Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

As the name suggests, Bywater was a hobbit town in the Shire located by water, more specifically by the Water, the hobbit-name for a river that emptied into the Brandywine. Unlike Hobbiton, which appeared to be a late medieval village overseen by a landlord, Bywater was a commercial center occupied by working and middle-class hobbits who owned a shop or knew a trade. My design of Bywater considers many factors, including a map created by Tolkien, pre-historic town design, medieval markets towns, revivals of medieval architecture occurring around the time of the book’s publication, and design features specific to pubs and shops still used in modern England.

The Half-Underground Town: Skara Brae

I have already discussed underground houses while describing the architecture of Bag End and earthen dwellings when covering Hobbiton, but I have not yet mentioned houses with grassy roofs and stone walls built above and below the ground. In Sandwick, Orkney, Scotland is a Neolithic town now called Skara Brae where visitors can learn about people who lived over five thousand years ago. While one might expect such lodgings to be primitive, these people did have one technology familiar to those in the modern world: indoor toilets that drained into the nearby sea. The bathrooms of Bag End were not so far-fetched in comparison.

Today, Skara Brae is part of a larger complex of excavated sites called the Heart of Neolithic Orkney by UNESCO World Heritage Centre, which was dedicated around 1998 with the most recent boundary modifications in 2015. These sites include a “chambered tomb” called Maeshowe, much like the barrows of the Old Forest just outside the Shire, and a pair of stone henges similar to the most famous Stone Henge. As an added bonus, this area was memorialized in Orkneyinga Saga, an Old Norse story that took place between the 9^th and 13^th century as Vikings attacked Scotland and looted ancient sites, leaving runic graffiti along the way. Carvings were found throughout Maeshowe by mid-19^th century archaeologists, but Skara Brae was untouched.

Real Medieval Market Towns

Medieval market towns in Europe may have been larger than medieval villages but were nothing compared to the population of villages today. Timber-framed buildings in smaller towns tended to be one or two stories in height and have thatched or roughly shingled roofs. Buildings in larger towns could be three or four stories tall; be constructed of wood, stone, or brick; and have neatly shingled roofs colored black or red. These types of buildings still exist in the modern world. The Danish museum Middelaldercentret reproduces a 15^th century Scandinavian market town, while the town of Idstein in Germany mandates that builds be maintained to appear romantically medieval on the exterior, although casement windows have been changed for more energy-efficient modern designs, and streetlights are inevitably electric.

An illustration of a green sign with an insignia of a smiling green dragon holding a mug in his paw. The sign is attached to a stone building.

Rural shops had little to no signage, since most people shopping at the market were local, but shops in larger cities employed distinct iconography on their signs, a practice that stretched all the way back to medieval Britain. As mentioned last week when discussing pub culture, Romans distinguished a tavern or taberna by hanging a vine outside, which morphed into an ivy bush in Roman Britain. With the English love of a pub came the proliferation of inns and alehouses. Faced with the need to control the sale of ale, in 1393, Richard II decreed mandatory signage for all establishments serving alcohol so an ale-conner, also spelled aleconner and ale-kenner, could easily sample the fares to be sure the drinks were of high quality. Bad ale was apparently a regular problem, and the job was not enjoyed as one might have guessed. As for signage for fictional inns in Middle-earth, a king of Arnor may have decreed their usage, and his former subjects used them ever since.

An illustration of a light green sign with the insignia of a bush. The sign is attached to a stone building

Another important note for medieval towns and villages was the use of land to grow crops. Tolkien illustrated many fields surrounding Hobbiton, and I have likewise added many fields around my version of Bywater. Only two-thirds of the fields would have been planted at a time, as medieval Europeans used a three-field system of farming beginning in the 9^th century and perfected by the 11^th century. Oats, peas, beans, and barley were planted in the first field in autumn and harvested in spring. Grains like wheat, rye, and more barley were planted in spring in the second field for a late summer harvest. The third field laid fallow or unplanted. The people did not know why this system worked, but modern agricultural experts have learned that peas and beans help nitrogen stay in the soil, which acts like food for other plants.

An illustration of a straight dirt path between two rows of street trees. To the left is a brook and a brick mill. To the right and front are medieval style commercial buildings.

