Of Elections and Stewed Rabbit

On teaching Tolkien in fall of 2024

This essay comprises a soft-launch of this newsletter, which will shortly be paired with a video series my wife and I are undertaking—me writing and narrating, her producing and editing, as well as doing some original art (that’s hers below)—on topics dealing with fantasy and speculative fiction. When we post a video, I’ll also post the unedited transcript with bibliographical references and footnotes here. I’ll also occasionally post longer pieces like this one, which are too ponderous for the YouTube treatment.

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On the day before the U.S. election, I found it difficult to keep my mind on my job. My job that day partly entailed prepping a lecture on Samwise Gamgee and his love of potatoes.

That wasn’t the sum total of the lecture, but rather a way into a handful of other topics, by way of what has become—not least because of Sean Astin’s endearing portrayal of the character in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations—one of the most beloved scenes in The Lord of the Rings (LotR). Preparing a rabbit stew, Sam laments the lack of taters. The nominally reformed Gollum, now going by his original name Sméagol, expresses confusion. “What’s taters, precious?” To which Sam spells out, “Po—ta—toes … The Gaffer’s delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly.” The film embellishes this exchange with the oft-memed line “Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.”

This is one of my favourite lectures to deliver. I begin with a discussion of Tolkien’s use of food in LOTR—or more specifically, the fact that he rarely goes into detail about food.¹ That hobbits love to eat is a fact often repeated, but with the exceptions of two feasts of mushrooms early in Fellowship, we don’t get many menu details. Unlike, say, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which doesn’t go more than a few pages without a lavish description of a capon roasted with honey and crusted with herbs, or the Harry Potter novels with their feasts magically heaped on the groaning tables of Hogwarts, Tolkien is sparing in his depictions of food. He mostly reserves his considerable descriptive talents for wilderness and landscape. All of which makes this moment of Sam’s cookery stand out.

The more I return to this scene, the more it moves me. It is, at base, an act of love—seeing Frodo growing wan and gaunt under the terrible burden of the Ring, Sam responds in the best way he knows. Galadriel’s gift of lembas sustains them physically; but even the nigh-magical elven waybread grows tedious, and when Sam finds himself thinking wistfully of a proper meal “by the fire in the old kitchen at Bagshot Row,” he understands that what he and Frodo need is something like comfort food. Food for the soul. Sméagol reluctantly obliges by catching for him a pair of rabbits.

If only Sam had some taters.

The ultimate subject of the lecture, you may have gleaned, is Sam himself. There comes a moment for many of us who are in a long-term relationship with LotR when it dawns on us that the hero of the story is not Frodo; nor is it Aragorn, or Gandalf. No, the true hero of Tolkien’s epic is Samwise Gamgee—the gardener, the servant, the most devoted of friends. Sam is there from the start, and he has the novel’s final word. He is honest, true, stalwart, and (mostly) uncomplaining. He is not a deep or subtle thinker but proves often the wisest of those around him. He is, as Tolkien notes on more than a few occasions, blessed with a trove of “hobbit-sense.” All of which makes him, I will always maintain, the novel’s moral center.

This past semester marked the fourth time I’ve taught my department’s LotR course. It’s a third-year class originally designed by a senior colleague who passed the Tolkien baton to me when she retired. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a reliably popular class, and one I find profoundly satisfying to teach. I take great joy in sharing my love of Tolkien with students, both those new to Middle-earth and those who’ve read LotR as obsessively as me. But one of the things I always look forward to is: what will I find this time around that I haven’t encountered before? What parts of the story will stand out? What new discoveries await in this well-trodden territory?

On the eve of an election that would prove a dispiriting vindication of a politics based in cruelty, it was Sam’s simple humanity² that resonated more than ever before.

1.

I always think of a simple axiom a professor of mine from undergrad used to cite: that “literature” is not what you read, it is what you re-read. That the texts most worth studying, teaching, and writing about are those that reward you for revisiting them. Particularly rich texts yield up new readings and interpretations with each go-around. Sometimes there are details you missed, but most frequently it’s not the text that’s new, it’s your perspective. Age and experience and the context in which you find yourself all have bearing on how you read something, no matter how familiar it is to you.

