Abby Epplett, Historian

Continuing my series on historical comparisons with The Lord of the Rings , I move on to “2 Concerning Pipe-weed”, the second section of the Prologue. Smoking is a nearly universal concept, with cultures around the real world and in fantasy cultivating and imbibing their own favorite herb. J.R.R. Tolkien was a known heavy smoker, rarely going anywhere without his pipe, and yet his writing shows that he understood the dark side to smoking. Tolkien may not have been aware of the more serious health risks to smoking at the time of the books’ publication; in fact, smoking in moderation was considered a normal, even healthy way of life. However, the most common plant species used for smoking — including tobacco, opium, cannabis, and coca — are linked to colonization, worker exploitation, and addiction. Big Pipe-weed in Middle-earth, much like Big Tobacco in the real world, is quietly pervasive throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings until the shocking final chapters of Par...

Last night — March 29, 2024 — I watched the latest installment of the 2024 season of Parked at Home hosted by the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BRVNHP) . During this webinar, chief of interpretation Todd Smith joined us from Fairbanks, AK to discuss Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (GAAR) . Park Ranger Mark Mello began by remarking how people tend to look down at phones and tablets instead of up at nature even when visiting a national park. Mello grew up in a relatively rural part of southeastern Massachusetts where he saw many stars at night. He first experienced severe light pollution as a teenager when he visited Boston and realized he could not see the stars. In contrast, while working at Arches National Park , he saw significantly more stars than at home and understood why the area was dedicated an International Dark Sky Place . The first people to inhabit the Blackstone River Valley had a close connection to the sky. The name Wampano...

On March 27, 2024 at 8:00 p.m., I attended the webinar AIA Archaeology hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America . Kisha Supernant , the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology , professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta , and a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta, led the talk entitled, “Finding the Children: Using Archaeology to Search for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada”. Supernant began this work in 2018 and is dedicated to making sure her work meets the needs of the community. She opened by acknowledging that archaeology is often viewed in a colonial context, where archaeologists extract the belongings and knowledge of Indigenous descendant communities and excluded them from conversations about how their culture will be represented. Supernant collaborated with three other scholars to edit the book Archaeologies of the Heart , which advocates for a diff...

Despite all my travels, I have never done Quick History Stops for local towns. Since I completed updates on my adventures from last museum season, and the next season does not start until April, I will be revisiting small towns within the Blackstone River Valley to showcase all the history they have to offer. The first stop is Whitinsville, a village of Northbridge, MA and one of six sites in Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park . These quick history stops have some overlap with the Wonders of Whitinsville ranger-led walking tour from June 2023 and is based on a class that I taught through Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Tufts University . Overlooking the mills and Mumford River is the James Fletcher Homestead built in 1770. James Fletcher constructed a blacksmith shop near his home in 1772. Twenty-one years later, in 1793, Paul Whitin  married Fletcher’s daughter Betsey . By 1809, Whitin and Fletcher established Northbridge Cotton Manufacturing Comp...

A major motif in The Lord of the Rings is the presence of large bodies of water, especially rivers and the Sea. In the Prologue “1 Concerning Hobbits”, the narrator explains that Hobbits had developed an antagonistic view of this type of water, along with the exploration and cultures associated with it. Hobbits of the Shire and the neighboring settlement Westfarthing lived not far from three Elf-towers located in the appropriately named Tower Hills and believed “one could see the Sea from the top of that [tallest] tower… no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it… the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death”. (8) This passage also describes their dualistic relationship with Elves because of that Race’s association with the Sea. Although Hobbits admired, even envied, Elf culture by appropriating their crafts and a variant of their writing system, along with being ruled by the Elf-like or Elf-descended Fallohide Hobbits, as discussed in my post last week , at t...

Yesterday — Thursday, March 21 at 7:00 p.m. — I watched the third installment of the 2024 season of Parked at Home featuring Amistad National Recreation Area in Texas with park archaeologist Jack Johnson. Park ranger Allison Horrocks of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park started the webinar by explaining the migration of butterflies between New England and Texas, which takes four generations to complete. She compared this migration to “The Butterfly Effect”, a theory that small events can affect people around the world. In this way, the dam and mill in Pawtucket, RI built in 1793 started social changes and industrialization across the young United States.

For my birthday, I received the book Greek and Roman Technology by K.D. White , published in 1984 by Thames & Hudson with Cornell University Press . While the author claimed this book was “no more than a survey, and a starting-off point” (173), his work was by far the most extensive information I have found on the subject. The book was divided into two parts. In Part I, White outlined the technologies available in Ancient Greece and Rome while explaining the environment in which these were developed. In Part II, White divided technologies into categories and explains each category in detail. At the back of the book were extensive information on White’s sources, several appendices, tables, a bibliography, endnotes, and an index. White opened his book with his “Introduction” pointing out what he claims to be inaccurate work done by other historians and archaeologists. He had written this book to fill “the need for an up-to-date account of the technical resources of the...

Back in November, I took a trip to Cumberland, RI to walk the trails around the former Cumberland Monastery , formerly called  Our Lady of the Valley Monastery . Once the home to Cistercians or Trappist monks, this property now contains the Cumberland Public Library , Cumberland Senior Center , and the Office of Children, Youth, and Learning for the town of Cumberland .

This post will be divided into three sections to explain how I used a combination of textual evidence, evolutionary theory, and historical fashion to illustrate the three breeds of Hobbits that will serve as my basis for designing future characters. In the first segment, I will discuss the evolutionary theories of the Hybrid-and-Replacement Model, Assimilation Model, and Convergent Evolution, relating these real-world theories about human history to descriptions presented in the first section of the Prologue, “1 Concerning Hobbits”, that appears in The Lord of the Rings: Part One, The Fellowship of the Ring . In the second segment, I review the physical descriptions of Hobbits overtly presented in the text along with making inferences based on this text and The Hobbit . Finally, I will describe the real-world 16 th and 17 th century cultures that inspired the outfits for these characters, including the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and the Sámi. The Lord of the Rings ...