Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

Since the late medieval period, pubs have been a culturally and historically significant aspect of English life. Accordingly, the largest historical organizations in the region put forth great effort to catalogue and preserve such establishments. Historic England lists England’s Historic Pubs to commemorate businesses and their buildings that have shaped local identity, Historic UK has identified the oldest pubs and inns in England, while Heritage Pubs and Historic Pub Interiors recorded by The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) gives a glimpse of how pub-going has changed over hundreds of years, and how some aspects have remained the same.

To best understand what makes a pub, I have decided to focus on two aspects: the history and culture of pubs, and the architectural features of these buildings and the surrounding environment. I will focus on the former aspect this week and the latter aspect next week, complete with illustrations on what fictional pubs in the Shire might have looked like.

History & Linguistics

The concept of a place where a traveling stranger could stay overnight, eat among the wealthier locals, and feed his horses flourished in England beginning around 1350. As covered extensively in previous posts, the decline of feudalism led to more freedom for the working class, also known as peasants, allowing them to travel without being tied to the land under the authority of a feudal lord. Additionally, protoindustrialization or a rise in technology caused larger towns to appear, especially at ports and crossroads. Among the most successful early manufacturing industries involved cloth making. Even before the machinery of the First Industrial Revolution, the availability of cheaper clothing allowed people to use their resources elsewhere.

Many words appear to be synonyms for taverns, including inns, alehouses, bars, clubs, and pubs. However, these words have distinct meanings and arrived in English at different times. The word “inn” came from Old English and meant a “public house with lodging” as early as c. 1200, while “tavern” came from Latin via Old French around 1300 thanks to the Normans invasion. Although the Latin taburna was synonymous with inn, the English “tavern” was an “establishment that sells and serve drinks and food” without the boarding element. “Pub” is slang from 1859, short for “public house”, which was synonymous with “inn” from the 1660s and with “tavern” from 1768. “Alehouse” came from Old English, and famous English dictionary compiler Samuel Johnson lets us know that only ale was served at alehouses, which as an “unhopped fermented malt liquor” was distinct from beer as a “hopped malt liquor”, while taverns sold wine; apparently the term “tipling-house” was a synonym for alehouse at the time of publication in 1755. A “bar” became synonym for “tavern” in the 1590s, referring to the counter where drinks were served, while the word “club” meaning “tavern” appeared around the 1660s.

With that bit of pedantry aside, the important distinction to recall is that between 1350 and 1600, alehouses technically served a lower-class customer, while inns tended to have wealthier clientele, and taverns apparently filled the middle, although that French-based word was less popular to the general public. By 1577, the English government had put rules around what establishment could be considered an alehouse, tavern, or inn. The number of inns and alehouses fluctuated but generally increased over time, with alehouses being more common. Alehouse keepers could receive a permit to brew their own beverages, and as many as two-thirds did so. When Pippin wanted to visit the Golden Perch because it sold the “best beer in the Eastfarthing” (The Fellowship of the Ring, 99), he mentioned a beverage that could not be purchased anywhere else.

Additionally, within these categories were hierarchies, with some establishments considered more reputable than others. In the fictional town of Bywater, the Ivy Bush and the Green Dragon must have been competitors, and their reputation seemingly changed over time. During Bilbo’s adventure in Shire Reckoning (S.R.) 1341, the Green Dragon was an inn serving the wealthy elite, as the dwarf king Thorin II Oakenshield and his group rented from the establishment, while the manor owner Bilbo was familiar with it. The Ivy Bush was featured in S.R. 1401 as a place for working-class Hobbits, since the Gaffer and his companions held forth there. By S.R. 1418, Sam and his working-class friends gathered in the Green Dragon, showing that the reputation of the establishment was in decline.

