Because this opinion has surfaced a number of times here: Yes, Tolkien did care deeply about the realism of his world. And because he spent his whole life studying pre-modern societies, the societies he creates in Middle Earth do function very realistically. I think there are two reason why many readers miss this:
(1) Much of Tolkien's world-building is implicit rather than explicit. He doesn't talk about Aragorn's tax policy because he doesn't need to; Aragorn is recognisably a feudal king and there is a standard way taxes are done a feudal system (i.e. the vassals take care of gathering them). Tolkien has a deep understanding of how such societies function, but much of this comes out indirectly in the story, through the way the characters behave and what they can and cannot do.
(2) Pre-modern societies are so deeply different from modern ones (economically, culturally, and socially) that I think many readers stumble across things they find unexpected and dismiss it as "unrealistic fantasy", without understanding that in such a context, this is exactly how one would expect the world to work. For example, the deep devotion and self-sacrificial service Sam shows to Frodo is often discussed in terms of friendship (and it is a great friendship), but one cannot fully understand it unless one also understands it as a (very positive) master-servant relationship.
Aragorn is not a ‘feudal king’, he is a king of legend.
Tolkien was trying to write a mythology - it’s meant to be a mythological past for our actual world. It isn’t set in the medieval era of our world though, it’s meant to be timelessly ancient. Myths set in an ancient past often are told with protagonists who seem to come from a more recent time though. Consider Saint George and the Dragon - a 12th century myth about a knight in shining armor who ‘long ago’ fought a dragon. A knight - a saintly one in particular - was a contemporary character but the story was set in the ancient past of legend. Similarly the ancient Greeks told legends about the Trojan wars where characters who resembled their contemporary warriors fought alongside gods.
The anachronism is part of the form. The shire isn’t ’medieval’ or ‘feudal’, it’s timelessly rural or * bucolic*. Hobbits are in behavior far more like 19th century farmers than medieval peasantry and that’s appropriate because they are meant to represent a nostalgic persona to an early 20th century audience, even though they are participating in a story that is meant to take place in a nebulous prehistory, before the world changed.
The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.
> Aragorn is not a ‘feudal king’, he is a king of legend.
I was not using "feudal" to denote a time period in our world's history, but rather a system of governance based on liege-vassal relationships. I agree with you that Gondor feels more classical than medieval, but as a king, Aragorn is quite clearly the liege-lord of vassals (Imrahil, Faramir, the Thain) who hold their lands by his bequest. So while Aragorn is definitely legendary in the sense that he is an idealised fictional figure, in-universe he is very much a feudal king.
> The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.
Yes, absolutely. Tolkien creates the countries of Middle Earth out of many different historical inspirations, with a heavy dose of mythology mixed in. I find it good fun to see where he got his ideas from - for example the parallels between Beowulf and Rohan (compare the great halls of Heorot and Meduseld).
But of course Tolkien never simply mixed and matched. His creativity drew on things he knew, but he didn't just recombine them, he amalgamated them into something really new. So I agree, seeing Middle Earth as "medieval Europe with a different geography" is just plain wrong, on many different levels. But still we can analyse the ingredients that Tolkien used to create his world, and use that to gain a richer understanding of it.
> The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.
Very insightful comment. I have read (and thought deeply about) the books countless times over many years but never realized this before.
If we draw parallels to history, Gondor is more like Byzantium, and Mordor and the orcs is of course the Turks. Return of the King is a fantasy where Constantinople never falls and instead the Roman empire is reunited and ressurrected.
The Classical/ancient world in Tolkien is Nuemenor which is somewhat a parallel to Troy.
I think the argument about the taxes is that, being a wholesome person is largely orthogonal to being a good king, like it is being good with a sword doesn't make you a good monarch. For example, letting Grima leave edoras because 'enough blood has been spilled' is really cool, but dubious and questionable.
Though I don't know much about ME and maybe in that world, the challenges present in the real world don't exist there.
> being a wholesome person is largely orthogonal to being a good king
I disagree with Martin here. Of course, not every good person also makes a good king, and not every good (i.e. politically effective) king was a good (i.e. morally upright) person. But the thing to realise is that the political power of feudal kings was much more limited than we often assume, and was based to a large part on the continued loyalty and goodwill of their vassals. In other words, a king's power rests on the relationships he has; it is both personal and relational.
This means, of course, that a king who is perceived by his vassals as being a bad person is unlikely to keep their support and allegiance for long. He might be able to cow individual vassals by force, but the more his relationships degrade, the more precarious his position will be. (For example, King John's scandalous behaviour and personal conflicts with his barons were one of the main causes for the Baron's Revolt and the Magna Carta.)
With that in mind, it is little surprise that medieval handbooks for rulers heavily emphasise a good character, loyal relationships, and morally upstanding behaviour as key to being a successful aristocrat. Tolkien understands this, and so his depiction of kings and aristocrats focusses strongly on the relational ties between them: the fealty and oaths they have sworn, the ancient friendships and marriages that connect them, the personal admiration and sympathy they have for each other. Put differently, medieval aristocrats would readily recognise Aragorn, Theoden, Eomer and Imrahil as model princes.
> For example, letting Grima leave edoras because 'enough blood has been spilled' is really cool, but dubious and questionable.
My read has always been that Théoden was still unsure about what to do with Grima after what has been revealed. He is clearly angry at him, but it is also difficult for him to let him go, after he had has been his closest council for so long. When they meet Saruman and Grima at Isengard, Théoden even tries to plead with Grima again. And it doesn't make sense that Théoden is trying to lure Grima, because if he is trying to be cunning, he would well know that Grima would never bother, instead, it reads as Théoden still holding out hope.
So yes, it is questionable to send Grima away. And Tolkien isn't exactly subtle about it.
Gondor has arguably more parallels to the Byzantine Empire than to a Western feudal society, so would have been a tax policy, though I suspect that more of the governments wealth would have come through collecting rent on agricultural land owned by the nobility.
