Tolkien Trewsday Week 6: Celebrations & Festivals – Tuesday 4 April 2023

Week 6: “Celebrations & Festivals” – Tuesday 4 April 2023
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien

Welcome to #TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday.

The hub for this Twitter-based event can be found here.

Tolkien Trewsday (the Hobbit name for Tuesday!) invites the #Tolkien community to form a fellowship to collectively tweet about a pre-selected theme about Tolkien, his works and his life.

Each week a new theme will be selected, often via a poll or by a guest host/curator, and together we will build a collective outpouring of creativity, knowledge and love for J.R.R. Tolkien and the adaptions based on his works.

The inspiration for this comes from the highly successful #FolkloreThursday which engaged lovers of Folklore, academics, artists and more to use Twitter to discuss it.

We only ask that if you are joining in, please do so with courtesy and kindness in your tweets. This is a positive-action community event, open to all and supportive of fan diversity. Intolerance, racism, bigotry have no place here.

💬 This week’s theme
Week 6: “Celebrations & Festivals” – Tuesday 4 April 2023

Following a poll, Tolkien Trewsday invites you to join us for a day focused on the theme of "Celebrations and Festivals". From Dragontide (The One Ring roleplaying game 1e by Cubicle Games) to Bilbo’s leaving Party in “The Lord of the Rings”, festivals and celebrations are part of life in Middle-earth which bring people together.

How to contribute

We are keeping it very simple. All you need to do to join is tweet something about the current week’s theme and use the following hashtags in your tweet:
#TolkienTrewsday #TolkienTuesday #Tolkien

Your tweet, besides following the theme, can be anything. Examples include:

• Celebrations/festivals in adaptions
• LOTRO seasonal festivals
• The Party Tree
• Celebrations after battles

Sadoc preparing his speech for the Harvest Festival in Amazon Studio’s
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

Week Six – Harvest and Harfoots in “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”

Celebrations and festivals are events that bring people together and strengthen bonds within communities. Whether it is important birthday parties in the Shire or the remembrances such as the defeat of Smaug, called “Dragontide” in the One Ring roleplaying game (1e) by Cubicle 7, such events mark occasions where people stop everyday work to come together. In The Lord of the Rings Online there are quite a few of these “special events” to bring players together and five are based on the seasons: Spring, Midsummer, Farmers Faire, Harvest and Yule.

Other Tolkien-related games and adaptions have festivals too, some centred around the seasons and others linked to events. The Tolkien Gateway online encyclopaedia, winner of the Tolkien Society Awards 2023 for “Best Online Content”, has entries for “Festivals and Feasts” including “Bilbo's Farewell Party”, “The Great Bear dance” and “Nost-na-Lothion” (“Birth of Flowers – Spring).

I want to return to “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” adaption for this brief post today and look at a festival held by the Harfoots in particular. What follows are notes for ongoing research looking at the representation of Harfoot culture in Amazon’s TV series and some idea about what is going on with their “Harvest festival”.  More research needs to be done but I present a few ideas here.

Dilly gathering berries and making a discovery at the old farm in Amazon Studio’s
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 1: A Shadow of the Past)

The Harfoot story for Season One of “The Rings of Power” is about the build-up to a festival and eventual annual migration from one place of safety to another in the ongoing routine of the Harfoot characters. The first mention of the “Harvest festival” is in Episode One (“A Shadow of the Past”) whilst Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot and Poppy Proudfellow have taken a group of young Harfoots to the old farm which is meant to be off-limits. They gather berries here. When they discover evidence of wolves nearby, Nori rallies the children with the reward of:

“First one back to camp gets the first pie of the Harvest Fest.”

 -- Nori, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Episode 1: A Shadow of the Past

The Harfoots at this point in their existence are hunter-gatherers and don’t have organised agriculture that we see during the Third Age in the Shire. The migration appears to travel between safe havens where the Harfoots stock up on certain food types. As Nori says to the Stranger:  

“You see, we winter in Old Forest, and mid-summer, we make for Norfield Glen to snail when snailing’s good. And at the first blush of the oak leaves, we head to the Grove. A whole orchard, popping with bar apples, plums, apricots, carrots, you’ll… you’ll love it.”

-- Nori, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Episode 5: Partings

Norfield Glen is the Summer safe haven for Harfoots whilst the Grove is the Autumn/Fall one. The sustenance available is very much seasonal. In the build up to the Harvest festival you can see the Harfoots are gathering vegetables, snails, summer fruits (various types of berries) and small animals like coneys (rabbits).

Largo carrying a coney at the Norfield Glen Harfoot encampment in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 1: A Shadow of the Past).

In “Episode 2: Adrift” preparations are further on their way when a tent is being put up by Sadoc, Largo and others. This sadly proves hazardous for Largo when one of the tent ropes snaps and he twists his leg holding up a pole. The injury will later put his partaking in the migration into question. Hobbits and tents seem to go hand in hand as this preparation scene for Bilbo and Frodo’s upcoming birthdays from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” shows:

“One morning the hobbits woke to find the large field, south of Bilbo’s front door, covered with ropes and poles for tents and pavilions. A special entrance was cut into the bank leading to the road, and wide steps and a large white gate were built there.
…
The tents began to go up. There was a specially large pavilion, so big that the tree that grew in the field was right inside it, and stood proudly near one end, at the head of the chief table. Lanterns were hung on all its branches. More promising still (to the hobbits’ mind): an enormous open-air kitchen was erected in the north corner of the field. A draught of cooks, from every inn and eating- house for miles around, arrived to supplement the dwarves and other odd folk that were quartered at Bag End. Excitement rose to its height.”