Then there is the serendipity of reading something that the events of the present moment inflect in powerful and surprising ways. Tolkien frequently grew irate in his correspondence with readers who took as given that LotR straightforwardly allegorized recent events—that Sauron was Hitler and the orcs Nazis, that the Ring was a metaphor for atomic power, and so on. In the preface to the second edition of LotR, he writes, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” But he goes on to say that “many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” In part, this distinction is an argument of the get-off-my-lawn variety, against the intentional fallacy: whatever you get from the text, he seems to be saying, whatever “applicability” you find useful, knock yourself out—but don’t assume that’s the author’s intent, and certainly don’t assume the author’s intent is gospel.

Or more baldly: if you find allegory, I sure as hell didn’t stick it there.

To be fair, it’s utterly unsurprising that people reading LotR in the 1950s saw obvious correlations between Tolkien’s grand saga and the grand sagas of recent events. By the same token, it is an historical curiosity that an epic fantasy novel by a religiously conservative Catholic found such resonance on American college campuses in the 1960s, in which you had long-haired anti-war radicals, free love advocates, and militant atheists of the New Left wearing buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF. Works of literature ebb and flow with the times, finding new resonance or losing cachet depending on how they land with readers. In both examples, it’s a testament to LotR’s richness that such disparate audiences found, and continue to find, profound relevancies in the tale.

Indeed, for me these works, with which I am so intimately familiar, still find new serendipitous harmonies with my thoughts and preoccupations. These past few months I’ve found myself thinking a lot about dutiful, earnest, honest Sam. I’ve taken enormous comfort in him, and what his presence means, thematically and otherwise. I showed the last ten minutes or so of The Two Towers in class, principally because I wanted to show the Ents’ assault on Isengard—but of course in Jackson’s film, that sequence is intercut with the conclusion of Helm’s Deep, and Sam and Frodo being brought to Osgiliath as Faramir’s captives. The sequence concludes with Sam’s speech in response to Frodo’s despair:

By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something … That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo … and it’s worth fighting for.

Not gonna lie: I found myself tearing up, and my voice was hoarse when I started talking again. I said something to the effect of, “Well, that landed a bit harder than usual.”³

Sam’s speech in the film is an adaptation of a similar passage from the novel. The original is less self-consciously inspirational, more ruminative. Tolkien rarely gets meta in his fiction; what moments he offers come by way of Bilbo’s reflections on his own adventure, and Sam’s fumbling attempts to make sense of his own unexpected circumstances:

And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same—like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into? (The Two Towers)

Tolkien here dresses up in Sam’s homespun wisdom to reflect on the question of which stories get told. He has Sam fumble to a recognition of how narrative shapes the inchoate chaos of life and events, and the way some tales become conventionalized, and some people seem more suited to having story-worthy adventures, and indeed seek them out. But part of Sam’s reflection proceeds from an acknowledgment of how bizarre it is that he and Frodo find themselves embedded in this unfolding story. The conceit of the unlikely hero carries over from The Hobbit: much is made there of how Bilbo is uniquely ill-suited to adventures. A complacent and well-fed homebody, he nevertheless comes to play a key role in momentous events and proves far better suited to adventuring than anybody expects (Gandalf excepted).

In this respect, he is not unusual in children’s literature, which often features unlikely heroes. Nevertheless, Gandalf brings Bilbo on board almost as a self-conscious rejection of certain narrative conventions, noting that their party can hardly be expected to assault Smaug the Dragon head-on. “That would be no good,” Gandalf points out, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one, but warriors are too busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce.” These Warriors and Heroes, presumably, are those whom Sam mentions actively seeking adventures: “I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them.” By contrast, in “the tales that really mattered”—which I take to mean stories of actual historical significance—folk “seem to have been just landed in them.”

One of the things Sam is getting at in his earnest and unlettered but very wise way is just how bizarre it is that he and Frodo should be at the center of these events. And the fact that Tolkien puts them there—in the novel that arguably comes to define an entire genre veritably synonymous with Warriors and Heroes—is a detail that should give us pause.

2.

Because of the place Tolkien has in our literary culture, because of how enormously influential he has been in fantasy and related genres, it can be easy to forget how subversive LotR is on two crucial points.

First: the quest at the heart of the story is not about the attainment or acquisition or realization of power. It is, rather, about the destruction of power. The entire goal is to cast Sauron’s Ring into the fires that created it. But doing so will entail not just the defeat of Sauron, but the eradication of magic in the world, as the power of the three Elven-rings is also tied to the One. At the Council of Elrond, the Dwarf Glóin asks what will happen to the Elven-rings if Sauron’s ring is destroyed, and receives a grim prediction:

“We know not for certain,” answered Elrond sadly. “Some hope that the Three Rings, which Sauron has never touched, would then become free, and their rulers might heal the hurts of the world that he has wrought. But maybe when the One has gone, the Three will fail, and many fair things will fade and be forgotten. This is my belief.” (The Fellowship of the Ring)

LotR describes a strikingly elegiac trajectory: the War of the Ring is, for the Elves, the final battle one way or another. Either they lose and all their works are destroyed by Sauron, or the One Ring is destroyed … leading to the demise of all their works. In victory, they see the passing of magic from Middle-earth, and themselves along with it as they depart to the land of the Valar. But as Elrond notes, that is the sacrifice that must be made. The novel ends on a profoundly melancholy note with Frodo joining Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel on their journey into the West.

The second key point, as I started to discuss above, is who assumes the burden of bearing the Ring. That Frodo the hobbit, along with Sam, are the questing heroes is (to put it mildly) a bit of a departure from fantasy’s primary influences. Fantasy as a genre emerges in a large part from medieval romance and ancient myth; Tolkien was a scholar of Norse and Old English sagas and was best known in his field for his work on Beowulf. The heroic sagas of The Silmarillion are more consonant with this sort of source material. When Frodo volunteers to take the Ring from Rivendell to Mordor, Elrond offers a roll call of the heroes and warriors from Tolkien’s broader mythology, saying, “though all the mighty Elf-friends of old, Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin, and Beren himself were assembled together, your seat should be among them.” The pronouncement is striking precisely because of the contrast it establishes: Elrond means to emphasize the significance of the quest Frodo has agreed to, but in so doing also makes plain how unusual Frodo is in the hero’s role.

He also emphasizes the hobbits’ small stature when he opines on the nature of the quest, which “may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong.” The deeds that must be done, he continues, which “move the wheels of the world,” needs fall to Frodo, as “small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”⁴ The “weakness” of “small hands” rests on the implicit contrast between the hobbit and the standard conception of the Hero, such as enumerated by Elrond’s list. It is Gandalf however who sees strength when others only see diminutive halflings. When Frodo initially resolves to carry the Ring at least as far as Rivendell, Gandalf exclaims, “Hobbits really are amazing creatures … You can learn all there is not know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you.” Though expressing pleased and affectionate surprise, Gandalf has already noted the resilience of Hobbits, revealing to Frodo that Gollum himself had once been of Hobbit stock. When Frodo reacts with revulsion at the thought that he might share common ancestry with Gollum, Gandalf notes that “Gollum was not wholly ruined. He had proved tougher than even one of the Wise would have guessed—as a hobbit might.”

The surprising toughness of hobbits is a recurring theme in LotR—a doughty capacity for enduring adversity that is also modest, not advertising itself like the feats of strength and skill exhibited by the rest of the Fellowship. Which, again, marks a significant departure from the conventions of source material that features such super-human dragon-slaying warriors as Sigurd and Beowulf. Indeed, someone coming to LotR after immersing themselves in non-Tolkien fantasy might find the experience somewhat bewildering. Writing of his first encounter with The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, George R.R. Martin talks about how unexpected it was for him, who had been drawn to fantasy by the stories of Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror:

Dipping into the fat red paperback during my bus ride home, I began to wonder if I had not made a mistake. Fellowship did not seem like proper heroic fantasy at all. What the hell was all this stuff about pipe-weed? Robert E. Howard’s stories usually opened with a giant serpent slithering or an axe cleaving someone’s head in two. Tolkien opened up his with a birthday party. And these hobbits with their hairy feet and love of ‘taters seemed to have escaped from a Peter Rabbit book. Conan would hack a bloody path right through the Shire, end to end, I remembered thinking. Where are the gigantic melancholies and the gigantic mirths? (Dreamsongs I)

His use of the word “gigantic” is notable, as it evokes the sort of outsized feats, appetites, and egos of mythical heroes replicated in pulp magazines by Robert E. Howard, whose Conan the Barbarian stories were more or less contemporaneous with the first appearance of Hobbits⁵—whose appetites, though also not insignificant, are of a notably different character than those of Conan and his ilk (who were not well known for their love of second breakfast).

Perhaps it goes without saying that Martin’s scepticism didn’t last and that before long, “A chill went through me, such as Conan and Kull had never evoked.” I quote his initial response here as exemplary of Tolkien’s key inversion. It’s not as if LotR lacks for Conan and Kull-esque heroes (albeit of a less overtly muscular variety), but they are not where the novel’s focus lies.

And what of that focus? There are any number of ways to read the hobbit-centric dimension of LotR; not least is the fact that it began as a sequel to The Hobbit and carried over the children’s literature trope of the unlikely hero. But Tolkien’s subversion of the capital-H Hero becomes particularly suggestive when you consider the historical context in which he created LotR—most notably for the ways in which Nordic and Germanic mythology was being deployed elsewhere. Tolkien’s loathing of Nazism generally and Adolph Hitler specifically proceeded along several fronts, but what particularly enraged him was what he saw as Hitler’s perversion of the myth and literature to which he’d devoted his professional scholarly life.

This antipathy emerges starkly in Tolkien’s correspondence and subtly in his fiction. Writing to his son Michael in 1941, he notes his lifelong interest in “studying Germanic matters,” and thus “I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this ‘Nordic’ nonsense.” The “Nordic nonsense” in question refers to the mythical armature of the Nazis’ Master race narrative, which took as both inspiration and justification Nordic mythology, at least in part as translated through the operas of Richard Wagner. Nazi propaganda throughout the war was salted with allusions both implicit and explicit connecting the Nazis and the German volk to the Vikings.⁶

I don’t presume to know Tolkien’s thinking on this matter, whether he deliberately kept Hobbits at the center of LotR in symbolic rejection of the Nazi appropriation of the great heroes of Norse mythology as a form of Wagnerian grandiosity. But as I tell my students ad nauseum, authorial intent is irrelevant—the bottom line is what is present in the text, and the centrality of the Hobbits (and the valorisation of “Hobbit-sense”) is one of the most subversive elements of a novel that otherwise tells stories with which we’re not unfamiliar.

3.

One of the moments of great thematic significance in LotR comes when the Ring tempts Sam. Believing wrongly that Frodo is dead, killed by the giant spider Shelob, Sam takes the Ring in order to carry out the quest on his own. Standing atop the mountain range that marks the edge of Mordor, looking down at the desolation spread out below him with the smoking summit of Mount Doom in the distance, thoughts of the Ring intrude on his mind: “he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor.” The Ring shows him fantasies of greatness, “Sam the Strong, Hero of the Age,” the conquering gardener at whose command “the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and brought forth fruit.” All it would take was claiming the Ring for himself—“He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for himself, and all this could be”—but Sam finds the strength to reject its treacherous promise:

In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm: his own hands to use, not the hands of other to command.

The uncharitable reading of this passage is that this is merely an exercise in putting Sam in his feudal place, as a lesser being who cannot aspire to being more than a servant among Hobbits. But there is also here the profound wisdom of humility—humility and love, which together prove the salvation of Middle-earth.

Sam is a gardener—this is how he is identified throughout, it is what Galadriel recognizes with her gift, it is what the Ring uses as the basis for the delusion of dominion it offers him. Sam’s preoccupation is always with caring, tending, and cultivating, in seeing to the health and well-being of his immediate environment. It is through this attention that he derives the wisdom of the observant, as he sees what others do not, and intuits more than most. It is the main reason he sees through the Ring’s deceit.

