Hobbit Tea from Mennonites

So, thanks to friend Steve (hi Stan!), I recently learned that someone had started selling HOBBIT TEAS OF THE SHIRE. And, naturally, I immediately decided to order some -- as someone else pointed out (hi Ed), it's almost as if there were a market made up just of people like me.* I had trouble making the online ordering work** and so eventually just called them up and ordered over the phone. The goods arrived yesterday, and today I've been sampling. Not bad.

There are three favors, each in its own nicely decorated box (which can serve as nice little keepers long after the teabags within are returned to the dust):

(1) Gandalf the Gray Tea

(2) Hobbiton Meadow Mint, &

(3) Bilbo Baggins Breakfast Blend.

The first isn't really tea at all but a chamomile/rooibis blend. I like the idea of chamomile tea but have never really been a fan of the taste, which reminds me of warm grassy water, but it turns out adding the rooibis makes it a little more flavorful. The accompanying text on its box reads Chamomile has for many years grown beside the road leading to Hobbiton from Brandywine Bridge. The flowers are harvested for a soothing tea. While most of the South Farthing has been taken up with the growing of pipeweed, meadows of the red bush still remain, and are much prized as a tea throughout the Shire. Chamomile & red bush tea has been enjoyed by Wood Elves, Hobbits, and even the old wandering wizard dressed in gray.

The second is minty indeed, being a mix of spearmint and peppermint. I prefer black teas with mint in them to straight herbal blends, but think this wd be a gd brew mixed about one-to-two with some black teabags. Have to try that tomorrow and see. The boxtext reads The low places surrounding Bywater supply patches of mint, which are harvested by nearly every Hobbit in the Shire. Some, like the Gamgees, have taken to cultivating the herb in their garden plots, and have come up with a long list of medical benefits for the tea it produces. Hobbiton Meadow Mint is a popular drink in the Shire at weddings and parties.

The third, which I liked best of the three, contains actual tea (definitely a point in its favor in my book), along w. some orange peel, red clover, and cinnamon. The back of the box reads Bilbo Baggins Breakfast Blend did not originate in the Shire. The mixture of tea, orange, and cinnamon was first blended by Bandobras Took during one of his adventures far from home. Young Belladonna Took brought the recipe with her Under the Hill. Her son Bilbo shared the brew with Thorin & Company in the morning as they started off for the Lonely Mountain, and from that morning on, as far and wide as the members of the Company traveled, the brew was known as Bilbo Baggins Breakfast Blend.

Tolkien trivia question #1: can you spot the slip in the name of one of these three teas?

Tolkien trivia question #2: can you spot the slip in the fictional backstory provided for one of these teas?

Tolkien trivia question #3: can you find any surprising feature on the Shire map (see below) appearing on the boxes?

--all of which just goes to show that they're tea-merchants, a small family business, and not Tolkien scholars.

For more on their story, wh. is quite interesting (and where the Mennonite/Amish angle comes in), see the following, wh. I first found reported on The One Ring.net:

http://www.cleveland.com/taste/index.ssf/2010/02/mennonite_farmer_gets_ok_to_ma.html

One nice little touch is that the article names the three student artists from the Cleveland Institute of Art responsible for the project's art, which I rather like: Yusef Abonamah (who did the Gandalf box), Albert McClelland, & Daniel Farruggia (who I assume were each responsible for one of the other boxes, but I don't know who did which one). Although it doesn't leap out at first, each box also has an attractive folksy map of the Shire that I haven't seen before, although not everything appearing on the map is actually there on Tolkien's original (at least not in the same place!).

For more about the tea, or to order, see their website: http://hobbittea.com/ (click on the image of Bilbo's round green door to enter the site)

For more on the history of the company involved, and how a family dairy farmer decided to go grow organic mint instead, see http://mintbrookmeadows.com/

All in all, given that this is an officially licensed product from Tolkien Enterprises (The Saul Zaentz Company), I think that as movie merchandising tie-ins it rivals the Lord of the Nazgul piggybank from the Bakshi horror as Most Unexpected.

--JDR

................

*Ed's actual words were "It's like they decided upon a demographic by drawing a circle around John".

**My wife's comment: "Mennonites cdn't make a website work? Go figure!"

Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?

So, a week or so ago I mentioned in another post that I was finally finishing up Paul Veyne's DID THE GREEKS BELIEVE IN THEIR MYTHS? [1988], a translation of LES GRECS ONT-ILS CRU A LEURS MYTHES? [1983] by Paula Wissing. To which 'Extollager' remarked, in a comment, as follows:

1 COMMENTS:

Extollager said...

