VIDEO: Tolkien, Hobbit-sense, and the Magic of Home

Why Were the Nazgûl So Useless in the Shire?

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Magic permeates J.R.R. Tolkien’s world, but we rarely see it performed. By which I mean: Tolkien doesn’t often show us Gandalf casting spells. Magic is, rather, innate to certain places and people. For instance, Rivendell and Lothlorien are saturated with magical power, and such characters as Elrond, Galadriel, and even the Balrog in Moria are obviously magical beings. But as far as how magic works? Tolkien is quite vague on that matter … though he does offer some interesting hints here and there.

While I’m not about to embark on a large-scale consideration of magic in Middle-earth, today’s video will focus on one small aspect of it that I find quite compelling: that is, the way in which different conceptions of home give us an insight into Tolkien’s understanding of magic.

My thinking in this vein was inspired by a question asked by a student the very first time I taught my class on LotR. Why, the student wanted to know, are the Nazgûl so useless at the start of the novel?

Think about it: the Nazgûl, or Ringwraiths—aka the “nine mortal men doomed to die”, the men whom Sauron seduced with rings of power and thus transformed them into terrifying be-robed and be-cowled entities of terror and malice—these beings are capable of freezing whole battalions of soldiers in their tracks with the mere sounds of their voices. Boromir reports as much to the Council of Elrond, recounting Gondor’s defeat at the hands of Sauron’s army. But though Gondor’s army was outnumbered by Sauron’s minions and the allied forces of “Easterlings and the cruel Haradrim,” he maintains that “it was not by numbers that we were defeated. A power was there that we had not felt before.” This power did not manifest in shot and steel, but in sheer terror: “Some said that it could be seen, like a great black horseman, a dark shadow under the moon. Wherever he came a madness filled our foes, but fear fell on our boldest, so that horse and man gave way and fled.” (319-320)

We later see such debilitating fear at work in The Return of the King, as a Nazgûl pursues Faramir’s men to the gates of Minas Tirith: “men were breaking away, flying wild and witless here and there, flinging away their weapons, crying out in fear, falling to the ground” (1073). Later, the Nazgûl function as a simple weapon of terror:

Out of sight and shot they flew, and yet were ever present, and their deadly voices rent the air. More unbearable they became, not less, at each new cry. At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war; but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death. (1077)

So, keeping this capacity for debilitating terror in mind, let’s think about the hobbits’ first encounters with the Nazgûl, who come sniffing (literally) around the Shire in the early chapters of Fellowship of the Ring. Though Frodo had heard about the Ringwraiths from Gandalf in chapter two, he doesn’t make the connection to the “Black Riders,” whom he and the other hobbits avoid and evade as they begin their journey. And while the Black Riders are certainly scary, they are perhaps more creepy than terrifying. Sam Gamgee’s father, the Gaffer, recounts speaking with one asking for Frodo by name: “Hissed at me, he did. It gave me quite the shudder.”

“Quite the shudder” is of a somewhat different order than the stout men of Gondor breaking ranks and fleeing. One assumes that the Nazgûl wasn’t making an active effort to freeze the Gaffer’s heart in terror, but that raises a related question: why wasn’t he? Why all this slinking around? There can be no doubt the Nazgûl sense they’re closing in on Sauron’s Ring, and they are definitely pursuing the hobbits … but the hobbits have what seems in hindsight a fairly easy time eluding them. Then in Bree when the wraiths actually attack, they are confounded by the clever ruse of … pillows and bolsters heaped under bedclothes to simulate sleeping hobbits.

It is in considering this episode that my student’s question becomes most pointed. Precisely how do these unearthly, undead vessels of dark magic get fooled by such a Ferris Buellerian trick?

There are a few ways to answer this question, not least of which is the simple fact that, at this point in the narrative, LotR hasn’t quite left the world of The Hobbit. By which I mean: LotR started as a sequel to The Hobbit, but as Tolkien famously noted, “the tale grew in the telling.” It eventually shook off the children’s-story sensibility, but one way to read these early chapters, especially as evidenced by the travails in the Old Forest and the encounter with Tom Bombadil, is that Tolkien was still working within the idiom of Bilbo’s adventure.

There are more textually grounded answers: the Ringwraiths are at this point being deliberately stealthy; they are less powerful during the day, or when acting singly or in twos and threes; so far from Mordor, their connection to Sauron is lessened. Indeed, in the passage from RotK I cited earlier, Tolkien makes clear that a large part of this overwhelming force of terror projected by the Nazgûl is due to Sauron’s own proximity and increasing power: “as their Dark Lord now grew and put forth his strength, so their voices, which uttered only his will and malice, were filled with evil and horror” (1077).