In the essay “The English Urban Inn 1560-1760” with the 1973 book Perspectives in English Urban History, medievalist Alan Milner Everitt griped that “the historian will find the literature of the English inn for the most part a wretched farrago of romantic legends…”, meaning that the fun inns appearing in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, and certainly Hollywood movies do not bear resemblance to the inns of history. I give bonus points to Everitt in his use of the word “farrago”, coming to English from Latin in the 1630s and meaning “a confused mix”. Besides his love of antiquated vocabulary, Everitt noted that while “[t]he golden age of the English inn” is commonly believed to have lasted between the reigns of Queen Elizabeth to Queen Victoria, or from 1558 to 1901, plenty of establishments appeared in medieval England before the first queen, while people who lived after the second queen prefer a hotel.

Social Life

In the complex hierarchy of people living in post-medieval towns, innkeepers were among the wealthiest. While more on the life of the innkeeper will be explained in a future essay on Barleyman Butterbur and his Prancing Pony, the lives of the people who patronize the inns and similar businesses is my focus here. As someone who has no interest in going to a pub, I rely on ethnographic studies to understand what goes on. As any fiction reader or movie watcher knows, common activities include talking, singing, drinking, and playing games. However, these activities occur within a social and cultural context, meaning the way that people behave while at the pub will change depending on whether they are with family, friends, coworkers, or strangers, and what their responsibilities are in the outside world. Studies on this phenomenon have only been conducted since the 1970s and show what one might expect: some modern pubs attract rowdy young men, some are popular among older men, others are good for dates, and a few are family-oriented.

Many drinking establishments in the post-medieval period were likewise co-ed. Both men and women visited, especially the nicer establishments, to enjoy live music and a meal. Famed English diarist Samuel Pepys went on alehouse dates with his wife, Elisabeth de St Michel Pepys, because they liked “harp and viallin”, his own spelling of violin. Sentiment on tavern-going shifted in the late Victorian Era because of our friend the temperance movement, where upper-class women branded lower-class women who frequented pubs as being on the same level as sex workers.

This division of inns into different categories was evident in Middle-earth, as the older hobbits-lads prefer Ivy Bush, the younger hobbit-lads prefer Green Dragon. The Prancing Pony seems open to people of all ages, genders, classes, and racial backgrounds, as Frodo’s perspective mentioned the “gathering was large and mixed” (Fellowship, 175). Less clear was Golden Perch, which was either a family pub or the hangout of younger hobbit-lads. Even the wildest activity in the inns of Middle-earth, likely Frodo giving his song and dance routine on a table Prancing Pony, was tame compared to pub activity in the Real World. This narrative choice was in line with the text’s self-censorship, which relinquishes darker elements to subtext and allows families to enjoy a book written for adults.

Names

I pride myself in having a reference book for everything, and this topic is no different. Today, I turn to The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pub Names compiled by Leslie Duncan and Gordon Wright in 1994. The named inns in The Lord of the Rings were not as unique as they might seem to the casual reader. The Green Dragon is a fairly common pub name in the “Dragon” category, the other favorite colors being red and golden. Dragons appearing on tavern signs in the Real World are often accompanied by St. George, famous slayer of a dragon often portrayed with green scales. In signage depictions, the knight and monster tend to be “having a rest… drinking a flagon of ale”.

The Ivy Bush likewise has a common pub name, as Ancient Romans apparently used poles decorated with evergreens to indicate wine for sale. Other popular bush varieties include holly, elder, and mulberry. Some taverns instead focus on the ivy component, including ivy bowers, ivy cottages, ivy greens, ivy houses, ivy inns, and ivy leaves.

A good deal of modern pubs use “golden” as a modifier, much like the Golden Perch in the Eastfarthing. This included objects such as arrows, balls, a bannock or oatmeal cake, which were also enjoyed by the people of Rivendell (The Hobbit, 48), a bowler or hat, cross, cup, and key; animals such as a cock or rooster, hind or deer, lion, and swift; and legends like a dragon, fleece, knight, and martlet or magic bird with no feet. The use of a perch or freshwater fish is comparatively less common, although it may be a pun on visitors who “perch” at the bar to have their drinks.