If we continue the parallels to the Byzantine Empire more than the text can take us, much more important to the merchants than taxes would likely have been the government's involvement in the skilled trades (i.e. guilds) and setting of interest rates.
> he spent his whole life studying pre-modern societies
Tolkien was not a historian, but a philologist — professionally, he was a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics — and I think it's a stretch to say that he "studied pre-modern societies" outside the context of their languages.
The Lord of the Rings is essentially a re-imagining of pre-historic Britain, and the setting isn't so much informed by history as by mythology. LotR isn't "medieval", which is probably one of the greatest misunderstandings about the book, and one that lead to an unfortunate excess of faux-medieval sword-and-sorcery fantasy literature.
Except it very obviously IS a medieval world. Not our Middle Ages, but a world that works very closely like how we understand Middle Ages to work. It's feudal, he understands Anglo-Saxon warfare to an amount surprising in an author of trivial literature, and he very obviously DID make a huge effort to make many details correct either in the "how we understand the past" way or to frame them in a way that is understandable for the people who read Beowulf and similar myths.
Vague memories here, but I think Tolkien is said to have built his stories primarily as background for his constructed languages, because he believed that a language cannot be created in isolation without seeming hopelessly artificial and shallow.
The fact that Tolkien did care about the realism of his world doesn't mean that it is perfectly realist or perfectly coherent. I don't expect a writer to have a so perfect world building that you can analyse all parts and find it coherent and with real world counterparts
This article is interesting, but feels like a bit of a stretch to me, particularly when making assertions as bold as "I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively." I am not a master of the LotR lore, but my assumption when reading the books years ago was that Tolkien wanted an idyllic utopian society of rural leisure, and didn't necessarily work out a fully realistic plan for how such a society could be sustainable long-term in the real world with real humans. LotR is a fantasy world, and such worlds are filled with fantasies: imaginary things that are unrealistic and don't need to be physically feasible.
I don't think it's a stretch. I think the idea that LoTR is highly idealized/idyllic is an interpretation made up by people who didn't notice how carefully it's written and thought he left it out!
Similarly, a lot of later grimdarker fantasy stories try to be "Tolkein but with realistic tax systems and warfare", so something like ASoIaF tries to talk about those things more, but then messes up the actual details so it's inconsistent. But if you follow the analyses on https://acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/, the battles in LoTR are very carefully thought out and realistic (based on Tolkein's personal experience) and Gondor's feudalist system is also pretty realistic (based on his academic expertise). He just talked about the details less.
I would even say they're grimmer than "grimdark" stories, half of the Gondor battle is about the enemy using psychological warfare tactics and the story ends with Frodo having to leave with the elves because he has PTSD.
(I further claim that the reason LoTR doesn't have many women isn't because he forgot about them, it's because they're doing household labor and Frodo doesn't encounter them due to being something between a celibate priest and gay.)
I think there has been an understandable pushback against the trope that Tolkien's world building was too loose and idealised, but we shouldn't take things too far in the other direction and imagine him as fastidiously realist.
Yes, Tolkien was a medieval historian, but he wasn't only that, and LoTR is not a work of historical fiction. Tolkien was also a storyteller, and in his famous denunciation of allegory he makes it clear that he prioritises the story above all other concerns. He was also a lover of myth and legend, which are inherently unrealistic forms. And, perhaps most importantly, he was a Christian, and his entire legendarium is an elaborate reworking of Christian theology.
Indeed, there is something Edenic about the Shire. The Hobbits are portrayed as innocents, literally child-like in stature, and protected from evil by the efforts of the Rangers and Gandalf. And this guarding of their innocence is presented as a fundamentally good thing.
To believe that the Shire was in fact a society built on economic exploitation, and that Tolkien meticulously figured all this out (but failed to mention it), undermines the morality of the tale. And the fact is, nothing truly like the Shire ever existed, so attempting to contrive a real-world explanation for its qualities is impossible. Yes, it was obviously influenced by Tolkien's understanding of and attitudes towards the English class system and rural life, but I would insist that it is basically a speculative creation, intended to portray what an idyllic version of what that society could look like, with exactly how it actually works left deliberately vague and dependent on some contrivances such as the Ranger guard.
> I don't think it's a stretch. I think the idea that LoTR is highly idealized/idyllic is an interpretation made up by people who didn't notice how carefully it's written and thought he left it out!
I'm confused by this though. I read through a bit of the article and although I could readily buy its conclusions as "plausible" I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.
IMO, not only does "The Shire is a successful anarchic society where resources are plentiful and everybody is afforded a lot of leisure" read have the benefit of requiring fewer leaps of logic from the reader, it thematically makes more sense as a counterbalance to what is happening elsewhere across Middle Earth. This is the last holdout in a world being corrupted by lust for power and greed, after all, so maybe it truly is exceptional?
Even in-universe the Hobbits aren't fully "realistic"; they are supported by the Rangers keeping the many and sundry threats of Middle Earth off of their borders. Without that protection the whole system actually fell apart even in-universe. There's not a lot places in the real history of the real world where a society had no defense burden, and they don't tend to be long-term stable either.
Iceland is one example. They have a coast guard but no standing military. On the other hand, their independence is formally guaranteed by the US (and maybe others, I don't remember), so nobody's gonna be trying to annex them any time soon. On the other hand, Iceland's only been "independent" since slipping out from Denmark ~WW2.
The shire didn't had nothing that would deserve going out of the way to loot it (at least nothing known).
Hobbits had a sort of primitive defense systems against occasional invasions of goblins and wolves and LOTR mention their skills in the use of several weapons. A few chickens or tobacco herbs simply don't not worth the mess, specially when men were richer and can just buy it.
