Orcs and the Other: Tolkien's Biopolitics

This week we responded to a highly interesting article by Niels Werber entitled ‘Geo- and Biopolitics of Middle-earth: A German Reading of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings’.[1] We began by reflecting on the following passage from the article:

Through reading Tolkien's novels, seeing the movies, or playing computer games like "The Battle for Middle-earth" (EA Games, 2004), one is introduced into a certain bio- and geopolitical knowledge: first of all, races are different not only in terms of skin color or height, but in moral worth, refinement, wisdom, and political integrity. The races are either hereditarily good and wise like Elves or genetically evil and dumb like Orcs, and therefore they make "natural-born" enemies. The absolute and insurmountable hate between Elves and Orcs is not outlined as a consequence of political decision-making, but as a result of their opposing DNA sequences.[2]

The group instantly noted that the generalisation of Elves as ‘hereditarily good and wise’ needs more consideration. Whilst it is true that the orcs are depicted as ‘genetically evil and dumb’, the Elves can be good or malevolent, as in the examples of Fëanor and Thranduil. We agreed, tentatively, with the general premise that hatred between Elves and Orcs comes from ‘opposing DNA sequences’, although some members of the group had reservations.

Werber’s suggestion that the ‘analogies between the battle for Middle-earth and the Nazi campaign of racial warfare are striking’ was also met with some uncertainty. One member stated it was ‘pushing it a bit’ to draw this comparison. Tolkien, after all, said he was not a fan of allegory in the preface to the second edition of LotR.  

We pondered the depiction of the orcs as inhuman and the notion, put forward by the German scholar Schmitt, and considered by Werber, that ‘the “inhuman” enemy deserves neither pity nor lawful treatment, but instant death’.[3] We agreed that attitude seems to prevail in The Lord of the Rings, but considered Gollum as an example of an inhuman character that invites pity. We were reminded of the oft-quoted conversation between Frodo and Gandalf:

"What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"

"Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."

The conversation, rarely quoted in its entirety, goes on, with Frodo comparing Gollum to an Orc:

‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’

‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. ‘I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.’ (LotR, 3 vol edn, p. 58, my italics)

The conversation clearly speaks to the issues discussed by Werber and seems to be a comment on the dangers of making ‘us and them’ distinctions. In Frodo’s eyes, because Gollum is an enemy, he ‘deserves death’. It should be noted that Frodo makes these remarks because he is ‘frightened’, Tolkien perhaps suggesting that fear is a contributing factor to an ‘us and them’ attitude.

We concluded by thinking about Peter Jackson’s depiction of the Orcs in the movie trilogy. We considered Werber’s argument that ‘not a single scene is shot from the perspective of an Orc. They lack a point of view. We do not see the dreadful attacks of Rohan cavalry or Elf-snipers from the standpoint of the "other."’ We agreed with Werber, although some members of the group noted that there were some scenes depicting the orc point-of-view, such as Gothmog’s during the attack on Osgiliath and Minas Tirith. The point Werber makes, however, is that Orcs are not depicted in a way that invites pity for them. Jackson does nothing new to address the ‘us and them’ issue in Tolkien’s fiction with regard to the Orcs. The Orcs are ‘just an enemy’ and need to be destroyed.

Werber’s thought-provoking article contains some complex ideas and we agreed that it would take more time and further research to draw definitive conclusions about the nature of the Enemy and the Other in Tolkien’s fiction.

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[1] Niels Werber, ‘Geo- and Biopolitics of Middle-earth: A German Reading of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings’, New Literary History, 36 (2005), 227-246

[2] Werber, p. 228.

[3] Werber, p. 232.