Tolkien, J.R.R., “Book One Chapter 1: A Long-expected Party” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2022 Kindle edition, HarperCollins: London)

This event became known as Bilbo’s Farewell Party held in the Party field around the Party Tree. In a similar fashion, the Harfoots held their Harvest Festival with tents and more, and also later in the evening had a remembrance service for Harfoots lost in previous migrations, the names of which Sadoc reads aloud from what Marigold calls “book of the left-behinds”.

The Harfoot Party tent in Norfield Glen in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 2: Adrift).

In the scene where some of the Elders (Sadoc and Malva) attempt to question Nori about her father’s condition, we get a glimpse of one of the festival costumes in the form of an older Harfoot wearing small “antlers” which I’ll note later.

The “antler man” along with Malva and Sadoc in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 2: Adrift).

In episode 3 (“Adar”) we finally see the Harfoot Harvest Festival. With there being a lot of visuals and so much going on, I’ll do try to cover some of the details I have noticed and hint at what I think is going on along with sources for ideas behind what we are seeing. This is part of my ongoing research, so expect more at a later date.

The festival starts with a parade of Harfoots in mixed costumes – some are animal masks, some wear decorative headwear taken from the local flora and some are full costumes. The first we see is a Harfoot with a crow mask and black shaggy coat resembling the wings and body of a bird. In the West Cornwall town of Penzance during their Mayday celebration, in a procession called “May Horns”, a crow/raven costumed character known as “Old Ned” must be resurrected three times by horns and whistles during a ceremony to mark the passing of Winter into Summer.

The crow appears in Amazon Studio’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

Next we see more costumed Harfoots this time representing a mortal danger or peril, as Nori later calls them, in the form of wolves. The masks are angular with many teeth in their snapping jaws whilst the body is again shaggy and black. These wolves mix in the procession with Harfoots with simpler clothes but sporting headgear adorned foliage and fruit.

The wolves and other processional Harfoots in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

We get our first glimpse of one of the Skekler costumes alongside the crow in full wingspan next.

The Skeklers and the crow in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

The Harfoots in the procession so far seem to be younger members of the tribe and the adults appear to be at the pack of the procession wearing straw and fruit/floral headwear whilst shaking rattles.

Harfoots with rattles in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

The procession then heads into the encampment proper with Sadoc leading the Skekler children, the crow and the wolves, where they march then walk around Sadoc in circles. The rest of the procession joins them. 

The procession enters the Harfoot encampment in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

Skekling is a tradition from the Shetland islands and the Harfoot children’s costumes look remarkably like some of the images I discovered and tweeted about in a thread here. At the time I predicted the Harfoots stole the corn to make such costumes from a nearby human settlement, but as we now know the Harfoots were far from the Southlands, being up in a region that will later become the Brown Lands. We also see the corn the Harfoots would have foraged when the two hunters’ movements are being watched.

Sadoc and the Harfoot children lead the procession into the encampment in 

Amazon Studio’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

In a thread about the connection between Harfoots and apples here,  I put the theory forward that the Harfoot children’s Skekler costumes could well represent another animal: the hedgehog. In medieval Bestiary lore, hedgehogs go to orchards where they roll around on the ground, collecting apples on their spines to eat later. The hats worn by the children have ball-shapes and the corn itself looks a little like hedgehog spines. This would tie in with the strong Harfoot connection to apples.

We also see the Harfoot sporting the antler headgear again, during the encampment sequence, and I speculate whether he is meant to represent some form of deer or “horned being” in this twitter thread here.

The “horned man” in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

The procession with animal masked Harfoots reminds me very much of medieval pageantry with mummers dressed up with animal-heads costumes, such as that seen in the “Romance of Alexander” manuscript (Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264, c.1400) in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, here:

Mummers in the Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264. Source.

After the events of the procession and I am presuming feast, the Harfoots settle into the encampment, much later in the evening, and then comes Sadoc’s speech (which we saw him writing earlier in the episode when Nori is trying to get hold of a star map) and a remembrance service:

“We remember those from prior migrations, who fell behind.”

 -- Sadoc Burrows, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Episode 3: Adar

Sadoc reads from the “book of the left-behinds” in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

The remembrance takes the form of Sadoc reading out a name and how they were lost and the Harfoot audience chanting, “We wait for you!” The Harvest Festival is full of such chanted dialogue, where earlier the procession spoke the words of the Harfoot code of “Nobody goes off-trail. And nobody walks alone.” This is mentioned in other episodes and seems to be a didactic lesson to younger Harfoots about keeping together, especially during the migration.

“We wait for you!” says Largo in Amazon Studio’s 

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” (Episode 3: Adar).

A point to make here is that the “left-behinds” in the book and chant were not so much abandoned but died in tragic accidents, especially along the migration route. The Brandyfoot family do have a fear of being left behind because of Largo’s injury but the ceremony shown is for those who died enroute, not literally left behind to struggle, and are remembered in ceremony and in the apple seeds carried on Harfoots, even if some of the deaths were avoidable as in the case of Blovo Bolgerbuck and the bees. The next episode does show that the Stranger does play a massive role in helping the Brandyfoots keep up with the rest of the caravan however. This is considered harshly by some viewers of the TV series, though I think the dangers of migration were not emphasised enough, since we can see the Harfoots are quite terrified of the world between their safe havens.

Sadly we do not learn much more about the Harfoot ceremony because it is interrupted with the sudden appearance of the Stranger who accidently set the star map alight after discovering it left by Nori. The Harfoot festivity of their Harvest ceremonies shown across the episodes of season one of “The Rings of Power” are fascinating dips into fictional folklore, perhaps based on the creative team’s research into our own traditions and festivals. This is a topic I hope to research further.