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 distinction I’m making is that while you can interpret the throne of Gondor as a liege lord with vassals, that is as much because when we are telling a story about a legendary king we understand that idea of ‘king’ in familiar terms, and as western readers our image of a warrior king is rooted in medieval castles and courts.
But Aragorn is as much of a feudal king as Gilgamesh, Minos, or Arthur. The various princes charming, wicked queens, and abandoned princesses of fairy stories are all vaguely ‘feudal’ in feel too but that doesn’t mean the stories are embedded firmly in a world of strict Christendom-style vassalage and primogeniture succession.
My point is really that asking what Aragorn’s tax policy was is like asking what the economic consequences were of King Midas’s reign. By the end of RotK, he’s a ‘king’ in the archetypal, storybook sense. You know: the King. Happily ever after.
Hm, I think I understand your point, but I still disagree. For three reasons:
First, Tolkien isn't writing another Grimms' fairy tale. His world has sufficient depth to it that we can make valid comparisons to real-world societies. Aragorn and Theoden are not generic fairy tale kings of some unspecified country. We know a lot about the geography, culture, history, and political organisation of their realms. We can see how they raise their armies, how they interact with their vassals, how they see themselves. They are not just "vaguely feudal in feel", they are actual (albeit fictional) examples of feudal rulers in action.
Second, these are not just incidental details that make the story more fun to read, they are highly relevant for the development of the plot. Questions of succession, legitimacy, and loyalty drive the attitudes and actions of Aragorn, Boromir, Faramir, Denethor, Theoden, Eowyn, Eomer, and Imrahil. The values to which these characters hold themselves are, in many ways, typically feudal.
Third, we know that Tolkien spent his life studying these societies, and he himself often talks about where he got his inspiration from. Unfortunately I haven't read his letters myself yet, but I know from other sources that he is often quite explicit about where he drew his ideas from (see e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influences_on_J._R._R._Tolkien).
> 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.
I think it’s connected to how Tolkien always connects his ‘fantastical’ elements with the ‘ancient’.
The balrog is a primal evil the dwarves released by digging too deep; Tom Bombadil has been alive forever; Fangorn and Mirkwood forest are remnants of the ancient forest that once covered the world; Gollum has been granted long life by the ring making him a remnant of the past that has survived; The elves’ long lives make them a living connection to the past.
His mythology is all about people touching and being touched by something primally ancient, so to confront that world requires that kind journey through time.
I wouldn’t claim any special insight. Like a lot of people I read LotR at a very formative age and as a result I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it.
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.
The context gives further support to the article's statement that George Martin didn't think things through very well before posing his questions. Or even read the books very carefully, for that matter. For example, Martin's questions about the orcs are answered, by implication, in Book VI, Chapter 5:
"[T]he King pardoned the Easterlings that had given themselves up, and sent them away free, and he made peace with the peoples of Harad; and the slaves of Mordor he released and gave to them all the lands about Lake Nurnen to be their own."
So as long as whatever orcs were left didn't take up arms against other peoples, they would be left alone in their own lands to make their own way. No genocide.
(In fact, it's not even clear that Martin understands what actually happened to the orcs and other creatures that Sauron had bred. He seems to think they were "in the mountains"--but that's what happened at the end of the Second Age, not the Third--the orcs that survived the War of the Last Alliance hid in various places in the mountains, and remained threats to travelers in the mountains during the Third Age. But it's made clear that that was because at the end of the Second Age, the Ring was not destroyed and Sauron's power was not forever taken away. At the end of the Third Age, it was. Big difference.)
Were the slaves just the orcs, or the various people (including orcs, but not all of the orcs) enslaved by Sauron (largely in the East, beyond Mordor)?
The slaves were probably a mixture of orcs and other races. There might not have been many orcs left at all; in Book VI, Chapter 4, it is said that many of the orcs after Sauron's fall slew themselves or fled away to hide, with the implication that they would not have survived for very long without Sauron's direction.
It's not an attack of LotR realism I think. But more a meta analysis. The story does end with aragorn's coronation. Millitary general getting popular after winning a war is nothing if not realistic.
Heck, i think it's consistent at least in LotR, that Aragorn must be a good king. A world where it's literally the music of a good god. You literally can't miss by just doing the wholesome thing, as no good deed will go unrewarded.
> Millitary general getting popular after winning a war is nothing if not realistic
Exactly. It even works in democracies; Dwight Eisenhower became US president from 1953 to 1961 largely because of his success as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in WWII. And Grant and Washington too, of course.
I took a peek since 53 was 8 years after WWII. What a weird time it must have been. Truman telling Eisenhower that Truman would run as VP is Eisenhower ran as president.
12 April 1945 Truman assumes presidency after Roosevelt's death
2 September 1945 WWII ends
2 November 1948 Truman elected president
2 November 1952 Eisenhower elected president
[In 1947] As a result of Truman's low standing in the polls, several Democratic party bosses began working to "dump" Truman and nominate a more popular candidate. . . . On July 10, Eisenhower officially refused to be a candidate.
For both Republicans and Democrats, there were movements of support for General Dwight D. Eisenhower . . . . Unlike the latter movement within the Democratic Party, however, the Republican draft movement came largely from the grassroots of the party. By January 23, 1948, the grassroots movement had successfully entered Eisenhower's name into every state . . . . Stating that soldiers should keep out of politics, Eisenhower declined to run . . . . [0]
In July 1947, President Harry S. Truman considered him an ideal candidate for the Democratic Party, and wanted to "groom the general to follow him". That month, Truman even secretly offered to be the vice-presidential candidate if the general would run for president as a Democrat.
Hoping that Eisenhower would run for the Democratic Party, Truman wrote to him in December 1951, saying: "I wish you would let me know what you intend to do." Eisenhower responded: "I do not feel that I have any duty to seek a political nomination."
Although Eisenhower believed he would win the presidency more easily and with a larger congressional majority as a Democrat, he felt the Truman administration had become corrupt and that the next president would have to reform the government without having to defend past policies. The internationalist wing of the Republican Party saw Eisenhower as an alternative to the more isolationist candidate—Senator Robert A. Taft, the son of former president and chief justice William Howard Taft. Before the primaries, Taft was widely referred to as "Mr. Republican" [1]
I think what is written in books vs what is practiced is a bit dubious. It is still true today as it would have been back then, what books profess as good and how people behave in real life is quite different.
It often doesn't and a lot of historians are very aware of this. The wars of ASOIAF are brutal affairs which make no sense. The idea of total war didn't become a thing until much later on. This is just one example. Bret Devereaux talks about this on his blog [1] and other historians have stuff to say also.
P.S. The comments on this thread are a tire fire. I feel like I'm reading random Twitter drive-by comments oh boy.
The ACOUP blog post only deals with the Middle Ages, and only on the European Middle Ages. (And a brief reference to the pre-Middle Age eras notes that the Romans were very much proponents of total war.)
The idea of total war didn't become a thing until much later on.
Troy, Assyria, Babylon, Macedonia, Carthage, and Mesopotamia would like to have a word with you on that point. Or they would, if they hadn't been completely wiped out. The Mongol Hordes were known for total warfare. It was their whole spiel: join us, or be completely destroyed.
The very concept of not targeting civilian populations during warfare is so recent that there are people still alive today who were around when the idea was first proposed.
ASOIAF however portrays a very clearly medieval society -- vassalage (badly used in the story, but obviously meant to be quite feudal), the general tech level with castles (not palaces!) and the language used are all meant to evoke a late medieval feeling. What Rome did with Carthage is pretty immaterial in this context, because no medieval European ruler would have either the inclination or the ability to enact such destruction.
I'd also point out that destroying an entire city is not total war. Brutality in war and targeting civilians isn't enough to be total war in itself, especially if it's limited to exceptional circumstances -- in general, Rome was extremely happy to conquer new populations to increase their ability to extract wealth.