But I propose another possibility, which is that the Nazgûl’s power is dramatically lessened by the Shire itself—that here, in Tolkien’s idyllic, idealized figuration of 19C English rural life, the magic of the hobbit’s homeland denudes the wraiths’ ability to bring their own dark magic to bear.

That the Shire possesses a sort of magic is consonant with one of the most striking themes running through LotR: the way in which a given place gets imbued with the nature and character of its inhabitants. We see this most glaringly and perniciously with the way in which evil stains and poisons the land it inhabits. Mordor is a blasted hellscape of ash and cinder; the land to its northwest still bears the ghosts and scars of the cataclysmic war between Sauron and the Last Alliance at the end of the Second Age; we also see the processes of degradation at work with Saruman’s transformation of Isengard into an industrial pit, and the slow seeping of Mordor’s influence into the land of Ithilien. At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf recounts what he sees of the land below 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” (339).

Similarly, when Frodo and Sam, with Gollum in tow, come to Ithilien, they find their spirits lifted by the wholesomeness of the landscape: “The hearts of the hobbits rose again a little in spite of weariness: the air was fresh and fragrant, and it reminded them of the uplands in the Northfarthing far away” (848). Though this strip of land between Gondor and Mordor had fallen to the forces of Sauron, “It seemed good to be reprieved, to walk in a land that had only been for a few years under the dominion of the Dark Lord and was not yet fallen wholly into decay.” But they see signs of blight, “for this land, fair-seeming still, was nonetheless now territory of the Enemy.” They come across pits of refuse, trees wantonly chopped down, with “evil runes” carved in their bark. Sam himself stumbles “on a ring still scorched by fire, and in the midst of it he found a pile of charred and broken bones and skulls” (851).

Finally, there is Mirkwood, an example of a deft little bit of retconning on Tolkien’s part. We venture into the dark, dank forest in The Hobbit—an enchanted wood in which it is easy to get lost, it is inhabited by all sorts of nasty beasts, in particular the giant spiders who capture the dwarves. Taken solely as it appears in The Hobbit, Mirkwood is like any “forbidden forest” of fairy-tale or medieval romance, which is to say its dark magics and dangers are just a given—no explanation needed. Tolkien later expands on the history of Mirkwood when he folds it into his larger mythology: formerly known as “Greenwood the Great,” the forest becomes the spider-infested “Mirkwood” when Sauron, disguised as the Necromancer, sets up shop in its southern reaches. It is his pernicious presence that infects the formerly sylvan expanse with darkness and evil enchantment.

By contrast, the places of respite we encounter during the quest—most notably Rivendell and Lothlorien—aren’t merely just pleasant, but provide recuperative qualities to both travelers’ bodies and souls. This sense is even conveyed in The Hobbit when they rest in Rivendell, described there as “perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley” (61). “Merely to be there,” FotR adds, “was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness” (293).

Notably, these qualities do not disappear with the departure of the place’s inhabitants. As the Fellowship journeys south, they arrive in a region of historical significance, whose history can still be felt. Gandalf notes, “We have reached the borders of the country that Men call Hollin; many Elves lived here in happier days, when Eregion was its name” (368). As with Sam and Frodo’s experience to come in Ithilien, the company feels their spirits rise. “There is a wholesome air about Hollin,” Gandalf continues. “Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.”

All of these examples I cite display a certain kind of affect that goes deeper than the mere experience of a pleasant locale. Tolkien’s characters feel it on something like a spiritual level, even as they feel it physically. In Hollin, in Rivendell, in Ithilien, they feel refreshed, healed, the opposite of the experience of Mordor or Mirkwood. In a world like Middle-earth with such magical beings as Elrond and Galadriel, it makes sense that the strongholds of Rivendell and Lothlorien are magical bulwarks. “Indeed,” Gandalf tells Frodo as they sit in the House of Elrond, “there is a power in Rivendell to withstand the might of Mordor, for a while” (290). That much is perhaps unsurprising, but the wizard then adds, “There is power, too, of another kind in the Shire.”

“Of another kind.” There goes Gandalf, being cryptic again. But really, this is arguably just another example of Tolkien being vague about the nature of magic in Middle-earth.

What “power” resides in the Shire? This much is never made clear by Tolkien, but I would suggest it’s precisely the kind of magic that I’ve been discussing, the magic of home. It is not magic of the same order as found in Rivendell, or which still lingers in the land formerly known as Eregion. But it is a magic that is crucial to LotR, as it is the magic that succeeds where others fail.