Costa Rica is a bit like that. They have no military but they do have an armed law enforcement agency which maintains internal security and guards the borders. This has been stable since 1948. In fact, Costa Rica has been more stable than many other countries in Central and South America where the militaries are often a breeding ground for coups and civil wars.
I can only speak to my own interpretations of the text, but this is a setting where magic well and truly exists, if typically in forms that were seldom seen directly. I don't think it's explicitly said, but again, Bilbo the burglar and Frodo somehow sneaking into Mordor, there is a broader underlying implication that hobbits are intrinsically easy to ignore and discount. I was always given the impression this was largely what kept them safe, not any realistic defense mechanism, but a borderline mystical unimportance.
This is something that varied a lot in Tolkien's writing throughout his life.
When he wrote The Hobbit, he was very much writing a fairy tale. So there was very little consideration for things economics and agriculture because it wasn't that type of story, and those types of things aren't important in fairy tales. And when he started to write the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, he was still very much in that mode - it was intended to be a direct sequel to The Hobbit and the opening chapters have that much more light hearted feel to them.
But the story grew in the telling, and by the time he reached the end of of The Lord of the Rings he was far more invested in realism and consistency within the world - so was paying a lot more attention to this type of thing (including going back and editing and rewriting sections multiple times).
This is also very evident in his other writings. The first drafts of what would become The Silmarillion were very much more fantastical and mythic - we got stories of a flat world and very brief and vague descriptions of the Elves awaking under the stars before the Sun and Moon were made, and marching across the land. The versions of that same story he wrote towards the end of his life had a round world, and carefully planning out of the Elvish aging and reproductive cycles throughout the march, to work out how many generations would be needed for there to be a suitably large host.
Didn't the world start as flat and then Eru made it round to keep Aman away from mortal eyes, being reachable only by those who could see the "straight path" like the elves?
THough I agree there's no need for any of this to be plausible or realistic I di think that at lest for me, a reader brought up in the british isles in the later half ofthe 20th century those assumptions absolutely do hold. There's not muchI found surprising about the political economic settlement that the author describes in the article, it's more or less what I assumed whilst reading the book.
At some point, suspension of disbelief is the expected behavior of the reader. Nobody would want to read a fantasy about dwarfs, hobbits, elves, and dragons if they first had to get through a complete history of the financial systems within the fantasy world. Most people can't make it through all of the language system within the tomes that Tolkien did include.
Expecting all of the details to work in a FANTASY story is just ludicrous. This is why a lot of people that are not fans shy away from fans having these types of conversations.
Tolkien himself had a different point of view. In his opinion, if suspension of disbelief becomes necessary, it's a sign that the writer has failed. He preferred "secondary belief" instead. The idea was that the reader should remain immersed in the fictional world, confident that the world works consistently according to its internal logic. That the logic is there, even if the reader doesn't know it, and that the writer doesn't break it for their own convenience.
> Nobody would want to read a fantasy about dwarfs, hobbits, elves, and dragons if they first had to get through a complete history of the financial systems within the fantasy world.
Japanese fantasy works on a system where you look at whatever novel is currently popular, copy every surface/world detail from it, then add exactly one thing you wanted it to be all along and just talk about all the time. It's basically done for SEO reasons, but it means you can save all the setup time if every story is in the same medieval isekai that vaguely feels like Dragon Quest.
So yes, there are stories that are just about forex speculation with elves or whatever. Spice and Wolf is one.
I feel like Western writers also used to do this, but the difference is they'd copy D&D and instead make the story about the super complex magic system they made up, and frankly I don't want to hear about your magic system.
In the Hobbit movie, Smaug's gold hoard was so vast that if it actually went into circulation, gold would be cheaper than iron. The citizens would be making roof tiles and plumbing out of it.
(Although iron ore is plentiful, it is expensive to refine and smelt.)
Even the relatively few Spanish gold ships hauling gold to the Old World resulted in massive inflation, not wealth.
On the other hand, Tolkien spent his time creating realistic languages and lore to go with that, above and beyond many fantasy writers.
On the gripping hand, having read through various histories, it's nuts how often historians get things mixed up or wrong, or obsolete with emerging evidence. Our histories, even evidence-based, tells a story of our past, and no narrative can fully describe what happened.
The Shire is idylic but not exactly utopian or paradisic. Clearly most people have to work - they are farmers, gardeners, millers etc. There is a clear social hierachy but nobody is exploited.
Perhaps the hobbits enjoy a bit of work. Perhaps a society need not be perfect to count as a utopia. Perhaps I used the wrong word. Hopefully my meaning was clear enough regardless.
As an American, I had to read LOTR about 5 times before I started to perceive the class-based nature of the world of Middle Earth. Class here is not as in-your-face as it is in Great Briton.
What's fascinating to me is that this sort of world/economy/way-of-life is the backdrop of virtually every fairy tail, fantasy novel, or even video game (e.g. World of Warcraft). For some reason, this kind of world--which in actuality is on of the most rigid and with the least opportunities--is nevertheless the world which, in our imaginations, is the one most brimming with possibilities and the most potential for adventure.
Why this kind of world? When I asked my father that question, he pointed out that fairy tails often start with brothers "setting out to seek their fortune" and invariably have the youngest brother coming out on top. The reason was the laws of primogeniture--the oldest son inherits everything, so in every generation, all of the younger sons had to do just that--go out and see if they could make something happen, because despite their privileged upbringing, they were going to get dumped out into the wide world to fend for themselves.
Adventure was had within ones own class strata in older stories. Or at least the main characters don't change substantially in class even if they encounter others and grow and change.
It's only recent stories that the adventure was about transgressing the strata. It's the American way, the frontier is the edge of one's station in life to be crossed over. Australia has a similar but different classless idea. I think it's more working class as the common level but there's less acceptable social movement.