Sigh okay you got me, I was referring to the European Middle Ages, the implicit background for this thread, for LoTR, and for ASOIAF. I thought the context would be obvious but you win this pedantry.
> "Troy, Assyria, Babylon, Macedonia, Carthage, and Mesopotamia would like to have a word with you on that point. Or they would, if they hadn't been completely wiped out."
> 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.
I would rather take it at face value, as a perhaps surprising but nevertheless fitting display of magnanimity and mercy.
Theoden has been restored to his right mind and character. The whole thrust of the his character plot (in the books) is that he ends his reign as noble as any of his forbears; freed from the influence of the lies of Saruman, he becomes an exemplary king. And one kingly virtue that Tolkien presents again and again is that of magnanimity to defeated foes: Bilbo doesn't kill Gollum (which Gandalf explicitly praises), the Rohirrim don't kill the Dunlendings, Gandalf doesn't kill Saruman.
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment."
This magnanimity is also something prized in Earth-medieval kingship, too. Many a revolt against a king ended with the king pardoning the vassals that rose up -- only a king very secure in his throne could depose or even execute rebellious vassals. Of course, it's important that it be a common member of the nobility for this to work consistently. Against commoners, brutality was far less politically costly. And heretics (read: Kathars), who risk the Wrath of God coming over the whole community, are even less worthy of protection.
> When they meet Saruman and Grima at Isengard, Théoden even tries to plead with Grima again.
I've only read the book twice and it was a long time ago I last read it but... The whole Saruman/Grima/Theoden thing is way different in the book. In the book by the time Saruman arrives at Saruman's tower, Saruman had escaped (I think by tricking one of the ent, smooth talking it).
Saruman then goes to attack the shire. It's Grima who kills Saruman, but in the Shire.
I don't think Theoden tries to plead with Grima? That's a Peter Jackson / LoTR-the-movie invention no!?
I don't remember enough of the book but the whole "Theoden pleads with Grima / Saruman slaps Grima / Grima stabs Saruman in front of Theoden" is definitely not happening like that in the book.
It's maybe even the biggest difference between the book and the movie (it kinda changes the whole timeline).
I am mistaken. Théoden does not plead with Grima in the book. But Théoden is less eager to throw out Grima, when the truth has been revealed at Edoras compared to the movie. I must have confused the scene in the films for happening in the book, even though I had just read the book, though notably, Théoden continues to refer to him as "Grima" while everyone else calls him "Wormtongue". Regardless, I was talking about the events at Orthanc in the third book, in the second volume, chapter The Voice of Saruman, not the events much later in the Shire.
Edit: It's not the scene in the movie I confused it with, it's that Théoden does remark that he hopes Grima can come back after the incident, but he does not in fact plead directly with Grima.
But Ivan the Terrible simply wasn't a good king - taking Russia from being a grand-principality centred on Moscow to a continent spanning empire is a major change in the world that we have to note in history, but it doesn't make someone a good king, neither his contemporary nobles nor his contemporary peasants nor the conquered peoples really benefited from that.
There's a difference between good and great, having a major impact doesn't imply that the impact is good. Alexander the Great is another example of someone who had an outstanding impact, but was not a good king.
I feel that it's a fairly notable distinction. See the Manson trials. An individual exerting will to 'corrupt' someone helpless is markedly different than someone, through mostly their own free will, doing something terrible. Abstractly then, the thing doing the corrupting need not be a will, but can be systems too. And you might make the case that nearly everything is this way, to which I'd say..yes. Social roles and conditions can corrupt or twist our moral precepts. You wouldn't steal from someone outright, but put it behind a spreadsheet and slap some tech jargon and suddenly the prospect is tempting.
I don't think that's really useful or coherent perspective. If you approach things from a causal or deterministic mindset, then everything and everyone is morally inscrutable. Furthermore, if you take that approach, it doesn't mean that people are moral, just that they are not responsible for their actions.
Hitler and Jesus are on equal moral footing. They are both the products of causality, whether you hold that to be governed by physics, or the character of their Immortal soul.
Are you saying that being corrupted by your social conditions allows you to remain good while doing bad? Are you saying that it is moral to steal with a spreadsheet?
What is morality if not resisting corruption and temptation?
I think it is much more coherent to believe that one's actions determine their morality, but not all people face equal tests. This makes more sense than trying to rationalize how a murderer is a moral person.
Maybe we're getting lost in the weeds. I'm not arguing for determinism, though Robert Sapolsky certainly is if you're keen on learning more. Also my perspective doesn't justify or make a murderer moral, it just leaves room for change. I think it's fruitful to assume we're both arguing in good faith here yes?
Anyways, back to it. What I'm saying is that a kings conduct to do governance doesn't tell me about their character as a human. We all curate profiles and have different moral standards based on the situation (see spreadsheet example).
So to say that it's an entirely level playing field isn't fair to social conditions and identity. A kings conduct is instrumental, whereas personal conduct, if done with grace, is often not. Me helping you without any favour returned is by all accounts something humans value. A king helping a vassal state implies more than just a deontological 'good for the sake of good'. To realize that is to, I feel, realize that politics exist.
Ive read Sapolsky and listened to his Stanford Coursework. I think he has a lot that it interesting to say, but there are some areas where I disagree and even he admits there are weaknesses to his position. Im not arguing against change, reform, or anything else.
>What I'm saying is that a kings conduct to do governance doesn't tell me about their character as a human.
This is where I disagree. If a king needlessly tortures and rejoices in suffereing, that tells yuo about their character as a human. The governance of Sauron or Jofferry tells you about their moral character.
>So to say that it's an entirely level playing field isn't fair to social conditions and identity.
This is where you lose me? Who said anything about a level playing field? IF you reread my last post, I said different people can find it more or less difficult to be moral. I see no problem with the idea that is more difficult to be both a king and a moral person, than a peasant and moral person. Just like some jobs are more physically strenuous, some are more morally challenging.
Back to reality, this is obviously the case. Different people are faced with different life challenges, and moral challenges. The playing field is not level.
It is easy for me not to beat innocent people. I do it without thinking and it takes zero effort. Take someone raised in an physically abusive household and this might not be so easy for them. The difference in challenge does not mean you can be moral while going around and beating innocent people.
Im fine with the idea that being a moral king, or a moral politician is a hard task. I dont think that it being hard means the bar for morality is lowered.
The same goes for corruption, which is where we started.
>Seems irrelevant. If someone is corrupted and does amoral things, the result is still an amoral person.
Sauron is not moral but corrupted. They were corrupted, and thus became amoral.
I dont think power corrupting is relevant to judging if a king/politician/murderer is a moral person.
I should have added a necessary 'necessarily' to my assertion lol. Power corrupting gives you a template or heuristic to base some assumptions from. There are obviously exceptions, but we know that it's prudent to be skeptical of those in power. Not because of any tabula rasa 'take them for what they are' but because we have a countless examples of power being a corrupting force. And I don't think I've said anything about beating people up being moral. Could you explain where you may have gotten that impression?
My original assertion was that being a moral person is not orthogonal to being a moral king. I added that how a king rules is a huge factor in their moral standing as a human.
You asked: "So do you think then that power doesn't corrupt?"
My response was that power corrupting is irrelevant to judging if a person in power is corrupt or not. I dont think that additional challenge lowers the bar for morality.
You brought up the Mansons, social expectations, ect as examples of mitigations to consider in moral judgement.
I have doubled down on the idea that the moral standing of a human should be based on their actions, not on their circumstantial considerations or mitigations.
The law does have mitigations though, like if someone has suffered severe trauma or was in an otherwise uncontrollable position that led them to make so and so actions. Same reason why children aren't morally culpable for certain things, even murder.
Doubling down is collapsing the moral landscape down to a hard and fast rules. We make moral decisions from circumstances, there are countless examples of this in psych research, like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Now. Is that right? Is that fair? Probably not. I'd want my rulers to be good people and leave it at that, but the allure of power, the wanting of it, leads to corruption or at least gives us some indication that that abuse is possible and that we should be vigilant.
