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Tag Archives: Taters

Sugar Is Sweet, And…

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Narrative Methods

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15th-century hat, 15th-century sallet, Across the Doubtful Sea, Bag End, bevor, Bilbo, British Navy uniforms, Caribbean sugar mill, Christopher Columbus, clone helmet, costuming, Darth Vader, Death Star Gunners, French Navy uniforms, hogsheads, honey, John Mollo, Middle-earth, Samurai, science fiction, Star Wars, sugar, sugar cane, sugar loaf, Taters, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, The Illiad, Tobacco

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

As we continue to explore Bilbo’s entryway, we feel a little like Bilbo himself watching as all of those dwarves gradually pile in until they almost overwhelm their surprised host.

Unlike our earlier postings on barometers and clocks, which are really on the walls, in this posting, we confess to what is called in literary criticism a “creative misread”.  Take a look at the far left of the illustration.

image1bilboshallway.jpg

There is a kind of entryway table, with a mirror and hooks—probably for hats—and those should have tipped us off—but a preconceived notion overwhelmed us, inspired (well, we suppose you could call it that) by how we initially interpreted the object on the right hand corner.

It’s a hat—you can just make out the brim.  It’s a kind of 15th-century hat called a “sugarloaf”, however, because of the crown.

image2sugarloafhat.jpg

(There is a 13th-14th century helmet given that nickname, as well.

image3asugarloafhelm.jpg

In fact, perhaps there’s a certain similarity with the phase 1 clone helmet, if you add a sort of flange to the lower edge—and a ridge piece?

image3b.jpg

If so, it certainly wouldn’t be the only medieval-influenced helmet in Star Wars—just look at the Death Star gunners

image3cdeathstargunner.jpg

and compare it with a 15th-century sallet with its bevor

image3dsalletwbevor.jpg

Although Darth Vader’s helmet is a bit more samurai-ish.

image3edv.jpg

image3fsam.jpeg

All of these came to the screen through the work of uniform historian and costume designer John Mollo,

image3gjohnmollo.jpg

who died on 25 October, 2017, at the age of 86.  His work included not only science fiction costuming

image3himps.png

image3irebs.png

but also the text for works on the history of uniforms.  For our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, he and his illustrator for Uniforms of the American Revolution in Color (1975),

image3juniforms.jpg

provided us with an accurate view of the uniforms of the British and French navies of the period.

image3kbrit.jpg

image3lfrench.jpg

 

But—as we began to say—the crown of that hat bears that nickname because it looks like sugar as it used to be formed, shipped, and sold.

Today, we see sugar in bags

image4sugarbag.jpg

or in little packets in fast food restaurants

image5packet.jpg

or even in cubes.

image6sugarcubes.jpeg

In earlier centuries, sugar came in a very different form:

image7sugarloaf.jpg

and, to use it, you had special tools to snip off or scrape off pieces when you needed them.

image8tongues.jpg

image9sugarwork.jpg

Sugar came like this because of the process by which sugar was extracted from a very tall plant,

image10sugarcanefield.jpg

the sugar being inside the plant.

image11sugarcane.jpg

The first step was to cut the plant down.

image12cutting.jpg

This and some of the following illustrations are drawn from a series of colored engravings published in 1823 and entitled Ten Views in the Island of Antigua.

image13tenviews.jpg

And, as you can see from the subtitle, the collection is devoted to the sugar-production industry, which was an extremely profitable one.  (And it should always be remembered that the great majority of the workers in these images are slaves.)

Cutting, however, is just the first stage in the process.  In the next step, the cane has to be crushed to get the pulp out.

image14crushing.jpg

(We note the mistake in the caption—this isn’t a painting, but a colored engraving.)

The pulp then has to be boiled and sieved until it’s a pure liquid.

image15boiling.jpg

Then—initially—it was dried, forming a coarse brown powder, as you can see on the right hand side of this illustration.

This was then packed into huge barrels, called “hogsheads”,

image16packing.jpg

and shipped.

image17shipping.jpg

When it reached its final destination, it was turned back into a liquid and further refined until poured into molds, which is how it was commonly sold, even into the 20th century, apparently.

image18mold.jpg

It is estimated that the average person consumes 53 pounds (24kg) of sugar a year, partly because sugar is mixed in with a huge variety of products where you would have to read the label before you realized that it was even an ingredient.

