Bricks and Brick-making in the Shire

Ian Smalley & Sally Bijl Geography Department, Leicester University, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK (ijs4@le.ac.uk)

Bricks make only a small appearance in the Lord of the Rings; but they are worth a brief look and a modest consideration. Bricks are found in the Shire, they are used sparingly by the hobbits; they are not used in any obvious sense by the other peoples encountered in the texts. The dwarves have stone and improve caves, the elves should favour wooden construction, although Elronds house could be of stone, the men of Gondor took to stone construction and the Riders of Rohan to wood; the enemy favours iron. Bricks are found in the Shire, which means they are encountered twice in the great tale, and our view of them changes on each encounter. We might distinguish early bricks and late bricks. The early bricks are acceptable and neutral. When the hobbits, newly embarked on the adventure, encounter Farmer Maggot there is a mention.. The Maggots, and the Puddifoots of Stock, and most of the inhabitants of the Marish, were house dwellers; and this farm was stoutly built of brick Stoutly suggests approbation, but its a modest approbation. Tolkien was ambivalent about bricks, they were seen as essentially industrial artefacts and therefore to be shunned and denigrated, but they do represent the very simplest of

technological objects which predated the industrial revolution by many centuries. The brick can be made by hand, it is a craft object as well as an industrial product. A well made brick may not have the status of a well made sword, but it belongs in the same group of objects. When the adventurers return and its time for the Shire to be scoured we see a different aspect of the late bricks; we encounter The Shirriff house at Frogmorton built of ugly pale bricks And later on, at the industrialised Sandymans mill frowning and dirty ugliness a great brick building straddling the stream and polluting it. But all is not lost, redemption is possible. Before Yule not a brick was left standing of the new Shirriff houses but the bricks were used to repair many an old hole, to make it snugger and drier. The hobbits must have been quite good at reclaiming bricks; a task which would have been made easier by the use of lime mortar rather than other cementing materials in the original constructions. The old hole can accommodate new bricks; we can accept careful innovation. The travellers were away for years(S.R. 1418-1419) and for most of that time life in the Shire was normal and undisturbed. Disturbance arrived after the fall of Isengard so the mischief was done in a relatively rapid time. Now we have seen that the hobbits were desultory users of bricks, which suggests that no great stocks were kept. This means that the bricks for the new Shirriff houses, and the new mill would have to be made and delivered in a very short time. There was obviously no brick industry as such in the Shire, the bricks were made by individual craftsmen or small groups, as in mediaeval England (where some beautiful bricks were made). The firing would be in clamps with wood as fuel. We suggest that the most probable brick making region would be the Marish, and the country around the settlement of Stock.

Stock is across the river from Buckland and one might have expected an input of Stock bricks to build Brandy Hall. But Brandy Hall is very close to the river, it looks to be constructed into a loess bluff, it is a brilliant hobbit building on the grand scale. There might be some exterior brick details but essentially Brandy Hall is a hobbit hole writ large. Buckingham Palace may be built of Kentish stock bricks, but Brandy Hall is not built of bricks from Stock. We suspect that the Stock brick could have been very like the north Kent stock brick. The north Kent stocks were yellow, a pale brick; they were made from the local loess, called brickearth which was in the vicinity courtesy of the rivers Medway and Thames. The Stock bricks and the Brandywine have the same position in the Shire. We have already suggested (see Scribd.com) that the Shire is a loess region; if it was then, the loess being a relatively recent deposit, there would be easily accessible brick making material well distributed in the region. Probably a concentration near the large river, but outlying deposits probably existed, as in sothern England. The loess in southern England was made into bricks in mediaeval times and this served to concentrate pre-1500 brick buildings into the south-east part of the country. The burst of brickmaking required for Sarumans attack on the Shire might have been accomplished if there were easily accessible loessic brickearth deposits for the small-scale brick makers to exploit. There would not have been time to utilise harder, older clays like the Jurassic clays of Middle England which are used to make the well-known Fletton bricks. Actually our simple dichotomy into early bricks and late bricks has to be somewhat modified, we make an unexpected visit to the Shire halfway through the adventure- via Galadriels mirror. What it reveals means that

we have to enlarge our speculation somewhat. Sam sees a vision of Sandymans mill: But now Sam noticed that the Old Mill had vanished and a large red-brick building was being put up where it had stood. Lots of folk were busily at work. There was a tall red[brick] chimney nearby. Black smoke seemed to cloud the surface of the Mirror. The bricks used at Hobbiton were red bricks. Can these red bricks be produced from the same brickearth that produces yellow Stock bricks? Yes they can. We think that Hobbiton bricks were red because they were fired unmodified (like tiles and terra-cotta stuff made in Kent and Essex); the Stock bricks were fired with admixtures included, as were the stock bricks of north Kent. Hobbiton is a long way (in terms of brick transportation) from Stock; we know that pale bricks were used at Frogmorton, but of course that is a lot nearer to Stock (an earlier version of this discussion appeared in Amon Hen)