I think hobbits might have used a four-field system, as they would grow flowers in one of their fields. The overhead view of Bywater looks much like Keukenhof, one of the largest flower fields in Holland, the Netherlands. These roadside gardens also reminds me of wildflowers recently planted in England by the non-profit Pictorial Meadows with the encouragement of Plantlife, a strategic initiative to protect plants and fungi in the United Kingdom. Since 2013, the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has maintained at least eight miles of wildflowers along the main road. Other governments near Rotherham have since experimented with their own meadows, making the area more friendly to pollinators and commuters alike.

Mid-Century Medieval & Post-War Storybook Houses

After World War II, beginning in the mid-1950s and reaching its height during the mid-1970s, English-speaking countries went through a sudden reemergence of architectural and clothing styles previously used by people in the European Middle Ages. The style has recently been dubbed mid-century medieval or post-war storybook, as it has garnered interest in the field of consumer aesthetics research. A few factors are credited for the appearance of medieval-themed capitalist opportunities like the Steak and Ale restaurants, founded in 1966 and now limited to a single location in Minnesota. Fanzines such as Ancalagon, named for the largest dragon within Tolkien’s legendarium and first mentioned by Gandalf in “The Shadow of the Past” (The Fellowship of the Ring, 67), spread information about a genre of fantasy deemed “sword-and-sorcery”, distinguishing works with wizards from historical fiction and spy stories.

Illustration of a stone building with two round windows, one on each side of a round green door. Hedges on either side of a path leading to the door. To the right of the building is the corner of a similar building.

In the United States, young veterans returning from World War II and the Korean War married and started families in an era of relative prosperity, resulting in the Baby Boom that spiked population numbers. With the need for new housing to please the local boys who had seen the world, Southern California designers Jean and Shannon Vandruff, a pair of brothers with androgynous names, created “Cinderella Homes” with architectural details reminiscent of German and Swiss villages. These designs were popular throughout the 1950s and 60s, spawning cutesy suburbs as far as Kansas and Oklahoma.

An illustration of a small tavern with a wooden ceiling, hard-packed dirt floor, and an assortment of tables and chairs painted varying shades of green and yellow. The windows and door are round.

Surprisingly, this was not the first time a whimsical design style took hold of the area. A similar desire to design fancifully came after World War I, where survivors of trench warfare admired the English and French style architecture and took it home. Hollywood stars built “Robin Hood” style mansions in the Los Angeles area, while art director turned architect Harry Oliver designed both private and public buildings in a fantasy style, inspiring future designs at Disneyland. A generation later in the 1940s, husband-and-wife team Lawrence Joseph and Martha Young Joseph created “Fantasy Revival” apartments that have since been rebranded as “Hobbit Houses”. Lawrence had worked for Walt Disney Studios and included round windows in his design, while Martha specialized in preserving the structures, a task now assured by Los Angeles Conservancy via an easement.

Pub & Shop Architecture in England

Among the oldest known and extant shops or parts of shop architecture in England came from the 15^th century. Hawkers had originally set up temporary stalls at a market or fair, no different from modern farmers’ markets. Over the next three hundred years, preference for a stall shifted to preference for a permanent building. An example of these buildings is at Weald & Downland Living Museum in Singleton, Chichester, West Sussex, England. A timber-framed market hall from the early 16^th century was open on the first floor and “panelled up about breast high”, allowing customers to see the wares of the seller, while the second floor had typical walls to offer privacy and storage. As clever as this design was, Bywater hobbits would not appreciate it, as they did not build second floors on their houses.

Illustration of a bright yellow bar and matching yellow stools. Behind the bar are piles of wooden barrels and a stone fireplace. To the left of the bar is a stone wall with two round windows.

Modern commercial enterprises in England are frequently located on a High Street, which developed during the consumer revolution. With Great Britain and other European empires holding colonies across the globe, the modern Western desire to accumulate goods began during the 17^th and 18^th centuries and led to the First Industrial Revolution. The transatlantic triangle trade facilitated the passage of goods across the Atlantic Ocean at a rate never before seen. High Streets across England, or Fore Streets as they are called in Cornwall, were already the busiest roads in the town with many being built by the Romans centuries before. Adding shops along these roads was the simplest way to attract customers. The term “high street” morphed into “highway” after the 17^th century, which became synonymous with speedy travel by car.