Finally, while the Prancing Pony in Bree has a fictional name, a Prancing Horse exists in Newbury, England, and the inn claims the insignia is now used on the Ferrari car logo. Plenty of pubs and their signs feature ponies, who may play polo, pull a cart, haul coal from a mining pit, or trot. The larger horse is a more popular choice for signage, with 160 results versus the 8 results for pony, and 2 results for a nag or “small riding horse of pony”, often one nearly bound for the glue factory and not unlike poor Bill the Pony (Fellowship, 202).

Songs

Taverns are known as locations for music, whether songs are performed by tipsy customers, professional musicians, a jukebox, or over a modern speaker system. Older medieval secular music is not well attested, but rising literacy across Europe during the 16^th and 17^th centuries due to a variety of factors — such as the decline of feudalism, the rise of protoindustrialization, and the Age of Enlightenment — led to a larger written record, which included tavern songs.

William Shakespeare wrote songs into his plays during the Elizabethan era. This style of performance maintained popularity throughout the reigns of James I and Charles I, but Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell banned this type of fun during his rule from 1649 to 1658. With the return of King Charles II in 1660, also known as the Restoration, the “licentious” and “bawdy” songs that Elizabethan people loved came back in style, along with French music that Charles had learned as an exiled child. For our linguistics fact of this section, the 1814 term “glee club” meaning an a cappella group often found on college campuses and known for singing popular music, originated in the 1650s with the term “glee” meaning “musical composition for three or more solo voices, unaccompanied, in contrasting movement”.

As for the recording and selling of songs, broadside ballads were peddled on street corners and at country fairs between the 16^th and 19^th centuries in England. The sellers would sing a sample of their wares, allowing passers-by to recognize the music. Literate purchasers would sing ballads for their illiterate friends, allowing the song to be transmitted orally and change over time. In this way, ballads and folk songs often had the same origin. A folk song might be written down to become a ballad, while a ballad might be sung aloud and altered to become a folk song.

The content of these songs falls into the categories one might expect. In colloquial English, the most common themes seem to be “I like this girl”, “We are drinking alcohol”, “This is my job, and I hate it”, “I heard about this guy who sounds really cool”, and “This song is just silly.” Fortunately for the pedants, people more articulate than me have taken the time to compile folk songs and broadside ballads into a sophisticated database system available online in the Roud Indexes, making this the second highly specific reference source I am using today. The system is named for Steve Roud who compiled almost a quarter of a million references first using 3x5 index cards and now hosting at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the English Folk Dance & Song Society. He has also worked with the American Folklife Center and the Library of Congress in the United States.

While only one pub song, “The Man in the Moon Stayed Up to Late”, was sung by Frodo in the Prancing Pony in the original text, the opportunity to add a few more songs seemed too good to pass up. In the hypothetical musical, an introduction song will take place in the Ivy Bush, its reprisal will occur just outside the Green Dragon, and an additional song to establish setting will occur in the Prancing Pony. Thorough explanations of these songs, including their relationship to songs within the Roud Indexes and the structure of modern musicals, will appear in later essays.

Conclusion

For nearly seven hundred years, pubs have provided a place for people to gather, enjoy a meal, and learn a new song. Historical organizations and local economies continue to work together to guarantee these establishments can serve many generations to come. While I have no desire to visit a pub, I understand how these businesses would act as the hub of a social circle, along with a factor in defining the complex hierarchy of a community. The Gaffer’s tales in the Ivy Bush gave him the opportunity to create social capital, giving value to his community not through good works and charitable donations, since he did not appear to have the capacity to do either, but through providing information on the manor owners, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who still held influence over the town despite the apparent decline of feudalism. The first lines of dialogue within the original text were given to these tavern-goers spreading incorrect information about their “betters”, as the Gaffer called wealthier hobbits. By placing the first conversation in a familiar setting populated by common people, Tolkien made the original reader feel at home even in a fantasy setting, along with continuing a theme he had established in The Hobbit: the most important things in the world are not the great battles or powerful people, but simple times enjoyed among family and friends.

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical