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Re: Modern World references in Middle-Earth
Ball games are recorded throughout history, but usually with few details of the rules. But we know that the Classical Greeks played a game similar to football called harpaston and the Romans played a variant of it they called harpastum.
Likely various ball games using feet have been known almost since ball games were invented, so Thorin is not necessarily making any kind of necessarily modern reference here.
The reference in The Hobbit to golf being named from the Goblin king Golfimbul is perhaps more anachronistic, though here again there are mentions of various club and ball games throughout history of which we know little. Presumably we must imagine some similar game in the Shire which Tolkien has represented as golf, and has modified the true name of the Goblin king name accordingly.
The food and material artifacts found in the Shire, especially in The Hobbit are very anachronistic: coffee, potatoes, tobacco, mantlepiece (chimneys were not invented till the middle ages) with a clock on it, umbrellas, and various modern musical instruments played by the Dwarves in The Hobbit. But some of these are probably supposed to be analogues to modern counterparts. Coffee would really be another kind of drink altogether, for example, and the musical instruments would correspond very roughly. The clock, perhaps on a shelf rather than a fireplace mantlepiece, could be some sort of waterclock.
Potatoes are perhaps to be identfied with the mysterious roots that Mîm the Dwarf gathers for food in the "Narn i Hîn Húrin" in Unfinished Tales, which are unknown to Men and Elves, and perhaps mostly stayed unknown to them but were later used by Hobbits? The European poisonous nightshade is a relative of the potato. Perhaps in the Third Age there were also non-poisonous nightshade tubers?
Tobacco was introduced from Númenor, and would be thought of as dying out in the Old World sometime after the Third Age and our own era.
Stirrups are mentioned also, though historically they can be traced no earlier than the 2nd century BCE in India, and probably reached Europe only the the 7th or 8th centuries.
In LR, "A Long-Expected Party", occurs the rather odd phrase, "The dragon passed like an express train."
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