Fire-Based Technology

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Elleth
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Fire-Based Technology

Post by Elleth »

I've been listening to the Fellowship audiobook while doing crafts and chores of late, and just came across this little bit of trivia yesterday:
'You may make a fire, if you can,' answered Gandalf. 'If there are any watchers that can endure this storm, then they can see us, fire or no.' But though they had brought wood and kindlings by the advice of Boromir, it passed the skill of Elf or even Dwarf to strike a flame that would hold amid the swirling wind or catch in the wet fuel. At last reluctantly Gandalf himself took a hand.
FOTR, Bk II, Chapter 3: The Ring Goes South
I read that as implying that Dwarves are known for their skill at kindling flame. Which I imagine gives a tinderbox crafted by their hands a bit extra of cache in the eyes of those that wander the wild. :)
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by caedmon »

Udwin wrote:Even though in Letter 178 Tolkien does suggests that his conception of the Shire is "in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee…”, which was 1897!!!
Someday, someone is going to have to work out the mystery of the Shire's economy, technology, and hidden heavy industry.

Perhaps Saruman's meddling was much more pervasive, and started earlier than we had ever expected?
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Elwindil »

http://www.henneth-annun.net/events_view.cfm?evid=816 this is a good read, and contains some information about Saruman's interest and meddling in the Shire, there's even some dates given, most are direct references from the text, but some are extrapolated from time of year and other comments from supporting characters.
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Straelbora »

caedmon wrote:
Udwin wrote:Even though in Letter 178 Tolkien does suggests that his conception of the Shire is "in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee…”, which was 1897!!!
Someday, someone is going to have to work out the mystery of the Shire's economy, technology, and hidden heavy industry.

Perhaps Saruman's meddling was much more pervasive, and started earlier than we had ever expected?
I'm thinking the whole 'Dwarvish tinder box' is not unlike 'Swiss watches.' In our world of planetary trade, it's hard to imagine technologies being limited to a small geographic area or culture, but it took Europeans centuries to figure out how East Asia was producing porcelain, etc.

I remember reading that in WWI, field glasses/binoculars were in very limited supply among the Western allies, with only high ranking officers having them, whereas in the Austro-Hungarian forces, many rank and file soldiers had them, because at the time, the only large capacity output facilities for high quality lense grinding in the world were located in Austria.

Technology is certainly not uniformly distributed in Middle-earth, but then again, it's not so on our Earth. I've read that something like a billion people today have never made a phone call. And think of the disparity in technology say, in 800 AD. The Angles and Saxons (Rohirrim) lived in a post-apocalyptic landscape of Roman ruins, less literate and lacking in large areas of knowledge that the people who lived there before them a couple of centuries early enjoyed. And at the same time, in China, they had silk, porcelain, paper (used in kites, playing cards, and soon, books), and gunpowder.
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Elleth »

Someday, someone is going to have to work out the mystery of the Shire's economy, technology, and hidden heavy industry.

Perhaps Saruman's meddling was much more pervasive, and started earlier than we had ever expected?
I think a lot falls out from Tolkien searching more for emotional resonances than trying to emulate a fully featured economy. He was interested in legendary universals, not flax trade routes.

Thus, I confess while I try to stick close to the text as I can, I've provisionally just written things out of my own mental model of Middle-earth if their existence implies a 19th century industrialized economy just offstage. Hobbits might play with sparklers of Gandalf's creation, but can't make the things themselves. Pipes are lit with coals rather than friction matches. Dwarves are superb craftsmen, but they're not proto-steampunk industrialists capable of Victorian era chemistry or mechanization.

YMMV, of course. :)
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Udwin »

(I kinda feel like we're getting off the topic of tinderboxes, move to new thread?)
Elleth wrote:Dwarves are superb craftsmen, but they're not proto-steampunk industrialists capable of Victorian era chemistry or mechanization.
The other day I read where Tolkien implies that dwarves are engaged in coal-mining (TH 1), and at times even "have to stoop" to it (1960 Hobbit, HoTH p779). While I suppose it's easy to imagine them using coke/stone-coal in their own “furnaces”, this doesn't explain the negative connotation in the later version.