But what about Bilbo?  So far, as there is no concordance to the complete works of JRRT, as there is for something like the Iliad.

image19concordance.jpg

(A concordance is a complete collection of all the words, in their various forms, in a work, listed alphabetically, with reference to where they may be found.)

Our research, then, is completely casual—we paged through The Hobbit and, although we found no mention of the word “sugar” per se, we did find, particularly in Chapter One, a number of references to baked goods (“cake”, “seed cake”, and “tarts”).  We might suppose that, as in our medieval times, Bilbo employed honey in his recipes,

image20honeycomb.jpg

but, for the sake of our sugar loaf misread, we’re going to imagine that sugar is the ingredient.  (After all, there are “taters” and tobacco/pipeweed and, in the first edition of The Hobbit, even tomatoes mentioned, so why not?)

The next question, of course, is where this sugar came from.  Sugar is native to Southeast Asia, growing in tropical regions.  As far as we understand it, the Shire appears to be rather like southern England for climate, which means grains and things like hops, for beer, and perhaps even tobacco (in the United States, tobacco is grown as far north as Massachusetts), but nothing which requires a warmer, moister climate.

image21tobacco.jpg

Europe first began to receive its sugar (after tiny and very expensive exotic imports) in the 16th century from plants descended from cuttings from the Canary Islands and planted in the Caribbean by the agents of Christopher Columbus.  (The Portuguese did something similar in Brazil.)

Looking south on the map of Middle-earth, where would the climate allow for the growth of such plants?

image22map.jpg

Our best guess is to look as far south as we can—which is why, in our next posting, we want visit Harad and chat with those Corsairs of Umbar…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Rare Good Ballast

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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Tags

Ballast, Chunu, Coney, Cuzco, Fish and Chips, Gollum, Green Eggs and Ham, Inca Empire, King James I, Machu Picchu, Potatoes, Sir Walter Raleigh, Smeagol, Spanish Explorers, Taters, Tea, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tobacco, Tobias Hume, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, to our latest posting. This one is based upon a word, but that word leads us to an interesting question: when you make a new world, do you intend to include anything from your own? Or do things just sort of slip in?

The word is “taters”, as in “I’d give a lot for a half dozen taters.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 4, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

(And a footnote–if you’re an American, you say that “erbs”, but, if you’re from the UK, you say it “Herbs”.)

It’s Sam, of course, trying to create a little domesticity while he and Frodo live rough on the trek south from the Morannon.

Gollum+Frode+Sam.jpg

At Sam’s request, Gollum has gone hunting and has returned with a pair of wild (European) rabbits, or coneys. (“Coney” is a worn-down form of the Latin word cuniculus, “rabbit”, through Old French, the source of so many Latin-based English words.)

rabbit3.jpg

Gollum, who has long forgotten about cooking (although one presumes that, in his distant life among his fellow proto-Hobbits, he wore clothes, lived in a house—or a hobbit hole–and ate bread), is convinced that Sam is going to ruin his catch.

“ ‘Stew the rabbits!’ squealed Gollum in dismay. ‘Spoil beautiful meat Smeagol saved for you, poor hungry Smeagol! What for? What for, silly hobbit? They are young, they are tender, they are nice. Eat them, eat them!’ “

(And here we can hear Sam-I-am from Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, “Would you? Could you/In a car?/Eat them! Eat them!/Here they are.”)

GEH

Along with the coneys, Sam would like something more, “taters”, much to Gollum’s puzzlement:

“Smeagol won’t grub for roots and carrotses and—taters. What’s taters, precious, eh, what’s taters?”

And Sam spells it out:

“Po-ta-toes…The Gaffer’s delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly. But you won’t find any, so you needn’t look.”

Most readers would know immediately what Sam meant when he said, “Po-ta-toes”, but how about “ballast?”

In a way, it may be odd that Sam would know this word, as it comes from the world of ocean-going ships and Sam has never been closer to bigger water than the Brandywine—and that only near the beginning of The Lord of the Rings.

