Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

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Straelbora
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Straelbora »

jbook wrote:Celtic_settlement-Open-Air_Archaeological_Museum_Liptovska_Mara_-_Havranok,Slovakia_opt.jpg

This reminds me of what Greg posted earlier in the thread.
Looks like that's from the southern slopes of the Carpathians, other side of the ridge where my family comes from (northern slopes of the Carpathians). Very acute angle on the roof because of the large amounts of snow that fall there.
Vápnum sínum skala maðr velli á
feti ganga framar því at óvist er at vita
nær verðr á vegum úti geirs um þörf guma
Hávamál
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Elleth
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Elleth »

Oh I love those pictures - especially the wooden "celtic settlement"
The stone roundhouses look a little archaic to my eye for late Third Age, but I could easily believe there are a few cots scattered about not unlike them.

Also - I LOVE THAT HEARTH. :)
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Ursus
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Ursus »

What about some of the blackhouses and longhouses you see in Scotland?
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Kortoso »

This thread is reminding me how many great open-air museums there are in "Old Blighty":
Butser Ancient Farm
West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village
Weald & Downland Living Museum
Even on this side of the pond, we have a few resources:
Plimoth Plantation
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by caedmon »

Udwin wrote:While 'they're Dunedain', we also have to remember that, as Straelbora has said here and previously, Eriador by the late 3A is practically post-apocalyptic.
Consider: there hasn't been a unified kingdom in 2100+years...
(revisiting this post in response to Elleth's comment here)


The term 'Post-Apocalyptic' in a ME context rubs me the wrong way. The standard association of post-apoc is of the Road Warrior/Wasteland Warrior/FallOut 4 variety. This means eeking out a miserable existence in the ruin of former glory. New things are not produced, but repurposed from the detrious of the old. Roving bands prey on the feeble output of others, etc.

And this LOTR is certainly not. Yes, they are living in an age of diminished glory, with access to the ruins of ancient civilizations... but we are also not shown people living in and among the ruins. Things are either old and kept up (e.g. Rivendell, Minis Tirith, Tower of Cirth Ungol), desolate and remote (Weathertop, Argonath), or relatively contemporary and kept up (Bree, Esgaroth, etc.) There no mention of anything like 'the Old Arnorian wall' in Bree or the Shire, so I don't feel like that interaction is a part of anyone's daily life.

As for inspiration, 8-9th century Britain doesn't really fit the bill for post-apoc. Roman stuff isn't being routinely reused and repurposed, art is inspired by older models but dynamic and youthful, and people are not looking back to golden ages of plenty. 5th-6th c. and Britain does, for the sub-Roman Britons, (i.e. Gildas ), but we rarely go back that far for inspiration.
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Elleth
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Elleth »

I totally get where you're coming from. I hate to say "semantics" and yet... I think a great deal depends on what metric you're looking at, and especially what your mind's eye pictures at the word "post-apocalyptic." Certainly I ABSOLUTEY agree that for the average person in Eriador in the late Third Age, it doesn't feel like Mad Max. The fall was so long ago that everything I think must feel fairly normal - it's just a "normal" of surprisingly low population density, especially in Eriador.

I don't know how much of that is rampages of orcs and other evil things constantly keeping the Free Peoples in check, how much is the influence of the three elven rings acting on the world to encourage a kind of stasis to preserve the elven realms, how much is cultural: and yet Eriador of the Third Age still feels desolate to me, compared to the Arnor of the previous age.

... and so I think the term fits, but I absolutely get why it won't seem fitting to others.

(It's also possible I'm grossly misreading the text, and Eriador between the Shire and the Misty Mountains is more peopled than I believe - after all, a new town and inn every night doesn't make an adventure story. But it certainly doesn't seem to me to be the case)
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Straelbora »

caedmon wrote:
Udwin wrote:While 'they're Dunedain', we also have to remember that, as Straelbora has said here and previously, Eriador by the late 3A is practically post-apocalyptic.
Consider: there hasn't been a unified kingdom in 2100+years...
(revisiting this post in response to Elleth's comment here)


The term 'Post-Apocalyptic' in a ME context rubs me the wrong way. The standard association of post-apoc is of the Road Warrior/Wasteland Warrior/FallOut 4 variety. This means eeking out a miserable existence in the ruin of former glory. New things are not produced, but repurposed from the detrious of the old. Roving bands prey on the feeble output of others, etc.

