Nasty Millers

[Tirned Tinnu]

Milling in general has a strange connotation to it in Faery-tales. Has anyone read the tale of the Salt-mill? It runs like this: one of those salt-grinders that people used - the diecast metal ones - is found by a fisherman, and it can do amazing things, like grinding out food, or gold, or salt. The problem is, if you don't know the magic words to stop it, it will grind till kingdom come. And so the villan in the tale discovers, to his chagrin....
Sometimes this tale is also called "How the Sea became Salt" and you can guess how it got that way! Evil mills and evil millers!

As I recall, I was watching the tale of Tolkien's life, and it seems he spent some time near his home watching the local miller grinding bones in his mill. After a while the miller would be covered with fine white dust, making him look big and scary. JRR called him the Ogre! Apparently the man was rather grumpy about having kids hanging around his mill.
That, I think, is partly where JRR got his ideas for evil millers, not to mention the idea of industrialization as a modern evil.