We get to see a bit of Sam Gamgee's family life in an epilogue to the Lord of the Rings that Tolkien worked on but ultimately abandoned as not being a good closing to the tale. It takes place about seventeen years after the destruction of the year and is primarily a discussion between Sam and his oldest child Elanor. It is not mentioned in the text of this epilogue, but according to the Appendices Sam is two years into his second term as Mayor of the Shire, so we know that the basic underlying political structures of the Shire are still in place.
It would seem, however, that a working-class gardener becoming mayor for 7 terms, and sending his kids off as courtiers to foreign kings, is at least an exception to the class distinctions, if perhaps not an outright overturning of them.
We get to see a bit of Sam Gamgee's family life in an epilogue to the Lord of the Rings that Tolkien worked on but ultimately abandoned as not being a good closing to the tale. It takes place about seventeen years after the destruction of the year and is primarily a discussion between Sam and his oldest child Elanor. It is not mentioned in the text of this epilogue, but according to the Appendices Sam is two years into his second term as Mayor of the Shire, so we know that the basic underlying political structures of the Shire are still in place.
It would seem, however, that a working-class gardener becoming mayor for 7 terms, and sending his kids off as courtiers to foreign kings, is at least an exception to the class distinctions, if perhaps not an outright overturning of them.
Perhaps. One of the notable things about the Mayor of Michel Delving (sometimes styled the Mayor of the Shire) is that it is an elected office with a fixed term who, unlike Thain or Master of Buckland, doesn’t seem to require a specific pedigree. (These are the only three Hobbitish offices mentioned, other than postman or shirriff). Will Whitfoot, Sam’s immediate predecessor in office, does not seem to be of particularly high birth. To the best of my recollection he’s the only Whitfoot we see in the books, unlike the various Tooks, Brandybucks, or any of the other family names of the Hobbit gentry class that Bilbo rattles off in his farewell speech. In other words being Mayor seems like the kind of administrative post that had long been at least theoretically attainable by working-class Hobbits.
It would seem, however, that a working-class gardener becoming mayor for 7 terms, and sending his kids off as courtiers to foreign kings, is at least an exception to the class distinctions, if perhaps not an outright overturning of them.
I'd guess that being a close personal friend of said genuine Numenorean king might bump you up the class rankings a bit. One of Sam's daughters marries the Thain's heir, his son-in-law is named Warden of Westmarch by the Thain at his request.
I think what we see here is that Sam is de facto promoted to the hobbit gentry. Whether this is by being named Frodo's heir, or by being friends with King Elessar, or some combination is perhaps unclear.
Wasn't the chief duty of the Mayor of Michel Delving to preside at banquets, according to the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring? I don't think class comes into the question at all. Frodo told Faramir that in the Shire, gardeners were honoured.
The Shire does seem to have been fairly egalitarian, although, as has been said, there were *landed gentry* as well as more workaday folk.
FWIW, I find the general lack of religion in LOTR - or an organised form of it - refreshing. Virtually no churches, temples etc., and yet there is an underlying sense of guiding hands...though even Gandalf and Elrond are very wary of being anything other than vague about this.
FWIW, I find the general lack of religion in LOTR - or an organised form of it - refreshing. Virtually no churches, temples etc., and yet there is an underlying sense of guiding hands...though even Gandalf and Elrond are very wary of being anything other than vague about this.
That was quite intentional. Tolkien wrote to his friend, Jesuit priest Robert Murray:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
(Letter 142 for those who have Humphrey Carter’s The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981, though I think a new edition was released last year).
FWIW, I find the general lack of religion in LOTR - or an organised form of it - refreshing. Virtually no churches, temples etc., and yet there is an underlying sense of guiding hands...though even Gandalf and Elrond are very wary of being anything other than vague about this.
That was quite intentional. Tolkien wrote to his friend, Jesuit priest Robert Murray:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
(Letter 142 for those who have Humphrey Carter’s The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981, though I think a new edition was released last year).
Yes, it was indeed intentional, but no less refreshing for all that!
There are hints here and there - the Elves who meet with Frodo in the Shire are singing a hymn to Elbereth, or Varda, and IIRC there is an occasion in Ithilien when one of Faramir's men calls upon the Valar, in what sounds like a prayer, to turn a stampeding oliphaunt aside...
There's a lot more about Eru, the Valar, the Maia, and so on in the other works, of course, and we are told fairly clearly that Gandalf dies in Moria, and is brought back to life...
FWIW, I find the general lack of religion in LOTR - or an organised form of it - refreshing. Virtually no churches, temples etc., and yet there is an underlying sense of guiding hands...though even Gandalf and Elrond are very wary of being anything other than vague about this.
That was quite intentional. Tolkien wrote to his friend, Jesuit priest Robert Murray:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
(Letter 142 for those who have Humphrey Carter’s The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981, though I think a new edition was released last year).
Yes, it was indeed intentional, but no less refreshing for all that!
There are hints here and there - the Elves who meet with Frodo in the Shire are singing a hymn to Elbereth, or Varda, and IIRC there is an occasion in Ithilien when one of Faramir's men calls upon the Valar, in what sounds like a prayer, to turn a stampeding oliphaunt aside...
There’s also the “Standing Silence,” where the Men of Gondor stand and silently face the West before eating.
