The Moral Economy of the Shire

_{Who paid for this?}

There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and because I am the way that I am, every time I see it, it makes me start thinking. “Are there taxes in the Shire? If not, how does the government function? Are there worries? Does the lack of taxes relate to the lack of worries? How do people think a whole economic system built around drinking and pipe-smoking even works?” Luckily, I think there are answers to this. Tolkien does not describe the political economy of the Hobbits in any detail, because it’s rarely relevant to the story, but I think we can learn a lot about it from what he does mention. In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Shire is built out an idealized version of rural English society. By looking at how he depicts this–and what eventually happens to it–we can learn a lot about how these sorts of societies function and change over time, and what the benefits and drawbacks of living life Hobbit-style really are.

The Sauronic Empire

_{Map of Arda and the Sauronic Empire, c. FO 174}

Hail Sauron; Great King, King of Kings, King of Men, King of the World!

As the Third Age waned, the Shadow in the East came forth to cover all the wide earth. The Free People fell under the dominion of Mordor, and the greatest empire the world has ever known was forged, spanning sixteen hundred leagues from the Sundering Seas in the west to the foothills of the Orocarni Mountains in the east, and more than four thousand and eight hundred leagues from Forodwaith in the north to Far Harad in the south. This document attempts to present an overview of the state of the Sauronic Empire in its first two centuries, in an effort to preserve the Lore of one of the more remarkable times in the history of Arda.

The End of the Third Age and the Beginning of the Fourth

Inherently, due to the nature of the event, it is impossible to definitively state when Sauron reclaimed the One Ring. It was not within his grasp during the events of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, on March 15^th, TA 3019. By March 25^th, when Sauron’s hosts issued forth from Morannon once more and launched the Second Invasion of Gondor, he had clearly gained it. The forlorn hope that Aragorn had led to the Black Gates in a desperate attempt to buy time for the Ringbearer found itself transformed into a rearguard, and fought a brutal and vicious fighting retreat through Ithilien and across the Anduin. On April 11^th, the Second Siege of Minas Tirath began, and ended. Though the fighting was fierce, and the forces of Mordor grievously hurt, the White City fell, as did King Éomer of Rohan and Aragorn, son of Arathorn, last scion of the House of Elendil. It was a great and terrible triumph for Sauron, and marked the end of any of true hope of resisting his dominion. And yet, it was not a victory entire. For while Aragorn and his warriors fought to the last, holding the Eye of Sauron in place, Faramir and Éowyn led a great host of the people of Gondor and Rohan in retreat into the west.

Are Dwarves Jewish?

This is a Discourse that seems to resurface perennially every few months online, usually in regards to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Sometimes framed as a ‘expose’ on the antisemitic roots of dwarves in popular culture, sometimes as a laudatory story of how Tolkien used his fiction to promote the Zionist agenda. In truth, it all seems to revolve around a single quote from the author, given in a BBC intervew:

I didn’t intend it, but when you’ve got these people on your hands, you’ve got to make them different, haven’t you? The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic. The hobbits are just rustic English people.

It’s a slim reed to build an analogy on, and it’s one that frustrates me, both as Tolkien fan and as a Jew. In truth, I think most of the discussions miss the point, and in doing so, avoid some much more interesting avenues of inquiry.

To put it simply, Tolkien’s dwarves aren’t Jewish. But Terry Pratchett’s are.

My Five Favorite Moments in Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is one of those books where every time I read it I stumble upon something new that knocks me over. I first read Tolkien’s masterpiece in……fourth or fifth grade, I think? And I’ve returned to at least a dozen times since, and yet each time, it seems fresh and new, and each time, I discover a few new hidden gems I’d missed before. If it’s not clear, I really like these books. Lord of the Rings is such an influential book, in the way that is has shaped and molded the fantasy genre in its own image, that I think it’s really easy to miss how revolutionary and remarkable the original books truly are. Tolkien blends genre and style together, combining his beloved Anglo-Saxon epic poetry with High Fantasy and First World War memoir to create something that few, if any, of his legion of imitators have been able to match. More than just the generic ur-text of modern fantasy, Tolkien creates an organic, fully-fleshed-out world, and then weaves a tale that uses the tropes and motifs of pre-modern epic poetry and tell an achingly familiar story about the costs of war and the price of progress. I really like these books you guys.

Today, I want to pull out and unpack a few of my favorite moments and talk about why I think they resonate so strongly. Some of them are full scenes, some just lines of dialogue, but all of them have stuck with me through the years, and I think help show why these books have endured for so long.

(All page numbers taken from the 1994 version of the Second Edition.)

