We Hobbits are a Merry Folk:

An Incautious and Heretical Reappraisal of J.R.R. Tolkien

an article by David Brin, Ph.D.

An abridged version of this article appeared in the late-December 2002 online edition of Salon Magazine.
 
Currently published in Tomorrow Happens.
Copyright © 2002, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

Want to forget about terrorism and all those distracting rumors of war? Need to ignore the economy for a while? Got the holiday blues? Our culture has a sure-fire cure -- the traditional spate of post-Thanksgiving movies. This year, despite a clamor over the latest Harry Potter film, much of the attention is going to another fantasy called The Two Towers -- part two in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Will it succeed in distracting us for a while, conveying audiences to a world that is at once more beautiful and stirring than humdrum modern life?

Naturally, I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) Trilogy as a kid, during its first big boom in the 1960s. I mean, what was there not to like? As William Goldman said about another great fantasy, The Princess Bride, it has "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad Men. Good Men. Beautifulest Ladies. Spiders. Dragons, Eagles. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Magic. Chases. Escapes. Miracles."

In 1997, voters in a BBC poll named The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the 20th century. In 1999, Amazon.com customers chose it as the greatest book of the millennium.

Of course there is much more to this work than mere fantasy escapism. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote his epic -- including its prequel, The Hobbit -- during the dark middle decades of the Twentieth Century, a time when modernity appeared to have failed in one spectacle of technologically amplified bloodshed after another. From the nineteen-thirties through the fifties, planet Earth fell into armed camps of starkly portrayed character, tearing at each other in orgies of unprecedented violence. Titanic struggles, with the fate of all the world at stake.

LOTR clearly reflected this era. Only, in contrast to the real world, Tolkien's portrayal of "good" resisting a darkly threatening "evil" offered something sadly lacking in the real struggles against Nazi or Communist tyrannies -- a role for individual champions. His elves and hobbits and uber-human warriors performed the same role that Lancelot and Merlin and Odysseus did in older fables, and that superheroes still do in comic books. Through doughty Frodo, noble Aragorn and the ethereal Galadriel, he proclaimed the paramount importance -- above nations and civilizations -- of the indomitable romantic hero.

All right, I read Tolkien's epic trilogy a bit unconventionally, starting with The Two Towers and backfilling as I went along. Likewise, I may be a bit off-kilter in liking, best of all, the unofficial companion volume to LOTR, perhaps the funniest work penned in English -- the Harvard Lampoon's 1968 parody, entitled Bored of the Rings. Even if you revere Tolkien, or take LOTR much too seriously, who can restrain guffaws at the antics of Frito, son of Dildo and his sidekick Spam... along with Gimlet, son of Groin, Eorache, daughter of Eordrum, and Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt, son of Araplane? Many of the sixties references may seem dated, but any author should be flattered to receive such inspired satire.

In fact, toward the end of this essay, I'll offer my own small bit of ironic take-off. A different, and possibly much better, way of viewing Sauron, the evil Dark Lord.

But first let's get serious. Some of what I am about to say may seem unconventional, provocative, heretical... even foolhardy in the face of a pseudo religious reverence that some accord to Lord of the Rings. There may be even more hate mail than when Salon ran my piece criticizing the Star Wars universe.

So let me start by saying that I deem Tolkien's trilogy to be one of the finest works of literary universe-building, with a lovingly textured internal consistency that's excelled only by J.R.R.T.'s penchant for crafting 'lost' dialects. Long before there was a Klingon Language Institute, expert aficionados -- amateurs in the classic sense of the word -- were busy translating Shakespeare and the Bible into High Elvish, Dwarfish and other Tolkien-generated tongues.

And yes, LOTR opened the door to a vast popular eruption of heroic fantasy, setting up many others who followed with exacting devotion to his masterful architecture, scrupulously copying the rhythms, ambience and formulas that worked so well.

Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles -- in which the great-grandchildren of illiterate peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, view far-off worlds and elect their own leaders -- slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals!