The whole of the context* of the LOTR can best be understood through the lens of this comment by Tolkien:
> My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
Paul Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory” (which I highly recommend) tied comments like these to the change in mentality of the (primarily) English upper classes and gentry. Just living and working closely with working and agrarian class soldiers led to a realization that yes, they struggled with poor boots through no fault of their own (an example Fussell quotes), only visible because for the first time they saw them as comrades due to the shared experience in the trenches.
And that changed the mentality of many in the upper classes, who came back from the war and voted liberal or even labour when before that would not have been even imagined.
This essay talks about the effect of capitalist colonialism in Viet Nam (I agree with the author’s point here) but Tolkien’s experience reflected the consequence of an interesting domestic shift in the British isles, as industrialization increased the separation between the classes. Contrast the comradeship of Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: a group of aristos and a mob of peasants looking for money and just a change of being stuck on the land: the trench experience was a forced reversion to a social propinquity common from ~800s to the 1700s.
* I don’t mean to imply there is a “correct” reading: it’s an adventure story, a masterful recreation of the tradition of the Sagas, and other things. But even as a naive 12 yo in the 1970s I realised it was a deeply conservative story.
Not a reactionary one: Tolkien doesn’t appear to want to go back. But a recognition of what (in his mind) was lost. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!
That sense of loss IMHO is much better captured by T. H. White’s roughly contemporaneous “Once and Future King”, a much more sophisticated, but less filmable, book.
It's a great article. It also made me aware of a fun bit of unreliable narration in the Hobbit that went completely under my radar before:
In the Hobbit, the Tooks are introduced as the slightly quirky, more adventurous and less reputable cousins of the Baggins. (Marrying a fairy/elf, running off into the blue, owning magical artefacts of foreign origin, etc) The characters in LOTR are likewise: Frodo Baggins comes over as serious and at times almost statesmanlike, whereas Pippin Took seems more like a boyish mischief-maker mostly looking for adventure.
In contrast, OP suggests the Tooks are really the much more powerful, wealthy and reputable family: They have an entire region - Tookland - under patronage; they have a permanent claim to the Thain office, making them something like the representatives of the Shire to the outside world; the Old Took also seems to be at the root of several of the hobbit families.
If you take that suggestion, then some things look different: Their "adventurousness" could really just be a greater awareness and connection to the outside world than the "normal" hobbits, something that probably comes with the Thain office. On the other hand, the Baggins seem to have been an extremely conservative family even for hobbit standards (before all the events of the books at least) : It's mentioned that Bilbo looked and behaved like an exact copy of his father. The family also had a reputation for being so predictable that you could answer any question that you'd want to ask them already in your head, without bothering to actually ask the question.
So it might be that the description of the quirky Tooks and reputable Baggins was really just the self-perception of the slightly stuck-up second family of the land making some friendly scoffs at the first family of the land.
(Of course things change massively already at the end of the Hobbit, when Bilbo sacrifies much of the families predictability and gains worldliness instead - and at the end of LOTR anyway when the entire social order of the Shire is basically redone and Tooks, Baggins, Brandybocks and Gardeners probably all have equal ranks in society)
I assume it’s a reference to how most hobbits seem to hold and manage productive land, or at least to be attached to a family that does.
(I’d not made the connection to distributism, but also get a similar sense of how their society is structured, just from reading The Hobbit and LOTR—but, this may be a biased perspective because we’re hanging around with some of the richest Hobbits that there are)
Look up distributivism. Catholics like Chesterton advocated for it as something of a middle ground between the abuses of capitalism and communism after the Pope write an encyclical on the tragedy of workers. They recognized both capitalism and communism as being abusive. Tolkien would have been aware of the theory I believe and it could have influenced him.
Distributivist thinkers promote a more localized system of government with a strong community where the ultimate goal isn't milking out all value (capitalism).
One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system (your local community isn't going to design and manufacture an Xbox or advanced medical equipment). It does sound more equitable on paper though.
tolkien saw it as the person-centric economy, and advocated for it. it’s easy enough to see the idea reflected into the Shire, itself kind of an idyll of what a good society was like.
I feel like this article misses something obvious, which is that Hobbits aren't humans and the world of LotR includes people doing things that we would describe as magical. Hobbits for instance have a semi-magical ability to hide by how it's described in the books. If their society seems unrealistic for humans with medieval technology, I think that just shows us that Hobbits are fundamentally different from humans. The apparent almost total lack of Hobbit on Hobbit violence in the book also shows that Hobbits are just psychologically different from humans.
Hobbits are pretty clearly intended to represent a kind of idealized English rural life. There would be little reason to for humans or hobbits to commit violence living in small villages or other kinship based settlements where everyone would know everyone. Smeagol killed for the ring just after discovering it so Hobbits are capable of violence but their way of life does not normally call for it. Also Hobbits are in no way innocent as they do pranks and commit petty theft from the farmer.
>There would be little reason to for humans or hobbits to commit violence
There's little, if any, reason for humans today to commit most of the violence they do, but they do it anyway. People don't usually commit violence for some understandable reason; they do it because they have psychological deficiencies. It's little different than a pitbull that randomly snaps and attacks a child in the family it's living with.
Clearly, based on Tolkein's depiction of them, hobbits are simply far superior to humans in this regard. And to be fair, the humans in Middle Earth don't seem to have so much of this problem as real-world humans either. Instead, I'd say the orcs sound pretty close to how many real-world humans today behave.
I mean, Medieval English villages had violence, we have court records of it. People got drunk and got in fights, threatened to burn a neighbors house down, and all sorts of other reasons why people turn to violence that Hobbits seem to do only under extreme circumstances, like being under the influence of The One Ring as you point out.
Also I imagine a Hobbit's calorie requirements are substantially lower than a man 3 times their size. They're no less intelligent (indeed they are shown to be particularly clever), they have access to draft animals and basic machines, so their agricultural productivity is likely still high. This should allow for substantially greater surpluses even before we invoke magic.
The way I see it, all the fantasy races ARE humans, just humans with a different emphasis. The ones called "humans" are the vanilla people that have average human qualities, and then every other has its own slant on humanity. They all still have recognizably human emotions, desires, social structures, and so on, they are just each a study in some particular area. Maybe you have a race of people who are more spiritual, or a race of people who are more warlike, or hierarchical, or egalitarian, and so on.
Sure, it's fantasy and you could stop there. But the story often treats them as little people in a medieval setting and I think it wouldn't be enjoyable without that point of reference. So it's worth making comparisons.
I do wonder, just a little, if rather than fantasy this touches on the idea that a homogeneous people in w well-ordered society with a functioning economy might not commit much violence among themselves. If such were the idea being espoused, then whether or not the idea was valid, it would be difficult to talk about openly in our current political climate. If it could be shown to be invalid for whatever reason, then the idea might be attacked that way, but it'd be better still if it could just be dismissed as childish drivel.
> In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions. It is one of the great contradictions of civilization and one of the great sources of its discontents, and Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: “the narcissism of the small difference.” As he wrote, “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.”
It's just a part of the human condition, sadly, to hate others based on the smallest of differences. And you will always find a difference, even among the most homogeneous of societies - be it the color of your hair, the pigment of your skin, your accent... it follows then that a homogenous society is not a solution; rather, fostering awareness and understanding around discrimination is the way forward.
We also see, in the Amazon series, a group of apparently hunter-gatherer hobbits with iron and textiles.
The conclusion I come to is that Hobbits magic up manufactured goods from the idealized English countryside of Tolkien’s imagination. If you have some English ancestors who lost a pot, it time-slipped into Middle Earth. Presumably they are where the socks go. Ever notice an excess of old keys around the house? Hobbits need boxes!
> Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat
This is _only_ because, in medieval times, when there was enough food people had more children until there was no longer enough food for everyone, maintaining the equilibrium and making it to be "just enough" most of the times, with a lot of "not enough" between those. Incidentally that is also how most animals and normal evolution operate.
But what if they only have ~2 children per couple, so they CAN easily maintain this lifestyle? Specially given they are long-lived (taking care of things long-term) and have culture+technology either from abroad or from long ago (mills, craftsmen, etc). I can definitely see this more plausible than the jump to classes the post does.
As a personal note, once I visited the UK countryside and was surprised by the amount of wild berries there were, we grabbed a bunch and there was definitely enough that we could've eaten for few days. Sure probably not a whole town and not all year round, but these were _just_ the wild ones, with a bit of work I can see how lush the land could become.
One distinctive feature of the Shire, is that it was surrounded by mostly empty space. A combination of emigration (the Elves), war (Arnor and later Arthedain vs. Angmar), and plague, had opened up a lot of open space. This is not just how the Hobbits got the Shire in the first place (the King of Arthedain had spare land to grant them), it also allowed them to expand when their population needed to. Buckland was described by JRRT as a "colony" of the Shire, and after the LotR they expanded westward again, creating the Westmarch (hence "the Red Book of Westmarch", which LotR was supposedly translated from).
What the Hobbits would have done if they had been in a place without room to expand, is interesting to debate, but in the actual Third Age they could have lots of kids, and just expand into more good farmland when they needed to, because emigration, war, and plague had cleared the areas around them.
> > Premodern agriculture was characterized primarily as being low-surplus and high-labor, it takes a lot of people a lot of time to produce enough food for everyone to eat
I think this is the crux of all the other socio-economic superstructure arguments the article's author makes. The assertion is that Tolkien's fantasy world of wizards, wraiths, walking trees, dragons, invisibility rings, dwarves, elves, etc would have a realistic medieval material production culture.
In order to imagine an idealized/fantasy bucolic shire, wouldn't Tolkien just imagine soil that's more fertile and nutritional crops with higher yield? Would this be the furthest he asks the reader to stretch their imagination?
We already have a real-world example of that[1], which is in medieval times in China, the land was a lot more fertile than in Europe, and with a crop also more nutrition dense (rice). So what happened there is that, instead of achieving something similar to the Shire, the plots of land became smaller per family, to achieve again an equilibrium where each family had enough to eat for themselves, but not a lot to spare. So more fertile/nutritional crops, while it would def help the Shire, would not be the whole answer without some sort of population management.
Readit News
(1) Much of Tolkien's world-building is implicit rather than explicit. He doesn't talk about Aragorn's tax policy because he doesn't need to; Aragorn is recognisably a feudal king and there is a standard way taxes are done a feudal system (i.e. the vassals take care of gathering them). Tolkien has a deep understanding of how such societies function, but much of this comes out indirectly in the story, through the way the characters behave and what they can and cannot do.
(2) Pre-modern societies are so deeply different from modern ones (economically, culturally, and socially) that I think many readers stumble across things they find unexpected and dismiss it as "unrealistic fantasy", without understanding that in such a context, this is exactly how one would expect the world to work. For example, the deep devotion and self-sacrificial service Sam shows to Frodo is often discussed in terms of friendship (and it is a great friendship), but one cannot fully understand it unless one also understands it as a (very positive) master-servant relationship.
If you want a better understanding of the deeper realism of LotR, I cannot recommend Bret Devereaux' blog highly enough. He is an ancient military historian and has written extensive (but entertaining!) analyses of both LotR and GoT. See here for two samples: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/22/collections-the-battle-of-helm..., https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-wa...
Tolkien was trying to write a mythology - it’s meant to be a mythological past for our actual world. It isn’t set in the medieval era of our world though, it’s meant to be timelessly ancient. Myths set in an ancient past often are told with protagonists who seem to come from a more recent time though. Consider Saint George and the Dragon - a 12th century myth about a knight in shining armor who ‘long ago’ fought a dragon. A knight - a saintly one in particular - was a contemporary character but the story was set in the ancient past of legend. Similarly the ancient Greeks told legends about the Trojan wars where characters who resembled their contemporary warriors fought alongside gods.
The anachronism is part of the form. The shire isn’t ’medieval’ or ‘feudal’, it’s timelessly rural or * bucolic*. Hobbits are in behavior far more like 19th century farmers than medieval peasantry and that’s appropriate because they are meant to represent a nostalgic persona to an early 20th century audience, even though they are participating in a story that is meant to take place in a nebulous prehistory, before the world changed.
The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.
> Aragorn is not a ‘feudal king’, he is a king of legend.
I was not using "feudal" to denote a time period in our world's history, but rather a system of governance based on liege-vassal relationships. I agree with you that Gondor feels more classical than medieval, but as a king, Aragorn is quite clearly the liege-lord of vassals (Imrahil, Faramir, the Thain) who hold their lands by his bequest. So while Aragorn is definitely legendary in the sense that he is an idealised fictional figure, in-universe he is very much a feudal king.
> The journey in the Lord of the Rings is almost as much a journey back through deeper and deeper legend as it is through space - the hobbits travel from a Napoleonic era Shire, through Renaissance Rivendell, back to a medieval Rohan then classical Gondor, and then into the strictly mythological Mordor.
Yes, absolutely. Tolkien creates the countries of Middle Earth out of many different historical inspirations, with a heavy dose of mythology mixed in. I find it good fun to see where he got his ideas from - for example the parallels between Beowulf and Rohan (compare the great halls of Heorot and Meduseld).
But of course Tolkien never simply mixed and matched. His creativity drew on things he knew, but he didn't just recombine them, he amalgamated them into something really new. So I agree, seeing Middle Earth as "medieval Europe with a different geography" is just plain wrong, on many different levels. But still we can analyse the ingredients that Tolkien used to create his world, and use that to gain a richer understanding of it.
Very insightful comment. I have read (and thought deeply about) the books countless times over many years but never realized this before.
The Classical/ancient world in Tolkien is Nuemenor which is somewhat a parallel to Troy.
Though I don't know much about ME and maybe in that world, the challenges present in the real world don't exist there.
> being a wholesome person is largely orthogonal to being a good king
I disagree with Martin here. Of course, not every good person also makes a good king, and not every good (i.e. politically effective) king was a good (i.e. morally upright) person. But the thing to realise is that the political power of feudal kings was much more limited than we often assume, and was based to a large part on the continued loyalty and goodwill of their vassals. In other words, a king's power rests on the relationships he has; it is both personal and relational.
This means, of course, that a king who is perceived by his vassals as being a bad person is unlikely to keep their support and allegiance for long. He might be able to cow individual vassals by force, but the more his relationships degrade, the more precarious his position will be. (For example, King John's scandalous behaviour and personal conflicts with his barons were one of the main causes for the Baron's Revolt and the Magna Carta.)
With that in mind, it is little surprise that medieval handbooks for rulers heavily emphasise a good character, loyal relationships, and morally upstanding behaviour as key to being a successful aristocrat. Tolkien understands this, and so his depiction of kings and aristocrats focusses strongly on the relational ties between them: the fealty and oaths they have sworn, the ancient friendships and marriages that connect them, the personal admiration and sympathy they have for each other. Put differently, medieval aristocrats would readily recognise Aragorn, Theoden, Eomer and Imrahil as model princes.
(For a more detailed discussion of medieval aristocratic values, see here: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/27/a-trip-through-dhuoda-of-uzes-.... For a discussion of personal kingship - based on Crusader Kings III - see here: https://acoup.blog/2022/09/16/collections-teaching-paradox-c...)
My read has always been that Théoden was still unsure about what to do with Grima after what has been revealed. He is clearly angry at him, but it is also difficult for him to let him go, after he had has been his closest council for so long. When they meet Saruman and Grima at Isengard, Théoden even tries to plead with Grima again. And it doesn't make sense that Théoden is trying to lure Grima, because if he is trying to be cunning, he would well know that Grima would never bother, instead, it reads as Théoden still holding out hope.
So yes, it is questionable to send Grima away. And Tolkien isn't exactly subtle about it.
Tolkien would disagree. So strongly in fact that he wrote an entire fantasy series about it!
If someone is a king, being a good person is synonymous with being a good king. Same with being a good loyal knight, ect.
There is no need to separate the individual and social role.
You have a moral archetype of for each social role, and judge the morality of the people in those roles against it.
If we continue the parallels to the Byzantine Empire more than the text can take us, much more important to the merchants than taxes would likely have been the government's involvement in the skilled trades (i.e. guilds) and setting of interest rates.
Tolkien was not a historian, but a philologist — professionally, he was a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics — and I think it's a stretch to say that he "studied pre-modern societies" outside the context of their languages.
The Lord of the Rings is essentially a re-imagining of pre-historic Britain, and the setting isn't so much informed by history as by mythology. LotR isn't "medieval", which is probably one of the greatest misunderstandings about the book, and one that lead to an unfortunate excess of faux-medieval sword-and-sorcery fantasy literature.
Nietzsche says that we cannot take this too seriously. An Artist's ideas will never conform to reality and the gaps torture a good artist.
Similarly, a lot of later grimdarker fantasy stories try to be "Tolkein but with realistic tax systems and warfare", so something like ASoIaF tries to talk about those things more, but then messes up the actual details so it's inconsistent. But if you follow the analyses on https://acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/, the battles in LoTR are very carefully thought out and realistic (based on Tolkein's personal experience) and Gondor's feudalist system is also pretty realistic (based on his academic expertise). He just talked about the details less.
I would even say they're grimmer than "grimdark" stories, half of the Gondor battle is about the enemy using psychological warfare tactics and the story ends with Frodo having to leave with the elves because he has PTSD.