FWIW, I find the general lack of religion in LOTR - or an organised form of it - refreshing. Virtually no churches, temples etc., and yet there is an underlying sense of guiding hands...though even Gandalf and Elrond are very wary of being anything other than vague about this.
That was quite intentional. Tolkien wrote to his friend, Jesuit priest Robert Murray:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
(Letter 142 for those who have Humphrey Carter’s The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981, though I think a new edition was released last year).
Yes, it was indeed intentional, but no less refreshing for all that!
There are hints here and there - the Elves who meet with Frodo in the Shire are singing a hymn to Elbereth, or Varda, and IIRC there is an occasion in Ithilien when one of Faramir's men calls upon the Valar, in what sounds like a prayer, to turn a stampeding oliphaunt aside...
There’s also the “Standing Silence,” where the Men of Gondor stand and silently face the West before eating.
Yes, that has a quasi-religious (and very dignified) ring to it...it makes the hobbits feel rather rustic...
I think the LOTR and Silmarillion make it clear that there is no question of faith. They have some rather old elves, most notably Galadriel, who have witnessed the events of the Silmarillion; Galadriel has actually met the Valar. She has personal knowledge and not faith. (She may be the central figure in the whole overall story.) Gandalf and the other Istari are actually Maia, that is, the lesser angels serving the Valar, who are the archangels (although few others know who the Istari are).
The Standing Silence is more of a historical reference than a religious observation.
I think the LOTR and Silmarillion make it clear that there is no question of faith. They have some rather old elves, most notably Galadriel, who have witnessed the events of the Silmarillion; Galadriel has actually met the Valar. She has personal knowledge and not faith. (She may be the central figure in the whole overall story.) Gandalf and the other Istari are actually Maia, that is, the lesser angels serving the Valar, who are the archangels (although few others know who the Istari are).
The Standing Silence is more of a historical reference than a religious observation.
Faramir says of the Standing Silence, “We look toward Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be.” To me, that suggests a historical reference linked with religious significance, which is often how such things work, at least in my experience.
I think the LOTR and Silmarillion make it clear that there is no question of faith. They have some rather old elves, most notably Galadriel, who have witnessed the events of the Silmarillion; Galadriel has actually met the Valar. She has personal knowledge and not faith. (She may be the central figure in the whole overall story.)
Galadriel is interesting, but she's not a central character to any of Tolkien's stories, or the overall arc of his stories. She's kind of like Tiresias in the various Theban stories; always there and sometimes playing an important part, but never a central character. Some of this may be because it's my understanding that Tolkien wrote the character back-to-front; having her first appear in The Fellowship of the Ring and then creating a backstory for her in his half-formed (at the time) legendarium. This may be why Galadriel is such a peripheral character in the Silmarillion. The rough outline of a lot of events had already been sketched out so there wasn't a lot of room to fit her in.
Or as Christopher Tolkien put it in Unfinished Tales:
There is no part of the history of Middle-earth more full of problems than the story of Galadriel and Celeborn, and it must be admitted that there are severe inconsistencies 'embedded in the traditions'; or, to look at the matter from another point of view, that the role and importance of Galadriel only emerged slowly, and that her story underwent continual refashionings.
This is, of course, one of the big problems with Tolkien's "works". He was constantly revising them and most of his Middle-earth material was only published posthumously, so that for a lot of stuff we have to make educated guesses about what counts as the definitive version.
It has been very interesting to read through this after I went through a - I'm sure there's a theological word for it, but I'm not sure what - not so strong as revulsion in my early twenties. After reading LOTR several times and collectiing stuff such as maps, the Swann songs, calendars etc. I bought the Silmarilion as soon as it came out, but couldn't get into it. Cirencester Oxfam had the delight of a window display of 'first edition' which didn't display long.
There were two things which affected my attitude. One may seem trivial, but I stopped being able to identify with any characters as I read. Trained on the Odyssey, I had been used to seeing the protagonist's point of view, and the side characters, but I was beginning not to want to identify with the males so much. Homer writes a good female. Tolkien doesn't. Eowyn doesn't serve. She has to pretend to be a bloke. And who wants to identify with Ioreth? I wanted something with active women who could be women. Tricky. And of the males,, during the whole story, Sam was most ordinary. Faramir was not bad, shame he was left out of the film.
The non-trivial reason was that everything was black and white. It's obvious Sauron is bad, so why on Middle Earth choose to follow him? A friend has put it as if two cold callers turn up on your doorstep with brochures " Excuse me, but have you considered turning to the dark side?" (It goes for Star Wars as well.)
The music from the radio LOTR and the Hobbit is now on earworm replay. I could sing them when I read the Hobbit to my class!
The non-trivial reason was that everything was black and white. It's obvious Sauron is bad, so why on Middle Earth choose to follow him? A friend has put it as if two cold callers turn up on your doorstep with brochures " Excuse me, but have you considered turning to the dark side?" (It goes for Star Wars as well.)
In the middle phase of the Harry Potter saga, my father phoned me one day to exclaim that if he were Harry he would walk up to Crabbe and Goyle and appeal to them in the name of rational self-preservation. Voldemort is a terrible, terrible person who randomly kills people who work for him. Joining his side, or becoming involved with him in any way, is absurdly dangerous. If you’re a Malfoy or something, and you know he’d come after you if you tried to quit, then joining him is certainly the safest option. But willingly getting involved is rather like plunging enthusiastically into a game of Russian roulette. I cite this example because its simple appeal to human Reason (Evil is bad! You don’t want to be around it! Think about it!) is exactly the sort of argument which lay at the heart of the Handbook of Princes genre before Machiavelli got his ink-blackened hands on it.