So did the Greeks believe their myths?

I was struck by Chesterton's remark in The Everlasting Man (I think) to the effect that he doesn't believe they did.

March 10, 2010 1:05 PM

To which I can only say, good question. Veyne's answer is No, But.

And herein lies the problem: while this is a slim book (129 pages, plus another 22 pages of small-font notes), without the repetition and meandering it cd have been slimmer still: I think Veyne cd have said everything he had to say worth saying in twenty pages or so. Here are a few of his main points:

(1) the Ancients thought mythical time had been different from the contemporary time they themselves lived in. So there might have been monsters in the time of Hercules or Odysseus, but not anymore. This reminded me v. much of Kordecki's dissertation, which concluded that folks in the Middle Ages believed in dragons because they had so much evidence (in the form of old stories, including multiple mentions in the Bible, now re-translated away today) that dragons had once existed. But they didn't think they still existed as something you could run into 'nowadays', in their equivalent of modern times. Similarly, I know of some Xian denominations that believe the Age of Miracles ceased with the death of the last of Christ's original disciples, John, at Patmos around 100 AD. Veyne draws the demarcation line as about the time of the Trojan War, after which Gods ceased to appear and epic monsters died out.

(2) Disbelief took the form not of rejecting myths but of trying to rationalize them. For example, by late Hellenic/early Roman Empire times writers and thinkers didn't believe in the Minotaur but instead thought it'd been a person named Taurus who held an important post under Minos (pretty much the solution Mary Renault came up with in her Theseus novel). They didn't doubt that there had once been a king named Minos, just that the supernatural stories connected with him were exaggerations beneath which lay historical facts, recoverable to the sharp-witted. I was reminded of people who try to prove scientifically that the Star Over Bethlehem was some sort of nova or Velikovsky's account of the Parting of the Red Sea. As I understand it (second-hand, never having read Velikovsky), he never doubted that the sea opened up and let Moses and the Israelites pass, then came rushing back and drowned the Egyptians, but instead of a miracle thought it had been caused by a catastrophic planetary alignment (Venus passing too close to the Earth), which occurred again a generation or so later, causing the sun to stand still in the sky (that is, the Earth to stop rotating for a few hours). A modern skeptic wd simply doubt that the Red Sea miracle occurred at all; a non-literalist Xian wd be closer to Veyne's Romans and latter-day Greeks, believing in the people but not the specific events.

Perhaps Veyne's most interesting point is that the Greeks (and Romans) simply cdn't conceive it was all just made up. There must have been a Romulus, a Theseus, and so forth. I'm told there's exactly as much archeological evidence for the existence of King David and Solomon as there is for King Arthur (i.e., none), so perhaps we're not so v. different in what we choose to believe. His passage on the psychology motivating "sincere forgers" -- i.e., folks who at some point made up detailed geneologies out of whole cloth -- is also interesting.

Unfortunately, Veyne's methodology is somewhat suspect. For example, when someone like Aristotle introduces a reference to a myth with "it is said" or some such phrase, Veyne asserts that this means Aristotle is revealing that he doesn't believe a word of it. Well, maybe. But maybe not. It's too subjective a claim to settle such a fundamental point essential to his argument.

Oddly enough, I'd recommend skimming this book and then reading the Endnotes, which are wonderfully detailed and much better written than the main text, which loves to say and unsay and re-say and assert and retract and generally mull out loud over the same points time and again.

So, a fascinating topic, and it'll make you think, but in the end it doesn't really satisfactorily answer its own question.

--John R.

Glozel Est Authentique!

So, today while looking at something else (an obituary of OE scholar Bruce Mitchell), I came across a news article about the death, at age 103, of a French farmer who, back in 1924, set off a controversy still not settled today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/7370099/Emile-Fradin.html

In brief: sixteen or seventeen year old Emile and his family claimed to have found a site that had a remarkable mix of artifacts: pseudo-Phoenician writing, neolithic carvings, primitive pottery, and much much more. Some proclaimed it the find of the century; others an outright fraud. Decades later, modern testings seems to have established that some of the artifacts seem to be genuinely old (though just how old -- Medieval? Classical? Neolithic? -- isn't readily apparent from a quick skim of the material). Definitely a topic worth further research.

