9 ms·

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

• jerf 2y ago
  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.
  • indigochill 2y ago
    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.
    • 082349872349872 2y ago
      I guess the US guarantee is what kept the "cod wars" limited to shouldering? (how well might current DDGs stand up to a similar full and frank discussion?)
      • JackFr 2y ago
        Never new about that. Fascinating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars
      • daedalus_f 2y ago
        Even without the US guarantee, I strongly doubt the UK would have entered an actual shooting war with Iceland over fish.
    • thworp 2y ago
      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?
      • indigochill 2y ago
        Sorry, I meant it as an example specifically of this (similar to the Hobbits "outsourcing" their defense): > There's not a lot places in the real history of the real world where a society had no defense burden I'm certainly not making an argument that it has signs of long-term stability.
    • mistrial9 2y ago
      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)
  • nradov 2y ago
    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.
  • pvaldes 2y ago
    Amish would be an example. 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.
    • Attrecomet 2y ago
      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.
      • javier_e06 2y ago
        Water too. Loot the land, get the water and all that follows and reserve some arid land elsewhere for the Hobbits.
  • philodelta 2y ago
    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.
• dylan604 2y ago
  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.
  • hosh 2y ago
    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.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      > 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 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geschicht
  • jltsiren 2y ago
    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.
• entuno 2y ago
  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.
  • causality0 2y ago
    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?
    • entuno 2y ago
      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).
      • causality0 2y ago
• popalchemist 2y ago
  Yes, the author has made a category error.
• bazoom42 2y ago
  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.
  • hatthew 2y ago
    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.
    • bazoom42 2y ago
      > Perhaps the hobbits enjoy a bit of work. 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.
      • 082349872349872 2y ago
        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 Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcCb3BFp85w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcCb3BFp85w EDIT: it might be easier to understand why those last 4 were considered revolutionary by comparing their act to the Eurovision entries of the time, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632aaGy8QGk&list=PL5EC4F7D0EB873EA7&index=7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632aaGy8QGk&list=PL5EC4F7D0E...
        • complaintdept 2y ago
          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.
• astrange 2y ago
  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/ 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.)
  • staminade 2y ago
    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.
• sparky_z 2y ago
  That was my first reaction too, but I have to admit that the book quotes he was able pull out to support his argument took me by surprise.
  • hatthew 2y ago
    I agree, the argument seems plausible. Just not as definitive as it purports to be.
• tomgp 2y ago
  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.