Undead and Uncanny: The Gothic in Tolkien's Fiction

This week we turned our attention to the gothic in Tolkien’s fiction. This session was not inspired by the closeness of Halloween but by a chapter by Sue Zlosnik in Reading the Lord of the Rings, entitled ‘Gothic Echoes’.[1] In this article, Zlosnik argues that more attention needs to be paid to the influence of the Gothic on The Lord of the Rings. The novel, she says, is ‘best read like a Gothic novel’.[2] She writes:

What I remembered as archetypal evil forces, I found represented through the discourses of late Victorian Gothic fiction. This perception has been enabled by the emergence of a wealth of scholarship in Gothic studies over the last 25 years. The work of Gothic scholars has established critical paradigms that enable us to read The Lord of the Rings as a text that, although set in a mythical past, is preoccupied with the fears of a twentieth century still haunted by a legacy of late nineteenth-century anxieties.[3]

We started our response by brainstorming the various aspects of Gothic that can be found in Tolkien’s fiction. We came up with some key ideas, including the use of ruins, Gothic or uncanny creatures and the undead. We talked about the fact that Tolkien mentions vampires in his fiction and has a character called Thuringwethil who Tolkien Gateway describes as ‘a Vampire servant of Sauron during the First Age’ and ‘Sauron's messenger’. We looked at the following excerpt from the Lay of Leithian:

…The wolves whimpering and yammering fled

like dusky shadows. Out there creep   2810

pale forms and ragged as from sleep, 

crawling, and shielding blinded eyes:

the captives in fear and in surprise

from dolour long in clinging night

beyond all hope set free to light.    2815

A vampire shape with pinions vast

screeching leaped from the ground, and passed, 

its dark blood dripping on the trees;

and Huan neath him lifeless sees

a wolvish corpse – for Thu had flown   2820

to Taur-na-Fuin, a new throne 

and darker stronghold there to build…

It was remarked that this passage evokes something of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned’ and his Dulce et Decorum est as much as the Gothic:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

[…]

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Are lines 2810-15 influenced by the horrors of the trenches that Tolkien himself experienced or an evocation of the Gothic?[4] Reading this passage, we also noted how it is difficult to get a sense of Tolkien’s vision of vampires in his work – what do they look like? Are they human? Bat-like? Or both? The poem gives very little away, although we observed that Thuringwethil, with her ‘pinions vast’ is meant to be interpreted as having a bat form.

We then started to think about how the concept of the vampire might appear in Tolkien’s fiction in other ways. We thought about the ring as an evil force that can control another’s will and were taken with Zlosnik’s discussion of vampiric infection:

There are vampiric resonances in The Lord of the Rings. The insidious evil that the Ring represents infects the artefacts that serve it and, by extension, those whose bodies come into contact with them. The knife that pierces Frodo in an early struggle takes from him his strength in a way that is different from the trauma of a normal wound. It also infects him with a nameless poison that enhances the temptation of the Ring; like the bite of the vampire, it infects him with desire.[5]

In The Lord of the Rings, victims of evil can be controlled by the will of dark forces and can also be transformed into the immortal, the undead. For example, the nine Kings of Men who were given rings of power become the undead Ringwraiths and bound to Sauron’s will.  We compared, too, the death of the Witchking with the death of Dracula – both of whom are malevolent, undead characters. ‘Almost in the drawing of a breath,’ Stoker writes, ‘the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight…’ (Stoker, p. 377). The Witchking similarly vanishes from sight; his clothes are left ‘empty’ and ‘shapeless’ and it is said that ‘a cry went up into the shuddering air, and faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up, and was never heard again that age of this world.’ Tolkien’s description, we agreed, is certainly evocative of the Gothic.

Finally, we turned our thoughts to the Uncanny. We considered the following two terms and how they might feature in The Lord of the Rings:

Heimlich: belonging to the house; friendly; familiar; I, b: tame (as in animals); I, c: intimate, comfortable; i.e: secure, dometic(ated), hospitable.

Unheimlich: unhomey, unfamiliar, untame, uncomfortable = eerie, weird, etc.

The Lord of the Rings, we reflected, is fully of references to both what is homely and unhomely, familiar and unfamiliar. We found that the gothic was not so much to be found in the contrasts of homely and unhomely, however, but rather in the familiar and unfamiliar. In the portrayal of Gollum as neither Hobbit nor animal we found echoes of the uncanny. There are similarities to be drawn between Gollum and Dracula. In her article, Zlosnik draws our attention two passages, one describing Dracula’s descent down the castle walls and one describing Gollum climbing down a rock:

Down the face of the precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out. Maybe its soft clinging hands and toes were finding crevices and holds that no Hobbit could ever have seen or used, but it looked as if it was just creeping down on sticky pads, like some large prowling thing of insect-kind. And it was coming down head first, as if it was smelling its way. Now and again it lifted its head slowly, turning it right back on its skinny neck, and the hobbits caught a glimpse of two small pale gleaming lights, its eyes that blinked at the moon for a moment and then were quickly lidded again. (LotR, TTT, p. 268) 

...my feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out about him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow...I saw the fingers and toes grasp the stones, worm clear of mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. (Stoker, p. 34) 

We agreed that these depictions were remarkably similar. It was pointed out that the similarities could simply be coincidence, but there are a number of things about the descriptions that suggest otherwise, including the way they both move – the emphasis on uncanny, downwards movement – and the description of both characters as unhuman-like creatures – Gollum is described as looking like something of insect-kind, Dracula a moving like a lizard. Other similarities outside of these passages include their general appearance – both have sharp teeth and pale complexions. Tolkien writes of Gollum, ‘His tongue lolled out between his sharp yellow teeth, licking his colourless lips’, whilst Stoker describes Dracula as having ‘peculiarly sharp white teeth’ which ‘protruded over the lips’ and as have ‘extraordinary pallor’. It is worth noting that Dracula’s lips have ‘remarkable ruddiness’ and actually suggest he has ‘astonishing vitality’.

We concluded that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is not overtly Gothic, but that the Gothic permeates the text; it is, to quote one Thinklings member, ‘woven deeply into the novel’s DNA’.

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[1] Sue Zlosnik, ‘Gothic Echoes’, in Reading the Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic, ed. by Robert Eaglestone (London: Continuum, 2005), pp.47-58

[2] Zlosnik, p. 50.

[3] Zlosnik, p. 47.

[4] A question for further discussion.

[5] Zlosnik, p. 56.

Random Rant: Dwarves vs. Smaug in Erebor

About two weeks ago, I was able to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on DVD, and for the most part I was content. However, after two hours I decided I may as well throw my copy of The Hobbit out the nearest window.

For the last half hour, I watched dumbstruck as the dwarves scampered round Erebor trying to kill Smaug with all manner of industrial mining stuff. It’s a complete departure from the dwarves in the book who push Bilbo into Erebor and wish him luck with finding the Arkenstone. For me, Jackson has forgotten one of the reasons I love The Hobbit – the good guys are complicated. They’re not there to take back Erebor, they’re there to get their gold back. It’s this that gives them depth because they’re going to the Lonely Mountain is out of greed rather than some noble quest.

However, Jackson does give us this awesome last scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3-vfsZdrK0

- Michael C

Maps and Memories: Navigating Landscapes and Ruins in Tolkien's Fiction

This week in Thinklings we talked about landscape and ruins in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. We began by considering how Tolkien uses landscape in his fiction and how it features throughout the novels. We discussed the following assertion made by Steve Walker:

Tolkien’s topographical anatomy is the more natural for its responsiveness to the systole and diastole of narrative; the relative prominence of anatomy in the landscape directly reflects the relevance of setting to the immediate situation. Thus, when the ruggedness of the landscape becomes a prominent threat to the progress of Frodo and Sam towards Mordor, setting previously peripheral asserts itself, dominating the narrative through a vividly hostile animistic profile.[1]

After decoding the author's body metaphor, we agreed that anatomy in the landscape was indeed something that occurs often in Tolkien's fiction. One member suggested that the landscape seems to get more vivid and more prominent as Frodo and Sam enter Mordor. We looked at the way the following passage makes use of personification to suggest that the landscape is trying to hinder the hobbits' progress:

‘Before them, darkling against a pallid sky, the great mountains reared their threatening heads…they swung out long arms northward; and between these arms there was a deep defile. This was Cirith Gorgor, the Haunted Pass, the entrance to the land of the enemy. High cliffs lowered up on either side, and thrust forward from its mouth were two sheer hills, black-boned and bare…’[2]

We then thought about how Tolkien personifies the landscape in general. We had a rather lively debate about the stone giants in The Hobbit and whether or not these are meant to be literal or metaphorical. Most members of the group tended to believe that Tolkien was trying to personify the landscape and that the 2012 film interpretation was inaccurate and merely there to provide more action.

