It has a huge variety of historical recipes from different regions, taken from manuscripts, transcribed and translated, and a whole section of notes about the context for the recipe. It's really fun and I AM going to try a couple of these recipes.
Look at how this lamb recipe is presented:
This is just such a fun way to learn more about historical foodways and discover traditional cuisine.
Look at all the filters you can use:
Maybe if I can forage some good blackberries this year, I can make a 300 year old recipe for blackberry wine!
â Does this ship make any sense whatsoever by any reasonable metric
â Does the thought of these characters standing next to each other make you want to chew concrete and then break apart a nearby automobile with your bare hands
The fun thing is he would understand why people were getting him outfits with storks on them. Thatâs a word, itâs his name, straightforward. All the humans get him the same gag gift, but like, theyâre putting effort in at least. This is a genuinely nice outfit. Stork will be a walking zero-effort pun sometimes, rather than waste a perfectly fine robe.
Itâs fine. This is a readily comprehensible human illogic. Exactly the kind of thing he expected from moving to Earth.
Six years in he finds out about the stork bringing babies.
Stork has a good long meditation session about this myth, his name, his job, the outfits, the whole shebang (or whatever Vulcan concept is the equivalent).
And he decides heâs honored by it, in a humanly illogical way.
The humans are asking him to do what is after all his job, and specifically requesting him for the joy his name brings them on top of an already agreeable and satisfying task. He has no objection to engendering positive emotions in others. Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so happiness must logically slow it down.Â
Plus, Vulcans of his generation love puns. There were two decades of punning competitions in colleges across the planet. So when he realizes that he is a walking zero-effort pun, and that the humans also love the pun, he is all for it. He is the Joe Cool of the entire Vulcan population in his city.Â
And via this pun, the humans are including him in a cherished and traditional myth, by casting him as the literal bringer of life and the expander of families.Â
Thereâs no downside. Stork wears his robes, pins, keychains, and other bird-related tchotchkes with genuine pride.Â
For real though working together with some human social workers, a Vulcan would be an excellent caretaker for children in an adoption center.
Child has a meltdown? Imagine Stork, perfectly calm and unbothered, approaching the kid and saying âYou appear quite upset, Eliza. If you would please allow me to relocate you to the âbean-bag-chair,â we can discuss the source of your distress.â
A Vulcan educated in medicine and child psychology would be endlessly patient with a kid with behavioral issues. Stork wouldnât get or upset or frustrated. After all, these are children with medical and psychological conditions. It would be illogical to blame the child or to not treat them with the appropriate care.
Even if the a little one was having a bad day or was just overtired, Stork wouldnât get angry. He might even be a calming presence. Any new kids acting out would learn real quick that theyâd have better luck trying to arm-wrestle a Klingon than get a rise out of Stork.
Not only that, Vulcans live much longer than humans. Imagine Stork looking virtually unchanged as decades pass. Kids heâd helped years ago would turn up fully grown, maybe there to adopt their own kids, and run into Stork, looking almost exactly as they remember him.
And heâd probably remember them too. âWelcome back, Eliza.â
thank you for co-creating red dwarf, which whether intentional or not has some of the most comforting and relatable autism rep iâve came across. never have i seen myself represented more clearly than in rimmer â which, on reflection is probably something should be concerned about, but nonetheless, it is comforting to me every day.
you and doug naylor created a character like that for me and millions of other people. you put a black scouser in space to represent the whole human race.
red dwarf was hilarious, it was thought-provoking, and it was yours.
current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.
someone brought a cake analysis robot to feed the cake into to determine the exact ingredients and supposedly it can spit out the exact same cake. and if you're like dude. what. then they're like well if it bothers you you should have made more cake. i'm hungry and i deserve cake. and you're like dude we're at a party.
Three months later you find out that fifty people locked themselves in a room to discuss how much they loved your cake and how they wished you made more. None of them ever told you.
Concerning (things about) Hobbits: Meeting the Big Man
One of the most important characters in Lord of the Rings is someone you like and trust. You quote him often, remember him fondly, and rely on his word.