<snip>
Cesare Borgia was both feared and loved. The “loved” part may seem out of place given Borgia infamy, but it was true. The papal vicars Cesare replaced had been widely disliked by the peoples they ruled, since most of them were corrupt and more interested in family advancement than their people’s well-being. Cesare offered something different, and in many cases better. Better how? Because the fundamental purpose of government, from the perspective of a butcher or a weaver, is to keep the peace and prevent killing and looting. Cesare did that. Cesare did that very, very well. How? If someone was caught causing strife in the streets, that person would be executed in the most horrifically graphic possible way and his corpse strung up in public. Consequence: peace. Two examples of Cesare’s activities in this period crop up particularly vividly in the history books, and in Machiavelli’s “little book on princes.” The first is the case of Remirro de Orco. Cesare conquered the territory of Romagna (East/middle hunk of Italy), including the city of Cesena. Such was the chaos resulting from the violent upheaval and expulsion of the old rulers, that the region of Romagna had largely degenerated into chaos, banditry, killing and looting. Cesare needed to bring order. He appointed a mercenary captain named Remirro de Orco, one of his more loyal men, and commanded that he bring peace to the area as efficiently as possible by using maximum brutality. Following Cesare’s order, Remirro carried out numerous executions, using methods gruesome even for the Renaissance, and speedily crushed the region under the iron heel of peace. No one looted. No one dared. After peace was achieved, Cesare inspected the region and confirmed that it was indeed stable, arguably even more prosperous than it had been before his conquests, but that the people were fired with bitterness and rage. The next morning, Cesare had departed, and Remirro de Orco was found in the town square of Cesena, having been sliced in half, with his gore-spewing entrails strewn across the decorative pavement. No one doubted it was Cesare’s doing, but to Machaivelli’s astonishment, the effect of this unthinkable betrayal was instant and lasting peace. The people were satisfied, even grateful, that Cesare had taken revenge upon the brutal oppressor, and the new, gentler vassal he left in place to rule the region was readily obeyed. They did not blame Cesare for the atrocities loyal Remirro had carried out at his express order – instead they thanked him for avenging them. Cesare was loved.
He was also feared, by other loyal vassals who noticed (as my father urged Crabbe and Goyle to) that the villain had a tendency to brutally murder people near him, even loyal servants. This was unheard of. The Handbook of Princes says the success of the prince depends on his ability to inspire loyalty and love from his vassals. The vassal betraying the benefactor is the worst thing in Dante’s Inferno; Dante didn’t even have a section for benefactors who betray their vassals because it simply didn’t occur to the Renaissance political mind that one would ever want to. But it did occur to Cesare. By this phase, by the way, Cesare’s face had been disfigured by syphilis, and he had taken to wearing a mask. And dressing all in black. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he genuinely did go around dressed all in black wearing a mask, betraying and murdering people. Sadly, we have no documentary evidence that he went “Wa ha ha! Wa ha ha ha ha!” The nervousness that swept through Cesare’s vassals leads us to the second amazing incident, the massacre at Senigallia. In very late 1502, several of the vassals who had supported Cesare in return for receiving power under him and having his help crushing their enemies became increasingly afraid, both for their lives and for Italy and Europe, and plotted against him. This was really quite rational. But they were disorganized and uncertain, and did not follow through well. They heard rumors that Cesare had heard about the plot. They didn’t quite trust each other not to sell each other out to him. One problem led to another, and in the end they decided to abandon the plot, confess to him that they had considered treason but renew their vows to follow him to the end, and beg his forgiveness. They confessed. He forgave. They rejoiced. He invited them to join him for a feast. They heartily accepted. He massacred them all. High on Olympus Hestia sighed, and the vengeful Furies in the depths gnashed their teeth as the Laws of Hospitality lay wounded. Cesare’s vassals never plotted against him again.
I'm pretty sure that we can all think of other real world examples of where ordinary people chose to follow total monsters.
Faramir wasn't left out of the films although his character was changed, and not for the better.
It was my observation that one major fault of Jackson's film adaptations was that the minor characters were most often portrayed in a worse light so that the main characters would look better by comparison.
The non-trivial reason was that everything was black and white. It's obvious Sauron is bad, so why on Middle Earth choose to follow him? A friend has put it as if two cold callers turn up on your doorstep with brochures " Excuse me, but have you considered turning to the dark side?" (It goes for Star Wars as well.)
Power and promises. The "strong arm" principle. Why do people support dictators? Same principle.
Sam does wonder about this when he sees one of the haradrim dying after a skirmish with Faramir's raiders, and wonders what threats or lies had led him there.
It's easy to know that Elrond is one of the good guys when you've been to Rivendell, and seen what Elrond stands for. Less so if you haven't.
People followed Sauron for all sorts of different reasons which basically boil down to either fear or the desire for power (or both). Saruman is quite upfront about it (well, once he's been rumbled); he doesn't think the leaders of the West can win and he wants to be on the winning side. He also doesn't seem to value the things that Gandalf et al. are fighting for. If you don't care about trees, why shouldn't you chop them all down to use as firewood?