(I further claim that the reason LoTR doesn't have many women isn't because he forgot about them, it's because they're doing household labor and Frodo doesn't encounter them due to being something between a celibate priest and gay.)
Yes, Tolkien was a medieval historian, but he wasn't only that, and LoTR is not a work of historical fiction. Tolkien was also a storyteller, and in his famous denunciation of allegory he makes it clear that he prioritises the story above all other concerns. He was also a lover of myth and legend, which are inherently unrealistic forms. And, perhaps most importantly, he was a Christian, and his entire legendarium is an elaborate reworking of Christian theology.
Indeed, there is something Edenic about the Shire. The Hobbits are portrayed as innocents, literally child-like in stature, and protected from evil by the efforts of the Rangers and Gandalf. And this guarding of their innocence is presented as a fundamentally good thing.
To believe that the Shire was in fact a society built on economic exploitation, and that Tolkien meticulously figured all this out (but failed to mention it), undermines the morality of the tale. And the fact is, nothing truly like the Shire ever existed, so attempting to contrive a real-world explanation for its qualities is impossible. Yes, it was obviously influenced by Tolkien's understanding of and attitudes towards the English class system and rural life, but I would insist that it is basically a speculative creation, intended to portray what an idyllic version of what that society could look like, with exactly how it actually works left deliberately vague and dependent on some contrivances such as the Ranger guard.
I'm confused by this though. I read through a bit of the article and although I could readily buy its conclusions as "plausible" I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.
IMO, not only does "The Shire is a successful anarchic society where resources are plentiful and everybody is afforded a lot of leisure" read have the benefit of requiring fewer leaps of logic from the reader, it thematically makes more sense as a counterbalance to what is happening elsewhere across Middle Earth. This is the last holdout in a world being corrupted by lust for power and greed, after all, so maybe it truly is exceptional?
The shire didn't had nothing that would deserve going out of the way to loot it (at least nothing known).
Hobbits had a sort of primitive defense systems against occasional invasions of goblins and wolves and LOTR mention their skills in the use of several weapons. A few chickens or tobacco herbs simply don't not worth the mess, specially when men were richer and can just buy it.
When he wrote The Hobbit, he was very much writing a fairy tale. So there was very little consideration for things economics and agriculture because it wasn't that type of story, and those types of things aren't important in fairy tales. And when he started to write the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, he was still very much in that mode - it was intended to be a direct sequel to The Hobbit and the opening chapters have that much more light hearted feel to them.
But the story grew in the telling, and by the time he reached the end of of The Lord of the Rings he was far more invested in realism and consistency within the world - so was paying a lot more attention to this type of thing (including going back and editing and rewriting sections multiple times).
This is also very evident in his other writings. The first drafts of what would become The Silmarillion were very much more fantastical and mythic - we got stories of a flat world and very brief and vague descriptions of the Elves awaking under the stars before the Sun and Moon were made, and marching across the land. The versions of that same story he wrote towards the end of his life had a round world, and carefully planning out of the Elvish aging and reproductive cycles throughout the march, to work out how many generations would be needed for there to be a suitably large host.
Expecting all of the details to work in a FANTASY story is just ludicrous. This is why a lot of people that are not fans shy away from fans having these types of conversations.
Japanese fantasy works on a system where you look at whatever novel is currently popular, copy every surface/world detail from it, then add exactly one thing you wanted it to be all along and just talk about all the time. It's basically done for SEO reasons, but it means you can save all the setup time if every story is in the same medieval isekai that vaguely feels like Dragon Quest.
So yes, there are stories that are just about forex speculation with elves or whatever. Spice and Wolf is one.
I feel like Western writers also used to do this, but the difference is they'd copy D&D and instead make the story about the super complex magic system they made up, and frankly I don't want to hear about your magic system.
(Although iron ore is plentiful, it is expensive to refine and smelt.)
Even the relatively few Spanish gold ships hauling gold to the Old World resulted in massive inflation, not wealth.
On the gripping hand, having read through various histories, it's nuts how often historians get things mixed up or wrong, or obsolete with emerging evidence. Our histories, even evidence-based, tells a story of our past, and no narrative can fully describe what happened.
What's fascinating to me is that this sort of world/economy/way-of-life is the backdrop of virtually every fairy tail, fantasy novel, or even video game (e.g. World of Warcraft). For some reason, this kind of world--which in actuality is on of the most rigid and with the least opportunities--is nevertheless the world which, in our imaginations, is the one most brimming with possibilities and the most potential for adventure.
Why this kind of world? When I asked my father that question, he pointed out that fairy tails often start with brothers "setting out to seek their fortune" and invariably have the youngest brother coming out on top. The reason was the laws of primogeniture--the oldest son inherits everything, so in every generation, all of the younger sons had to do just that--go out and see if they could make something happen, because despite their privileged upbringing, they were going to get dumped out into the wide world to fend for themselves.
Only because (a) you're a fish in water, and (b) the US national fiction is "we're all middle class".
It's only recent stories that the adventure was about transgressing the strata. It's the American way, the frontier is the edge of one's station in life to be crossed over. Australia has a similar but different classless idea. I think it's more working class as the common level but there's less acceptable social movement.
Tall poppy syndrome.
> My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
Paul Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory” (which I highly recommend) tied comments like these to the change in mentality of the (primarily) English upper classes and gentry. Just living and working closely with working and agrarian class soldiers led to a realization that yes, they struggled with poor boots through no fault of their own (an example Fussell quotes), only visible because for the first time they saw them as comrades due to the shared experience in the trenches.
And that changed the mentality of many in the upper classes, who came back from the war and voted liberal or even labour when before that would not have been even imagined.
This essay talks about the effect of capitalist colonialism in Viet Nam (I agree with the author’s point here) but Tolkien’s experience reflected the consequence of an interesting domestic shift in the British isles, as industrialization increased the separation between the classes. Contrast the comradeship of Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: a group of aristos and a mob of peasants looking for money and just a change of being stuck on the land: the trench experience was a forced reversion to a social propinquity common from ~800s to the 1700s.