Wouldn't life seem richer, finer if we still had kings? If the guardians of wisdom kept their wonders locked up in high wizard towers, instead of rushing onto PBS the way our unseemly 'scientists' do today? Weren't miracles more exciting when they were doled out by a precious few, instead of commercializing every discovery, bottling and marketing each new marvel to the masses for a dollar ninety-five?

Didn't we stop going to the Moon because it had become boring?

Just look at how people felt about Princess Diana. No democratically elected public servant was ever so adored. Democracy doesn't have the pomp, the majesty, the sense of being above accountability. One of the paramount promoters of the fantasy-mythic tradition, George Lucas, expressed it this way.

"There's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled."

This yearning makes sense if you remember that arbitrary lords and chiefs did rule us for 99.44% of human existence. Amid the brutally predictable drudgery of everyday life, miracles were awesome, far-away things. For example, flight was a legendary prerogative of demigods in stirring fables. And a man was meaningless out of context with his king.

It's only been two hundred years or so -- an eyeblink -- that 'scientific enlightenment' began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture. Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat. (Sexist language is meaningfully accurate here; those cultures had no word for "sexism," it was simply assumed.)

They then proceeded to announce rules and 'traditions' ensuring that their sons would inherit everything.

Please, try to find even one exception. You won't succeed. Putting aside cultural superficialities, on every continent society quickly shaped itself into a pyramid, with a few well-armed bullies at the top... accompanied by some fast talking guys with painted faces or spangled cloaks who curried favor by weaving stories to explain why the bullies should remain on top.

Only something exceptional started happening. Bit by bit -- in gradual stages -- the elements began taking shape for a new social and intellectual movement, one finally capable of challenging the alliance of warrior lords, priests, bards and secretive magicians. It didn't happen all at once, but in fitful jerks, sometimes five steps forward and four (or more) steps back.

Timidly at first, guilds and townsfolk rallied together and lent their support to kings, thereby easing oppression by local lords. Long before Aristotle became a tool of the establishment, his rediscovery during the High Middle Ages offered some relief from dour anti-intellectualism. Then renaissance humanism offered a philosophical basis for valuing the individual human being as worthy in its own right. The Reformation freed sanctity and morality from control by a narrow, self chosen club; it also legitimized self-betterment through hard work in this world, not the next. Then Galileo and Newton showed that creation's clockwork can be understood, even appreciated in its elegance, not just endured.

Still, the entire notion of progress remained nebulous and ill-formed. Society's essential shape -- pyramidal, with a narrow elite atop a vast and permanently ignorant peasantry -- stayed largely unchanged until a full suite of elements and tools were finally in place, setting the stage for true revolution.

A revolution so fundamental, coming with such heady, empowering suddenness, that participants gave it a name filled with hubristic portent. Enlightenment.

The word wasn't ill-chosen, for it bespoke illuminating a path ahead. Which, in turn, implied the unprecedented notion that "forward" is a direction worth taking, instead of lamenting over a preferred past.

Progress, in a forward direction, and boy, did we take to it. In two or three centuries our levels of education, health, liberation, tolerance and confident diversity have been momentously, utterly transformed.

Along the way, history -- once the core of every curriculum -- became a minor elective subject, with the ironic effect that today's citizens have very little idea what the past was like, how grindingly cruel and bitter life was for nearly all of our oppressed ancestors. In other words, by turning away from the past, we seem paradoxically unable to measure how far we've come. How very far.

The very shape of society changed, away from the once-universal pyramid -- toward a diamond configuration, wherein a comfortable and well-educated middle class actually outnumbers the poor. For the very first time, let me emphasize. Anywhere.

One side-effect (among many) has been to transform our myths -- our songs and dramas and vivid tales -- toward a new shared-theme, seen today in a majority of popular films. The nearly all-pervasive theme: suspicion of authority. And the notion, nearly absent in other cultures, that individual eccentricity and freedom are sacred things.

We can argue endlessly about the detailed accuracy and implications of this "diamond" analogy -- and its vast remaining imperfections -- but not over the fact that a profound shift has occurred, driven by a genuine scientific-technical educational revolution.

Next... the Romantic Movement rises to defeat the Enlightenment.

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