Hippity Hobbity Ho

Documentaries on a Modern Myth

With apologies to Joseph Campbell, myths are always being created.  You don’t have to go back to ancient India, Egypt, China, the Middle East, Rome, Greece, Gilgamesh or the Bible. If you are still doing that, you are missing a boat. This article is about the most popular literary myth of the Twentieth Century in ‘the west.’  It’s an equivalent to the Mediterranean Mare– a sea in the ‘middle of the land’ in Latin.  It is about the other middle, Middle Earth, the world created by J.R. Tolkien.  This world actually led J.R.R. Martin to creating Game of Thrones, an even more recent myth-making event.

Two somewhat odd documentaries shed light on the geography and mythical origins of the stories in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (LotR).  They are “The Real Middle Earth” (2003) and “Looking for the Hobbit” (2014), both on Amazon.  

PLACES

The Real Middle Earth identifies the Shire from the obvious – the various county ‘shires’ in the Midlands of England where Tolkien grew up, had family and lived - Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire and the rest.  As a child Tolkien explored a rural area near Birmingham called Sarehole Mill, christening various hostile personages as ogres.  The huge rolling downs west of Oxford became Rohan, with White Horse Hill at the center.  Old Oxford itself, a city he taught in for 40 years, is theorized to be part of the model for the fortress city of Minas Tirith.  You could consider the "Eagle and Child" pub in Oxford as the real Prancing Pony.  The odd Anglo-Saxon names of towns and villages in this area inspired his naming of places like Bree in The Shire. 

Tolkien, as a too-young man in high-school, maintained that the ancient kingdom of Mercia located in this area should reject the Norman conquest of 1066, evidently preferring Anglo-Saxon settlers to Norman ones.  Saxons and Angles both migrated to Britain from Germany after the Roman’s left.  Their languages formed much of the basis of Old English and this was perhaps his attraction. 

The documentaries do not identify the woods that make appearances in the books, but Tolkien was a nature fan who rode bicycles and walked in rural areas on a regular basis. There are still forests scattered across the counties, and in the pre-WWII era there were more. He loved trees, as can be seen in his creation of the anti-industrial Ents who opposed the destruction of forests by Saruman for the making of weapons and armor. Castles in the area like Broughton and Warwick would also have been familiar.    

Tolkien actually didn’t travel much, except in his philology and in his imagination. He was first a philologist – a linguistic collector of words and etymologies.  He created the Elvish language out of a combination of Finnish and Welsh – two close-by but absolutely foreign languages to him.  He also deeply explored Old Norse.  But most importantly, he ‘traveled’ to Europe in his 20s to fight in WW1.  His experience on the bloody Somme in France as a young man made him turn to writing, trying poetry first.  He explicitly said that the Dead Marshes were from his experience in that war.  Mordor, with its foul odors, smoky air, violence and general desolation is sourced to the broken battlefields of the Somme too. Above all, the Lord of the Rings is a war story inspired by the rejection of power, which is the goal of inter-imperialist and inter-capitalist wars like WWI and WWII.  The ring of power must be destroyed... and who is tasked with destroying it?  Who can we trust?

The Hobbiton set still exists in New Zealand

The HOBBITS

In the search for influences on Tolkien’s writing and stories, the Looking for the Hobbit documentary cannot find any references to the ‘halflings’ – to the small but big-footed rural people, to little heroes like Frodo or Bilbo, to anything like the Hobbits.   They are nowhere in the noble myths that Tolkien was familiar with and studied.  These myths are the Arthurian legends; the heroic German epic the Nebelungenlied; Icelandic and Nordic Sagas; common fairy tales; the Finnish epic poem Kalevala; the old English epic poem Beowulf.  From these he drew dragons, the city of Midgard, trolls, dwarfs, Mount Doom and more.  He was inspired by Siegfried to create Aragon II; Grendal perhaps became Gollum; Merlin inspired Gandalf; the dragon in the Nibelungen was a model for Smaug, the Fellowship was a borrowing from the Round Table.  These books have been translated into 80 languages by the way, so the resonance of these little people goes far beyond Europe.  LotR are some of the best-selling books in history which is why this is significant. 

So who are the hobbits?  As both documentaries point out, Tolkien called himself a ‘hobbit.’  They are his greatest creation - THE central figures in this modern myth of the Twentieth Century.  They are quite clearly English rural people visually grounded by their ‘big feet,’ but by extension ordinary people trying to go about their lives, not lusting for power, money, wealth, fame and the rest. They are somewhat dumb and ridiculous, enjoy comfort, but also capable of feats of intelligence, kindness, morality and bravery. This populism was injected by Tolkien into stories that are normally the province of heroes and heroines, of kings and queens, of princes and princesses, of warriors and devils, of monsters and dragons, of dictators and Caesars.  The hobbits bring us back to modern reality, back to the people. 