Saruman is quite upfront about it (well, once he's been rumbled); he doesn't think the leaders of the West can win and he wants to be on the winning side.
He does however think he can play both sides against the other, take the One Ring for himself, and defeat Sauron that way. Which is even more unlikely.
@Dafyd : unlikely but not impossible. Sauron and Saruman were both Maia, and if Saruman had got his hands on the Ring he would have controlled a large part of Sauron's power. Possibly even some of his armies.
He did start building up his Uruk-hai armies (and chopping down trees) long before he found out that Frodo had the Ring, though.
Without his duplicity though the quest would have failed - if Saruman had told Sauron everything he knew about the Fellowship and their intentions.
Would it? I'm not sure of the value-added intelligence Saruman could have provided. As of the second chapter of Fellowship of the Ring Sauron already knows that the Ring is in the possession of a halfling named "Baggins" from the Shire and that the Ring is on the move (as of September 3018). Saruman is not present at the Council of Elrond (having already been rumbled as a traitor) so he doesn't know of the plan to destroy the Ring (though he may guess). There's not much Saruman could tell Sauron that Sauron didn't already know.
Faramir also refuses the Ring, though he could easily have taken it from Frodo at Henneth Annun. His brother Boromir, of course, tries to take it, and fails...
Both Gollum and Sam dream of what they might do if they had the Precious...
Does Saruman even think the Fellowship are going to destroy the Ring? His plan to capture the Ring only really makes sense if he believes the Fellowship are planning to cut across Rohan to Gondor (IIRC the Fellowship are only where they are because Aragorn is putting off ruling it out).
Faramir also refuses the Ring, though he could easily have taken it from Frodo at Henneth Annun.
I think "refuses" is a bit of a stretch. Faramir says he would not take it (and does not), but unlike Gandalf and Galadriel the Ring is never offered to him.
His plan to capture the Ring only really makes sense if he believes the Fellowship are planning to cut across Rohan to Gondor (IIRC the Fellowship are only where they are because Aragorn is putting off ruling it out).
The Fellowship end up where they are at the end of the first book because they're deliberately avoiding cutting across Rohan, largely because Isengard sits right at the Gap of Rohan and it's too risky to take the Ring anywhere near that place. Knowing that the Ring is on the move but hasn't passed through the Gap of Rohan is why Saruman eventually resorts to Uruk-hai search parties.
Faramir also refuses the Ring, though he could easily have taken it from Frodo at Henneth Annun.
I think "refuses" is a bit of a stretch. Faramir says he would not take it (and does not), but unlike Gandalf and Galadriel the Ring is never offered to him.
<snip>
I think "refuses" is a bit of a stretch. Faramir says he would not take it (and does not), but unlike Gandalf and Galadriel the Ring is never offered to him.
He and his army have the custody of two small runaway hobbits, who he knows to have the Ring. That's functionally almost the same as being offered it.
'Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!' he said. 'How you have increased my sorrow, you two strange wanderers from a far country, bearing the peril of Men! But you are less judges of Men than I of Halflings. We are truth-speakers, we men of Gondor. We boast seldom, and then perform, or die in the attempt. Not if I found it on the highway would I take it I said. Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them.
'But I am not such a man. Or I am wise enough to know that there are some perils from which a man must flee. Sit at peace! And be comforted, Samwise [...] Your heart is shrewd as well as faithful, and saw clearer than your eyes. For strange though it may seem, it was safe to declare this to me. It may even help the master that you love. It shall turn to his good, if it is in my power. So be comforted. But do not even name this thing again aloud. Once is enough.'
I think "refuses" is a bit of a stretch. Faramir says he would not take it (and does not), but unlike Gandalf and Galadriel the Ring is never offered to him.
He and his army have the custody of two small runaway hobbits, who he knows to have the Ring. That's functionally almost the same as being offered it.
That's a pretty messed up idea of consent. I guess that's the same sense in which Déagol "offered" the Ring to Sméagol; since Déagol wasn't able to prevent his own murder, that practically makes the Ring a birthday present!
The important thing is that he did not seize it, nor apparently was even tempted to. Thus showing that's he's one of the most mora;;y pure characters in the trilogy, imho.
The important thing is that he did not seize it, nor apparently was even tempted to. Thus showing that's he's one of the most mora;;y pure characters in the trilogy, imho.
Yes. Faramir is one of the most attractive of the secondary characters in LOTR - but what did they do to him in the film? I've seen it, but can't recall.
What's intriguing is that this interpretation can be reached using nothing but the canonical information from LotR and inferences drawn from that information.
I think "refuses" is a bit of a stretch. Faramir says he would not take it (and does not), but unlike Gandalf and Galadriel the Ring is never offered to him.
He and his army have the custody of two small runaway hobbits, who he knows to have the Ring. That's functionally almost the same as being offered it.
That's a pretty messed up idea of consent. I guess that's the same sense in which Déagol "offered" the Ring to Sméagol; since Déagol wasn't able to prevent his own murder, that practically makes the Ring a birthday present!
Rather like that, yes. The Ring is under Faramir's power. He knows where it is, and if he wanted to take it, two tired little hobbits wouldn't be able to stop him. So I don't see that the temptation he gets is so different from had Frodo offered him the Ring.