This debate brought us eventually to Shippey's notion of Tolkien's 'cartographical plot'[3] and Tolkien’s assertion that he ‘wisely started with a map, and made the story fit…’ For Tolkien, the geography of Middle-Earth came before the plot; we considered to what extent this is an unusual approach to story-telling and compared the cartographic plot of LotR to the plot of The Hobbit. Members generally agreed that The Hobbit’s story may have been driven more by plot and less by geography. We also considered the following notion from Shippey:

…for their first hundred-odd pages the Hobbits seem to be wandering through a very closely localised landscape…and that landscape and the beings attached to it are in a way the heroes. They force themselves into the story. But while they slow its pace, appear strictly redundant, almost eliminate the plot centred on the Ring, they also do the same job as the maps and the names: they suggest very strongly a world which is more than imagined…one which has been ‘worn down’, like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millennia.[4]

This led us from landscapes to ruins and the way in which ruins might serve to suggest a world ‘worn down’ or ‘do the same job as maps or names’. We began by thinking about ruins we had visited ourselves and how they made us feel. We thought about how they might make us feel reflective, might recall a memory, as well as how the present intersects with the past in these ancient places. We discussed a member's visit to the Rollright Stones (see picture) and how Tolkien’s visit to this place influenced his depiction of the Barrow Downs and their ‘hills…crowned with green mounds and…standing stones pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums’.

From thinking about our own experiences we were able to interpret the Old English poem The Ruin and the narrator’s feelings as he considers a Roman ruin. We thought about the following summary of the poem’s narrative by Lawrence Beaston:

Howsoever ephemeral are the objects of material culture in the long stretches of geological time, the speaker sees that those works are much more durable than the people who constructed and used them. The poem’s central truth, then, concerns not the mutability of the world but the fleeting nature of human life. The poem’s point is that the things that people make out of the substances of this world have the capacity to outlast their makers. Not only could human artifacts last beyond the span of a single life. They could, the speaker realizes, survive any given socio-political order. And perhaps nothing represents the difference in the durability of physical artifacts and their makers more aptly than an uninhabited city. [5]

We thought about the role of ruins in The Lord of the Rings, contemplating each ruin we come across. Ruins stir memories, like the stones atop Amon Sul, which generate discussion of the past and invite Aragorn to sing a song about a piece of Middle-Earth history. In light of this, Deborah Sabo’s reflection on the nature of ruins seemed especially relevant:

The particular role of a ruin or archaeological place in a cultural landscape will depend upon how that place is remembered, the degree of attachment, and especially the way in which stories drawn from the deep past, or perhaps more recently invented and woven around that place, serve the needs of the present.[6]

We thought about how the ruins in The Lord of the Rings might serve the ‘needs of the present’ and the way in which different places are remembered. ‘The material leavings of more ancient inhabitants’ and the memories they stir, says Sabo, ‘contextualize the story's present events, simultaneously for the reader and for the characters’.[7] One of the best examples of LotR’s depiction of ruins comes from Legolas’ ‘Lament of the Stones’ – a lament that seems an apt conclusion to this blog entry:

'The Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the Silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them; only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago.'[8]

- Corinne

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[1] Steve Walker, The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style (London: Macmillan, 2009), p. 44.

[2] J. R. R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (London, Harper Collins, 2012), p. 622

[3] Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, (London: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 118.

[4] Shippey, p. 124.

[5] Lawrence Beaston, ‘The Ruin and the Brevity of Human Life’, Neophilologus, 95 (2011), 477–489.

[6] Deborah Sabo, ‘Archaeology and the Sense of History in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth’ Mythlore, 26 (2007), 91-112 (p. 91).

[7] Sabo, p. 93.

[8] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (London: Harper Collins, 2012), pp. 283-4.

Random Rant: Thranduil's Face

Random rants and random reflections from fellow Thinklings - the rules: No more than 150 words!

I read an article in Empire magazine recently in which Philippa Boyens answers some questions about the movies. One of these was about Thranduil's scarred face. This is what Boyens had to say:

'The conceit is that Thranduil has faced the great fire-breathing dragons and been scarred by them, physically and emotionally. He's used the magic of elves to conceal it. That also perhaps explains what's happened to Legolas' mum.'