I think the law is not the same thing as morality.
I fully understand that we make moral decisions based on circumstances. You brought up Sapolsky, who is basically a determinist, and I agree with him on the science.
What I am rejecting is the moral relativism. As more is understood about psychology and biochemistry, some people seem inclined to change the expectation for moral behavior based on these factors. Some people would be inclined to give the punishers a pass in the prison experiment because power corrupts. This is where I disagree.
"everyone was doing it" doesn't make bad behavior good, nor does the complex biochemistry around missing breakfast.
>Now. Is that right? Is that fair? Probably not.
Im not sure what this is in reference to. I think fairness has very little to do with moral judgement. Its not fair if someone was born in circumstances that turn them into a murderer, but someone else's circumstance lead them to a life of charity. This unfairness in circumstance does not make the murderer a moral person.
Circumstance can create immoral people and circumstances are unfair.
>the allure of power, the wanting of it, leads to corruption or at least gives us some indication that that abuse is possible and that we should be vigilant.
If you think circumstance excuses bad behavior, why be vigilant?
where did I say circumstances excuse bad behaviour? Morality exists I agree, and personally yes, I don't think there's a transfiguration of what morality is based entirely on circumstance. One wouldn't affect the other, and moral relativism is often just a way to do terrible things. Let's assume morality is a fixed line.
However, no matter how moral a person is, they are never perfect and they faulter. Judging a person independent of this human condition isn't fruitful, the point a person is at can shift on that fixed line. Murderers can reform and Kings can become murderers.
So we need to be vigilant of circumstances that allow for people to lean in to that corruption. A moral king isn't necessarily going to be moral forever. And unless we have purity checks, we really can't select the morals from the immorals when it comes to matters such as this. Doing so would also be pretty presumptuous too.
Now I may be misinterpreting you. And if so please correct me, maybe we actually agree (and I'm beginning to suspect we truly might) and this is just the nature of async back and forths. If so, apologies in advance.
.. carved out of a land where tribal conflict was constant and common, massacre was well known, and illiterate poachers held huge territory.. hard to imagine from an armchair in a suburb in modern times
Just saying, it’s not Ivan the Great and Peter the Terrible. Both lived up to our modern expectations of autocrats, but one was more involved with what we now consider conducive to ‘greatness’ ie grand reformist ideals, science and modernization.
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.
> ... 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.
It's easy for me to read Gandalf's motives as almost the opposite, of realizing that their innocence is a danger to themselves and including them in the fellowship not only due to the ring, but for their own growth. So it wasn't accidental that Generals Brandybuck and Took were trained by their adventure sufficiently to lead the scouring the Shire on their return, and that Sam learned to repair the ecological disaster. Gandalf was indeed protecting children from their innocence but by helping them grow out of it, knowing more of the hobbits' capacity than they did themselves.
I think it's a bit like PG Wodehouse. The world of Bertie Wooster or Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth is certainly an idyll; at the same time no one would pretend it is a classless idyll.
Tolkien would not refer to that class structure as "economic exploitation" - that is part of his politics. That does not mean he did not understand that society very well, and seek to portray it in an idealized form.
I think the you need to take that position either.
I think it is likely that Tolkien intended social strata, but simply doesn't veiw it through our modern black and white moral extremism. It's not "economic exploration" its just life, and a good one at that.
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.
The English countryside of old is exactly the model for the Shire. Its idyllic, comfortable lifestyle contrasted with the dirty, busy, industry of London and the disgusting, disease-ridden horror of the trenches in WW1 (in which Tolkien personally fought).
The mythology of LoTR Tolkien drew from his knowledge as a scholar but the setting was deeply rooted in personal experience. There are plenty of people living today who enjoy an idyllic, rural lifestyle in full ignorance of the industry, politics, and wars of the wider world.
> 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?
Yes. But. The Shire’s prosperity was established in text to have been supported (in secret) by the efforts of the Rangers. Recall that Bilbo ran into evil, “cannibal” trolls barely outside of the borders of the Shire. This kind of threat would simply never appear in, say, Hobbiton.
The Shire itself is set in the ruins of a collapsed kingdom destroyed long ago by the Witch King. The last vestiges of the old order, the Rangers, patrol the land to try to push back the monsters. They collect no taxes. They pass no laws. The people of the Shire are largely unaware of them at all.
This is a clear statement of Tolkien’s politics, that an idyllic society like the Shire is the result of the hard work of good people shielded from the evils of the world. The role of the King then is to protect the people from these threats while otherwise not involving himself in the day-to-day lives of the citizens.
> I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.
The Shire is both an "anarchic" society (what government exists is extremely weak and has little impact) and a class society with a definite social hierarchy, which does play a strong role in organizing people's lives. The social hierarchy is not a government, but that doesn't mean it's weak and that people just do whatever they feel like without regard to it.
> resources are plentiful and everybody is afforded a lot of leisure
It's not at all clear that this is true of the Shire. Wealthy bachelors like Bilbo and Frodo, or heirs of wealthy families like Merry and Pippin, seem to have a lot of leisure, yes, but what about Sam? He clearly has plenty of work to do, as did his father before him. So do the other hobbits of their own class that they interact with. The hobbits that gather at the Green Dragon of an evening do so after a day's work; they don't idle there all day.
> This is the last holdout in a world being corrupted by lust for power and greed
While "corrupted by lust for power and greed" is certainly true of Saruman and the ruffians he gets to infiltrate the Shire, it's not at all clear that it's true of, say, Gondor. Even Denethor in Gondor, while he comes to a bad end, does not do so out of "lust for power and greed". He does so out of his despair, based on what Sauron shows him through the palantir, that he is doomed to fail in his life's task of preserving Gondor. But Gondor as a whole does not despair, nor does it go to the other extreme and use the Ring against Sauron--which, as Tolkien himself pointed out (and had several characters point out in the course of the story), is what would have happened if "lust for power and greed" had been the primary motivator.
>I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.
Sam is Frodo's servant. Anarchic societies don't have masters and servants. Then the natural question you should ask is why? Frodo is not a noble and Sam is not a slave, so the only reasonable explanation for why Sam is the servant is because Frodo's family is wealthy and Sam is in their employ.
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.
But Iceland has decidedly not been stable. They gained de facto independence in 1918 and completely lost their sovereignty only 22 years later when Britain occupied them (that is despite them still having armed forces in 1940). Since WW2 things have obviously been stable-ish (things were really bad in 2009). How long do you think that would last once Iceland tried to exercise their sovereignty, for instance by leaving NATO?
Analogously, how long did the Shire last against a motivated attacker with comparatively little resources?
except Icelandic bankers toppled their own government in the 2008 credit crisis due to making a specific haven for certain kinds of crazy leveraged lending in the UK (!) (corrections welcome)
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.
In a pre-industrial society, rich agricultural lands and even just this year's produce would count as something worthy to loot. Heck, they might do so now -- I'm sure Russia wouldn't be unhappy to be able to add fertile Ukrainian lands to their dystopia.
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?
In The Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion that's correct. But in some of the later drafts Tolkien wrote he moved away from that towards a story where the world had always been a sphere (often called the "roundworld" versions), seemingly in an attempt to add more realism to the story.
The "flat world made round" was recast as a somewhat primitive Mannish myth (as a way to recon the earlier writings).
I'm pretty glad that didn't make it into the official canon. The evolution of the world is one of the most fascinating things about the legendarium. Imagine living during the age of the lamps.
I completely agree. The stories of the Elves awakening and living of the stars, the first rising of the sun and moon, and the world made round are so evocative it would have been a real shame to lose them in the name of realism.
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.
> In his opinion, if suspension of disbelief becomes necessary, it's a sign that the writer has failed
I mean on the base universe level there are tiny ink blobs on paper. There is no Frodo, there is no Middle Earth, there is no words or sentences just ink marks on paper. Anything other than that is the "suspension of disbelief" already.
