imperialistic, and possessed of an all-powerful state is Mordor – admittedly the most powerful force of all, as such, but essentially an alien invader (as Sauron originally was) rather than a native. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is thus a Europe, as Luling puts it, that has never been ‘Europeanized,’ or, what amounts to the same thing, ‘modernized.’ And the story of The Lord of the Rings – as reflected in its very title – is about the resistance to just that. The potential relevance of these books consequently opens out not only to anyone living in ‘the West,’ but to anyone affected by it; which is to say, nearly everyone anywhere.
We shall also consider The Lord of the Rings as literature. That involves considering why Tolkien chose ‘fantasy,’ with its affinities with fairy-tale and myth, as the appropriate form and strategy; and why the wisdom of that choice has been so roundly confirmed by readers, although ignored or condemned by critics. There is also the question of comparable books. I shall suggest that there are indeed a few other works of literary myth, or ‘mythopoeic’ fiction, which also reveal its true power, feed the soul, and escape the modernist critical compass. There are others, also apparently ‘fantasy,’ which are completely different. Here I am obliged to be unkind to some sacred cows: from the pernicious productions of The Walt Disney Company, and pseudo-fairy-tales like The Wizard of Oz, to some of the authors and critics now canonized by literary feminism.
Given how unavoidably subjective and personal it must be, compiling lists of ‘great’ books is a game we can all play. I have no doubt that The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, even if not always for purely ‘literary’ reasons. But I am not too concerned to persuade the reader to agree; just to realize that it is fully deserving of affection and respect, and even some passionate attention. Written with love, learning, skill and sacrifice, it is a cry (as someone once said of religion) from ‘the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions,’ but also something more. It offers not an ‘escape’ from our world, this world, but hope for its future.
· 2 · THE SHIRE: CULTURE, SOCIETY AND POLITICS
Hobbits, according to Tolkien, were more frequent ‘long ago in the quiet of the world …’ They ‘love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom … Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking.’ They thought of themselves as ‘plain quiet folk’ with ‘no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!’ ‘Nonetheless,’ their chronicler notes, ‘ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill …’ In other words, they manifested ‘the notorious Anglo-hobbitic inability to know when they’re beaten.’
Hobbits were also inclined ‘to joke about serious things,’ and ‘say less than they mean.’ Indeed, they ‘will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.’ Similarly, they preferred speeches that were ‘short and obvious,’ and ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.’ They were ‘a bit suspicious … of anything out of the way – uncanny, if you understand me.’ It wasn’t difficult to acquire a reputation for peculiarity in the Shire.
But as Tolkien notes, in addition to their wealth ‘Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with Elves.’ The nephew of ‘mad Baggins,’ as he eventually became known, Frodo was something of an aesthete and intellectual, who, ‘to the amazement of sensible folk … was sometimes seen far from home walking in the hills and woods under the starlight.’ None of this was usual among their peers, and Sam the gardener, although recently and exceptionally lettered, was a more typical hobbit than his fellow Companions – or as Tolkien put it, ‘the genuine hobbit.’
Like some readers, Tolkien himself sometimes found Sam, as he wrote:
very ‘trying.’ He is a more representative hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he has consequently a stronger ingredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity – by which I do not mean a mere ‘down-to-earthiness’ – a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional ‘wisdom.’ … Imagine Sam without his education by Bilbo and his fascination with things Elvish!
Even with this kind of conservative peer pressure, however, your behaviour had to be extreme to land you in any real trouble, for the Shire at this time had hardly any government: ‘Families for the most part managed their own affairs. … The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving,’ and ‘almost his only duty was to preside at banquets …’ Otherwise there were only hereditary heads of clans, plus a Postmaster and First Shirriff – the latter less for Inside Work than ‘to see that Outsiders of any kind, great or small, did not make themselves a nuisance.’
Now it doesn’t take any great perceptiveness to see in ‘these charming, absurd, helpless’ (and not-so-helpless) hobbits a self-portrait of the English, something which Tolkien admitted: ‘“The Shire” is based on rural England and not any other country in the world,’ and more specifically the West Midlands: Hobbiton ‘is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee’ (i.e. 1897).
Compare the portrait by George Orwell writing in 1940, and one still instantly recognizable, albeit sadly altered in some respects, of a conservative people neither artistically nor intellectually inclined, though with ‘a certain power of acting without thought;’ taciturn, preferring tacit understandings to formal explication; endowed with a love of flowers and animals, valuing privateness and the liberty of the individual, and respecting constitutionalism and legality; not puritanical and without definite religious belief, but strangely gentle (and this has changed most, especially during the 1980s), with a hatred of war and militarism that coexists with a strong unconscious patriotism. Orwell summed up English society as ‘a strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency.’
True, these attributes are inextricably mingled with ones that the English have wanted to find in the mirror; nor are they eternal and immutable. Because this image partakes of a national pastoral fantasy, however, it does