I rather think Galadriel has more temptation, though. Faramir knows the story of Isildur, but little of what the Ring is really capable of. Galadriel wears one of the three, and is the mightiest of the Noldor remaining in Middle Earth. She knows exactly what the One Ring could do, and what she could do with it.
He and his army have the custody of two small runaway hobbits, who he knows to have the Ring. That's functionally almost the same as being offered it.
That's a pretty messed up idea of consent.
Faramir is a senior commander in the army of Gondor and pre-modern armies need to requisition stuff from civilians in order to function, which would tend to blur the difference between consent and not consent when operating in their own territory.
(As explained on acoup.com, which IIRC I found following your link, for which thank you.)
Mind you, from what we see we can suppose that Gondor's logistics are pretty good so maybe the Gondorean army is well-enough organised that while in Gondor's territory it functions on solely on supplies that it pays for or acquires through regulated taxation in kind.
It seems to me that the distinction between Faramir refusing the offer of the Ring from the Ringbearer on one hand and Faramir refusing the take advantage of the power to easily take the Ring from the Ringbearer on the other hand is, at the end of the day, a distinction with little if any difference, except to the extent it makes Faramir’s decision, which also involved disobeying the law, more admirable.
@Bishops Finger , they had him capture the hobbits and start taking them back. Then for no apparent reason he let's them go.
The reason is that while crossing the Anduin at Osgiliath (en route to Minas Tirith and Denethor), they are attacked by a Nazgûl, who almost captures Frodo. Faramir is impressed by Frodo and Sam’s resolve, so he allows them to leave.
Faramir is a senior commander in the army of Gondor and pre-modern armies need to requisition stuff from civilians in order to function, which would tend to blur the difference between consent and not consent when operating in their own territory.
This is true, but pre-modern armies did still make some distinctions. They had separate terms for what armies confiscated to satisfy their immediate needs ("forage", which usually means food for troops, fodder for animals, and firewood) and things confiscated for other reasons ("pillage", which means pretty much anything that's not forage). I'd suggest the Ring falls into the latter category, though a case could be made that it qualifies as a weapon.
(As explained on acoup.com, which IIRC I found following your link, for which thank you.)
My pleasure. For those who are interested, here are the acoup.com analyses of the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helm's Deep. Each is a multi-part analysis, but they're done by a military historian who can speak to the details of what's being depicted.
Mind you, from what we see we can suppose that Gondor's logistics are pretty good so maybe the Gondorean army is well-enough organised that while in Gondor's territory it functions on solely on supplies that it pays for or acquires through regulated taxation in kind.
The Ithilien rangers are probably getting by on supplies that have are the results of taxation in Gondor. The picture we get of Ithilien is land that has largely been abandoned due to the ongoing warfare. In other words, there is no civilian population present from which forage could be gotten. This fits pretty well with what the Ithilien rangers are portrayed as doing; a light infantry force conducting hit-and-run raids on forces moving through the area.
What's intriguing is that this interpretation can be reached using nothing but the canonical information from LotR and inferences drawn from that information.
It is, as the article says, “interesting speculation,” and a bit fun, but I’m not really convinced by it. And it doesn’t seem consistent with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, nor with Gandalf’s words or tone when, on the return to the Shire, he turns aside to talk with Tom Bombadil. (Nor do I quite buy that Tom Bombadil is as disliked by fans of LotR as the author suggests.)
I will admit to always being fascinated by Goldberry’s answer to Frodo’s question “who is Tom Bombadil?”
“He is,” said Goldberry, staying her swift movement and smiling.
It’s particularly interesting, I think, in light of Tom’s answer to the same question:
“Eh, what?” said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. “Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?
But what we are reading in Lord of the Rings is not an actuality but a mythology or rather a tale from a mythology such as the Odyssey. Tolkien is a master at imagining an alternative mythology, and his is pretty coherency within the mythology. Middle Earth, is not some alternative reality, it is the current world but before the age of man*. He even has an explanation about this change happened. However, no mythology should be perfectly coherent. So Tom Bombadil is simply one of the points at which it is not coherent.
I am somewhat surprise in all those theories no reference is made to the Green Man or Puck which to me seem much easier origins of Tom Bombadil.
*Tolkien's use when it implies the age when man ruled the earth rather than magical (older) beings. Not the age when men were around.
Yes, @Jengie Jon, I think Green Man comparisons are quite apropos.
FWIW, Tolkien wrote in a letter to Naomi Mitchison (a proofreader on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, who’d written to him with some questions):
As a story, I think it is good that there should be a lot of things unexplained (especially if an explanation actually exists); and I have perhaps from this point of view erred in trying to explain too much, and give too much past history. Many readers have, for example, rather stuck at the Council of Elrond. And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally). . . .
Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.
This is Letter 144 for those who have Humphrey Carpenter’s The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflen, 1981, pp. 174, 178–79), though as I said above, I think a new edition was released last year.
What's intriguing is that this interpretation can be reached using nothing but the canonical information from LotR and inferences drawn from that information.
Literarily speaking, Bombadil seems to be a holdover from the initial idea for what would later become The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's publisher requested a sequel to The Hobbit and at the same time rejected publication of what would eventually become The Silmarillion, which was still in early drafts. This seems like an entirely reasonable position or a publisher to take given that The Hobbit was already a commercial success and The Silmarillion was half epic saga where very unpleasant things happen to a lot of the characters and half linguistics exercise.