Ballast is the weight put into the deepest hold of a ship to keep it balanced in the water—especially when it’s empty of cargo. It’s commonly stone and it’s very useful now for underwater archaeologists, since the stone, if it remains in place after a ship sinks, can show the outline of a hull.

ships-stone-ballasts

ballastinsitu

So “rare good ballast for an empty belly” gives us the image of a Gaffer kept upright and balanced, moving with potatoes inside him.

Sam has also said, “But you won’t find any, so you needn’t look”: why not?

In our world, before the 16th century, potatoes were only available in South America, in particular in the Inca empire.

This was an elaborate patchwork of smaller peoples controlled by a military group with a capital at Cuzco.

Inca_MainMap3_sg

A Neolithic civilization, they were master architects, as may be seen in the remains of the Temple of the Sun, in the capital—

qoricancha

and in what is believed to be a summer palace, at Machu Picchu.

fondo-machu-picchu

With a king and an army

incanwarriors

they controlled much of the west coast of South America from 1438 to 1533, when Spanish invaders destroyed them and their world.

conquestofincas

A major food source was potatoes and there were many varieties available—and there still are, more than 1000—

Potatoes_Peruvian_varieties

In fact, the Inca even learned how to freeze-dry them to preserve them, a method called chunu.

Chunu

No one knows for sure when potatoes first came to Europe. It is imagined that Spaniards coming back from the New World would have brought them. In the English tradition, it was Sir Walter Raleigh who introduced them.

SirWalterRaleigh

They were then cultivated and rapidly became a major European food source, but they are not a native species and don’t grow wild—leading us to imagine that that’s what Sam is saying: Sam and Frodo and Gollum are in the wilderness and potatoes only grow where they’re planted—suggesting that, in Middle-earth, they are also an import—but from where?

(This reminds us of that moment in the Jackson film, where Sam and Frodo bump into Merry and Pippin in a corn—that is, maize–field. JRRT never mentions maize which, in European history, is also a New World import. This only makes us further wonder what the script writers thought they were doing in removing Pippin and Merry from their proper place in the story…)

There is more of this sort of thing, of course—Hobbits have teatime—we can suppose that it’s something herbal, but real teatime only appeared in England after the regular importation of tea to England from China in the mid-17th century. (For those familiar with it, there is a funny Horrible Histories episode which shows the introduction of tea in Stuart times when, according to the story, people had been refreshing themselves previously with cups of hot water.)

6a00d8341c84c753ef0147e02eab6c970b-300wi

And then there’s tobacco. It’s called that in The Hobbit, but it’s “pipe weed” in The Lord of the Rings. Tobacco is one more import in our world—brought to Europe in the 16th century. Here’s the first known image of someone actually smoking (from 1595).

Chute_tobacco.1595

It quickly became so popular that controversy over it, ranging from Tobias Hume’s ( 1579?-1645 ) love song to it, “Tobacco, Tobacco, sing sweetly for Tobacco” (from The First Part of Ayres or the Musicall Humours, No. 3, 1605—you can see the text and score if you Google “Tobias Hume” at IMSLP) to James the First’s condemnation of it, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), which you can actually read if you Google “A Counterblaste to Tobacco”.

When JRRT was revising The Hobbit for its republication in 1966, he made a number of changes to the text, but some things remained, such as teatime, and even the image of a railroad train—“At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.”

Douglas Anderson argues, in Note 35 of Chapter 1 of The Annotated Hobbit, that, in the case of the railroad, “This usage need not be viewed as an anachronism, for Tolkien as narrator was telling this story to his children in the early 1930s, and they lived in a world where railway trains were an important feature of life.” (The Annotated Hobbit, 47-48.) This is never really stated, in fact, in the Hobbit text, but the tone of the narration—which JRRT came to dislike—would suggest something of the sort. As for The Lord of the Rings, we have no explanation. Some items are never explained, they’re just there.

And, of course, there’s this:

“I’ll cook you some taters one of these days. I will: fried fish and chips served by S. Gamgee.”

fish-and-chips

FishAndChips

Perhaps this is in Hobbiton? Bywater? Michel Delving?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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