Any story -- fiction or non-fiction -- that is written down is just tiny ink blobs on paper. I don't need to suspend my disbelief to read a textbook about anatomy.
Reading fiction isn't about believing that the created world it's real, only that it's plausible, given the natural laws, constraints, and logic present in the world that's been built.
Put another way, when I read LoTR, I don't believe that Tolkien is asking me to suspend my disbelief that elves, dwarves, and fantastical creatures once populated our Earth; instead, he's built a world where such things exist, and he's asking me to read a story about them, while promising that his stories will maintain the internal consistency of the world he's built.
I like the GP's use of the term "secondary belief"; I think it very much encapsulates that middle ground where an author creates rules for a fantastical world that are always obeyed during storytelling, vs. an author who creates a fantastical world, but bends and breaks that world's rules (if there even are any to begin with) in order to serve the story they want to tell, which does require suspension of disbelief.
But that is the thing. We all learned that in order to enjoy a story we kinda pretend to believe it. Just sticking with Tolkien, you read the first line of the Lord of the Rings: “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” And you can right there and then say: “What a load of bollocks. There is no such a place as Hobbiton.” And then you close the book. And you are right! There is no such place as Hobbiton.
Of course you will be poorer for it. But that thing, where for the sake of the enjoyment of the story we pretend that “Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End” exists enough to hear the next sentence is the suspension of disbelief! Where you keep reading instead of calling the writer a liar is where you suspended your disbelief. It is the basis of all fiction. It is so inherent that you often don’t see it. The same way a fish don’t see the water. But it is there.
What you are talking about, the importance of having an internaly consistent story, is not where suspension of disbelief is, but where by abusing it the writer breaks it. And suddenly as it is shattered you realise its previous existence.
The goal is not to not have suspension of disbelief. Because you can’t tell any fiction without it. The goal is to not abuse it in order that the reader can enjoy the work.
It's the exact opposite though - the world presented a set of rules and then followed them, so it requires your belief not disbelief.
The good example of that "suspension of disbelief" is The Last Jedi, where the film kept breaking rules established within the franchise, so as someone familiar with Star Wars you have to keep suspending your belief to enjoy the film - and at a certain point it becomes too much.
Like if LotR ended with Aragorn just smashing the one ring with a sword, that would be an extremely unsatisfing ending to the story, partially because the books made it very clear earlier that the ring cannot be destroyed this way, so it breaks your set of beliefs that were established. You could say "why does it matter, it's all made up anyway!" but every story requires being consistent to be enjoyable.
I don't want to start a debate about the Last Jedi, but I will just say that the rules that are ironclad in franchises tend not to be the mechanics of the world but rather the emotional expectations of the audience. The kind of rules breaking you describe of Aragorn just smashing the ring is not so different from Dorothy learning she could click her heels together to go home all along, an idea that is silly and also deeply emotionally resonant.
>The kind of rules breaking you describe of Aragorn just smashing the ring is not so different from Dorothy learning she could click her heels together to go home all along
I disagree: in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.
However, I don't remember anything in Wizard of Oz which prevented Dorothy from clicking her heels together to go home. She just never knew this trick until the end, and it's not an immediately obvious thing to do anyway.
> in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.
FWIW, Gimli trying to destroy the ring with his axe is a Peter Jackson invention -- it's not in the books, and it's not at all consistent with the Ring's effect on people in the rest of the story, e.g. Bilbo was not capable of casting the ring into his fireplace (that was nowhere near hot enough to melt gold). So Gimli even attempting to destroy the Ring with his axe required me to suspend disbelief in an annoying and immersion-breaking way.
LotR is such a lightning rod for these kinds of debates because there are so many layers of "true fans." I know two fantasy nerds who are boomers with a deep attachment to Tolkien's work, one of them loved the movies and one of them hated them. It's not about how much you do or do not care about "immersion." I suspect it's a facet of personality. I'm not enough of a know-it-all to try and armchair analyze these two men, but I am enough of a know-it-all to gesture in that direction and slink off.
Just to be clear, I love the movies! I think they're incredibly well done and a great adaptation of Tolkien's work. I find that one bit with Gimli striking the ring to be one of the most irritating part, because it's so obviously inconsistent with the rest of the story -- but it's just one moment that I can easily ignore without it affecting my enjoyment of the movie.
I think it's different for different kinds of stories. To borrow your example, one possible interpretation of The Wizard of Oz is that it's a political and economic allegory around the gold and silver standards. Allegories often by their very nature have to stretch and bend reality (even an internally-defined one) to tell the story they want to tell.
I agree with your hesitation to start a debate about The Last Jedi, but I think your point about what rules are ironclad is why reactions to that movie were so mixed. For me (and many others), the mechanics of the Star Wars world are paramount. I have trouble experiencing strong in-universe emotions when those mechanics are broken, because when that happens, I'm pulled out of the story and have trouble immersing myself in what's happening to the characters. But to others, the emotional impact of what happens to the characters, and how they act, is the most important thing, as you suggest, with all other concerns secondary.
The writers of the Star Wars sequel trilogy had a very tall order on their hands: the "original" Star Wars fans are older (some might say much older) now, and they needed to tell a story that could appeal to those people (such as myself), but also appeal to children and young adults. It's very hard (some might even say impossible) to create a narrative that speaks to superfans who have been steeped in the mythology and mechanics of a world for decades, but also attracts a more casual viewer who just wants to watch a cool story with lightsabers and spaceship battles. My opinion is that they sacrificed the first bunch in order to attract a fresher audience, but it doesn't really matter if my opinion is "correct" or not; the fact that the movie (or entire trilogy, even) was so controversial, with so many opposing views, is all we need to know: they tried to appeal to too many different types of people, didn't do a great job of it (if a great job of it is even possible) and in the end a lot of people were unhappy.
I don't disagree that there is a divide between people who prioritize mechanics and those who prioritize emotions, but I think it's overstated. I think if you're thinking about mechanics, it's because the emotions failed you on some level. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed the JJ Abrams Star Trek, even if I don't think it's a great movie, because it's basically dramatically functional. Halfway through Into Darkness I was squirming in my seat thinking about the plot holes, because the movie doesn't work on any level.
With the Last Jedi, I honestly don't think the central problem is that the creators were trying to appeal to everybody at once. I think that better describes the Force Awakens, which miraculously succeeds at doing so at the cost of being kind of forgettable (see my point about Star Trek 2009 above). I think the issue with the Last Jedi is that it makes a very specific set of choices that don't please everybody.
The thing is, in some ways I'm the kind of old fan you're talking about, though I may be younger than you. I pored over books of EU spaceship schematics, read the Star Wars Legacy comics, played the video games, etc. Maybe my experience was different than yours because I watched the prequels at a similar age to the originals, because they were coming out in theaters when I was a kid.
I am not a casual fan, but I'm also not a superfan. I think it's easy to dismiss people who liked The Last Jedi as casual, but Star Wars is such a dominant cultural phenomenon that there is a massive spectrum of how much people care about it and what it means to them.
This has all been kind of a scattered argument. I'm not sure what my conclusion is. Maybe that the real issue with The Last Jedi for many people isn't that it ignores the lore. The prequel trilogy already directly contradicts loads of aspects of the original trilogy that EU creators and fans had to no-prize away. I think it's more to do with how The Last Jedi conceives of Star Wars as a story, and what it considers important and what it does not.
When you sense a deus ex machina ruining your immersion in a story, just think of it as observation selection effect: “if it went the other way, and hanging Harry was not rescued by a friend in a flying car, there would be nothing to write about in the first place”.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. If the writer paints themselves into a corner where they need a deus ex machina in order to continue the story, then they've done a poor job of it, and need to back up and reconsider where the story was going. The argument isn't "Harry needed to be rescued in an unbelievably fantastical manner because otherwise he would have died and the story would have ended", the argument is "the story shouldn't have taken Harry to a crisis where he couldn't have gotten out of it in an in-universe-believable way".
