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Old 07-07-2016, 02:40 PM   #39
Alcuin
Haunting Spirit
 
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Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Nurn
Posts: 73
Alcuin has just left Hobbiton.
We know the Númenóreans mined. They obtained metal for farming and tools, then later for weapons; and the only other place in Arda mentioned to have (ore) loads of mithril was Númenor, so they must have mined for that, too.

Eöl the Smith mined somewhere: this was part of his affinity with the Dwarves, which was unusual among the Elves of Beleriand. His son Maeglin was captured by Morgoth’s servants while he on a scouting expedition for veins of ore. Going back even farther, Fëanor dug a fortress along the mountains of the north coast of Valinor, where he and his father Finwë guarded the Silmarilli. (From whom were they guarding them? Was Fëanor already suspicious of Morgoth, or of his brothers, or the Valar in general?)

As for the Shire hobbits, Pippin told Bergil Beregond’s son that his father “farmed the land around Whitwell”: Pippin was a farmer, too. Maggot was a farmer: it seems most of the hobbits farmed or were merchants or tradesmen regarding farming. (Even innkeepers: their customers were farmers.) We are so far removed from the ways of our near ancestors we forget that only 100 years ago, about four in five people were “farmers”: either they farmed exclusively, or had some trade on the side. Even an innkeeper like Butterbur was likely to have a small plot for growing vegetables and keeping some animals (chickens, a cow, perhaps a pig; and we know he stabled horses).

My grandfather was a skilled carpenter, but he lived on a farm and was primarily a farmer: there was no fulltime work for carpenters. He told me all the builders in the rural area where he lived were farmers, and built only seasonally, between crops, or in an emergency: e.g., after a fire. Even today, of the dozen or so farmers I still know, I can only think of two that are full-time farmers (it’s 14- to 16-hour a day work), and one of those is manager of a farm in New England maintained primarily so the locals can see what life was like only a couple of generations ago. (But don’t get lost in rural Vermont or New Hampshire: “Yah cahn’t get theah frahm heah,” are the first directions a farmer give you. It means you have to go back: Take it in the humor in which it’s offered (usually pretty sharp humor), and ask him how to get to someplace from where you can get there.)

Tolkien remembered and loved a way of life that was vanishing, as he himself mentions in Letters.
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