Water Carriers of Middle Earth
Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2016 2:30 pm
Like many of you, when I first read Lord of the Rings as a child, I just SO much wanted to wander those landscapes like the Fellowship. One of the more vivid memories I have of the books was Frodo and Sam desperate for water in the wastes of Mordor. The leather water bottle sounded SO COOL and I had to have one for my adventures in the wildlands of my back yard!
The first time I saw a cheapy mass market bota, I had to have it - red plastic piping and grey vinyl sides notwithstanding. Of course it leaked like a sieve.
Since those childhood adventures, I've had a couple not-so-hot water carriers, some commercial and some homemade. But I've never had one that wasn't too modern, too leaky, or both.
It was finally time to fix that - but what with?
Middle Earth Water Carriers Part I: Historical Precedents
I remember long ago asking about what people did for canteens in the old times, and being told “they probably didn’t have them, the water was so clean you could drink from any stream.â€
… Adult understanding and the modern miracle of the internet have since proved that conceit very, very wrong of course.
So first I did a quick survey of what people really used way back when, and what modern reproductions were available.
The first stop of course was Costrels, Flasks, & Canteens on the wonderfully useful larsdatter.com site.
… and lots of subsquent web wanders.
To distill it down to the high points though, the big themes tend to be:
A. English jackware
We all know these of course: a container made from fairly thick leather sewn into a stiff sided container, then treated with wax.
Most typically found today in reenactor circles in a costrel or flacket/bottle shape:
("The Leather Working Reverend" writeups of a costrel and flacket are especially interesting)
Curiously, the hard leather bottle / costrel seems to be largely confined to the British Isles. The French are said to have laughed at Englishmen “drinking from their boots."
I don’t know if that’s a resource availability issue or a cultural one - but this Irish example from the early medieval period long predates the Norman influence in Britain:
(I've not found it on any museum site, but a number of images of this find are floating around the web giving it an bog find provenance to the "early medieval" era, and it's reported to be on display in an Irish musuem.
B. Soft animal hide bags.
These seem to take two primary forms: personal-sized Spanish(Basque?) botas and Middle Eastern /North African water containers utilizing the whole skin of a goat. These have a LONG history: the ones still in use today in Africa look to be virtually identical to those in carvings dating back thousands of years: See also this extensive discussion on Classical era waterskins from Roman Army Talk
Part I continues....
The first time I saw a cheapy mass market bota, I had to have it - red plastic piping and grey vinyl sides notwithstanding. Of course it leaked like a sieve.
Since those childhood adventures, I've had a couple not-so-hot water carriers, some commercial and some homemade. But I've never had one that wasn't too modern, too leaky, or both.
It was finally time to fix that - but what with?
Middle Earth Water Carriers Part I: Historical Precedents
I remember long ago asking about what people did for canteens in the old times, and being told “they probably didn’t have them, the water was so clean you could drink from any stream.â€
… Adult understanding and the modern miracle of the internet have since proved that conceit very, very wrong of course.
So first I did a quick survey of what people really used way back when, and what modern reproductions were available.
The first stop of course was Costrels, Flasks, & Canteens on the wonderfully useful larsdatter.com site.
… and lots of subsquent web wanders.
To distill it down to the high points though, the big themes tend to be:
A. English jackware
We all know these of course: a container made from fairly thick leather sewn into a stiff sided container, then treated with wax.
Most typically found today in reenactor circles in a costrel or flacket/bottle shape:
("The Leather Working Reverend" writeups of a costrel and flacket are especially interesting)
Curiously, the hard leather bottle / costrel seems to be largely confined to the British Isles. The French are said to have laughed at Englishmen “drinking from their boots."
I don’t know if that’s a resource availability issue or a cultural one - but this Irish example from the early medieval period long predates the Norman influence in Britain:
(I've not found it on any museum site, but a number of images of this find are floating around the web giving it an bog find provenance to the "early medieval" era, and it's reported to be on display in an Irish musuem.
B. Soft animal hide bags.
These seem to take two primary forms: personal-sized Spanish(Basque?) botas and Middle Eastern /North African water containers utilizing the whole skin of a goat. These have a LONG history: the ones still in use today in Africa look to be virtually identical to those in carvings dating back thousands of years: See also this extensive discussion on Classical era waterskins from Roman Army Talk
Part I continues....