Not another backstory! Just how much of The Hobbit are the writers going to write themselves? Why try to find ways to justify and explain things all the time?

- Corinne

Mithril and Mirkwood: The Influence of William Morris on Tolkien's Fiction

This week we turned our attention to the following quote from one of Tolkien’s letters:

‘Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.’ (Tolkien, Letter 226)

Having spent last week discussing how World War One might have influenced Tolkien’s fiction, it seemed only appropriate, given the assertions in the above quote, to discuss one of Tolkien’s other major influences: William Morris. The discussion involved some close reading of passages from The House of the Wolfings and The Wood Beyond the World. Our first port-of-call was the introductory poem from H of W:

Whiles in the early Winter eve

We pass amid the gathering night

Some homestead that we had to leave

Years past; and see its candles bright

Shine in the room beside the door

Where we were merry years agone

But now must never enter more,

As still the dark road drives us on.

E'en so the world of men may turn

At even of some hurried day

And see the ancient glimmer burn

Across the waste that hath no way;

Then with that faint light in its eyes

A while I bid it linger near

And nurse in wavering memories

The bitter-sweet of days that were.

The theme of the poem, we agreed, resonated with the themes of Tolkien’s fiction. The group picked out the ‘dark road’, the ‘waste that hath no way’, the ‘ancient glimmer’, the ‘wavering memories’ and the welcoming homestead with its lights burning as themes that occur in Tolkien's fiction. We compared Morris's poem with the songs ‘The Road Goes Ever On’ and ‘I Sit Beside the Fire and Think’. The following two verses from the latter seemed particularly apposite:

I sit beside the fire and think

Of people long ago

And people that will see a world

That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think

Of times there were before

I listen for returning feet

And voices at the door.

Next, we turned our attention to Chapter 1 of H of W. The group picked out some key names, such as the ‘Mark-men’ and ‘Mirkwood’. Our main concern, however, was with Morris’s opening descriptions of dwellings and of a race of people. We thought about how Morris’s stories are primarily about races as opposed to individuals and how the opening of H of W testifies to this. We thought about Morris’s interest in the ‘many branches’ of the ancestry of the Mark-men and of Tolkien’s similar interest in the roots and branches of races and people. We considered to what extent The Lord of the Rings was a story about races as opposed to individuals. To do this, we compared the prologue to LotR with the opening of H of W and could see fundamental similarities in the way Tolkien begins his tale with the setting out the nature, geography and history of the Hobbits. Tolkien's story begins not with an individual but with a race of people, and it is some way into the story before the reader can ascertain who the chief protagonist will be. Even then, the story does not focus on Frodo all the way through, but divides up into various sub-narratives that depict the various races of Middle-Earth and their roles in the War of the Ring.

Having discussed both Tolkien’s and Morris’s interests in races, ancestry and geography, we moved on to think about a very different aspect of H of W. We looked at the chapter in which the Wood-Sun (an immortal daughter of the Gods) gives Thiodolf (the lord of the Wolfings) a mailcoat to protect him in battle. The following passage struck a particular chord with Tolkien’s work:

Then [the wood-sun] leaned down from the stone whereon they sat, and her hand was in the dewy grass for a little, and then it lifted up a dark grey rippling coat of rings; and she straightened herself in the seat again, and laid that hauberk on the knees of Thiodolf, and he put his hand to it, and turned it about, while he pondered long: then at last he said:   "What evil thing abideth with this warder of the strife,   This burg and treasure chamber for the hoarding of my life?   For this is the work of the dwarfs, and no kindly kin of the earth;   And all we fear the dwarf-kin and their anger and sorrow and mirth."

We compared the mailcoat with the mithril vest that is given to Frodo by Bilbo. We compared the colour and appearance of the coat and how it was made by the race of dwarves. We thought about the Sindarin word mithril and how its etymology mean grey-glitter (mith = grey, ril = glitter). We also thought about how Tolkien sometimes creates histories for ambiguous or provocative names or objects in Old English and Norse ('Earendil' being one example) and we considered how Tolkien may have wanted to provide a rich history for the mailcoat. Tolkien creates a whole backstory to the mailcoat, with Bilbo being given it by the dwarves in The Hobbit and then Bilbo bequeathing it to Frodo.

