Just realised that I haven't put up a MYSTERY OBJECT of late; so here is one. It is made of brass and is three inches long. It has a double purpose. Please give the name of the object, where it was made, and BOTH purposes. I think it should be possible to work out the purposes from looking at both photographs carefully. Hope so anyway.
13 comments:
Is it a sugar/tong scoop aka sugar scuttle?
合併後的瓢葉茶和方糖鉗。請你們要去，使茶！
Hébìng hòu de piáo yè chá hé fāng táng qián. Qǐng nǐmen yào qù, shǐ chá!
A combined scoop for leaf tea & sugar lump tongs. Please go and make the tea! And a scrap of cake would be nice.
Thought I'd commented earlier, so this may be a repeat.
Is it a sugar tong/scoop aka sugar scuttle?
Hello Kippy and Crowbard.You are both on the right lines with 'tongs', but, other than than, in the wrong area. Try again, please.
for tobacco?
Happy New Year to you both, many Blessings xxx
You're getting slightly warmer, Maggie; but not quite the right answer, and certainly not the whole answer.
P.s. Dear Maggie and Mark - a very happy New Year to you both. Hope you're settling in well?
Love, Mike and Ann.
Are they then glede tongs for carrying a glowing coal to the pipe for ignition? With a secondary use of picking up fallen embers from the hearth-rug?
Hello Crowbard. I've not come across the expression 'glede tongs before. Just looked 'Glede' up, and found it to be the common kite, having the same root as to 'glide'. Other than that you are quite right. The usual name is 'ember tongs' for taking an ember from the fire to light a candle or pipe. The other purpose is the part at the opposite end to the pair of little hands, which is, of course, a tobacco tamper, for firming down the tobacco in the pipe prior to lighting it from an ember. The embers would probably be from a wood fire. The tongs appear to have been made, from their design, around the year 1800, and are English.
You are correct in so far as you go with regard to glede, Mike. But it is also a part of what we now consider an irregular word from middle-Emglish resulting in the modern words glowed, aglow, glowing et cetera. Chaucer uses it to describe the heat of passion and I seem to recall Llew Smart saying 'Lookit them gledes a-flying' when a gust of wind swirled up the sparks from a small garden fire. You beat me on the tamper which looks very like a scoop handle from the angle of the picture and without Maggie's hint I doubt I would have recalled the implement's primary use.
Hi Mike, It occurred to me that I had read the word ‘glede’ much more recently in an impeccable source, among the works of Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE, an English writer, poet and philologist who served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford from 1945 to 1959.
The Fellowship of the Ring, Lord of The Rings Book 2, Ch 2, The Council of Elrond. Gandalf visits Minas Tirith and reads the scroll of Isildur.
‘…. scroll concerns the Ring, and thus wrote Isildur therein:
It was hot when I first took it, hot as a glede,1 and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it.’
1 glede — An archaic word meaning 'live coal', commonly spelt gleed.
from:-
The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, by Wayne G Hammond and Christina Scull, Book 2, Ch 2, The Council of Elrond
Hello Crowbard. Thank you; the passage from Tolkien rings a very vague bell, but I'd somehow totally forgotten the word 'glede'. It's surprising that it managed to survive in the Norfolk fens. Thanks for reminding me.
Glode is also the Swedish for glowing ember... With dots over the o making it sound more like glede.
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