I tend to think of stone-coal use associated with the Industrial period, though I suppose it could be used in smaller scale in village smithies. But--for me, at least--it doesn't fit with Tolkien's non-polluting, anti-Industry world.
I guess it's entirely possible they Are exporting it to (hobbit, Men, Elf) blacksmiths along the East Road. Maybe they don't like sharing the high-energy secret of their metallurgy, and would prefer that non-dwarves go on using char-coal, but hard times require them to trade more?
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Elleth »

Hunh - that is interesting.
I confess, a spot of coal burning in a pinch doesn't bother me - even bessemmer-like smelting of iron using tall mountain shafts as natural chimneys sounds entirely reasonable.
Stainless steels I don't know enough of metallurgy to comment on, but at least of late I've turned a bit of a blind eye to it.

Its things that implicitly demand a whole economy that I write out: where's the rubber come from for a friction match? More importantly, if you can make a self-lighting match, you can as I understand it make explosives: which implies either:

A. The matches came from Saruman, and Gandalf missed an unmistakable screaming beacon of his influence in the Shire for a half century right under his nose.
B. The mortals of Middle Earth have enough chemistry knowledge AND PRODUCTION INFRASTRUCTURE to turn the battles of Middle Earth into something more resembling the Napoleonic wars, if not WWI itself.

Neither seems to me remotely likely, so: no (pocket strike-anywhere) matches in my reading of M-E. Maybe those spunk sticks Le Loup talked about - don't know enough chemistry, but old as they are I suspect they may be defensible.
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Udwin »

I wonder... As it's written, the only M-e entities associated with explosions are Gandalf, Saruman, and...goblins! And who did goblins have a genocidal war with, just a scant 150 years earlier? Dwarves! Is it possible that the majority of the 'R&D' for strikeable matches originates with the goblins of the Misty Mtns? They can be quite inventive, and their rudimentary experiments could have been encountered by the dwarves during their sweep down the range to Azanulbizar, then perfected to be sold to hobbits (as 'dwarves have never yet taken to matches'). Consider the brimstone odor of matches--who else but goblins could appreciate it? : )
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Taurinor »

I'm with Udwin - could a mod split this off, please?

I was reading up on matches (on Wikipedia - I know, I know...), and I came across this description of the invention of a so-called noiseless match in 1836 - "He liquefied phosphorus in warm water and shook it in a glass vial, until it became granulated. He mixed the phosphorus with lead and gum arabic, poured the paste-like mass into a jar, and dipped the pine sticks into the mixture and let them dry. When he tried them that evening, all of them lit evenly."

The lead referred to is apparently lead dioxide, which can be found in a natural crystalline form as plattnerite. I read that phosphorus was discovered around 1669, when Hennig Brandt "heated residues from boiled-down urine in a furnace until the retort was red hot, where all of a sudden glowing fumes filled it and liquid dripped out, bursting into flames. He could catch the liquid in a jar and cover it, where it solidified and continued to give off a pale-green glow." That sounds utterly terrifying, but not technologically difficult. Gum arabic is a tree gum, and while that particular one might not be available in M-E, something similar must be.

I don't know that the denizens of Middle-Earth would think to combine all those things to make a match (there were many iterations of matches that had been invented before this one - the inventor didn't pull this combination out of thin air), but the technological infrastructure required doesn't seem particularly complex, especially if the matches were not mass produced (which would require synthesis of the compounds on a much larger scale). So could they? Maybe. Would they? I have no idea.

That got me thinking, though - if matches were a hobbit invention (rather than a dwarfish or goblin one, although Udwin makes a good case for that!), it might make for an interesting slant on why the Rangers are protecting the Shire. I don't think hobbits would think to weaponize match technology, but the Rangers might recognize the potential and seek to prevent others from finding out about it. Just idle musing on my part, though, of course.
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Kortoso »

Elleth wrote:Hunh - that is interesting.
I confess, a spot of coal burning in a pinch doesn't bother me - even bessemmer-like smelting of iron using tall mountain shafts as natural chimneys sounds entirely reasonable.
Stainless steels I don't know enough of metallurgy to comment on, but at least of late I've turned a bit of a blind eye to it.