So Tolkien set about writing what he initially imagined would be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit, something similar in tone and style. At first he thought about more adventures for Bilbo Baggins. Then he decided that the protagonist should be Bilbo's son (or maybe nephew) Bingo Bolger-Baggins. The name gives you some notion of the tone of this early stage draft. Thankfully Bingo was eventually re-named "Frodo" and the family tree was revised to make him Bilbo's cousin.
Of course we know the turn he eventually took with this work. In some ways the rejection of The Silmarillion was fortuitous since it allowed Tolkien to channel that part of his creative mind into the emerging Lord of the Ring (singular in the initial title) and connect what had been conceived as a stand-alone work* (The Hobbit) into his larger legendarium.
*Yes, The Hobbit name checks a few items from Tolkien's First Age tales, most notably Elrond and Gondolin, but I think that was just borrowing some details for color. Of course once you start doing that and have a pre-existing massive body of details to draw from the way forward becomes obvious for a sequel that keeps growing.
The Shire does seem to have been fairly egalitarian, although, as has been said, there were *landed gentry* as well as more workaday folk.
I came across The Moral Economy of the Shire recently. Goldwag names his internet essay after James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. Goldwag posits that what we see in the Shire is not so much egalitarian as it is a kind of patron-client society where large landholders (Tooks, Brandybucks, Baggins, etc.) hold their positions not just because they control the means of production (agricultural land, in this case) but also through a network of traditional and customary relationships. Goldwag points out that this seems to flow both ways. Bilbo (and presumably other Hobbit gentry) seem to be maintained by the rents extracted from their landholdings but also have a series of socially obligatory feasting and gift-giving to maintain their status. Bilbo's 111th birthday party seems to be a particularly extravagant version of what is described as a typical event for a Hobbit of his station, where he feasts his neighbors and distributes gifts.
As I said before, this is the traditional system of social organization in the English countryside, sometimes known as “squirearchy”. The gentry, in this paradigm, aren’t nobility – they don’t have a distinct set of legal privileges. Serfdom, or other forms of labor bound to the land, doesn’t seem to exist, and there’s no evidence of military vassalage as an organizing principle. Instead, we can see that a relatively small number of families owns much of the land, and much of the agricultural capital – mills, granaries, oxen, plows, etc – allowing them to wield a high level of informal economic and social control over their community. Most other Hobbits would either be tenant farmers, paying most of their produce back to their landlords in rents, or yeomen, independent small farmers who owned their own land, but were still dependent on the gentry in many respects. We can see a small, burgeoning urban bourgeois emerging in the small towns and villages, perhaps, but without foreign trade or industrialization, this can’t grow to challenge the gentry, and no proletariat is likely to exist yet.
Understanding this sheds a great deal of light on Tolkien’s explanation of the Shire’s governance. The lack of much organized administration is not, as some suggest, a form of democratic anarchism, but instead the result of elite control.
Wasn't the chief duty of the Mayor of Michel Delving to preside at banquets, according to the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring?
Goldwag has a fairly persuasive take on the mayoralty and banqueting, both as a social institution in itself and as an explanation for the lack of centralization in the Shire.
This is a society organized around family and clan dynamics, where power flows not from the office, but from who you know, and the web of favors, debts, and relationships you can call upon. The Tooks are not powerful because they hold the Thainship, they hold the Thainship as a signifier of being “the first family” of the Shire, in terms of wealth and influence. The Mayor of Michel Delving’s main job is to preside over banquets because, in a political structure like this, those sort of social events are where everything is actually decided and established, in the subtle, informal relationships between the families who own everything. There’s no bureaucracy or administrative apparatus because there is no need for one. The Shire is not conducting war or diplomacy or trade, and isn’t administering large populations of subjects, and there would be no reason for the Oldbucks, Brandybucks, Tooks, etc to support the kind of centralization of state power that could challenge their informal reign.
This kind of customary and informal power structure may be alien to modern readers who are more familiar with written constitutions and the regulatory state, but it was historically a fairly popular form of social organization. The whole essay is well worth a read for those who are interested in such things.
Comments
Yes. Now it revolves chiefly around potty humor and complex and nuanced sex gags.
It would seem, however, that a working-class gardener becoming mayor for 7 terms, and sending his kids off as courtiers to foreign kings, is at least an exception to the class distinctions, if perhaps not an outright overturning of them.
Perhaps. One of the notable things about the Mayor of Michel Delving (sometimes styled the Mayor of the Shire) is that it is an elected office with a fixed term who, unlike Thain or Master of Buckland, doesn’t seem to require a specific pedigree. (These are the only three Hobbitish offices mentioned, other than postman or shirriff). Will Whitfoot, Sam’s immediate predecessor in office, does not seem to be of particularly high birth. To the best of my recollection he’s the only Whitfoot we see in the books, unlike the various Tooks, Brandybucks, or any of the other family names of the Hobbit gentry class that Bilbo rattles off in his farewell speech. In other words being Mayor seems like the kind of administrative post that had long been at least theoretically attainable by working-class Hobbits.