The garden as a symbolic space in LotR is itself an expression of humility. Tolkien’s gardens are not Edenic but are the median between nature left unbridled and nature exploited. Gardens are cultivated and tended—the taming of nature, but also expressions of care and respect. This indeed is one of those many places in Tolkien where straightforward Christian or Biblical allegory falls apart: the Garden in Genesis, and as embellished by Milton in Paradise Lost, is the symbol of Man’s dominion over nature. Tolkien evinces a somewhat pagan-inflected sensibility with his veneration of forests as the purest expression of Nature, not just set apart from human control but actively resistant to it, as we see with the malevolence of the Old Forest and Treebeard’s determination to keep Fangorn sovereign and safe. Nature in Tolkien is beautiful but dangerous (or, if you like, “fair and perilous”)—he does not sentimentalize it, while also explicitly figuring its depredations as dystopian. Mordor is the most obvious example in this regard, and we catch a glimpse of the process of despoiling when Gandalf recounts what he sees of Isengard while imprisoned by Saruman in the Tower of Orthanc: “whereas [the valley below] had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges … Over all his works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself around the sides of Orthanc.”⁷

Somewhere in the space between “fair and perilous” untamed nature and the hellscapes of Mordor is the Shire, itself a garden writ large. Where Rivendell and Lothlorien are enchanted spaces, and Edoras and Minas Tirith are basically medieval castles⁸ protecting their surrounding feudal countryside, the Shire is of much more recent vintage. As Mark Atherton observes in his book There and Back Again:

Hobbits live in a world that resembles an idyllic version of England in about the year 1890, an ahistorical English countryside—one that never underwent the notorious enclosures of the early 1800s that so taxed rural workers and was captured in, say, the writings of the poet John Clare.⁹ It is an ordered, “respectable” society with a municipal organisation (signposts), and some basic industrial production (baked tiles), but otherwise basically a pre-industrial modern world. In brief it is anachronistic, a vestige of rural England. (7)

Our first encounter with a hobbit finds Bilbo Baggins sitting on his porch smoking his pipe and reading his mail. The fact that Bilbo spends a pleasant morning reading letters is a further indication of municipal organisation, given that it indicates the existence of a post office. The pipe, by contrast, is a bit of creative anachronism: if Middle-earth is supposed to be analogous to medieval Europe, the fact that the Shire grows a tobacco crop makes it anomalous, as tobacco was not introduced to Europe until the late sixteenth century. The Hobbits’ love of pipe-weed, like Sam Gamgee’s fondness for potatoes, serves to set the Shire more clearly as a space apart, in time as much as space.

And even as it occupies a special place in Tolkien’s legendarium, functioning as a nostalgic and utopian homage to a particular conception of Englishness, so too the Shire exerts a sort of power within that world. If place becomes a manifestation of the qualities of its inhabitants, the Shire is Exhibit A insofar as it comprises a communal and civic expression of Hobbit-sense. With its well-manicured hedges and fields, its well-trodden hiking paths, and its many sylvan wooded areas, the Shire conveys a sense of a natural world at once untainted yet domesticated.¹⁰

If the Shire offers a balanced ideal, it finds its epitome in the character of Samwise Gamgee. Sam is the embodiment of “Hobbit-sense,” and, as I’ve suggested, he comprises the novel’s moral center. He is there from the start and has the novel’s last word; without him the quest would have failed, as he literally carries Frodo to the finish line;¹¹ and, notably, he is the sole Ring-bearer who manages to resist the Ring’s temptation.¹² He is above all other things, the gardener—a fact noted by both Galadriel, whose gift aids him in renewing the Shire at the novel’s end, and the Ring itself, which tempts Sam with the vision of making Mordor bloom. As a gardener, he embodies the Shire’s balance between nature and domestication; his ultimate reward is to become the Shire’s saviour and its first citizen.

4.

I’m posting this essay on January 1, 2025; I started scribbling its first stirrings in my journal almost two months ago, on November 4. The next day, a plurality of the United States’ electorate handed the presidency to the embodiment of cruelty, vanity, and vindictiveness. In this, the U.S. is not unusual: the forces of reaction and revanchism are ascendent around the world, eclipsing the empathy and inclusivity that are the most basic predicates of the democratic ideal. It is no coincidence that these transformations have occurred in tandem with the erosion and devaluation of the humanities over the past several decades. I’m not suggesting that the former is a direct result of the latter, but they are not unrelated.¹³ One of my main motivations for starting this newsletter and its related YouTube channel (coming soon!) is as a means of developing an understanding of humanism more open and inclusive than many of its previous iterations, one that is at once secular but alive to the numinous. Hence, “magical humanism”—which takes as one of its bases Terry Pratchett’s assertion that “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human,” and that what therefore defines the human condition is largely shared, consensual fictions.

