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:<p>(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.<p>(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.<p>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: <a href="https://acoup.blog/2020/05/22/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-iv-men-of-rohan/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2020/05/22/collections-the-battle-of-helm...</a>, <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-was-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-i/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-wa...</a>
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 <i>fully</i> 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.
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.<p>What's fascinating to me is that this sort of world/economy/way-of-life is the backdrop of virtually <i>every</i> 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.<p>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.
The whole of the context* of the LOTR can best be understood through the lens of this comment by Tolkien:<p>> 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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>* 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.<p>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!<p>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:<p>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.<p>In contrast, OP suggests the Tooks are really the much <i>more</i> powerful, wealthy and reputable family: They have an entire <i>region</i> - 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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 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.
> 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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/02/10/the-sauronic-empire/" rel="nofollow">https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/02/10/the-sauronic-...</a>
Real life equivalent to Shire is essentially Island of Sark: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark</a>
> <i>Tolkien does not describe the political economy of the Hobbits in any detail, because it’s rarely relevant to the story</i><p>I find this kinda a funny statement, because Tolkien wrote <i>so much</i> 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.<p>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.
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 <i>have</i> to work.<p>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.<p>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.
Tolkien, the catholic anarchist, made his utopian village into something feudal with a 'landed gentry'?<p>I suspect this person is reading things into these simulations of folklore that are unlikely to have a foundation in the author.<p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/j-r-r-tolkien-from-a-letter-to-christopher-tolkien" rel="nofollow">https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/j-r-r-tolkien-from-a...</a>
The economy of the orcs and Mordor was more interesting to me for some reason when reading the books.<p>One can easily imagine the good guys having functioning societies but the bad ones we expect disorder.
><i>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.</i><p>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.<p>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?".
"By learning how the Shire worked, we can start to understand how our own past worked, in all its complexity and contradictions."<p>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."<p>This i contentious, I have actually read scholars that argue the opposite.