I'd guess that being a close personal friend of said genuine Numenorean king might bump you up the class rankings a bit. One of Sam's daughters marries the Thain's heir, his son-in-law is named Warden of Westmarch by the Thain at his request.
I think what we see here is that Sam is de facto promoted to the hobbit gentry. Whether this is by being named Frodo's heir, or by being friends with King Elessar, or some combination is perhaps unclear.
FWIW, I find the general lack of religion in LOTR - or an organised form of it - refreshing. Virtually no churches, temples etc., and yet there is an underlying sense of guiding hands...though even Gandalf and Elrond are very wary of being anything other than vague about this.
Yes, it was indeed intentional, but no less refreshing for all that!
There are hints here and there - the Elves who meet with Frodo in the Shire are singing a hymn to Elbereth, or Varda, and IIRC there is an occasion in Ithilien when one of Faramir's men calls upon the Valar, in what sounds like a prayer, to turn a stampeding oliphaunt aside...
There's a lot more about Eru, the Valar, the Maia, and so on in the other works, of course, and we are told fairly clearly that Gandalf dies in Moria, and is brought back to life...
Yes, that has a quasi-religious (and very dignified) ring to it...it makes the hobbits feel rather rustic...
The Standing Silence is more of a historical reference than a religious observation.
Galadriel is interesting, but she's not a central character to any of Tolkien's stories, or the overall arc of his stories. She's kind of like Tiresias in the various Theban stories; always there and sometimes playing an important part, but never a central character. Some of this may be because it's my understanding that Tolkien wrote the character back-to-front; having her first appear in The Fellowship of the Ring and then creating a backstory for her in his half-formed (at the time) legendarium. This may be why Galadriel is such a peripheral character in the Silmarillion. The rough outline of a lot of events had already been sketched out so there wasn't a lot of room to fit her in.
Or as Christopher Tolkien put it in Unfinished Tales:
This is, of course, one of the big problems with Tolkien's "works". He was constantly revising them and most of his Middle-earth material was only published posthumously, so that for a lot of stuff we have to make educated guesses about what counts as the definitive version.
There were two things which affected my attitude. One may seem trivial, but I stopped being able to identify with any characters as I read. Trained on the Odyssey, I had been used to seeing the protagonist's point of view, and the side characters, but I was beginning not to want to identify with the males so much. Homer writes a good female. Tolkien doesn't. Eowyn doesn't serve. She has to pretend to be a bloke. And who wants to identify with Ioreth? I wanted something with active women who could be women. Tricky. And of the males,, during the whole story, Sam was most ordinary. Faramir was not bad, shame he was left out of the film.
The non-trivial reason was that everything was black and white. It's obvious Sauron is bad, so why on Middle Earth choose to follow him? A friend has put it as if two cold callers turn up on your doorstep with brochures " Excuse me, but have you considered turning to the dark side?" (It goes for Star Wars as well.)
The music from the radio LOTR and the Hobbit is now on earworm replay. I could sing them when I read the Hobbit to my class!
So thanks for making me think about it again.
This reminds me of someone discussing appealing to reason against joining "the baddies" in the context of another fantasy series (and also the Borgias).
I'm pretty sure that we can all think of other real world examples of where ordinary people chose to follow total monsters.
It was my observation that one major fault of Jackson's film adaptations was that the minor characters were most often portrayed in a worse light so that the main characters would look better by comparison.
Power and promises. The "strong arm" principle. Why do people support dictators? Same principle.
It's easy to know that Elrond is one of the good guys when you've been to Rivendell, and seen what Elrond stands for. Less so if you haven't.
He did start building up his Uruk-hai armies (and chopping down trees) long before he found out that Frodo had the Ring, though.
Would it? I'm not sure of the value-added intelligence Saruman could have provided. As of the second chapter of Fellowship of the Ring Sauron already knows that the Ring is in the possession of a halfling named "Baggins" from the Shire and that the Ring is on the move (as of September 3018). Saruman is not present at the Council of Elrond (having already been rumbled as a traitor) so he doesn't know of the plan to destroy the Ring (though he may guess). There's not much Saruman could tell Sauron that Sauron didn't already know.
Probably. Gandalf (male, or at least male-presenting) is also offered the Ring and refuses it, though in a less dramatic way than Galadriel.
Both Gollum and Sam dream of what they might do if they had the Precious...
I think "refuses" is a bit of a stretch. Faramir says he would not take it (and does not), but unlike Gandalf and Galadriel the Ring is never offered to him.
Probably not, but we can't say for certain.
The Fellowship end up where they are at the end of the first book because they're deliberately avoiding cutting across Rohan, largely because Isengard sits right at the Gap of Rohan and it's too risky to take the Ring anywhere near that place. Knowing that the Ring is on the move but hasn't passed through the Gap of Rohan is why Saruman eventually resorts to Uruk-hai search parties.
Quite right.
He and his army have the custody of two small runaway hobbits, who he knows to have the Ring. That's functionally almost the same as being offered it.
That's a pretty messed up idea of consent. I guess that's the same sense in which Déagol "offered" the Ring to Sméagol; since Déagol wasn't able to prevent his own murder, that practically makes the Ring a birthday present!
Yes. Faramir is one of the most attractive of the secondary characters in LOTR - but what did they do to him in the film? I've seen it, but can't recall.
What's intriguing is that this interpretation can be reached using nothing but the canonical information from LotR and inferences drawn from that information.