The Shire is an anomaly in the broader expanse of Middle-earth, which is otherwise a fairly faithful representation of medieval Europe. As Norman Cantor notes in his book Inventing the Middle Ages,

The landscape through which Frodo and his friends move in The Lord of the Rings is essentially a medieval environment. There are Germanic barbarian types of hordes. There are decayed cities. There are comfortable pockets of momentarily quiet and enclosed country. And there is war, threat of war, destruction of war, and memories of war … This was the way it was in France around 1450, after the Hundred Years War, or in France around 480, after the Germanic invasions. (227-28)

In this respect, Cantor continues, LotR is very much “a medieval story, but a counterromance, telling it ‘like it really was,’ not the way the court poets told it to flatter their lords” (229). We see this in the hobbits’ first real experience of “the Wild,” when Aragorn leads them from Bree off the main road, and really at all points in between the rare moments of refuge in places like Rivendell.

But where Rivendell and Lothlorien are enchanted spaces, and Edoras and Minas Tirith are basically medieval castles¹ 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” (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 organization, 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’s² 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.³ Tolkien makes his love of nature quite clear, but he is not sentimental: unbridled nature in Middle-earth is dangerous and occasionally terrifying. To repurpose a famous Tolkien line, it is fair, but perilous; if you’re going to venture into the Wild, best have a guide like Aragorn.

In the preface to FotR under the heading “Concerning Hobbits,” Tolkien informs his readers that

they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.

Laughter and eating and drinking “often and heartily,” are among hobbits’ favourite occupations, “being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them).” They are “generous and not greedy, but contented and moderate,” and this general sensibility meant that their customs and practices “tended to remain unchanged for generations.” We’re privy in the first chapter of FotR to a number of gossipy conversations indicative of a parochial mindset: preoccupied with neighbours’ behaviour, suspicious of outsiders, and indeed suspicious of hobbits (like Bilbo) who are perceived as behaving in unusual ways.

A recurring expression throughout LotR is “hobbit-sense.” The first time we hear it used is to express a parochial sentiment. Following Bilbo’s departure, the wagging tongues around the Shire lament what they perceive as Gandalf’s corruptive influence on Frodo: “If only that dratted wizard will leave young Frodo alone, perhaps he’ll settle down and grow some hobbit-sense” (55). Tolkien gives hobbits as a group a patina of silliness and unseriousness, which Frodo laments when he says, “there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.” Gandalf speaks in similar terms, referring to all the “charming, absurd, helpless … kind, jolly, stupid Bolgers, Hornblowers, Boffins, Bracegirdles, and the rest, not to mention the ridiculous Bagginses” (64). But this ostensible silliness and complacency becomes increasingly belied throughout LotR as Frodo and his companions prove themselves startlingly tough and resilient—something Gandalf predicts when he notes how Gollum did not fade into wraithness under the Ring’s influence but remained “thin and tough still,” retaining “a little corner of his mind that was still his own.” Gollum in this respect “had proved tougher than even one of the Wise would have guessed– as a hobbit might.” (72)

Hobbit-sense, then, denotes both a physical and mental toughness, perhaps best illustrated by Sam Gamgee’s capacity to resist the Ring’s temptation during his brief time bearing it: “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.”

The contrast between their apparent silliness and deeper wisdom and hardiness underpins Tolkien’s profoundly humane conception of hobbits, with the Shire, then, as the expression of hobbit-sense written into a landscape. Its magic is not of an order with Rivendell, but as Gandalf says, a power of another kind. Not the power of the Valar and Elven-rings, nor the power of nature unbridled, nor yet the malign industrial magic of Mordor, but something quieter—the magic of home, which lends strength to the hobbits as they journey. Frodo tells Gandalf, “I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.”

The Shire arguably finds its epitome in the character of Samwise Gamgee. Sam is the embodiment of “hobbit-sense,” and, I would further argue, 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;⁴ and, notably, he is the sole Ring-bearer who manages to resist the Ring’s temptation.⁵ 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.

So … why were the Nazgûl so useless in the early chapters of LotR? Whatever malevolent magic they could muster, I like to think it was blunted by the collective magic of concentrated Hobbit-sense.

REFERENCES

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

Cantor, Norman. Inventing the Middle Ages. William Morrow, 1991.

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

----. The Hobbit. HarperCollins, 2007.

----. The Return of the King. HarperCollins, 2007.

----. The Two Towers. HarperCollins, 2007.

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NOTES

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

2. For a more in-depth consideration of Samwise Gamgee and his love of the noble tater, please see my earlier essay “Of Elections and Stewed Rabbit.” I’ll also probably have something more to say in future posts about fantasy’s use of creative anachronism, but for now I’ll just note that potatoes were also an import from the Americas around the same time as tobacco, so Sam’s love of “Po—ta—toes,” i.e. the “Gaffer’s delight,” “rare good ballast for an empty belly,” is another example of an ahistorical detail with significant thematic implications.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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. Again, for more on this see “Of Elections and Stewed Rabbit.”