* I don’t mean to imply there is a “correct” reading: it’s an adventure story, a masterful recreation of the tradition of the Sagas, and other things. But even as a naive 12 yo in the 1970s I realised it was a deeply conservative story.
Not a reactionary one: Tolkien doesn’t appear to want to go back. But a recognition of what (in his mind) was lost. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!
That sense of loss IMHO is much better captured by T. H. White’s roughly contemporaneous “Once and Future King”, a much more sophisticated, but less filmable, book.
In the Hobbit, the Tooks are introduced as the slightly quirky, more adventurous and less reputable cousins of the Baggins. (Marrying a fairy/elf, running off into the blue, owning magical artefacts of foreign origin, etc) The characters in LOTR are likewise: Frodo Baggins comes over as serious and at times almost statesmanlike, whereas Pippin Took seems more like a boyish mischief-maker mostly looking for adventure.
In contrast, OP suggests the Tooks are really the much more powerful, wealthy and reputable family: They have an entire region - Tookland - under patronage; they have a permanent claim to the Thain office, making them something like the representatives of the Shire to the outside world; the Old Took also seems to be at the root of several of the hobbit families.
If you take that suggestion, then some things look different: Their "adventurousness" could really just be a greater awareness and connection to the outside world than the "normal" hobbits, something that probably comes with the Thain office. On the other hand, the Baggins seem to have been an extremely conservative family even for hobbit standards (before all the events of the books at least) : It's mentioned that Bilbo looked and behaved like an exact copy of his father. The family also had a reputation for being so predictable that you could answer any question that you'd want to ask them already in your head, without bothering to actually ask the question.
So it might be that the description of the quirky Tooks and reputable Baggins was really just the self-perception of the slightly stuck-up second family of the land making some friendly scoffs at the first family of the land.
(Of course things change massively already at the end of the Hobbit, when Bilbo sacrifies much of the families predictability and gains worldliness instead - and at the end of LOTR anyway when the entire social order of the Shire is basically redone and Tooks, Baggins, Brandybocks and Gardeners probably all have equal ranks in society)
> the gap between the lower gentry and upper yeomanry isn’t very large, and most families are able to support themselves with only minimal assistance.
For those who want to fall down the rabbit hole see:
1. The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882 2. https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-di...
I assume it’s a reference to how most hobbits seem to hold and manage productive land, or at least to be attached to a family that does.
(I’d not made the connection to distributism, but also get a similar sense of how their society is structured, just from reading The Hobbit and LOTR—but, this may be a biased perspective because we’re hanging around with some of the richest Hobbits that there are)
Distributivist thinkers promote a more localized system of government with a strong community where the ultimate goal isn't milking out all value (capitalism).
One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system (your local community isn't going to design and manufacture an Xbox or advanced medical equipment). It does sound more equitable on paper though.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/distributism-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
There's little, if any, reason for humans today to commit most of the violence they do, but they do it anyway. People don't usually commit violence for some understandable reason; they do it because they have psychological deficiencies. It's little different than a pitbull that randomly snaps and attacks a child in the family it's living with.
Clearly, based on Tolkein's depiction of them, hobbits are simply far superior to humans in this regard. And to be fair, the humans in Middle Earth don't seem to have so much of this problem as real-world humans either. Instead, I'd say the orcs sound pretty close to how many real-world humans today behave.
>homogeneous people
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/06/in-ethno-nationa...
> In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions. It is one of the great contradictions of civilization and one of the great sources of its discontents, and Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: “the narcissism of the small difference.” As he wrote, “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.”
It's just a part of the human condition, sadly, to hate others based on the smallest of differences. And you will always find a difference, even among the most homogeneous of societies - be it the color of your hair, the pigment of your skin, your accent... it follows then that a homogenous society is not a solution; rather, fostering awareness and understanding around discrimination is the way forward.
Deleted Comment
The conclusion I come to is that Hobbits magic up manufactured goods from the idealized English countryside of Tolkien’s imagination. If you have some English ancestors who lost a pot, it time-slipped into Middle Earth. Presumably they are where the socks go. Ever notice an excess of old keys around the house? Hobbits need boxes!
But, yeah, the time travelling pots and socks must be how it worked :) Kind of like Skynet in the future compiling our C++ code :)
This is _only_ because, in medieval times, when there was enough food people had more children until there was no longer enough food for everyone, maintaining the equilibrium and making it to be "just enough" most of the times, with a lot of "not enough" between those. Incidentally that is also how most animals and normal evolution operate.
But what if they only have ~2 children per couple, so they CAN easily maintain this lifestyle? Specially given they are long-lived (taking care of things long-term) and have culture+technology either from abroad or from long ago (mills, craftsmen, etc). I can definitely see this more plausible than the jump to classes the post does.
As a personal note, once I visited the UK countryside and was surprised by the amount of wild berries there were, we grabbed a bunch and there was definitely enough that we could've eaten for few days. Sure probably not a whole town and not all year round, but these were _just_ the wild ones, with a bit of work I can see how lush the land could become.
What the Hobbits would have done if they had been in a place without room to expand, is interesting to debate, but in the actual Third Age they could have lots of kids, and just expand into more good farmland when they needed to, because emigration, war, and plague had cleared the areas around them.
I think this is the crux of all the other socio-economic superstructure arguments the article's author makes. The assertion is that Tolkien's fantasy world of wizards, wraiths, walking trees, dragons, invisibility rings, dwarves, elves, etc would have a realistic medieval material production culture.
In order to imagine an idealized/fantasy bucolic shire, wouldn't Tolkien just imagine soil that's more fertile and nutritional crops with higher yield? Would this be the furthest he asks the reader to stretch their imagination?
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they...