Which is, by the way, the impact of the disputed ending of Game of Thrones too. That ‘game’ was not going to end well if anyone thought about the title for a second.  The result, unexpected by clueless viewers still searching for traditional heroes and leaders, was instead filled with a dead megalomaniac, her absent dragon, the rule of a mute cripple and the departure to join the anti-authoritarian Wildlings by the key player, Jon Snow.  The ‘ring of power’ and the ‘game of thrones’ are the same.  In contrast to Tolkien who Martin criticized about this, Martin has a modern, very dim view of kings and queens. 

Abuse of Hobbits by tall Reactionary

Right-Wing Attempts

Tolkien’s writings lean to the left, though this point is missed by some.  Giorgia Meloni, right-wing president of Italy, loved LotR as a young ‘reenactor’ and calls it a ‘sacred text.’ She posted as the “Little Dragon of the Internet” thus confusing the issue of dragons like Smaug. She endorses its rural, anti-industrial angle and its’ reliance on myth and fantasy as a method. As if fantasy has no connection to reality!  This while she presides with her ring of power over an Italian economy not just marked by grapes, wheat and olives, but by high-end fashion, high-end autos and motorcycles, high-end glass and high-end industrial and textile equipment.  She ran with the help of large Italian capitalists and landlords, who are the Saurons of Italy, along with the orcs of proto-fascism in the Brothers of Italy and the archaic backing of the corrupt right-wing proto-kings in the Vatican.  Is Meloni a great figure in the battle against global warming and deforestation, beloved of Ents?  No.  She attempts to be a right-wing populist instead, muddying any water still left.  The water of the Po, the longest river in Italy, is running dry.  

By the way, that great nationalist Italy that she promotes was on the side of Adolf in WWII, whom Tolkien called “that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf H....."  Here is Tolkien’s full quote written during WWII: “I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf  H.....”(for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”   

Demonic!  While infused by an ethnic angle, he was an anti-fascist.  He refused to work with Nazi publishers for German translations of his books.  He called Jews a ‘gifted people’ in one letter with these publishers.  He wrote LotR between 1937 and 1949 over the whole course of the Nazi period and WWII, a barbarity which did not escape him.  It gave to him day-to-day proof of the horrors of power and war. Hitler and Mussolini and Sauron and Saruman are a quartet in Tolkien’s world, but evidently not in Meloni’s. Power in these cases was the function of an alien ruling class, not the people.  Peter Jackson, who made 6 films out of LotR and The Hobbit, is not some kind of right-winger either.

According to YouTuber Adam Something, a Hungarian leftist, urbanist and engineer, Meloni is not alone.  Adam has translated a large number of propaganda comics put out by the Russian government publishing house, and in some of them heroic Russia is depicted as actually backing Sauron and Mordor. Perhaps they missed the fact that the volcano in Mordor is called Mt. Doom.  You can’t make this shite up. Post-modern reactionary confusionism is rampant – up is down, left is right, war is peace, red is brown, anti-imperialism can also be disguised reaction - nothing is as it seems. Even Hitler becomes an anti-fascist in some of these Russian comics. (The definition of fascism in these comics is anything against Russia.)  Ideological gibberish is the method of authoritarianism and fascism, which is why Meloni can twist it into any shape she wants.

Like any contested text or film (The Matrix anyone?) the duty of Left cultural criticism is to bring out proletarian, anti-war, anti-racist or anti-sexist, anti-capitalist and pro-environmental messages in works that are not otherwise explicit about such things.

See Adam Something’s podcast on the comics’ issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI6es9G0oo&t=135s    

PS:  The Rings of Power, the expensive prequel to LotR, is far more depressing than the original up to S2, E5. Two wandering half-lings, a confused pre-Wizard, a cast-out human, foolish Elf kings and smiths, a greedy Dwarf king and others present a scattered opposition to Sauron, the orc King (who seems to be a fallen Elf) and Mordor.  There is no Fellowship, no unity as yet, no one you can rely on except perhaps the relentless female Elf Galadriel and an Elf that reminds one of Obama.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Lord of the Rings / LotR,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Matrix,” “Tokien,” “myth,” “fantasy,” “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “English history.”  

The Cultural Marxist / September 15, 2024