In hindsight, it was serendipitous that I would be teaching my class on LotR this past fall—a happy serendipity, as there are few texts from which I take quite the same degree of comfort. When I was younger, the characters whom I saw at the center of the story changed along with my own maturity and wisdom. Samwise has been the fulcrum for a long while now; going into the coming years, there are far worse fictional characters to be a standard-bearer for the humane, humanist ideal.

REFERENCES

Atherton, Mark. There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Martin, George R.R. Dreamsongs Volume I. Bantam, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring.

----. The Hobbit.

----. The Return of the King.

----. The Two Towers.

1. One of the key points I make is, if we take Middle-earth as a simulacrum of medieval Europe, that makes potatoes anachronistic—they were first introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century, brought back from South America by the Spanish.

2. Yes, technically Sam is not human, but I’d say the hobbit/human divide is a distinction without a difference.

3. Based on the number of memes proliferating my social media feeds after the election featuring Sean Astin as Sam, saying “there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo—and it’s worth fighting for!”, I’m not the only person who found this scene particularly affecting in this moment.

4. This sentiment morphs in the film of Fellowship into Galadriel’s line to Frodo: “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”

5. More or less. Howard published seventeen Conan stories in Weird Tales between 1933 and 1936; The Hobbit first appeared in print in 1937.

6. The two most notorious symbols of Nazism were lifted from Norse symbology: the twin lightning bolts of the SS logo were versions of the sig rune ᛋ, which means “sun,” but which the Nazis termed siegrune, meaning “victory”; and the swastika itself (which was never specific to Nordic culture, emerging from a variety of proto-European origins), which was often curved rather than drawn with right angles, could variously refer to the sun’s transit, the spinning of Thor’s hammer, or more generally to fertility.

7. I’m leaving off addressing the Elves and their relationship with nature here because that’s basically a whole other essay unto itself. As mentioned above, Tolkien is too complex for straightforward Christian allegory, and the Elves as sort-of-divine-but-not-quite is exemplary of this. Their relationship to nature is more synergistic than anything else; the closest we get to the Edenic in Middle-earth are the spaces ministered by the Elves who do not cultivate nature so much as enhance it with their presence. Valinor is arguably the closest analogue to Eden, with spaces like Rivendell and Lothlorien exhibiting the residual qualities of the Valar in Middle-earth (and of course the Elven-rings worn by Elrond and Galadriel).

8. Edoras bears closer resemblance to the halls of Viking lords, but you get the point.

9. “Enclosure” refers to the process of taking land formerly held in common by farmers for grazing, haymaking, and some individual farming, and granting title to a landowner— “enclosing” the land by fencing it off and turning it into private property for which rent or fees must be paid by those wishing to use it. Enclosure at once benefited wealthy landowners and made the working-class dependent on them for their livelihood. In his poem “The Mores,” written sometime between 1812 and 1831, John Clare lamented the loss of the shared country in which “Cows went and came, with evening morn and night, / To the wild pasture as their common right,” as enclosure “came and trampled on the grave / Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave.”

10. And yes, I’m leaving out any mention of “The Scouring of the Shire” and the key thematic role this episode plays in the discussion I’m developing here, but that’s mostly for space considerations. It’s early days here at The Magical Humanist! Stay tuned and we’ll come back around to it.

11. A thought for a future post: arguably, the Ring’s ultimate demise comes down to Sam and Gollum, who together function as the sort of symbolic extremes of Hobbitness. They are effectively antithetical characters, but find common ground in their devotion to Frodo, and both are exemplars of the innate toughness of Hobbits as first observed by Gandalf.

12. I suppose Bilbo does as well, but only because Gandalf was present to make certain he passes the Ring to Frodo. And while Sam’s tenure as Ring-bearer is quite short, he feels its seductive power when it’s in close proximity to Sauron, and hence at its most powerful.

13. At some point in the future, I will likely have occasion to talk about how Tolkien has become an unlikely but probably inevitable skirmish in the larger culture war, with elements of the anti-woke coalition seeking to stake ownership of Tolkien as a religious conservative. If you’re interested in my previous thoughts on this topic, you can check out posts I make on my blog here and here.