My own interest in this stems from the fact that I recognized the name from an old THEATRE OF THE MIND Call of Cthulhu module I bought years ago but have never run. Digging it out again, I'm reminded that it contains two scenarios: GLOZEL EST AUTHENTIQUE! (the title adventure) and SECRETS OF THE KREMLIN, which I do remember running at a MonteCon back around 2001 (short version: given the choice, the Investigators found they'd much rather face the Mythos than Josef Stalin). I'll have to see if we can schedule the Glozel scenario into our Cthulhu group's alternating series of ongoing Cthulhu campaigns.

Here's a link to the Glozel museum here, with images of many of the odd artifacts found at the site.

http://www.museedeglozel.com/Ceramiqu.htm

I'm esp. curious about the writing (not surprising, given my interest in Bernal's CADMEAN LETTERS and Andrew Robinson's LOST LANGUAGES), but cdn't find any readily available account on it (something else to search for). The various carvings and statuary are also interesting; I wondered if any museum reproductions are available, but cdn't find any at the site (but then my French is not the best, so I might have missed it). I'm not likely to find myself in central France anytime soon (or, indeed, ever), but if anyone's passing through and visits the site and museum, I'd be interested in hearing your impressions of it.

And finally, just for fun, here's a rather loopy article on the subject from the FORTEAN TIMES (who are usually more credible and less credulous than this); once the author starts appealing to Graham Hitchcock (who I find like Von Daniken, without the gravitas) and Rennes-le-Chateaux, you know you're wandering off into unchartable waters.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/498/the_glozel_stones.html

A somewhat more neutral account can be found here: http://www.glozel.net/

current reading: TROY AND HOMER by Joachim Latacz (resumed)

current audiobook: THE FAERIE QUEENE, Bk II Canto XII.

current Kindle book: THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH (Percy Jackson, Bk IV).

current manga: SKIP-BEAT

Sometimes a Single Word Says So Much

So, having finished a slim but dense book I've been working my way through for weeks*, along with many distractions to sustained reading, I'm finally returning to other books set aside at various points recently (as well as launching upon some new ones) -- among them CSL's ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, EXCLUDING DRAMA [1954]. While reading further in the "Sidney & Spenser" chapter, I came across one passage that surprised me.

In talking about how Spenser's Prince Arthur (more than anyone else Spenser portrays Arthur as a young, active knight riding about fighting his own battles, not the stationary king who stays at court and whose knights do all the adventuring for him) owed little to Malory and more to the contemporary Tudor tradition that saw him as a near-direct ancestor of Henry and Elizabeth, Lewis writes

. . . Malory's Arthur would not serve the Elizabethans' turn . . . The [Elizabethan] Arthur . . . was a different figure. The same blood flowed in his veins as in Elizabeth's . . . At Henry VII's coronation the Red Dragon of Cadwallader had been advanced, and Henry's son was named Arthur** . . . 'in honour of the British race of which himself was'. Arthur's conquests supported our claims to Ireland.***

--O.H.E.L. pages 381-382

(emphasis mine)

It's the pronoun choice that struck me. It's sometimes said that Lewis considered himself an Irishman, but when he was growing up "Irish" could mean one of three things. (1) There were the (original) Irish, Celts who'd been living there for two thousand years and more, who were for the most part poor, Catholic, and largely excluded from government (at least, before the Easter Uprising, after which Things Changed). These are the people we think of as "Irish" today. (2) There were the Anglo-Irish, descended from English settlers who had started arriving in the 12th century, who were generally well-off, Anglican, and very much in charge (think Yeats, Swift, Dunsany). (3) And there were the Scotch-Irish, descendants of Scots who had moved to north-east Ireland in large numbers starting in the mid-17th century (after Cromwell decided to treat the Irish the way Americans treated Indians), who were mostly middle-class, Presbyterian, and largely confined to the Ulster/Belfast area (today called the "Northern Irish").****

Of these groups, no member of the first would ever refer to the English occupation as "our" claims. That Lewis would do so naturally and apparently un-selfconsciously is a revealing bit of proof that he was more Unionist than Irish, more British than English.***** The same was v. much true of Dunsany, who never did understand people who thought the English and Irish were two separate peoples, who spent half of each year in his castle in Ireland and the other half in his country home in Kent (and who managed both to get shot in the head by the Irish during the Easter Uprising and, a few years later, arrested by the government on suspicion of being too sympathetic to the rebels).

--John R.

*Veyne's DID THE GREEKS BELIEVE THEIR MYTHS? [1983, tr. 1988]

**this prince Arthur, who died without coming to the throne, was Henry VIII's older brother.

***Dr. John Dee, the famed occultist and one of the most gullible men who ever lived, even tried to prove Elizabeth was the rightful queen of France, based on the story of Arthur vs. the Emperor Lucan.

****that Lewis belonged to this group is shown not just by his growing up in Belfast but his having what sounds to American ears like a strong Scottish accent -- surviving recordings of his voice show that he sounded just like Sean Connery impersonating Alfred Hitchcock.

*****cf. Tolkien's assertion, just after CSL's death, that Lewis had been far more of an Ulsterman than CSL ever realized.

The Pharisees Are Always With Us . . .

So, a day or two ago I was looking for something else online and came across this:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19692743/Tolkien-Response-for-Library

It's taken me a few days to read through all fifty-six pages of Teri Jeter's piece (only a tiny fraction of which she actually wrote -- see below), which I found an interesting if distasteful exercise. The gist of all this verbiage is to say that Tolkien can't be Xian (i.e., her kind of Xian) because his works don't correspond to the mindset of what she's willing to consider Xian (buttressed by highly selective Bible quotations). In essence, this essay is a Jack Chick booklet without the pictures.

The odd thing about it is that it's mostly just a string of quotes. LONG quotes, sometimes going on page after page -- at one point the citation of third-party material goes on for six and a half pages (all from the same source) with only two brief interruptions* by the "author" of this essay. And for an anti-Tolkien screed, the author seems to have spent a huge amount of time searching out and reading what other people had to say about an author she seems to despise, which is a little weird in itself.

While Jeter's charges against him include the usual litany (magic! fantasy! imagination!), there is a touch of the bizarre here too, as in her counter against claims that THE LORD OF THE RINGS grew out of Tolkien's strong Xian faith: "Can anything be more blasphemous than that?" (p. 15) She's similarly indignant that anyone follow Christ's example and write fables (p. 19), or portray an angel in any nontraditional guise (e.g., Gandalf as a wizard). And she waxes downright poetic on the subject of Tolkien keeping bad company -- by which she means C. S. Lewis:

Jeter: "Mr. Tolkien’s companions and the places he frequented also reflect his lost condition:"

Quoted by Jeter: “It was nurtured by weekly meetings with his friends and colleagues including the philosopher and novelist C.S. Lewis and his brother, W.H. Lewis, and the mystical novelist Charles Williams. The Inklings, as they called themselves, gathered at Magdalen College or a pub to drink beer and share one another’s manuscripts."

Another quote: “In addition, he and Gordon founded a ‘Viking Club’ for undergraduates devoted mainly to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer.”

And another: “Tolkien’s friend, drinking partner, and fellow ‘Inkling’ C.S. Lewis is well known…”

Jeter's Biblical citation: “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.” 1 Corinthians 15:33 “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.” Proverbs 13:20

Jeter again: "J. R. R. Tolkien influenced the writings of the so-called Christian writer, C. S. Lewis:"

--I can see someone like Jeter being suspicious of Charles Williams (who after all really was a practicing occultist, who mingled Xianity with ritual magic), but I can't help but feel sorry for poor old Warnie coming in for his share of her sanctimoniousness. And no, she never does explain why she's so suspicious of CSL, other than that he drank, which is apparently a mark against JRRT and EVG as well.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of mistakes in her piece (it's hard to be accurate about topics you despise, as the example of Edmund Wilson teaches us), such as the claim that G. K. Chesterton was "a colleague" of Tolkiens (p. 21) or that Tolkien's interview with Denis Gueroult as his "last interview" and took place in 1971 (p. 37) [it was in 1964/65 and by no means the last, though certainly the best].** But what are we to make of statements such as that Tolkien was born a Catholic, not a convert (p. 27),*** or (Jeter herself this time) that "while J. R. R. Tolkien was a Roman Catholic at one point in his life, there is absolutely no proof that he was up to his death" (p. 19) -- and, conveniently enough, this is one of the few statements she fails to provide any source for (other than saying this idea has been "put forward by some Xians").

Finally, there's guilt by association: Tolkien includes a version of Atlantis in his works --as did Madame Blavatski, and she was an occultist. Decades after Tolkien's death, someone made a Tarot deck based on his work --wh. wd have horrified Tolkien far more than it does Jeter. Gary Gygax admitted, rather reluctantly, that D&D is massively indebted to Tolkien's works (well, duh) -- and Jeter even reproduces Appendix N: Recommended Reading from the 1st edition DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE to prove it. And, of course, there's always rock music to demonize, by way of pointing out that Led Zeppelin once did a Tolkien-inspired song.****

Jeter's conclusion is typical Pharisaical: " I know for a fact that TLOTR will never lead anyone to Christ since 'Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God' (not Tolkien). Neither do I believe any Christian will be benefited or grow in his walk with the Lord by reading TLOTR." (page 49).

So, what are we to make of this? My answer wd be: Not much. Jeter simply flails around and fails to build any kind of coherent case. Really, most of us learn in English 101 that you have to do more than string together a bunch of quotes to make a point, and an author really shd write more than 10% or 20% of her own essay.

Sometimes I like to read things to get insight into a different mindset, however much I might disagree with it (as when I read Dr. Calloway's little book SPIRITS, DEMONS, & THE BIBLE). But if there's a good case to be made for Xians not reading Tolkien, this isn't it.

--John R.

*a total of fifteen words, consisting of one anti-Catholic slur and one framing passage

**nor was Tolkien born in "Bloomsdale in South Africa" (!)

***to be fair, this comes in one of the quoted passages, apparently by Thomas Howard -- I don't know if the gaff is as egregious in the original context

****she even quotes Mike Foster!

Barfield at the Bodleian

So, last week I got word that the massive project of cataloguing all the Barfield Papers in the Bodleian Library is now complete and available online:

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/barfield/barfield.html

Not only is this an amazing resource, but it reveals a great deal we didn't know about Barfield's works before, including the existence of new as-yet unpublished ones. For example,

--short stories. I knew of only two ("The Child and the Giant" and "Dope"); now we have the names of four more ("The Lake of Nix", "The Little Perisher", "A Story for Alexander", "The Superman")

--plays, I knew of four (Orpheus, Medea, Angels at Bay, and Lady Be Careful), three of them unpublished, to which are now added two more: Ye Olde Englande and The Quest of Sangreal, the latter of which sounds particularly interesting (it wd make Barfield the fourth of the four major Inklings to write an Arthurian work).

--A fifty-eight page narrative poem, about which I'd never heard so much as a peep, called The Tower.

--And, perhaps most intriguing of all, a folder containing "Notes Towards a Possible 'Sequel' to My Novel ENGLISH PEOPLE", apparently dating from about a decade after Barfield completed that still-unpublished novel. Given how it's v. much a novel of ideas about the contemporary world at the time it was written, it'd be interesting to see what Barfield thought might happen next to its characters.

Nor is this all: a few miscellaneous items also catch the eye. For example, the description of the manuscript for A CRETACEOUS PERAMBULATOR credits JRRT as the author (mistakenly, I think, given that he's not so credited in the introduction to the published work). Also of note is (Dep. c. 1104.172) what is described as "letter from Walter Hooper about C. S. Lewis' work, 'The Dark Tower', 1974". I'd be interesting to see this one, though we already know pretty much what it says.*

Add to this resource the recent extensive bibliography by Jane Hipolito available on the Barfield Estate's official website ( http://barfieldsociety.org/Bibliography.htm ), and we have all the tools for some serious Barfield scholarship here. Definitely worth spending some time with the next time I'm at the Bodleian (whenever that may be).

--JDR.

current audiobook: THE FAERIE QUEENE, Bk II (The Legend of Sir Guyon)

...............................

*"I showed this fragment to Major Lewis, Owen Barfield and Roger Lancelyn Green and was disappointed to learn that they had never seen or heard of it" -- Walter Hooper, "A Note onThe Dark Tower", The Dark Tower and Other Stories page 92.

Tolkien at the Bodleian

So, it turns out there's a special one-day exhibit of Tolkien's original Hobbit art at the Bodleian on Thursday. It's in celebration of World Book Day on March 4th -- an event that's new to me, but sounds like it's one I can support. And it's been my experience that, whenever I see Tolkien's original pieces, I find them full of details that reproductions just don't pick up, like all the delicate shadings of green in some of his forests. So, if you find yourself in Oxford the day after tomorrow, take the time to drop by and treat yourself.

Here's the link: thanks to Jessica for letting me know about this (and to Alan R. for passing along the news to her). As Jessica pointed out, it's a v. nice poster, isn't it? I wonder if the Bodleian gift shop will have it available, as they do some other Tolkien art (mainly postcards, last time I was there)?

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2010/100301_1.html

--JDR

current audiobook: The Legend of Sir Guyon (FQ Bk II).