An illustration of a large room with a long green counter stretching across the front. Behind the counter are rows of empty green shelves. On the back wall is a brick fireplace. A row of chandeliers hang from the ceiling. The wall are made of brick and have round windows.

As for the busyness of these post-medieval commercial districts, a 1748 report in the Ipswich Journal of the High Street in Ipswich, England noted booksellers, coffee houses, taverns, cabinet makers, “woollen-drapers” or cloth sellers, “haberdashers” or sewing supplies sellers, “peruke makers” who designed upper class wigs, and saddle makers as having shops along the street. While some of these careers seem fitting for the Bywater hobbits, several would not be of interest to them: not all were “lettered”, putting booksellers in low demand; they drank tea instead of coffee; and they prided themselves on their curly hair, making a peruke maker unnecessary.

The exteriors of pubs tend to appear similar to surrounding buildings. The oldest inn and alehouse builders preferred a timber-frame design with whitewashed walls or a mainly stone building with Gothic features, although many were a combination of these two styles. More modern pubs in the 19^th and 20^th centuries were constructed of brick, generally a red brick but sometimes brown brick or covered with white paint. Stand-alone pubs in mid-sized cities like Liverpool have Gothic Revival and Romanesque design features mimicking the towers, arches, steeply pitched roofs, and tall but narrow windows found in castles. Pubs in large cities like London are more likely to inhabit the bottom floor of a three- or four-story building with the painted wooden panels on the exterior surrounded by seasonal flowers. Pubs in small towns are often stand-alone buildings set closely to other buildings with the same architectural style and rarely more than one or two stories in height. For Bywater, I combined the size and style of small town pubs with the flowers found on large city pubs along with taking inspiration from the design of The Hand & Flowers gastropub in Marlow, Buckinghamshire.

The interiors of modern pubs have seemingly not changed much from their beginnings, with the exception of electric lighting and indoor plumbing, as many have been in business for hundreds of years. Architectural drawings of pubs and photographs generously provided by my editor revealed that smaller pubs tend to have a few uniform tables and chairs, while larger pubs have tables and chairs of varying sizes. Inns had lodgings on either the second or third floor depending on building size — called the first or second floor in England — above the dining room on the first floor, which the English call a ground floor.

I took my design of the corridor and four bedrooms in the Green Dragon, placed at the back of the inn due to the hobbit aversion to higher floors, directly from the 1903 plans of the Angel in Islington, London. Built by the British pub designer firm Eedle and Meyers, the building was designated a Historic England Listed Building at Grade II in 1991. Unlike the National Register of Historic Places in the United States where historical and aesthetic value is not distinguished, the grades of listed buildings in England indicate the importance of the structure. Ninety-two percent of buildings on the list are assigned Grade II, meaning that these are the lowest level of significance but still worth preserving.

A (Fictional) Tour of Bywater

I was fortunate that The Shire Preservation Society offers tours not only of Bag End but also of Bywater, which was excavated and reproduced thanks to the work of Tolkien. In a similar vein, during the 1870s, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann rediscovered Troy, now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, thanks to his interest in Homer’s The Iliad. Period-accurate hobbit-furniture reproductions have not only allowed visitors to better understand the lifestyle of hobbits at the end of the Third Age but also provide an ideal gift shop purchase, as an adult hobbit was about the size of a five to eight-year-old child of men. Additionally, the hobbit’s emphasis on comfort and practicality make the furniture the perfect choice for early elementary classrooms, especially for Montessori and Waldorf schools.

This virtual tour allows visitors to experience the town at the height of hobbits, both the average height of three feet and six inches tall (1.07 m) and an estimated height of Frodo, a debated topic that is given here as four feet and four inches (1.32 m), to be thoroughly explained in a future essay. Interspersed with the 3D model are animated frames to be used in the hypothetical animated musical. I hope you will enjoy the tour down High Street, stopping in the Green Dragon and the Ivy Bush, passing shops and storage smials, admiring the fields of produce and flowers, and ending at the post office.

Watch the virtual tour here: