Abby Epplett, Historian

After my visit to the nearby American Heritage Museum , I walked around downtown Hudson, MA to see a series of quick history stops. I used the Hudson Walking Tour to guide me down Main Street, along with visiting the riverwalk and Assabet Rail Trail.

I am taking a brief hiatus from working directly with The Lord of the Rings and other texts by J.R.R. Tolkien to talk about another facet of my project: musical theater. Tolkien’s works contain songs in a variety of genres along with implied dance sequences. My hypothetical animated musical will honor these creative choices. The reader may ask, why did Tolkien write in this distinctive style? While he was likely inspired by a myriad of historical European traditions — Celtic bards , Nordic skalds , Greek aoidoi , and other ancient singers — his stylistic choices to include lush descriptions of scenery, contemporary slang, and passages of dialog show similarities with lavish Broadway productions. Tolkien did not have the luxury of living in New York City and seeing the latest hit during its first run, and London’s West End did not support the type of musicals seen across the water , but movie editions allowed British fans to catch a glimpse of this new medium. Interestingly, th...

For my second stop during last Saturday’s adventure, I visited the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, MA. While the name “American Heritage” might make one think of apple pie, baseball, and fireworks, this museum was actually about military vehicles from around the world with a special focus on World War II. Opened five years ago based on the collections of the late Jacques M. Littlefield via the former Military Vehicle Technology Foundation, the massive 67,000 square foot (6,625 square meter) structure with a state-of-the-art lighting and audio-visual system showcases the largest collection of its kind in an empathetic and engaging way. The museum is part of the Collings Foundation , which tends to focus on aircraft.

Last Saturday, I took my first daytrip of the 2024 museum season. For the first stop, I visited General Artemas Ward House in Shrewsbury, MA. This historic house museum has been owned and maintained by Harvard University since a member of the Ward family donated a much larger property in 1925. The hour-long house tour follows multiple generations of this family, beginning with General Artemas Ward himself, who briefly served as the commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and as second-in-command under George Washington. The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976.

Do you enjoy reading convoluted histories of transcribed and translated documents with discrepancies between surviving copies and a missing original manuscript? Then look no further than The Red Book of Westmarch , also known at The Red Book of Periannath , which is the fiction origin of The Hobbit , The Lord of the Rings , and possibly other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including parts of The Silmarillion . A highly detailed explanation concerning the creation of this manuscript and its early copies is given in “Note on the Shire Records”, the final section of the Prologue found in The Lord of the Rings: Part One The Fellowship of the Ring . While the confusing contents of this two-and-a-quarter page explanation have been reviewed elsewhere, I will take a few paragraphs to explain what fictitious books were presumably used in Tolkien’s “translation”, the framing device for the work. Then, I will cover a few rediscovered works in the real world, along with several historical hoaxes...

Last night — Wednesday, April 17, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. — I watched the final webinar for this season of AIA Archaeology Hour . This talk was sponsored by the AIA Chicago Society and featured guest speaker Deborah Carlson , who works at Texas A&M teaching about ships and shipwrecks of Ancient Greece and Rome, along with being the president of the non-profit organization Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) . Her talk “Excavating a Shipwrecked Marble Column Destined for the Temple of Apollo at Claros” described the challenges of working underwater while explaining the history behind what she and her team discovered. Carlson explained that the INA and AIA are “sister organizations”. The INA recently celebrated its 50 th anniversary, as “Father of Underwater Archaeology” Dr. George Bass founded the organization in 1973. The shipwreck was found near Kizilburun in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey, an area with a wide range of wreck dates ranging from the 16 th cen...

While the physical exhibition currently touring the country through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) will not reach the northeast until late 2025 and early 2026, the online equivalent of The Bias Inside Us can be viewed at any time from anywhere in the world. This succinct and informative conversation piece on understanding bias comes with an educators toolkit and links to research used when created the exhibit. The experience includes a brief introduction, a six-part online exhibition, and a thorough “About” section to learn highlighting the many contributing voices. Introduction A clever scrolling digital art piece at the start of the introduction gave the definition of bias as used in the exhibition along with the increasingly familiar quote, “We are all members of the same race… the human race.” Unfortunately, because I usually set my browser font size to “large” due to visual impairment, the bottom of each card in the section overv...

Last Saturday, April 13, I finally visited the Massachusetts State Police Museum located down the street in Whitinsville, MA, which had received three previous mentions on my blog: during the 250 th anniversary of the founding of Northbridge, MA ; the National Park Service Ranger Walkabout “Wonders of Whitinsville” ; and my Quick History Stops of Whitinsville from a few weeks ago. I received a personalized one-on-one tour from a retired state trooper and learned both the history of the police force along with its connections to other events in Massachusetts history.

Continuing my essay series on The Lord of the Rings , I will discuss the fourth section of the Prologue appearing in Part One The Fellowship of the Ring : “4 Of the Finding of the Ring”. This section reviewed events from The Hobbit , especially “Chapter V Riddles in the Dark”. For the first time, the narrator provided a year for the event: Shire-Reckoning (S.R.) 1341, which is Third Age (T.A.) 2941. The home of the dwarves, called Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit , now has an elvish or Sindarin name, Erebor. The narrator recalled Thorin’s death after the Battle of the Five Arms, and the description of Gollum was somewhat clearer than in The Hobbit : he is “little”, has “large flat feet”, “pale luminous eyes” (13) that turn green when searching for the ring, and ate both raw fish and orcs, originally called goblins, which he killed by strangulation. The narrator reviewed the ring itself: “a ring of gold that made its wearer invisible” (13) and the only thing loved by Gollum, which ...

Last night — April 11, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. — was the sixth and final installment of the webinar series Parked at Home hosted by the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BRVNHP) . Park ranger Allison Horrocks led the session with guest speaker Andrew Donovan, supervisory park ranger at Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site and Salem Maritime National Historic Site , which I most recently visited in October 2022 . Sherrolyn K. provided American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation. I had last visited Saugus Iron Works about eight years ago and appreciated the opportunity to refresh my knowledge about post-medieval mills leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Horrocks explained that Saugus, MA and Pawtucket, RI — one of six sites within BRVNHP — shared a business connection. The founder of Pawtucket in 1671, Joseph Jenks Jr. , originally settled in Saugus with his father, iron worker Joseph Jenks Sr. Years earlier while in England, the Jenks Sr. had worked for ...