You don't know his name. Fanart is nonexistent; thereâs no Ao3 tag, no breakout film portrayal, no Amazon money-milking series for this character. You know his voice, have memorised his words; you've probably never read any meta about him.
I'll bet Iâm the only person you've seen on Tumblr who really talks about That Fucking Guy, and I hate that man with a cold academic passion. (I also love him. He's my blorbo. He could be yours.)
I think you shouldn't trust him as much as you do.
Here is why.
This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history...
That is the first sentence of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The prologue of the Lord of the Rings is iconic. Swept away by the story, we forget weâre reading at all. It's understandable. Who can resist the overwhelming charm of the writer, and the bewildering excitement of being taken by the hand and invited into The Fellowship of the Ring.
But even people with deeper takes on Tolkien tend to miss the significance of the Prologue. Itâs a place where critical reading abilities and political processors usually turn off entirely - fair enough, it's probably a relief.
Let's talk about the Narrator.
Meeting the Narrator: Time, Place, Person
The Prologue is narrated by a Mannish (Big Folk) Narrator, a modern human being, from an accessible academic standpoint. We are encouraged to think of him as Friendly Professor Tolkien, although you really do need to remember that he is clearly addressing us from within a fictional narrative world. He is a character. Even if he is Tolkienâs self-insert, intended to be read as Tolkien Himself, he is still a character who can be analysed and interpreted. This is a fictional character.
The Big Man deliberately addresses the reader as someone with a shared background, in what is presumably somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century. It is stated multiple times that you (reader) and Narrator are both Big Folk together - there is no chance that you, the Reader, are a scholar of another race.
It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.
Pick out the âlater estrangementâ and park it for now.
The casting of the Narrator is a deliberate alignment with Professor Tolkien, and we are certainly intended to understand him as an academic, avuncular, rather unworldly male professor in the British Isles.
(Sidebar: for convenience I gender the Narrator as male. I think there's evidence for the Narrator being intended as male-by-default, which can be provided on request, and I personally feel the Big Man narrator is the translator/propagator of the silly convention of referring to modern humans as âcapital-M Men.â )
The Prologue is written charmingly, a framing device of an academic translator giving the context of background information before presenting someone elseâs text (the translated Red Book, etc). Later, this Prologue connects to the Appendices in The Return of the King, where the Narrator returns in his persona of the translator of the works. Our Narrator is certainly a strong, influential, deliberate character, with a specific and distinctive voice!
Anyway, whether or not you choose to picture the Big Man Narrator as Tolkien Himself doing a folksy Bit, OR as a character Tolkien created - Remember! The entire story is fiction and the Big Man Narrator is a created fictional character. Why would you assume he is telling the truth? Why assume that he is an expert? Where are his biases?
Look what the Big Man Narrator actually says. Look at what he chooses to tell, and what he finds unimportant. There are so, so many posts that pick over the fascinating bits of Concerning Hobbits, mining canon for more information, as if it is a pure source of truth. I suggest that the next time you do, you try this fun exercise.
Before we go into the Magic Thing, the narrator also notes AGAIN that hobbits exist today, but are shorter than they were;
They seldom now reach three feet; but they have dwindled, they say, and in ancient days they were taller.
This continues and reinforces the framing of âhobbits still exist now,â and sounds rather as if the Big Man has interviewed modern hobbits (âthey say,â) which weâll also park.
We move on, parking "it's assumed you're a Man, receiving information from a Mannish professor", the "future estrangement" and "diminished hobbits are available for interview."
The Magic Thing
I was provoked into writing this by a fun Tumblr post pointing out that "hobbits are said to 'not study magic' - does that mean that they don't HAVE magic?" which went off into a separate and funnier reblog chain.
I want to analyse this again, noting that this is information received from Big Man.
Letâs examine the âhobbit magic thingâ noting that we are being TOLD all of this by a CHARACTER.