(FWIW, I don't really object to this particular part in the story; I think a flying car is pretty consistent with the Harry Potter universe. And the poster upthread must have misremembered the scene; his friends merely came to "rescue" him from being locked in his room. He wasn't hanging out a window and wouldn't have died.)
Well, that’s the idea, to look at it the other way, like the anthropic principle does. Whether you consider that “wrong” is up to you, I think it is highly subjective.
Then I'm mentally making notches for every “the story would have ended there”. The story runs off its rails and needs the hand of god to set it back onto the track, and that diminishes the enjoyment of the world-building.
Maybe that's why I never liked Batman. He always just happened to have the exact very specialized tool on his belt to escape whatever contrived setup the Joker trapped him.
Invert the logic. The universe is in state X with narrator in it to tell the story because a super unlikely chain of events occurred. Call it anthropic principle.
Or, think how in many-words interpretation there is a universe for any arbitrarily unlikely development. The writer picked one that floats her boat.
I think it becomes intrusive into the storytelling when it becomes a constant chain of "and then yet another, even crazier thing happened to this one character". Especially when the character started as an everyman.
It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.
To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.
Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.
Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.
Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!
Making up random arbitrary things whenever needed to get out of a fix is just bad storytelling.
One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.
HP has no consistency.
Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.
I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
The (inconvenient, in context, for anyone who might be considered a protagonist) resurrecting of dead people is a major point in literally the first sequence of the first episode of the series, which is literally telling you what is coming that the people making mundane human decisions based on mundane human foibles and passing off anything more exotic as superstition were ignorant of to their peril. The return of that kind of magic to a largely unprepared world was telegraphed as the central theme of the series.
>One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.
LOTR has not one but three people rescued in the nick of time by enormous flying eagles that can talk. That's technically all fine within the rules of the universe, but it hardly seems any less of a stretch than flying cars in Harry Potter.
That is just plain false. The rules are not as clearly defined in HP (because it's not trying to be a hard magic system), but when Rowling makes a rule she follows it. For example, you can't bring people back from the dead. That's a rule which is clearly stated and is followed through the series.
In your example, no rule was broken. The book never said "things can't fly in this world". In fact, it's established pretty early on that broomsticks can fly by means of specific enchantment spells. The fact that someone got the idea to apply those enchantments to a car doesn't break the rules of the world. The fact that Harry's friends showed up to rescue him at the right moment is certainly convenient, but also doesn't break the rules of the world. The book explains why they were worried and came to check on him, after all. No rules were broken in this scene, you just don't like it. Which is certainly your right! But it's not poor writing which breaks the rules of the world.
> Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.
Well, if you're going to put in plausible extensions instead of following the rules then "i'm not interested in such lazy writing" as you stated. In any fictional story telling, there's going to be some creative licensing involved to tell the story. Hell, even in biopics and "based on true" there's a lot of creative license just to make the story interesting. Following the rules of known physics just limits the imagination to make for bland stories.
> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.
From the very off of the show, the resurrecting dead people was involved in the story. If it wasn't, "the night is dark and full of terrors" and "winter is coming" would be pointless. Just because the dead coming back was timed to happen with the story is just part of it.
I mean, next, you'll tell me that Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead were pointless since they were resurrected dead people too.
I think you've moved into the comic book guy territory of "worst book/movie/comic ever" type of meme
How does that change anything? If anything that adds a suspense element to the story: we're not sure if all the Lord of Light stuff is true, but finally when Jon is resurrected, we find out that it is.
To be fair, though, it was established before then that it was true, unless you didn't believe that Dondarrion had actually been repeatedly resurrected, and that it was just a story they told to make him more fearsome. Which is also fair, but it still feeds into the point of the suspense: if you had trouble buying the fact of the Dondarrion resurrections, then you finally got your answer when Jon got his treatment.
Also recall -- if you read the books and aren't just relying on the TV series -- Catelyn Stark was also resurrected after her death during the Red Wedding, though her resurrection didn't go quite so well physically, since her body had already partly decomposed in a river, or mentally/emotionally, as she turned into a non-empathetic vengeance machine.
I didn't like the Catelyn Stark resurrection, either. My interest in the books waned at that point, and I didn't finish it.
I liked the GoT where it was about human power plays, action, politics, intrigue, alliances, betrayal, love, death, etc. Suddenly mixing random magic into a well established structure just didn't work for me.
Both the book series and the show open with magic. It (and the fact that the people doing human squabbling, despite having a huge history of warnings about it that have faded into myth, were unprepared for it, and how they respond) is fairly overtly the theme of the series, and marketed as such.
I get not being interested in that theme, but being surprised and disappointed that the series progressively turns out to be about exactly the thing it tells you is the lurking force that most in the setting disregard that it is going to be about is... well, surprisingly poor media literacy.
It very, very clearly came not out of nowhere, even in the show. We had the Brotherhood of Banners resurrecting Bendric several times using the same magic, and in the book we had Lady Stoneheart to show what can also happen after being resurrected.
While the resurrection is probably going to happen if Winds ever comes out, it's not clear if Jon will actually be the Jon we know, or even Jon, after he comes back. Warging into Ghost will probably play a role, as that's a common theme in Dance.
Oh and, we had wights right from the very first book, maybe even Prologue ...
So it's not "convenient", nothing for GRRM is convenient currently, otherwise Winds would be out by now ...
The JS resurrection was not related to the zombies, as JS was able to resume a normal life.
If this could happen in the GoT universe, wouldn't you think that there'd be a massive effort by kings and others to resurrect dead family members? Or even talk about resurrecting them? There was no hint of that.
(Zombies violate the laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which makes it sad that most zombie movies try on some hackneyed explanation for them being the result of some virus. If you're going to try a scientific explanation for them, don't blatantly violate fundamental laws of physics.)
> lost all interest in Harry Potter when he was hanging outside a window, helpless. Then, his buddy appears with a flying car to rescue him.
Hmmm. When exactly does that happen? Are you referring to the very start of chapter 3 in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Because Harry most definitely is not hanging out of a window before his friends arrive.
He is kept locked up by his aunt and uncle. Because of that he is not answering his friend's letters. His friend has access to the magical means of busting him out (a flying car) so they do. If he would have decided to rescue him a day earlier or a day later he would have found Harry in basically the same situation.
This is the same in both the film [1] and the novel. Soooo what are you talking about? I think you made the scene up, which seriously undermines your point.
Why would you mention something while it was not relevant? The Weasley's dad was known to be intrigued by things of the Muggles, and was known to collect items such as the specific Ford (car not available in the US so the reference was a bit lost).
If Ron had told Harry about the car in some random conversation in a previous book, you would probably then complain about some bit of obtrusive foreshadowing ruining the plot line. Okay, maybe not you specifically, but that's another common trope of criticism of fiction.
I don't really see that as a problem, though. This is a world where magic is a thing, and is commonplace. That's the entire point of the world and the story wouldn't exist without it.
A flying car seems utterly unsurprising, especially when we've already seen flying broomsticks. I think I'm more surprised that we didn't see more of the flying car.
If you don't like that, definitely don't read the first Frontlines series by Marko Kloos! I find it enjoyable, but the main character is like a one-man quantum immortality thought experiment.
> 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.
No, it's not fanfic. It's not set in another continuity, it's just their own fantasy worlds are even less unique than ours. They have fanfic too of course.
> it's just their own fantasy worlds are even less unique than ours
They do have many more fantasy worlds though, not being as unique means they have room for many many more and better ones. I do feel western authors focuses too much on being different so often they make things bad just to not be like the others.
Do copyright rules exist differently in Japan than the US? Can you imagine if I created a movie that occurs within the accepted Star Wars universe so that my protagonist was from a planet called Tatooine who had a sister that was a princess? I would be sued into oblivion.
They're stricter in Japan if anything, but companies are better at knowing where their creativity comes from. (Domestically, I mean. They're pretty bad at it internationally.)
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.
