point of honor doesn’t have much in the way of brains to begin with!).

image14roland

Warriors and horn-blowing immediately make us think of Boromir.

Tolkien, Nasmith, painting, illustration, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, Hobbit, Middle-earth

His horn is just called a “war-horn” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”), with no further description, but, as medieval horns in our world can be made of elephant tusk, why mightn’t Boromir’s be made of the equivalent, mumak tusk?

image16oliphant

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trading with the Enemy

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bree, Cross-Roads, Gandalf, Gimli, Great East Road, Greenway, Isengard, Laketown, Legolas, Marxist Critics, Merry and Pippin, Middle-earth, Mirkwood, North-South Road, Peter Jackson, Pipeweed, Roads, Roman Roads, Rome, Saruman, Sauron, South Farthing, Swanfleet, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Theoden, Tolkien, Trade, Transport

Dear Readers,

In a recent posting, we opened with the image of Merry and Pippin happily feasting among the ruins of Isengard as Gandalf, Theoden, and company ride up to meet them.

“…suddenly they were aware of two small figures lying…at their ease…there were bottles and bowls and platters laid beside them, as if they had just eaten well, and now rested from their labour. One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head, and little rings of thin blue smoke.” L543

MandPIsengard

We, as the readers, may be just as taken aback as the company; we’re joining the Hobbits again for the first time since Isengard’s demise, and it’s natural to ask: where, in the midst of all of this ruin, did they find this stuff? Gimli doesn’t hesitate to ask for us.

“’Where did you come by the weed, you villains?’” L544

Of course, he’s talking about pipeweed, something common, yet treasured, in the Shire. It is not native to a place like Isengard, so far south, but here we have the Hobbits smoking it and even enjoying a surplus. Legolas is just as impressed,

“’You speak for me, Gimli,’ laughed Legolas, ‘though I would sooner learn how they came by the wine.’” L544

Pippin only teases, answering that

“’Here you find us sitting on a field of victory…and you wonder how we came by a few well earned comforts.” L544

And so we’re left with this mystery of supplies, but we can be sure that, in Tolkien’s mind, there was an answer. He was, after all, diligent about even minute details concerning Middle-earth, and was also the same man who once said that

“I am not incapable or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the ‘mortals’ go, Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and can be worked out…” LT, L.154 P.196.

In this quotation, Tolkien can almost be echoing, in an ironic way, the argument of Marxist critics that economic systems, even those appearing in literature, hide their true nature. Tolkien seems to be telling us that he was well aware of trade systems, and, we would suggest, this would include a basic foundation: transport. And, using what we are given in the texts, we can see that there were two main methods. One is by water–as in the flourishing wine trade between Mirkwood and Laketown.

hobbit-raft-elves

This pair of places is naturally connected by river and lake. Such is not the case with the South Farthing and Isengard, of course. Instead, water bodies like the Swanfleet lie between them. And yet there is that pipeweed. The Hobbits are smoking it and, in the extended edition of the film version, Peter Jackson even shows us two large barrels of pipeweed labeled “South Farthing”.

This brings us to our second method of transport, by road.

ShireRoads

Like all educated men of his time, Tolkien had been raised on the world of the Greeks and Romans and, among the longest-lasting monuments of the Roman world was the extensive system of roads, some of which are still in existence in our own time and are even (asphalted over) the basis of certain modern English roads. In Middle-earth, there appear to be a number of such ancient roads, such as the Cross-Roads:

CrossRoads

The Great East road:

greateastrd-map

The North-South road:

north-south-road

Other possibilities would include once-active, but now abandoned routes, like the Greenway, running north from Bree and the Stone Road which the Woodwoses know and point out to Theoden.

As you can see, we can easily imagine Tolkien thinking out the economics of Middle Earth through a road network similar to that of the Roman Empire, with its own intricate road systems

RomanRoadNetwork

 

Along these roads came much of Rome’s wealth and the case would have been the same for Middle-earth, so here’s a clue to Saruman’s pipeweed trade with the Shire. Looking at a map, we see that The Great East Road, which, traveling east from the Shire, would lead to Bree, and to the Cross-Roads, reaching The North-South Road.

fonstad01 fonstad02

Such trade would seem natural, not only to the Romans, but to us. In the wreckage of Isengard, however, for all that Merry and Pippin are so casual about it, there is another implication: Saruman, who wants to be another Sauron, must know much more about the Shire than anyone, even Gandalf has understood, and, thinking of the “Scouring of the Shire”, that could easily bode ill for the future of that place which the Hobbits think so safe and removed…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC,

CD

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