As well as the mailcoat, we also considered the relationship between Thiodolf and the Wood-Sun. We compared the mortality of Thiodolf and the immortality of the Wood-Sun to Aragorn and Arwen. We thought about the women in LotR and how they are left behind whilst the men go to war, comparing Eowyn’s plight with the plight of the Wolfing women:

‘Nor yet shall the Wolfing women hear words on the wind go by

As they weave and spin the night down when the House is gone to the war,

And weep for the swains they wedded and the children that they bore.’

(spoken by the Wood-Sun)

Lastly, we turned our attention to The Wood Beyond the World and the moment the protagonist, Golden Walter, encounters a strong dwarf after being shipwrecked and finding himself on a strange island. We discussed the dwarf as a source for Tolkien’s Gollum and saw clear similarities between Gollum’s speech and behaviour and the dwarf’s:

Said the dwarf, writhing his face grievously, and laughing forsooth: "I know it all: I asked thee to see what wise thou wouldst lie. I was sent forth to look for thee; and I have brought thee loathsome bread with me, such as ye aliens must needs eat: take it!"     Therewith he drew a loaf from a satchel which he bore, and thrust it towards Walter, who took it somewhat doubtfully for all his hunger.     The dwarf yelled at him: "Art thou dainty, alien? Wouldst thou have flesh? Well, give me thy bow and an arrow or two, since thou art lazy-sick, and I will get thee a coney or a hare, or a quail maybe. Ah, I forgot; thou art dainty, and wilt not eat flesh as I do, blood and all together, but must needs half burn it in the fire, or mar it with hot water; as they say my Lady does: or as the Wretch, the Thing does; I know that, for I have seen It eating."

We were very much reminded of Gollum’s relationship with Frodo and Sam and the moment in Ithilien when Gollum brings them two conies to eat. We also thought about how Gollum refers to Shelob enigmatically as ‘She’ and ‘Her’ and compared this to the enigmatic ‘Lady’ and ‘Thing’. The following passage also resonated with Gollum’s behaviour and speech:

     The creature let out another wordless roar as of furious anger; and then the words came: "It hath a face white and red, like to thine; and hands white as thine, yea, but whiter; and the like it is underneath its raiment, only whiter still: for I have seen It--yes, I have seen It; ah yes and yes and yes."     And therewith his words ran into gibber and yelling, and he rolled about and smote at the grass: but in a while he grew quiet again and sat still, and then fell to laughing horribly again…

The meeting between the dwarf and Walter, we agreed, shared an uncanny resemblance to the meeting between Frodo, Sam and Gollum. What’s more, like the dwarf, Gollum gibbers and smites the ground, displaying curious behaviour and speaking brokenly and with repetition.

Overall, the group were much more convinced by the similarities between the work of Morris and Tolkien than they were by the influences of WW1 on Tolkien’s fiction. But the uniqueness of Tolkien’s fiction, of course, is the combination of elements of the medieval with contemporary issues, such as industrialisation and modern warfare.    

Dug-outs and Domesticities: The Influence of WW1 on Tolkien's Hobbits

Since 2014 marks the centenary of World War One it seemed only appropriate to dedicate one of our sessions to the influence of the conflict on Tolkien’s fiction. This week we asked ourselves: To what extent did the Great War influence Tolkien’s depictions of the Hobbits?

The first aspect we looked at was Hobbit-holes and how they compare to WW1 dug-outs. After looking at some images of dug-outs, the group generally concluded that they did not seem to be an immediate source for Hobbit-holes. One student cited the opening of The Hobbit and the narrator’s remark that Bilbo’s hole was not a ‘dirty, wet hole full of worms’. I raised the point that Tolkien had described how ‘comfortable’ and well-furnished the German dug-outs were, but this did not seem to persuade the group.

