Tea at Trianon: The Original One Ring?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, April 5, 2013

The Original One Ring?

From The Hobbit Movie:

Dave Green, the property manager of The Vyne, now acquired by The National Trust since the 1930s, claimed that there is more to the story than this being simply an Iron Age ring; it was found at an iron-age site with ancient mine workings known as “the Dwarf’s Hill”, there was a curse on the thief who stole the ring, and a strong link to Tolkien himself. Tolkien, as a professor of Anglo-Saxon would certainly have been aware of its existence. He certainly knew of the curse and had been researching it for two years before writing The Hobbit in 1937.

The ring’s bona fides can be charted as authentic, because its history can be traced through its original owners the Chute family, which for generations was interested in politics, collecting, and antiquarian research. The ring was probably found in 1785 by a farmer ploughing a few miles away from where it now rests, but is known to be originally from Silchester, a pre-Roman British town. (Read entire post.)