Its things that implicitly demand a whole economy that I write out: where's the rubber come from for a friction match? More importantly, if you can make a self-lighting match, you can as I understand it make explosives: which implies either:

A. The matches came from Saruman, and Gandalf missed an unmistakable screaming beacon of his influence in the Shire for a half century right under his nose.
B. The mortals of Middle Earth have enough chemistry knowledge AND PRODUCTION INFRASTRUCTURE to turn the battles of Middle Earth into something more resembling the Napoleonic wars, if not WWI itself.

Neither seems to me remotely likely, so: no (pocket strike-anywhere) matches in my reading of M-E. Maybe those spunk sticks Le Loup talked about - don't know enough chemistry, but old as they are I suspect they may be defensible.
Didn't Gandalf make fireworks? That would imply a little more chemistry knowledge than simple matches and gunpowder.
(Or did he get them from Saruman before he turned bad?)
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Elleth »

Didn't Gandalf make fireworks? That would imply a little more chemistry knowledge than simple matches and gunpowder.
For Gandalf, yes.
For the hobbits of the Shire, not necessarily I think.
I wonder... As it's written, the only M-e entities associated with explosions are Gandalf, Saruman, and...goblins!
From this quote?
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.
The Hobbit, Chapter 4: Over Hill and Under Hill
I read that as not necessarily implying the goblins are making explosives at the time of the events in the Hobbit. Especially given as that quote comes from the early part of The Hobbit, where the professor is still in "Nighttime Fairy Story Reading" mode. If memory serves, not long before he implies hobbits are still around in the modern world, if rarely seen.
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Udwin »

Elleth wrote:Didn't Gandalf make fireworks? That would imply a little more chemistry knowledge than simple matches and gunpowder.
I had always figured his fireworks weren't necessarily chemically-based; as the keeper of Narya, fire is his 'element'(the speech before the Balrog is full of this), and he puts it to entertaining use for hobbits.
From this quote?
Yes, that's the one! I read it the same as you do (no actual goblin-explosives in the late 3A), but I wouldn't put it past them to muck about with some wicked phosphorus or sulfur.
There's also the bit just before when Gandy kills a few goblins on the Front Porch with "a terrible flash like lightning" and "a smell like gunpowder". I figure that's along the same anachronistic lines of hobbit umbrellas or the express-train...I do so wish he had completed the 1960 revision, would love to see if that line changed, seeing how he removed much of the modernish Narrator's voice.
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Re: Dwarven Tinderbox

Post by Straelbora »

Udwin wrote:(I kinda feel like we're getting off the topic of tinderboxes, move to new thread?)
Elleth wrote:Dwarves are superb craftsmen, but they're not proto-steampunk industrialists capable of Victorian era chemistry or mechanization.
The other day I read where Tolkien implies that dwarves are engaged in coal-mining (TH 1), and at times even "have to stoop" to it (1960 Hobbit, HoTH p779). While I suppose it's easy to imagine them using coke/stone-coal in their own “furnaces”, this doesn't explain the negative connotation in the later version.

I tend to think of stone-coal use associated with the Industrial period, though I suppose it could be used in smaller scale in village smithies. But--for me, at least--it doesn't fit with Tolkien's non-polluting, anti-Industry world.
I guess it's entirely possible they Are exporting it to (hobbit, Men, Elf) blacksmiths along the East Road. Maybe they don't like sharing the high-energy secret of their metallurgy, and would prefer that non-dwarves go on using char-coal, but hard times require them to trade more?
I think the negative connotation is that Dwarves are supposed to be mining precious metals and gems, not something as pedestrian as coal.

Coal was used, like peat, for home heating long before it was linked to industrialization.

As an aside, my parents are from a small coal-mining town in central Pennsylvania, and one of those memories that is completely fixed for me is the smell of coal stoves heating homes in the winter.
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Re: Fire-Based Technology

Post by Greg »

If you were looking for this discussion...it's over here now. ;)
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