And this LOTR is certainly not. Yes, they are living in an age of diminished glory, with access to the ruins of ancient civilizations... but we are also not shown people living in and among the ruins. Things are either old and kept up (e.g. Rivendell, Minis Tirith, Tower of Cirth Ungol), desolate and remote (Weathertop, Argonath), or relatively contemporary and kept up (Bree, Esgaroth, etc.) There no mention of anything like 'the Old Arnorian wall' in Bree or the Shire, so I don't feel like that interaction is a part of anyone's daily life.

As for inspiration, 8-9th century Britain doesn't really fit the bill for post-apoc. Roman stuff isn't being routinely reused and repurposed, art is inspired by older models but dynamic and youthful, and people are not looking back to golden ages of plenty. 5th-6th c. and Britain does, for the sub-Roman Britons, (i.e. Gildas ), but we rarely go back that far for inspiration.
I'm pretty sure I started referring to Middle-earth of the Third Age as 'post-apocalyptic' because that's how Tolkien described it in a letter, making a parallel to Anglo-Saxon England.
Vápnum sínum skala maðr velli á
feti ganga framar því at óvist er at vita
nær verðr á vegum úti geirs um þörf guma
Hávamál
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Elleth
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Elleth »

Fascinating! Do you by any chance remember which letter?
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Udwin
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Udwin »

Elleth wrote:Fascinating! Do you by any chance remember which letter?
If he did, I can't find it. Or at least, he wrote or worded it in his roundabout way that doesn't lend itself to direct searchability.
I also definitely don't get a 'wasteland' feel from late3A Eriador, as the Land itself is quite healthy and vigorous--the Brown Lands and the Dagorlad would definitely be a better fit for the public's mental conception of 'post-apocalyptic', blasted by Sauron's devilry or great battle.
Perhaps a better term for Eriador as a whole would be rewilded, as, aside from isolated islands of 'civilization' (the fields, pastures, and villages of the Bree-land, Rivendell, Angle, and the very human-built-landscape of the Shire), the landscape seems to have been allowed to return to a more primeval state. There might even be a bit of Fisher King stuff in there tying in with Aragorn's return.
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Thalion of Bree
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Thalion of Bree »

Not to be a necromancer and resurrect a dead thread, but check out this article on home heating throughout the Middle Ages!

https://www.medieval.eu/open-hearths-ovens-fireplaces/

Forgive my tardiness to this topic, but I'm stuck inside and already have all the work done that needs done for the day. So I was going through old threads, looking for topics that might shed some light on what a Dunedain ranger would do come wintertime. I cannot imagine they would all continue to adventure more than they had need to do, but they do live in a time of watchful peace at best and open war at worst, and so they probably would still have to range quite a bit for the protection of Eriador. Needs must in times of strife, as it were.
All the same, everyone needs a home to come back to at the end of the day, be it hall or camp. And those homes need to be heated somehow, which is a really interesting thing to study!
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Peter Remling
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Peter Remling »

Interesting article. While we all probably have seen examples of primitive baking in a clay oven, I have to wonder if instead of "hermetically sealing" the oven, they had a clay plug that would fit into the opening. The plug would be used to not only seal the opening but also used to heat the home as ceramics radiate their heat for extended times. Another thing comes to mind, that the baking would be done a lot more during the winter months as it would not only generate more heat for warming but also change the diet to include more recipes that include an element of baking. You'd see more salted fish, mutton and pork "pies" and less fresh meats.
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Thalion of Bree
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Re: Cot, hall, and hearth ... what does a Ranger come home to?

Post by Thalion of Bree »

So historically, there were multiple different ways of sealing your oven. The clay plug you mention is definitely one of them, but one I found out about more recently is to make a kind of flour-and-water paste and chink the gaps in the oven door with that. I suppose that would be useful in less clay-rich areas.
I personally found the advent of the German stove to be interesting, and possibly pertinent. Making a heater with the concave insides of old pots set into the outside so the heat has more surface area to radiate from is honestly genius, though I somewhat doubt that was why it was done. With all the broken pots one can find in a small Medieval community, it makes sense that people would try to do something with them. Imagine how many pots a farmstead would go through in a year, just allowing for accidental breakage! Gotta do something with all that smashed crockery. I imagine a farmstead in the Angle with a pile of broken up crocks and an old, cracked oven, and the matron of the house using some of the old pots to help fix it up—surprised and delighted when it heats the house better than it did before!
With that, I’d say you probably would see a good deal more baking. Which is saying a lot, considering that baking bread was a daily task on the historic homestead, and considering that most of the Dunedain settlements didn’t exactly constitute towns, it probably would be there, too. Pies, baked meats, etc. can all use one oven.
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