Abby Epplett, Historian

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

Location plays an essential role in The Lord of the Rings . Already in the first section of the Prologue, “1 Concerning Hobbits”, several place names have been revealed, although not discussed in detail. These place names appear in clusters. Westmarch and the Shire are home to modern Hobbits. Greenwood the Great, which became Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and Eriador were the lands of their oldest ancestors. Different groups travelled by foot through Weathertop and the Wilderland, by boat on the Great River Anduin to Loudwater, Tharbad, and Dunland; or using a combination of means from Rivendell down the River Hoarwell. The lengthy paragraphs of invented places continue while describing the complexities of Hobbit colonization, which becomes increasingly difficult to decipher when places bear multiple names in distinct invented languages.

For the 1965/1966 edition of The Lord of the Rings released in the United States by Ballantine Books , J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a five-page foreword giving context to his writing process, explaining inspirations behind the story, and rebuking his critics. While Tolkien insisted in this essay, just as he did in letters to fans and during interviews, that little in the book was based on reality, the influence of industrialization and the World Wars, trends in music and art, and historical discoveries affected his ideology presented in the novels. I will use the literary criticism theory of cultural studies to examine this foreword by describing important events that occurred concurrently with the many drafts of the manuscript. Future posts will demonstrate how these events influenced the text itself and my hypothetical animated musical. Near the beginning of the letter, Tolkien explained that one of his primary interests was writing “the mythology and legends of the Eldar Days”

My tour through The Lord of the Rings enroute to creating the animated musical will take a different approach to projects created by other enthusiasts. I am interested in exploring a holistic view of the text in its historical context. For me, the societies and cultures, both real world and fantasy, in which the book was written and read has the same importance as the material in the book itself. I come from an academic background, meaning that I was in school for too long and have permanently warped my brain with professor jargon, but I will do my best to keep these essays manageable for a reader with a high school level education. With this in mind, I begin with the three-paragraph introductory essay written by Peter S. Beagle and first appearing in the 1973 edition of The Lord of the Rings: Part One, The Fellowship of the Ring , which I will call Fellowship for the remainder of this post. When Beagle penned his mini-essay, he was already a well-established fantasy aut

In the second part of my two-part series on quick history stops in Amesbury, MA, I marched across a training field used during the American Revolutionary War, walked a wooded trail, passed by multiple historic buildings, and visited two monuments.

After visiting Longfellow House Washington Headquarters and Cooper-Frost-Austin House during my history adventure through Cambridge, MA back in August 2023, my third major stop was Harvard Art Museums . Part of the Harvard University campus, the three museums making up the unified building are Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum. According to the official website , Fogg Museum is the eldest of the three, first opening in a different building in 1895. Four years earlier, in 1891, Elizabeth Perkins Fogg bequeathed $200,000 and Asian art to build a museum in honor of her predeceased husband, William Hayes Fogg , who made his fortune as a merchant in the China Trade just after the Opium Wars . (Mr. Fogg happened to be from South Berwick, ME, the same town as two Historic New England [HNE] properties: Sarah Orne Jewett House and Hamilton House .) Next came Busch-Reisinger Museum , originally founded as the Germanic M