Hereâs how the passage about "hobbit magic" starts.
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today;
In our time, weâve just been told, hobbits still exist, but had a population drop and are vanishing. To the point where a reader is not expected to have ever heard of them. Chillingly, in typical mid century British academic fashion, the Big Folk Narrator assumes that the reader is also British; when he later mentions that the remaining hobbits only live in the British Isles, itâs a little alarming. Thereâs a species of humans native to these islands, so rare and so politically silent that youâve never seen or heard of them.
Hello?!
for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
We are told here that Hobbits are going extinct because they cannot readily survive due to, essentially, habitat destruction. (we feel the Narratorâs annoyance about the Industrial Revolution spoiling the âpeace and quietâ strongly here, more strongly than the buried implications for indigenous people).
They no longer have any land. Not only have they lost the Shire, they have no towns, small villages or even farms. âWasâ is very much past-tense, and they âhauntedâ land in the past, ghosting lightly and leaving no traces of their presence, rather than living there. so in our modern day thereâs certainly no Shire, no Bree (mixed human/hobbit town) and no Michel Delving, which in its time was a market town with above-ground buildings and a museum. For context, it takes a decent amount of work for the British Isles to lose towns, especially on the level of development that Hobbits had - famously anachronistic, they have waistcoat buttons and watermills and good china and museums and smoking habits, while all the rest of medieval-ish Middle Earth is not as developed.
Itâs hard to lose all that, without any trace at all, in crowded countries. Wholesale loss always means that Something Happened.
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.
âDo not and did notâ is further reinforcement of a still-living people. (I love the âunderstand or likeâ thing, which is charming - the implication that hobbits are perfectly capable of UNDERSTANDING machinery in textile factories, but would hate it.)
Something that makes the Big Man nuanced as a character is that he obviously adores hobbits, and studies them because he likes them. The fondness and admiration comes through, even as he is showing his own privilege and bias.
To me, the way this passage about machinery is framed - lumping together those machines as âabout the level of technology hobbits are comfortable withâ - is something that someone standing post-Enlightenment, probably post-Industrial Revolution, would do. The implication I take from this passage is that this is a modern writer describing the current status of modern hobbits; a mid-century British scholar, a self-insert of Tolkien.
This sense of time matters, because of everything else he says, and the temptation people will have to excuse the Big Man narrator as âa product of his time.â This isnât a medieval writer looking back on Middle Earth. Itâs a highly educated man writing in the 1940s: computers existed, there were several Disney films out, women had the right to vote, and feminist essays were published from Tolkien's own workplace.
Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of âthe Big Folkâ, as they call us,
We then proceed to see, across three books, examples of hobbit behavior in âthe ancient daysâ, which may serve as an example of this shyness. Several different relationship with Big Folk are outlined, in which fairly chirpy hobbits, characterised by their ready emotional availability, cohesion, and incredible abilities to build relationships and form massive political alliances, seem to do well on the strength of that. Hobbit shyness may involve glaring ferociously at Big Folk for a moment, but within a few days they are sitting on your lap, and then itâs all over. With this evidence in our memory, casting a coy âshynessâ as the reason for their avoidance of âusâ becomes uncomfortable.
and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find.
The Narrator is handwaving, in avuncular fashion, why the Reader has never seen a hobbit in their lives, and needs to be lectured, from first principles, on a living indigenous people of the British Isles. Do marinate on it for a moment, though. The tone of a professor or a parent, whimsically explaining to Victorian children why you donât see the Tooth Fairy - she hides! Teehee.
They avoid us with dismay.
Behind this airy statement, what happened? Massive betrayals, the loss of their land and political power, loss of the conditions they need for their survival, massive loss of their people, and a total breakdown in trust. Humans and hobbits, in the prologue and main story, are shown as natural allies; close kin who understand each other well; humans are shown owing a tremendous amount of their own political influence to hobbits, and even cold/reserved humans end up liking them after a conversation. Hobbits are especially shown for being loyal friends who do not break down under war; noted for retaining cohesion and resisting corruption; who, under unimaginable conditions, will still resist harming or betraying friends.
Hobbits and humans have clearly had some significant breakage of our kinship since the events of the LotR cycle. The Big Man knows this.
Earlier in the essay, when the Big Man told us that âhobbits are closest to (us)â he gave us a lot of additional information, didnât he? He refers to âlater estrangement.â (He also tells us clearly, in that subtext of that sentence, that no hobbit will ever read the book in our hands, no hobbit will ever be addressed as a reader, no hobbit will enter academia, no hobbit will be able to fill in the gaps that the Big Man waves his hand over. Certainly no hobbit scholar contributed to the Big Manâs translation of the Red Book. Theyâre not just going, theyâre functionally GONE. This is what I mean!) Anyway, even the Big Man notes that there was âan estrangement.â Something that has caused them to flee from contact with us in dismay.
whatever happened in that estrangement probably doesnât reflect well on the Big Folk. A species facing extinction and hiding, dismayed and estranged, from their closest kin, is not having a pleasant time on this earth. Especially when we understand that theyâre basically trapped in the crowded and inhospitable British Isles (and still managing to hide from us to the point of the public not being aware of their existence!)
The Big Man Narrator isnât interested. This is the point where you ought to start wondering about academic bias on the part of the Big Man Narrator. He's fond of hobbits, and has interviewed/met them, but would never treat one as a colleague.
[âŠ]They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical.
so hobbits have an inherent ability of being invisible/undetectable, which they still practice today (teehee, thatâs why itâs okay that youâve never spoken to one) and which is pretty damn effective. Effective enough that people in modern times are completely fooled, effective enough that it still counts as âdisappearing,â and the elusiveness of hobbits is so perfect as to conceal their existence from the general public. Effective enough that the few adults who DO discuss hobbits could conceivably think it could be magic. The Narrator has probably rolled his eyes over a rivalâs paper about âSlipping Into The Shadow-Realm: how hobbits shift space and time to conceal their vital signaturesâ (Sayers, 1934).
further, theyâve specifically developed this âartâ - from whatâs implied to be an instinctive/animal ability - to a higher skill, indistinguishable from magic. The âartâ is SOMETHING material and quantifiable, if it was innate-and-continually-developed.
But Hobbits have never, in fact, studied magic of any kind,
Here is a point thatâs been discussed on tumblr, and it is correct to note that âstudiedâ is doing a lot of work. Especially when contrasted against the previous sentence, with the interesting term âartâ. âIt isnât science/magic, itâs an instinctive artâ.
To me - remembering that this is intended to be a mid-century British academic speaking to us - it resonates with how romanticism of marginalised cultures was treated by academia, in the generation the Big Man Narrator wouldâve studied in - full of romantic, unexamined, politically revealing statements like, âThe Celts are skilled in the art of music, but have never properly studied it.â
What Iâm saying here is that we should not assume the Big Man is a good judge of the difference between âartâ and âstudy,â especially since the next bit reads:
and their elusiveness is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice, and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable by bigger and clumsier races.
Hobbit invisibility is an âartâ through âheredity,â but also a âprofessional skillâ refined through âpractice.â It has been âdevelopedâ until it is mistaken for âmagic,â but against this, we are told that hobbits âhave never studied magic of any kind.â In the cleavage point here, we can see the definition of âstudyâ that The Big Man is working with. This definition is possibly what makes something âmagicâ or not. Have you seen this before?
The point I am making here is that the Big Man is speaking to us from the position of a âcoloniser.â There are some worldbuilding implications to unpack from this. One is that the Big Man is speaking from a place where magic can be studied, not even requiring hereditary aptitude (if hobbits were excluded from magic by physiology, This Fuckin Guy wouldâve said it) but that it is an academic practice. Hobbits are not just nearly-extinct and terrified out of contact with humans; they are fully excluded from academia (they do not translate or contribute to translations of their histories; they do not study) and if they cannot formalise their practices in acceptable study as the Big Man defines it, it cannot be magic. This is exactly the tone in which majority cultures dismiss other practices of culture/medicine/science, by stating it is NOT a form of science, because it is not practiced with the academy, because it is definitionally not allowed in the academy.