Rather like that, yes. The Ring is under Faramir's power. He knows where it is, and if he wanted to take it, two tired little hobbits wouldn't be able to stop him. So I don't see that the temptation he gets is so different from had Frodo offered him the Ring.
I rather think Galadriel has more temptation, though. Faramir knows the story of Isildur, but little of what the Ring is really capable of. Galadriel wears one of the three, and is the mightiest of the Noldor remaining in Middle Earth. She knows exactly what the One Ring could do, and what she could do with it.
(As explained on acoup.com, which IIRC I found following your link, for which thank you.)
Mind you, from what we see we can suppose that Gondor's logistics are pretty good so maybe the Gondorean army is well-enough organised that while in Gondor's territory it functions on solely on supplies that it pays for or acquires through regulated taxation in kind.
The reason is that while crossing the Anduin at Osgiliath (en route to Minas Tirith and Denethor), they are attacked by a Nazgûl, who almost captures Frodo. Faramir is impressed by Frodo and Sam’s resolve, so he allows them to leave.
The films really didn’t do Faramir justice.
This is true, but pre-modern armies did still make some distinctions. They had separate terms for what armies confiscated to satisfy their immediate needs ("forage", which usually means food for troops, fodder for animals, and firewood) and things confiscated for other reasons ("pillage", which means pretty much anything that's not forage). I'd suggest the Ring falls into the latter category, though a case could be made that it qualifies as a weapon.
My pleasure. For those who are interested, here are the acoup.com analyses of the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helm's Deep. Each is a multi-part analysis, but they're done by a military historian who can speak to the details of what's being depicted.
The Ithilien rangers are probably getting by on supplies that have are the results of taxation in Gondor. The picture we get of Ithilien is land that has largely been abandoned due to the ongoing warfare. In other words, there is no civilian population present from which forage could be gotten. This fits pretty well with what the Ithilien rangers are portrayed as doing; a light infantry force conducting hit-and-run raids on forces moving through the area.
Thank for this @Crœsos !
Eminently plausible - I never did like Bombadil, and now I think I can see why...
I will admit to always being fascinated by Goldberry’s answer to Frodo’s question “who is Tom Bombadil?” It’s particularly interesting, I think, in light of Tom’s answer to the same question:
For anyone interested, here are some other theories about Tom Bombadil.
And as a lagniappe for anyone not familiar with them and with a little time to kill, the band Bombadil singing “Julian of Norwich.”
Tom reminds me of the equally horrible (IMHO) Dickon in The Secret Garden - far too good to be true...
I am somewhat surprise in all those theories no reference is made to the Green Man or Puck which to me seem much easier origins of Tom Bombadil.
*Tolkien's use when it implies the age when man ruled the earth rather than magical (older) beings. Not the age when men were around.
FWIW, Tolkien wrote in a letter to Naomi Mitchison (a proofreader on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, who’d written to him with some questions): This is Letter 144 for those who have Humphrey Carpenter’s The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflen, 1981, pp. 174, 178–79), though as I said above, I think a new edition was released last year.
When I was first introduced to LOTR I never got any further than the appearance of Tom Bombadil - I remember thinking "if it's all like this ..."
And I never did go back to it. So he basically soured the whole work for me.
So Tolkien set about writing what he initially imagined would be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit, something similar in tone and style. At first he thought about more adventures for Bilbo Baggins. Then he decided that the protagonist should be Bilbo's son (or maybe nephew) Bingo Bolger-Baggins. The name gives you some notion of the tone of this early stage draft. Thankfully Bingo was eventually re-named "Frodo" and the family tree was revised to make him Bilbo's cousin.
Of course we know the turn he eventually took with this work. In some ways the rejection of The Silmarillion was fortuitous since it allowed Tolkien to channel that part of his creative mind into the emerging Lord of the Ring (singular in the initial title) and connect what had been conceived as a stand-alone work* (The Hobbit) into his larger legendarium.
*Yes, The Hobbit name checks a few items from Tolkien's First Age tales, most notably Elrond and Gondolin, but I think that was just borrowing some details for color. Of course once you start doing that and have a pre-existing massive body of details to draw from the way forward becomes obvious for a sequel that keeps growing.
I came across The Moral Economy of the Shire recently. Goldwag names his internet essay after James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. Goldwag posits that what we see in the Shire is not so much egalitarian as it is a kind of patron-client society where large landholders (Tooks, Brandybucks, Baggins, etc.) hold their positions not just because they control the means of production (agricultural land, in this case) but also through a network of traditional and customary relationships. Goldwag points out that this seems to flow both ways. Bilbo (and presumably other Hobbit gentry) seem to be maintained by the rents extracted from their landholdings but also have a series of socially obligatory feasting and gift-giving to maintain their status. Bilbo's 111th birthday party seems to be a particularly extravagant version of what is described as a typical event for a Hobbit of his station, where he feasts his neighbors and distributes gifts.
Goldwag has a fairly persuasive take on the mayoralty and banqueting, both as a social institution in itself and as an explanation for the lack of centralization in the Shire.
This kind of customary and informal power structure may be alien to modern readers who are more familiar with written constitutions and the regulatory state, but it was historically a fairly popular form of social organization. The whole essay is well worth a read for those who are interested in such things.