>Although iron ore is plentiful, it is expensive to refine and smelt
Might explain why the land around the Lonely Mountain was unforested*. This is what happened in ancient Greece -- deforestation largely due to charcoal production for smelting iron. Topsoil got eroded and it still hasn't recovered today. Prior to metallurgy, Greece was densely forested, and must have had some biggish trees, judging by the construction of temples etc.
* IIRC. Also a fire breathing dragon taking up residence probably didn't help.
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.
> 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.
Indeed; the similarity of "history" and "story" is no mere coincidence, they share a root. And in German, both are the same word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geschicht
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.
Well the workers, farmers etc seem to largely be content with their lot in life just like the leisure class enjoy their life of leisure.
The Shire represent Tolkiens ideal society where everybody are happy with their lot and the lower classes take pride in serving and working for their masters.
In 1966 (less than 64 years ago), that wasn't just Tolkien's ideal society, judging by Cleese and the two Ronnies (or, for that matter, the 1960 Chatterley trial; was Rule 34 only un truc for Berliner/Parisian/Viennese Bohos back then?)
> I get a pain in the back of my neck. —RBC, CBE
> ...would you approve of your young sons, young daughters –because girls can read as well as boys– reading [Chatterley]? ... Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? —JMGGJ, CBE MC
IIRC the attorney arguing against Chatterley seemed grossly out of touch by mentioning servants reading it and it didn't help his case. LCL was a bit of an attack on the impotence of the upper class and the lawyer was oblivious to the context of his remarks.
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)
I guess the Shire is probably small enough to maintain such a political structure. J.R.R.Tolkein does model it with an ideal English countryside in mind, in which people like Bilbo Barkins, who are wise, participate in the politics of the community.
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.
> one of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system
What kills these systems is economies of scale.
You're citing one example, those in R&D, but it crops up as a handicap across production. The net result is such a society could really only exist if protected by a great power. (As we see with the Hobbits and Rangers.) And at that point, we're splitting hairs between a new economic system and benevolent feudalism.
I thought of the economies of scale issue, but didn't add it. I definitely agree it's an issue unless Hobbits are just really keen on not accepting cheap imports from abroad. I'd say it's also a problem globally if your country adopted such a system, but an enemy didn't and overcame your country's ability to defend itself. It's not that soldiers don't exist in such an economy, but that I don't think you'd be able to be competitive from a logistics standpoint and thus an easy target. For example, they're producing tanks and planes in a factory, while your country has a lot of rural blacksmiths.
That's pretty much the reason the world order looks the way it does. You could argue that people were happier as hunters and gatherers than as farmers, but agriculture allowed for growth in population and technology, leading to it plain outcompeting the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. Same with industrialization and markets. You can have whatever social order you like if it's isolated, but the moment two groups clash over some resource they both covet, one of them will dominate, and the other perish - interacting societies are subject to natural selection.
Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce. When labor is cheap and land is expensive, getting more food per acre is more important.
> I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements.
But your ability to post here depends on technological advancements. A simple agrarian society would never have invented the medium through which we are having this conversation. Not to mention the vast majority of the other wealth in our modern society.
You're free to start such a commune. They're not illegal. People start them up all the time in the US.
The trouble is, they don't work. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, and the people left after turning the fields into a sewage farm. The Summer of Love in San Francisco lasted 3 months or so. There are lots of others.
The Bruderhof communities, the Amish, and many of the other peace churches are largely sustainable examples of communities which seem quite self sustaining in this vein.
Monastic communities have operated this way, to varying degrees, for millennia.
To a certain extent, even the tenured academic system reflects this sort of dynamic -- and came from the same roots.
The Amish communities are not communes. The Bruderhof has many communes, with a total of 2900 members worldwide. Doesn't sound very successful. Monastic communities and academic communities seem to survive on external donations.
"The Bruderhof run a variety of businesses that provide income to run their communities and provide common work for the members who almost all work onsite."
Even if that's true (and, sure, they certainly aren't hippy communes), so?
Neither me (in the original comment that spawned this subthread) nor your direct parent said anything about communes or this idea being restricted to communes.
I just said "I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements"
That said:
>Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business?
Yes - "commune" is not the same as "communist". Just means sharing stuff and living together as a close community, it's not tied to Marxism, the Paris Commune of 1870, or other such doctrines (and obviously many of the examples are religious based).
>A commune is communism. The religious rationale for it is different than the Marxist rationale, but the result is the same.
A commune is a particular living arrangement. Communism can be applied to whole states, regardless of such a living arrangement.
On top of this, "communism" and "communist" has acquired specific meaning in 2024 and much of the 20th century, which is not the idea of communal living of early Christians, of hippies, or even that of Charles Fourrier.
Words are define by their use, not by their historical origins. This is just muddying the waters.
>That's the promise of communes.
Communes are neither necessary nor sufficient for this. You could have distributivism on a larger state that's not a commune. This wouldn't make the whole country "a big commune" without distorting the meaning of the term, and more importantly, how it's colloqually understood.
And of course you can also have communes with none of those elements, like people living together with high technology, a Star Trek like commune. Or a commune of people working their ass off and considering leisure a sin. Or a highly hierarchical commune. And several other types besides. Living together and sharing resources (the essentials of a commune) doesn't promise or guarantee the rest I've mentioned.
Because they are protected by a superpower that allows them to continue their way of life.
> I'd prefer society to be like that at large.
So you'd be fine with giving up a good chunk of your life expectancy? Because that's what the simple societies of the past involved.
You'd be fine with giving up modern medicine, sanitation, sewage disposal? You'd be fine with having to work all day just to produce a bare subsistence amount of food, so that your body wears out much faster than in a modern society? You'd be fine with no Internet, books being rare and expensive (no printing presses), travel beyond your local village being a huge undertaking? You'd be fine with no modern hospitals, no 911 to call, no ambulance to come get you if you're injured or have a heart attack or stroke? I could go on and on.
People who yearn for "the simple life" only do so because they have never actually experienced it and have no idea what it actually entails.
The "Amish community" is a general group with a specific heritage that follows certain principles. They live in many different states.
Actual Amish people do live in a communal way, share resources, help each other, have common church practice, etc, which makes their local communities (not "the Amish community" in general) communes.
I'm not sure if this is on the table even theoretically, as history shows that all those qualities correlate positively with technological advancement.
I'm probably biased heavily by modern upbringing, but "simpler life" sounds like a lot of mind-dumbing boredom, mixed with suffering and hard work, and defined by people dying young from trivial ailments we don't even consider dangerous today.
I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity. That's an earlier stage before industrialization, but does help make it possible.
The US could be seen as another example of the benefits of cheap or free land being widely available to small farmers, even though it didn't happen through land reform.
Tolkien wasn't writing about how to encourage economic growth, though. Rather the opposite.
Colonial America set up a system whereby colonists could lay claim to a piece of unused land, and if they farmed it for a while then they received ownership of it.
> I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity.
I have read that book as well:
The point of wasn't (entirely?) about agricultural productivity, but rather about giving every one / peasants a job to do to earn a living. As a country's economy progressed into higher value areas you wanted the people to leave the farms and move into factories. Over time farms should be consolidated and mechanized so that less labour is needed to produce food and more labour can create (proverbial) widgets and stuff.
The books describes this as one of Japan's 'failures': there are still a lot of small, unconsolidated farms being worked by aging farmers, with little interest from younger people on working in that area. The authors argue that the answer is to consolidate the farms and mechanize, but that seems to be a difficult thing to do in Japan, culturally speaking.
There are still strong property rights and ownership of the economy should be more distributed, but they don't advocate for some elite government entity to come scoop up everything and decide who gets what or outlaw people from owning land and property.
Unlike capitalism, instead of a factory making some kind of widget or product (example: ice cream) that makes one individual very rich and provides a low salary to a hundred workers, you'd have thousands of people across the country doing all kinds of jobs like that and hopefully making a living wage. Unlike communism, you don't have a fully centralized power dictating all aspects of life.