Lord of the Rings, Queerness, and the Nature of Great Art

Over the last month or so, there’s been a bit of an ongoing meltdown over the contents of the Tolkien Society’s annual Summer Seminar. Specifically, over the idea that the talks this year are too “woke”, that they engage with questions of gay interpretations of Lord of the Rings and other suchlike aspects of Tolkien scholarship that they deem too radical. Dreher, Tettenborn, and their compatriots do not actually attempt to make an argument against these views, instead they merely treat it as prima facie absurd to even entertain them, laughing at the idea that any “traditional bibliophile” could be interested in exploring concepts of queerness, colonialism, racism, or disability in the works of Tolkien. (Most confusingly, Tettenborn laughs at the very idea of discussing “traumatic stress or ecological frameworks” in Lord of the Rings, which makes me strongly suspect he has never actually read it). It’s tempting to respond to this contempt with the same, and merely mock these conservatives for being a bunch of whiny losers unable to deal with a changing world. Neither author here actually makes an argument coherent enough to be refuted. But, I actually do think this episodes provides a useful framework for discussing conservative misconceptions about art and literature.

To the people upset about “wokeness” at the Tolkien Society, analyzing art in an “incorrect” manner is a perversion or corruption or at least a mistake. In reality, it is the truest sign of a work of art’s greatness.

Tolkien’s Enigmatic Approach to Lore

J.R.R. Tolkien

Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien, is one of the most influential books ever written. In the decades since it’s publication, it has become a cultural powerhouse, inspiring blockbuster movies, video games, toy lines, and helping to give birth to the enduringly popular epic fantasy genre. Despite it’s venerability, however, Lord of the Rings holds up. Even now, when many of it’s knockoffs and imitators can seem portentous and dreary, Tolkien’s masterpiece retains a freshness, a clarity, that distinguishes it from the many, many other works of fantasy that have followed in it’s footsteps. Why is this? Part of the answer is, of course, that Tolkien was a genuinely great writer, but I think it’s worth examining Lord of the Rings‘s rather unique relationship to and treatment of Lore. “Lore”, used here to refer to the backstory, mythology, world-building, and background details, is an integral part of epic fantasy. It’s one of the things that the genre is best known for (or most notorious for, depending on your perspective), and Lord of the Rings is the quintessential example of this. After all, Tolkien spent literally most of his life working on the lore and mythic backstory to his novels. His son, Christopher Tolkien, spent most of his life publishing and editing it. That massive compendium of Lore is one of the key distinguishing features of the book. And yet!

One of the fascinating things about Lord of the Rings is that when you’re reading it, it’s very clear that there’s a huge mythic corpus that underlies the story but most of it is never actually explained. There is surprisingly little exposition! If you read it after having read The Silmarillion, you’ll notice dozens of references and allusions to events and characters from the history of Middle-Earth. But these are rarely unpacked for the benefit of the audience or, most importantly, particularly relevant to the plot. It’s a violation of the rule of Chekov’s Gun, on a truly massive scale. But it works.

Saruman Should Have Won: An Analysis of Rohirrim Cavalry Tactics in the War of the Ring

Charge!

It is undoubtedly one of the most dramatic moments in the Lord of the Rings movies. The Battle of Helm’s Deep has been raging all night, and the beleaguered Rohirrim under King Théoden are hard-pressed. Saruman’s Uruk-hai have breached the Deeping Wall, forcing the defenders to fall back to the citadel of the Hornburg. As the creatures of darkness batter down the doors, Théoden and Aragorn lead their few remaining soldiers on a forlorn hope, charging out the front gates on a sally, determined to die well in battle. But just as the Uruk-hai surround them and all hope seems lost, Gandolf appears on a hill to the East, accompanied by Éomer and several thousand horsemen. They charge down a steep hill, driving straight through the Uruk-hai pike phalanx and shattering Saruman’s army, routing the survivors and sending them fleeing into the forest of Hurons, where the trees devour them. It is a great victory, won at the last moment, and Rohan is saved from slavery. It is also one of the most ridiculous, preposterous, ahistorical displays of knightly propaganda I have ever had the misfortune to witness.

The Lord Of The Rings As Metafiction

The Red Book of the Westmarch

I think I first read Lord of the Rings in fifth grade, and I’ve loved it ever since. It’s one of those books that you can get something new out of every time you revisit, and despite the fact that it inspired a whole host of less-than-stellar imitations and derivatives that dominated fantasy for decades it remains startlingly great; deeper and more complex than the stale stereotypes it gave birth to would suggest. Famously, Tolkien was a linguist and a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature who wrote fantasy as much for an excuse to create his own language as for the story. Even when not lecturing the reader on the differences between Quenya and Sindarin, Lord of the Rings retains a scholarly air to it. There’s a self-conscious archaism, a deliberate element of throwback. The books are written in the style of the ancient epics Tolkien loved, and that comes through very well. Especially in the degree of metafiction included in the text.

The conceit that Tolkien retained (more or less) throughout his writings on Middle-Earth was that he was not an author, he was a translator. “Middle-Earth” was not another planet or dimension, it was a lost epoch of our history that he was researching. In some ways, this was fairly perfunctory. Maps of Middle-Earth, for example, cannot be made to match maps of Europe by any real means. But Tolkien never gave up on this concept, and metatextual elements are woven throughout his novels to a degree I’m not sure people fully appreciate.