We can then go to a higher level of political analysis and reading, and ask: who benefits from a definition of âmagicâ that includes (academic study) but excludes (hobbit arts)?
You can certainly do some delightful worldbuilding answers for yourself, and say that âperhaps magic is spells, material changes, great works as performed by Elvish or Maiar Ringbearers, etc.â But if we look at the political stuff Iâve just pointed out, why not examine the definition and who it serves and why? Given that weâve seen this pattern before - colonisers deliberately bundle, define and dismiss marginalised practices as primitive, animalistic, instinctual and unschooled, as part of the PURPOSEFUL WORK of colonisation - I read the Big Man definition as: âMagic is formalised by the bigger races and defined by excluding the practices of the smallest race.â
Who does this benefit? Well, the Bigger Races could in some ways. Magic must be studied, hobbits donât study, hobbits donât have magic, hobbits are The Only Unmagical Humans - despite having practices indistinguishable from magic - this could be something. Big Men would have some reason to define âmagicâ to exclude hobbits. Normally this is done in order to take resources or drain resistance from marginalised people, but as hobbits have had virtually no remaining resources or resistance since long before the Industrial Revolution, you could open this up to other worldbuilding implications - maybe, Big Men didnât really MIND hobbits going extinct.
An interesting point here is to re-read sections of this work with different interpretations of who the Big Man is. Where are his biases? Who is he as a character?
I personally read him as a friendly, Tolkienesque academic who likes hobbits, follows his linguistic interests, and is too blinded by his bias to think about their political position. He seems unaware of the horrors he's talking about. Perhaps that's down to innocence.
A character crying out to be analysed.
Landless and Dismayed
That sums up a lot of information that can be mined from one of the very first paragraphs of the Fellowship of the Ring. But here's another message to toy with - hobbits exist in the modern space; landless, estranged, fleeing from us in dismay. Quite likely to have been betrayed.
That said I'm going to have to push back on "for context, it takes a good deal of work for the British Isles to lose towns", because it doesn't, actually? The are towns and villages named as recently as the 1700s which are not only no longer on the map, but very difficult to locate at all - and despite their technology levels, the Hobbits of LotR are implied to be centuries (at least) before that.
One of the things about Britain being crowded and densely populated is that it makes it easier to lose settlements, because part or all of a town is very quickly over-built by other stuff.
Which fits really well with the sense described here of big Men displacing and appropriating the land of Hobbits. Also brings in some really interesting parallels with the inclosure (/enclosure) of common land in the 18th and 19th century - perhaps Hobbits' traditional autonomy and rights were a casualty of something similar?
I have to climb on my soapbox, maybe just to shout a couple of lines but I feel like I am holding a puzzle piece here: It's the early writing of the Gypsy Lore Society (I can almost guarantee that Tolkien, as a linguist, would have read it) and every single thing said about the hobbits is also said about Gypsies in Scotland, Wales and England.
As the, uh, Hobbit in this situation, I'm talking in the context of the UK specifically here, which is where the GLS drew many of its first members from - It's an all-gorjer institution (or, was, for much of its existence) but the general thrust of its raison d'etre was:
- There are Gypsies in the woods, less of them today than in former generations. Your ancestors would have met them often and worked with them, but you will probably never see one.
- They look different now to in the past, they tell stories that they used to be beautiful and stately and descend from kings, but now they're a shadow of themselves.
- They speak a fascinating language which is degrading fast, and they see themselves as the last of their line.
- They and their way of life have been doomed by the industrial revolution, so they don't trust us any more and we don't trust them.
- They don't use machines more complicated than the fire-bellows or the accordion.