I'm no expert on this theory though and it isn't perfect. Such a society probably doesn't build an iPhone...maybe that is the point haha. Or maybe it can, but I'm guessing technological advancements and discoveries would take longer with less efficiency and specialization.
You can only extract profit from the margin of efficiency your capital adds. If people can artisanally make ice cream for $1/cone, and a million-dollar factory can make it for 10¢/cone, you can extract some portion of that 90¢. If the efficiency gains aren't large enough or you don't pass enough of your gains on to the consumers, you'll just out-competed by the artisans. So it's unfortunately the biggest innovations that hurt workers and benefit consumers the most.
Under capitalism, as soon as some business owner gets rich, everybody else goes into business to compete with him. This drives up the demand for labor and hence wages.
First, the competition is only in markets with free competition where everyone can compete. There are many market structures within a capitalist society (example - monopolies or where other barriers to entry exist) where this simply isn't true in some large scale way. Maybe you say that isn't true capitalism, but it's the form of capitalism that actually exists.
Think about fast food wages still being at minimum wage in a lot of places despite widespread competition. McDonald's CEO is rich, but their employees are still on welfare. Wages only went up during the pandemic when labor became scarce.
Everyone? Only one competitor is needed to provide competition.
Fast food wages translate directly into how the fast food is priced. Increasing min wages for fast food workers is followed immediately by price increases.
When you said "everybody else goes into business to compete with him"
I was just trying to say this isn't true in a lot of cases due to a wide range of barriers to entry. This can be legal (patents or regulations), natural monopolies like telecom...etc.
You said competition leads to higher wages and I stated that hasn't been true in a lot of places and used fast food as an example. Your response, while true doesn't seem to be relevant to what I was saying.
I know you're a lot smarter than me, so we're probably just talking past each other :)
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.
That may be but there were huge increases in homicide and other crimes in the UK from 1900 to present alongside urbanization. Tolkien would have grown up being familiar with a relatively safe type of rural life. There are even many small villages today with no recorded homicides populated by humans, so I think its fair to argue those kind of places inspired the Shire.
Aphorism? There is substantial evidence supporting the statement that most violence is committed by people who know each other rather than by strangers. Here are some key findings from various sources:
- Sexual Violence: According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the majority of sexual abuse cases reported to law enforcement show that 93% of juvenile victims knew the perpetrator: 59% were acquaintances, 34% were family members, and only 7% were strangers¹.
- General Violence: Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicates that less than half of all violent crimes were committed by total strangers. A significant portion of violent crimes were committed by acquaintances, friends, and relatives⁵.
- Homicide: In 2004, only 23% of murders were committed by strangers, highlighting that a larger percentage of homicides occur between individuals who know each other⁴.
These statistics demonstrate that violence is more likely to occur within known social circles rather than between strangers. It's important to note that these findings are based on reported cases and surveys, which can have limitations, but they provide a general understanding of the patterns of violence.
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.
it is surprising to find times of no violence, not times of violence. The history of the British Isles is filled with raiders and tribal conflicts, armies and their Lords. Peasants lived on the lands of their masters, while traders and pirates roamed.
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.
> It's just a part of the human condition, sadly, to hate others based on the smallest of differences.
Part of me wants to agree with you, but you're using a very broad definition of hate for this to be true. This isn't the visceral hatred of the kid who bullied you all through school stealing your girlfriend in college, getting you framed and expelled from university, and then ending up your boss at the one place you could get a job. Such hatreds have been known to result in murder, after all. They're intense, they burn hot, and if the feeling manifests, a person seems unable to resist acting.
It's the "hate" of making the occasional (once every few years) joke about the village 10 miles down the road, and playing (good natured) pranks on them if/when they show up in your village. Someone else might insist that it's not hatred at all, but something more like "mistrust of strangers" or "self-sequestration". The choice of "hatred" isn't so much linguistically sensible, as it is about staking out a political position. And you just can't do that unless you've characterized this intrinsic human hesitation when dealing with strangers as "hatred". Can't really stand up on the podium and rant about how those other guys are stand-offish and don't make friends quickly.
The late 20th century Swedes weren't raping each other to any great degree. Homogeneity served them well. There wasn't any large degree of arson and assault in Japan in that same period. And while I might agree with you that homogeneity isn't a solution for any of their current problems, zealous heterogeneity of the sorts being pursued today might well be an anti-solution to be avoided.
> rather, fostering awareness and understanding around discrimination is the way forward.
The way forward to what, exactly? When you say things like this, it indicates that you have some vision of the future. I am not party to that vision, I do not know what it is, and no one else has bothered to describe it to me very much. Then, even if I do know this vision (and agree with it, I might not), I have to determine for myself whether or not your methods align with your aims. It might very much not ne the "way forward", you might be going backwards and believing you're going forward.
You've chosen a couple of very specific examples here (coincidentally, the same ones often chosen by neo-nazis). There are many well-known examples of very similar peoples hating each other and leading to widespread violence, several of which are mentioned in the linked article.
Characterizing these as "good natured pranks" seems to deliberately miss the point in favor of reinforcing your priors.
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.
Homo sapiens may be r-selected. Different cultures of homo sapiens may lean more toward r- or more towards K- (this is part of the thesis of Eric Jones's The European Miraclehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Miracle).
Insofar as Tolkien's work is a fantasy and Hobbits are not real, would it strain our credulity to imagine that they are K-selected?
I enjoyed the author's counterfactual description of the "Sauronic Empire" [1] that was established following Sauron's victory at the end of the third age.
> Tolkien does not describe the political economy of the Hobbits in any detail, because it’s rarely relevant to the story
I find this kinda a funny statement, because Tolkien wrote so much about his world, about things that were rarely relevant to his actual stories. In hindsight, it feels like a surprising omission that he left this out.
Then again, it's been close to 30 years since I read The Silmarillion, so I don't recall if political economy ever really came up that much for other communities in Tolkien's world. So maybe that's just a general topic that he didn't find of enough interest to write about.
If there's a few large landowners and many tenant farmers, I think there would need to be lots of police/military in order to uphold that property arrangement. Otherwise the tenants just start taking land.
...and do what with it, exactly? Farm it, like they're already doing?
The conflicts would not be about the land, they would be about rents/dues/duties/taxes. And there would only be conflicts when the tenants feel like those are unfair and they're not getting anything back in return. Which is not neccessarily the case. The article goes into quite some detail how the patronage system provides benefits to the clients, and how actual historical peasant revolts were often not about overthrowing the social order, but merely restoring it to a previous state.
The reason that there is no discussion of the economics of the Shire in LOTR is because it’s not relevant to the story and the land and the people are all fictional. It doesn’t have to work.
Tolkien was setting up a dichotomy between the idyllic, paradise-like shire where everyone lives in harmony with nature and has lots of leisure time and no one wants of necessities and everyone gets along , etc, is to set up a counterpoint vs industrialization and ugliness and capitalism etc. it’s just a big old trope. Just like sets in a play, it’s two-dimensional. It’s also a backdrop setting up an “innocence lost” storyline for the protagonists.
The bottom line is that it’s a utopia and utopias only exist in stories; real people are fallible and have many motivations, some of which are not noble, and so such a place can’t exist.
If you think the Lord of the Rings is one big trope, you really haven't given it enough consideration. Yes, Tolkien has very clear moral and social ideals, but using this as grounds to portray LotR as "two-dimensional" absolutely does not do it justice. There's so much more nuance to it!
The Shire is idyllic, but no paradise. Its inhabitants are lovable, but petty and smallminded, they squabble and feud and betray each other. Good and evil exist, but aside from Gandalf and Sauron, all "good" characters have faults and mixed motivations and all "evil" characters are at least potentially redeemable. The stories of Middle Earth are shaped by Tolkien's (conservative, Christian) worldview, but he definitely did not write a utopia.