Having dispatched pretty quickly with this topic, we moved on to think about the relationship between Frodo and Sam. We discussed the article ‘Frodo’s Batman’ by Mark T. Hooker and the group seemed generally convinced by Hooker’s reading of the WW1 batman as an inspiration for Tolkien’s Sam.[1] Like Hooker, we looked at some passages from Biography of a Batman and drew out some similarities between Pearson and Samwise. This passage seemed particularly apposite:

He would . . . prepare a varied menu from interminable bread, plum-and-apple jam, and the sickly meat and vegetable ration. He would clean my limited wardrobe, wash and mend the socks and shirts, keep me supplied with tobacco, dry my boots and stockings. The batman was omnipresent, yet ubiquitous. . . . And he would run when his officer went over the top, and fight by his side. When the officer dropped, the batman was beside him.[2]

One group member commented that out of all the influences of WW1 on Tolkien’s fiction, this influence seemed the most likely. We thought about the domestic tasks that Sam undertakes, as well as his bravery and his unwavering loyalty where Frodo is concerned. At Rivendell, it is Sam who goes over in his mind all the things he has packed – from saucepans to salt – and it is Sam who takes on most of the domestic duties.

From this, we went on to think about the nature of male Hobbits in general and the absence of women in The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. I suggested that Tolkien may have been inspired by the all-male world of the trenches and the inversion of gender roles that the Great War brought about. I asked whether the Hobbits’ domestic duties in the early scenes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings may have been influenced by changing attitudes to gender roles during and after World War One. The group tended to agree, although some questioned how much the Great War changed attitudes to gender roles over all. 

The group also talked about the male bonds in Tolkien’s fiction, in particular that between Frodo and Sam. The group was in agreement with Anna Smol that ‘the bond between Frodo and Sam is represented in ways that are markedly similar to the male friendships described by many British soldiers in the First World War’.[3] We generally agreed with Smol’s comment that

The paradigm of World War I literature allows us to see more fully how Tolkien is reflecting not the heroic pieties or sexual immaturity of Victorian and Edwardian medieval boys' stories, but the experiences of someone who has known the "animal horror" of trenchlife (Letters 72) and whose views of male bonding reflect many of the desires and complexities of living through that crucial moment in the formation of the modern outlook.[4]

We thought about how modern readers may misinterpret or be surprised by Tolkien’s representation of the relationship between Frodo and Sam, particularly Sam’s declaration of love. The group did not see any more to the intimacy of their relationship than a strong male bond influenced by Tolkien’s experiences of the hardships of war and the relationships that developed in the all-male environment of the trenches.

Finally, we moved on to discuss an article by Michael Livingstone which argues that Frodo ‘appears [to be] suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, more commonly known as "shell-shock”’.[5] This notion was met with some scepticism, with some members wondering if this reading was “going too far”. We considered the effects of shell-shock, not just on the mind but on the body, and how they differed from the trauma Frodo seemed to be suffering from. We talked about the fact that Tolkien does not offer readers much insight into Frodo’s mind and that this might be an aspect that would work against Livingstone’s argument. We thought about the following assertion, too:

Frodo is very reluctant to wear a sword, even an ornamental one. Such behavior would be familiar to Tolkien from his war experiences, as an aversion to violence is a common post-traumatic symptom of combat veterans in particular. This is not to say that Frodo was a violent, hardened warrior before his journey to Mordor - just as one cannot say the same for the generation of young men who went to the trenches of northern France - but Frodo had previously worn (and used) blades with pride. His unwillingness to wear one in Ithilien seems to be the result of a change in his character: he is simply no longer comfortable with bearing a weapon.[6]

The main contention we had with this assertion is that Frodo had ‘previously worn blades with pride’. We were unsure of the extent to which this was true and would have liked some evidence to support this assertion. Frodo rarely fights or sees battle, so his behaviour does not seem to correspond with someone who has seen enough of war. We did, however, agree that Frodo’s return home to the Shire could be read in light of the WWW1 solider returning home and being unable to resume, or pick up the pieces of, a ‘normal’ life.

- Corinne

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[1] Mark T. Hooker, ‘Frodo's Batman’, Tolkien Studies, 1 (2004), 125-136 (p. 131).

[2] Graham Seton Hutchison, Biography of a Batman (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. 1929).

[3] Anna Smol, ‘"Oh. . . oh. . . Frodo!": Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings’, Modern Fiction Studies, 50 (2004), 949-979

[4] Ibid.

[5] Michael Livingston, ‘The Shell-Shocked Hobbit: The First World War and Tolkien's Trauma of the Ring’, Mythlore, 25 (2006), 77‐93

[6] Ibid.