- They don't introspect, they don't know their own history, and they aren't involved in the academic chronicling of their own people - An academic researcher might know some Gypsies (Smart and Crofton, I am looking at you with the evil eye, I am spitting in your path) and talk to them regularly, but won't consider them an academic co-writer (EVEN IF THE ROM IN QUESTION WROTE THE WHOLE BOOK AND CROFTON JUST SAT AMANUENSIS, WESTER BOSWELL I WILL HAVE JUSTICE FOR YOU) and there is no chance of a Gypsy reading the paper, going to the university, etc.
- The tone is very fond and sad but of course these relics are dying out, it's just the way of the world, modernity eh?
- They previously left their mark on the landscape (atchin tans, horse fairs, etc) but those things are smaller now, lesser, invisible, scattered. Enclosure was part of that as @mangled-by-disuse points out (which destroyed a LOT of rural life here!) And also specific laws around trading, stopping, gathering, and use of public space by Gypsies specifically. Our architecture was of no use to Lords or railway companies or later motorway builders (even though we and Irish Travellers were employed in huge numbers to build the modern road network!) So we got demolished in the process of "improving transit".
- They are closely related to "us" (English people) but in an earlier age - This is around when both the Indo-European roots of Romanes and the theories around Proto-Indo-European really came to academic attention. As a linguist, the idea of a very "eastern" branch of the IE family being creoled (well, paralanguaged) with a very "western" branch, via a physical migration of people, is catnip.
- They don't study (magic? Anything!) But are very naturally skilled at some things to the point that it looks like magic (Graimengro, especially - who of course IRL learn their skills as soon as they can hold their head up on their necks - but also the association of Gypsies and "magic" in the real world is... Strong... And often especially in the early C20th and late C19th was contrasted with western occultism that was "more learned" - I think it's Leland who collected a lot about "Gypsy Magic" for a gorjer audience and he's a good place to start reading on gorjer attitudes to... All of that.)
I am wracking my brains but I feel like Concerning Hobbits DIRECTLY pastiches an individual GLS paper too... I'll probably remember in a few months.
Mea culpa @elodieunderglass I have written another essay about Gypsies in your mentions, this was not deliberate, I hadn't even realised it was you again!
I donât mind! You might be interested in the material about the âWandering Daysâ of hobbits - prior to settling the Shire, they âwanderedâ - and the commentary about them âforgettingâ their native language.
âHobbits came from nowhere and forgot their early histories - the silly things forgot their own language! And their diverse-and-distinctive-sounding names, hinting at strands of different internal cultures, were actually the Default Language they used in the absence of their ownâ feels like a really loaded series of decisions to make. And probably quite interesting in the context of how Tolkien would have thought about travelling peoples! I need to learn more about it, thank you so much
people talk about and excerpt the smutty passages from like romantasy booktok hits or whatever and sometimes it's to be "lol look at this embarrassing porn" and other times it's like a self-serious lit person being like "well certainly one can infer that the books' explicit erotic content is much of their appeal đ§" but nobody is willing to do the real work of like actually discussing why these scenes are bad at being pornography and not sexy or titillating at all. i mean i guess clearly they are successfully this for probably literally millions of people so that's not quite the right phrasing. but it's like the reason i don't read this stuff isn't because it was written to be jerkoff material it's because it's lousy jerkoff material. and it's lousy jerkoff material in ways i actually think are somewhat interesting to discuss from a craft perspective such as an abundance of cliche and a tendency for individual character dynamics to disappear once the fucking starts and an overreliance on banal physical description of insert tab A into slot B. but nobody is ready for this conversation because either they think it's embarrassing or morally wrong that romantasy jerkoff material exists or because they have extremely low literary standards for jerkoff material. everybody on earth it seems falls into one of these two categories except, of course, Me And My Mutuals
worst thing about liking an m/f ship is other people always bring gender roles into it and it's like okay atp you're shipping the platonic ideal of A Girl and A Boy. that is not how they are. get your gender roles out of my awesome bisexual ship.
there are two competing sects on this website - one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "neurodivergent" and one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "sexual content." i do not like either of them
