Tea sets of the Maiar

[amethyst73]

I don't quite remember how my husband and I got to talking about tea, tea sets, and tea parties last night. I remembered that I had been given a Really Nice Tea Set as a girl in the late 1970s. I remember my mother making a huge deal about the fact that it was made of porcelain, and being very upset when I inevitably broke some piece or other of the set.

I had no idea what to do with a toy tea set. My parents did not give tea parties. Nobody I knew gave tea parties in the late '70s. Perhaps some other social set still gave tea parties, but not ours.

(Cocktail parties, now, those I knew about. But they were boring grownup affairs, so even if toy cocktail party sets had existed, they would not have been any more fun than the tea party set was.)

One reads about girls giving tea parties for their dolls in older children’s books, like from the early 1900’s maybe. E. Nesbit’s characters probably had tea parties. And - I’m not sure how wizards got into the picture - if Nesbit had had recognizable wizards in her books, they probably would have gone to tea parties. At any rate, they would definitely have had tea every so often.

Which made me remember Gandalf in the Peter Jackson LOTR trilogy. In the first movie when he comes and visits Bilbo, Bilbo offers him all kinds of food. But Gandalf declines, saying tea will be just fine. 

Gandalf is one of the Maiar, one of the demigod-level characters in Tolkien’s mythology. We discussed the question of whether the Maiar get together for tea every so often. Do they take it in turns to host? Does Gandalf have a permanent residence where he could host tea? (Our image of him is very much a wanderer, so I think he’d have to ask someone else to provide the lodgings, and he’d bring all the snacks and stuff.)

Which led me to wonder: what would the tea sets of the Maiar look like?

I figure Gandalf has a completely mismatched and very battered set of mugs, all of them chipped in different ways, all of them handmade and slightly misshapen. I’m not sure he has a teapot, creamer, or sugar bowl. 

Saruman’s set would be a full set, perfectly matched, probably very fine, thin porcelain, and very modern in style. And stunning.

Radagast, my husband argued, would have a completely ordinary everyday set which was complete and matched, but that was probably about all one could say for it. While I think he’s probably right, I also think that Tom Bombadil found a delightful, beautifully sculpted set in the shapes of mossy tree stumps and flowers and the like which he gave Radagast. Radagast brings out that set when Tom visits, so that Tom will see that the gift is being used, but doesn’t bother with it otherwise.

That was all the Maiar I remembered off the top of my head. Then my husband mentioned that Sauron and the Balrog are also Maiar. Yikes. What are their tea sets like?

We decided that the Balrog does in fact have a tea set. It’s either volcanic glass, or it’s clay with that amazing glaze that has crystal bits in it that turn into crystal flowerlike patterns when it gets fired. But it doesn’t see much use, because nobody ever comes round for tea when you’re the Balrog. It’s a pity, because the tea never grows cold.

Sauron’s set is black and spiky, like everything else in Mordor. There’s a trick to drinking from the cups without lethally impaling oneself. Those who figure it out are invited back. Those who don’t … well, there’s plenty more orcs where those came from.