But it's also a playground, and once we close the book we can still explore the world built. Sure, the set is two dimensional, but we can try to figure out how it might work.
This is where the D&D multiple axes (plural of axis, not plural of axe, though D&D has those as well) of alignment comes in handy. Evil can be orderly, systematic. An evil society could be well functioning, with evil law and evil order.
>The implication in both books and movies is that most Hobbits spent their time either farming or enjoying leisure time, but this makes little sense, when one considers what we know about premodern agriculture and what little of life and culture in the Shire.
That's not even wrong. Medieval peasants in certain places like Italy had like half the year off as public holidays. And those of us old and rural enough to have seen pre-modern life in rural villages, known there was still a lot of leisure time going around. As for domestic chores, those were a couple of hours at max, intermingled with other work and leisure - and having the grandparents living close by meant more hands for helping with cooking, kids, and so on.
In those villages there was (and still is, a little less so, but compared to modern city life orders of magnitude more) leisure time, people hang in the public square and cafes for hours on end, and it's not that different today. People from the city are often surprised like "wtf, is anybody working here?".
I have serious doubts about such leisure time. For example, cooking with a fireplace is an all-day affair as it requires constant monitoring and a constant supply of wood. Next, making cloth and sewing it was a major time sink. The evidence for that was how valuable cloth was, such that it was recycled endlessly until it was more or less dust. Third, children were put to work in the fields as soon as they could walk. This does not suggest a surfeit of labor. Fourth, there was the daily feeding and maintenance of the animals. Fifth, have you ever tried sawing a plank with a handsaw? Building a house and a barn had to be a massive amount of hand work.
Bone evidence from American colonist farmers is that they worked physically very hard, and did not live to be old. Getting enough food was a constant problem. They didn't grow very tall.
>For example, cooking with a fireplace is an all-day affair as it requires constant monitoring and a constant supply of wood.
That's a modern urban misunderstanding. Tons of recipes they used to do (and we still do) just need a wood stove and the ocassional adding of woods every half hour or so (less if it's bigger). You put all the ingredients and let it cook (stews, potatoes and veggies, soups, the ocassional meat, eggs, greens, etc). And others just take a couple of hours. There's nothing about cooking with a wood stove (or a fireplace) that makes it a "full day affair" (huh?).
Growing up in rural Europe we cooked with a woodstove primarily (this kind: https://stock.adobe.com/gr_en/search?k=old+wood+stove&asset_... though less fancy) and it was never a problem for leisure time. We had a gas stove too, but the wood stove is what we cooked on 80% of the time.
>Next, making cloth and sewing it was a major time sink.*
You don't have to make clothes all the time. They didn't care for "fast fashion" trends back then. And you can sew while socializing even.
>Third, children were put to work in the fields as soon as they could walk.
That's because they were organically integrated into the family life and work. Everybody did some part. Doesn't mean they worked particulary hard, and even that was mostly not a thing in the 20th century, as rural kids still went to school just fine.
>Fourth, there was the daily feeding and maintenance of the animals
Which doesn't take that much, unless it's a larger for-profit business, which for the rural people it weren't - it was for their personal eggs, milk, and meat, and the ocassional exchange and gift. So small henhouses and such, takes next to no time.
>Fifth, have you ever tried sawing a plank with a handsaw? Building a house and a barn had to be a massive amount of hand work.
Luckily they didn't do it that often. Once per family was enough, and they could build it in a month or so (usually bringing in some people doing construction work too for the more advanced ones). They also added rooms piecemeal if they needed more. And in our parts, those rural village houses were made with bricks and stones, and many still stand, even centuries later (heck, many are still used).
>Bone evidence from American colonist farmers is that they worked physically very hard, and did not live to be old. Getting enough food was a constant problem. They didn't grow very tall.
> > Next, making cloth and sewing it was a major time sink.
> You don't have to make clothes all the time. They didn't care for "fast fashion" trends back then. And you can sew while socializing even.
Bret Deveraux has a blog series about pro-modern clothes production. My impression st that it was a huge timesink - not fo fashion-related reasons but for the production from raw material until you got finally some fabric you can sew.
>Did you go out and cut the wood, too? Haul it home? Every day?
I've cut tree branches with a saw but just for "gardening" maintainance. More often we used to do it with a chainsaw, but for special purposes, not cutting down trees to get the season's wood. In the village there were people who cut the trees and sold the wood. So didn't have to personally cut down trees. Probably that was the case in any larger village in the 19th century too.
I've hauled wood though - the bulk storage happens a few times a year (and it's just offloading what the guy brought), but from the storage to the woodstove/fireplace happened every day. Not a big deal. And if you have a carriage, which they did or someone in their village did, the former is not a big deal either.
>Consider why they had to work so hard, and still died young and malnourished.
Another common misconception. Birth/Early childhood death aside, the life expectance wasn't that different than today. And some of these rural communities even are in the "too many live to be 100" blue zones.
Depends on the place I guess. People in some midwestern half-desert like New Mexico or Arizona probably fared differently than people in places full of green, fertile land, and running waters, like in many areas of rural Europe. Or people under some nasty feudal lord working them to the bone, versus independent villagers. For those, the main thing that did did them bad, was adverse weather messing the crops some years.
I'm > 60 and still median age in a rural community filled with quasi retired farmers born in the 1920s and 1930s .. they variously sheared, split wood every day, got up at 3 am to take bullock carts to to the local well to bring home tanks of water daily, etc.
The GP has some odd ideas about manual labour killing people - here it was principally the lack of antibiotics that filled the cemetries and orphaned a good number of the people still alive here nearly a century later.
> The GP has some odd ideas about manual labour killing people
It's not odd at all. The bone evidence from colonial Americans shows that they were severely overworked. I think modern Americans have some romantic notion of what it was like, probably from watching Daniel Boone episodes on TV or Outlander.
I wonder what has changed? People today who attempt to get a piece of land and do subsistence farming usually discover it is way more work then they are used to doing and quit.
They lack the 20 years of mentor led training to do all tasks related to farming and surviving that average medieval adults had. How fast you can do things when you are skilled compared to unskilled is massive, unskilled subsistence farming not being viable isn't strange.
Smaller families? Historically families were large and the entire extended family helped out, across all generations. In the modern age our families are smaller, and we consider it morally abject to have children work, with the elderly being expected to retire.
"The average life expectancy of a pioneer man, woman or child ranged from 30 to 40 years, if they were fortunate enough to survive childhood." -- Google "life expectancy of colonial americans"
> More often we used to do it with a chainsaw
Right, because chopping down a tree with an axe and then cutting it into suitable lengths for the stove by hand is a massive amount of work. I have some experience cutting logs with saw and axe. There's a reason people invented chainsaws.
It is funny to see how person who clearly takes all their knowledge from books tells other person their actual experience couldn't happen, because that is what some book says. I'm not person who you replied to, but just from reading their comment I immediately knew they are talking from experience, because i partly saw, partly know from stories of my parents and grandparents, exactly the same kind of lifestyle. Should i now say that your source is "entirely false"?
Nothing about it is false. In fact it's lived experience.
Sorry, we cooked with wood most of the time, kept animals, and even washed clothes and such by hand (no washing machines until much later). It really wasn't that big of a deal. And we weren't even that rural (next to decent sized city).
I'm sure they had it harder in Texas or Utah or Alaska. Not a universal thing.
"By learning how the Shire worked, we can start to understand how our own past worked, in all its complexity and contradictions."
Sorry but this is totally preposterous. Why should we look at our past through a fictional creation of one author? Why don't we go directly to the sources that that same author had? Makes much more sense.
"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, and there’s rarely much left over."
This i contentious, I have actually read scholars that argue the opposite.
>This i contentious, I have actually read scholars that argue the opposite.
It is far from contentious, you are probably mixing up "premodern agriculture" with "pre-agriculture". Furthermore, as detailed in an article [1] referenced (and linked to) by this post, you are probably mixing up the labor paid as rent vs the whole of the labor required to survive
(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...